Oh good, the login to the CMS I wrote in 2001 still works!
Just a note -- I have been doing a series on Medium about art authenticity in the age of the copy. Here are all the links in one place:
Part 1: This Is Not a Vermeer TM Can anyone own a masterpiece? Five very dissimilar people share a common desire: To own a Vermeer.
Part 2: Uber for Art Forgeries So you want to own a masterpiece? It's easy! In part two in this series about artistic authenticity, we explore how to score that painting you have always wanted.
Part 3: Forgeries Gone Wild! How widespread is art forgery? Experts say it's wildly rampant. Is it time to reconsider the economy of images?
Part 4: The End of Authentication Woo-hoo! You just discovered a Vermeer in your aunts basement. But who will verify if it is real? Maybe no one.
We're now two episodes into The Newsroom, HBO's newest entry in chatter-inducing Sunday programming. Reviews of the show have been brutal, but asking a media critic to judge this show is like asking a cannibal how his gallbladder tastes. Outside of media circles (amongst the vegans, to continue this overwrought metaphor), the show seems somewhat more widely appreciated.
This phenomena fascinates me. We seem to have some sort of uncanny valley relationship to art. If we are extremely close to it -- if the subject matter is about us -- then it is very likely that we find the similarity ugly, a disfigured clone of ourselves. The entertainment landscape is littered with examples of subcultures (professions, geographies, lifestyles) disagreeing with how they are portrayed by mainstream art.1 It makes you wonder: When does a subculture actually ever like art about itself?2
The anxiety in appreciating art about oneself probably involves some deep Lacanian mirror stage shit. Or maybe it's dormroom pop psych: We are apprehensive about the shortcuts that art must take. We don't enjoy having our subcultures portrayed because it reduces ideas down to sketches, people down to characters. Local significance loses to storyline, depth loses to drama.
So duh, of course we media people hate The Newsroom. It's characters don't act like our colleagues, it's fantasies aren't our realities. So what? Part of me wants to say, fuck it, that's our problem, not Sorkin's. But other times, I'm like, wait, that's fucking bullshit.
I want to talk about the part that's bullshit.
I worked in newsrooms for over 10 years, most of the time at websites attached to TV stations or networks. I've seen, and usually participated in, the creation of news around executions in Texas, riots in Seattle, hurricanes in Florida, and psychotic killing sprees in Virginia.
What I offer here is not an artistic or moral assessment of The Newsroom. Despite having nuanced qualitative opinions about the show3, that's not what we'll be discussing here. Let's temporarily ignore the finer ethical and aesthetic points, which are usually finessed as blustery diatribes, and instead focus on what's believable.
What's bullshit, and what's not?
That eruption from Will McAvoy in the first scene. Yeah, this is kinda bullshit. It's easy to imagine an Olbermann-like figure doing this (actually, that's all he did), but it's pretty unimaginable for a Brian Williams or a Katie Couric. Or maybe our hero is supposed to be more like Dylan Rattigan or Rachel Maddow? Actually, who knows! The way this show blurs the monolithic network anchor with the opinionated cable host is precisely the kind of fake construction that feels like bullshit. Or as the greatest news anchor of our time would say, a great moment of truthiness.
Having a blog. Not bullshit. Olbermann had one, Maddow has one, Brian Williams has acouple, Tucker Carlson has a whole goddamn site.
Not knowing you have a blog. Complete bullshit. This portrait of social media ignorance would have been accurate 10 years ago, but television executives started to freak out about the internet a while ago. They've spent an immense amount of time catching up, so now they're better at Twitter than you.
Walking into a newsroom and yelling "Punjab" to the Southeast Asian character that you know isn't named Punjab. This would never happen, even if your name is Sean Hannity. Bullshit.
Dating people you work with. Not bullshit. The only professionals who fuck each other more are actors.
Arguing with people you date while you're working. Not bullshit. The only professionals who argue with each other more are politicians.
The speech from an Executive Producer about fearing Halliburton and the lawsuit it would bring. Bullshit. I don't know a reporter who wouldn't love to catch Halliburton, Scientology, or whatever big scary corporate entity you name. The mere fact that Time-Warner-owned HBO aired this scene seems to completely undermine any truth it is seeking to reveal.
Hiring a new Executive Producer without telling the anchor. I would say this is bullshit, but I've recently heard a story similar to this. Judgement: perhaps not bullshit.
Running to your agent when the President of News hires an Executive Producer over the top of you. Yeah, they're prima donnas, so this could happen. Not necessarily bullshit.
The ongoing debate between popularity and quality. This would never be said aloud. However, it subliminally infuses every newsroom decision. Pseudo-bullshit.
Forgetting the name of your hot blonde assistant. If this show is actually modelled on Olbermann, then this is bullshit. He'd never forget that.
Having a President of News who is drunk "most of the time" at work. Being a heavy drinker can still be romanticized within some media circles (especially if you hang out with bloggers), but being regularly drunk at work would simply not be permitted any more, at any level. Drink up, that's bullshit.
Quoting Don Quixote. Bullshit.
Quoting Man of La Mancha. Epic bullshit, fa la la la la.
Vacationing in Saint Lucia with Erin Andrews. Questionable bullshit.
Figuring out the oil spill that quickly. This is probably the single most annoying thing in the first episodes. If you remember the evolution of the oil spill story, it took weeks for scientists to figure out what our Happy Band of Googlers sleuthed out in a few hours. Complete media fantasy bullshit.
An executive producer threatening an anchor with a fake on-air graphic seconds before going live. Reminiscent of both Broadcast News and Network, this nifty dramatic effect was as much bullshit then as it is now.
Not knowing where your control room is. Crazy bullshit.
FOX News hiring someone with three Mohammeds in his name. Pass.
Sending an email that accidentally goes to 178,000 people. Yep, bullshit. Of course email groups like that exist, but they were introduced to corporations 10 years ago, not last year. So not only does everyone know how they work, but we all also know that not everyone has access to email all those lists. A reply-all snafu would have been less bullshitty.
A fluff newsreader with a PhD in Economics from Duke and an adjunct professor at Columbia. Sure, this is supposed to be Erin Burnett, but still bullshit! She's barely old enough to have a PhD.
The Three I's. That kind of bullshit would actually happen, so it's not bullshit.
Minutes after delivering the sanctimonious Three I's, commenting on a reporters legs. B-------.
The organization of this network. This is one of the more perplexing elements of the show. ACN is apparently a 24-hour cable news outlet, but this show gets the network treatment. Cable newsrooms are much more fluid than this show suggests, with more interaction of programming and personnel between shows.
Hiding under a bed while your date fucks his ex-girlfriend. I have less expertise on this matter, so I'll let you call this one.
So?
Correlating quality with verisimilitude is always a dicey proposition4. But when a show places itself into history with real news events, and within a professional industry whose mandate is exposing truth, The Newsroom must be aware that it has put itself under the lens of realism's scrutiny.
The Newsroom rubs so close to reality that it makes you wonder how Will McAvoy would feel about it. After a long walk, some nifty orchestration, and a verbose conclusion, he'd enter his closing judgement into the chryon: It's bullshit.
Footnotes
1 For example, I lived in Fargo when the movie Fargo came out. To this day, the city has an extremely antagonistic relationship toward their portrayal as noble unsavages with snowboots. 2 The answer? Lawyers always love seeing themselves. 3 It's bullshit. 4 Didn't those dragons in Game of Thrones grow up just a little too quickly?
In a recent episode of the WTF podcast, Bill Lawrence (the creator of Scrubs, Cougar Town, and Spin City) talks about how he hates the name of his show Cougar Town so much that he considered changing it this season. One of the main reasons he didn't is that DVRs aren't equipped to understand a name change, so the show would essentially lose any audience that had a season pass in TiVo.
Anyway, it got me thinking: Has there ever been a successful show that changed its name?
Rick says a bunch of interesting things in his new column about whether you need to a be highly networked individual to succeed online. I especially relish how he ties geography into the conversation, alluding to a midwestern startup.
And many, many more hyper-social New Yorkers and San Franciscans make successful startups than antisocial Midwesterners. Or even antisocial New Yorkers. These are things you can control. You can move to San Francisco. Better yet, you can move to New York. You can go to meetups. You can go to conferences. You can email investors. You can go to classes at General Assembly. It's in your control. Or, you can stay at home in the Midwest, reading TechCrunch and talking about how it's all rigged and an insiders game.
This will frustrate my friends in Minneapolis -- those dozens of startups trying to compete at CoCo and other places. They're trying to create their own scene right now. Creative acts are becoming increasingly dependent on groups of people. Being part of a "scene" in music was undeniably important in the '80s and '90s, but now it's become as true for fashion, technology, theater, and nearly all creative arts.
It's an interesting dilemma building a company in the midwest: Your success is as much a factor of your peers' success -- the community's success -- as it is the brilliance and execution of your idea.
I don't think I've ever worked with anyone who understands their audience more than Tavi. Here's a new interview where she describes who Rookie is for:
I keep just describing it as a "website for teenage girls," because I like to think it's not too niche, and I don't want to alienate anyone by saying it's for alternative girls or artsy girls or anything. At the same time, I mean, we don't speak for every girl, but we try to encourage girls to speak for themselves. Mostly we just try to avoid being condescending or making anyone feel like there's something wrong with them that they should be worrying about if they're not already. Or like we're teaching anyone how to be cool. I want people to know that they're already cool. Whatever they're into, that is enough.
New research shows that online dating sites promising "matching algorithms" don't work: The Dubious Science of Online Dating. In other news, I just helped launch the new blog for How About We, a dating site that tosses out algorithms in favor of proposing date ideas.
Mr. Morris has a grinning, laid-back persona, with an approach not dissimilar to Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism. In person Mr. Morris, son of the filmmaker Errol Morris, is bookish and intense, speaking with a fastidious attention to word choice.
For those of you who like their David Carr served with a dash of sentimentality (like a Replacements ballad!), here ya go:
You can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don't really know them.
David Carr came out bullish on Buzzfeed, while Paul Carr rebuffs him. It's too early to tell what Buzzfeed will do, but I will say that Paul gets this part wrong:
[Peretti] is a career-long SEO guy whose entire news sense is based on what people are already searching for, or what they might be sharing on Facebook tomorrow tomorrow. The first half of that equation -- the SEO half -- is inherently opposed to breaking news. If something hasn't yet been reported, then no-one is searching for it.
That's not true, and the best example of which is Kottke's subtle parody of HuffPo on Superbowl Sunday.
Sasha thinks that MIA not should have apologized for flipping the bird. I guess, sure? But that seems a particularly red shade of herring. As someone wrote on my Facebook wall when I asked "What exactly was she trying to say by flipping you off?":
That at the last instant, after making the song, being in the video, going through gigantic rehearsals, meeting with execs from the NFL and NBC, and Madonna's handlers, she felt she had to do something, anything in reaction to the massive, moneyed, orchestrated alternate really bubble she'd already bought into a thousand times over leading up to that moment.
Early last year, I told Elizabeth Spiers that Felix Salmon had made a bet with John Carney: she would be fired from The Observer within a year. It didn't happen; Felix lost the bet, in somewhat grumpy prose.
The Death of the Cyberflaneur argues that the web once seemed a place for the anonymously strolling (not trolling) flaneur:
Transcending its original playful identity, it's no longer a place for strolling -- it's a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone "surfs" the Web anymore. The popularity of the "app paradigm," whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflanerie less likely.
It then goes on to blame Facebook for much of this problem.
1) Will Wright Is Back. Whah! “If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness.” And maybe it includes a TV component! (His 2007 SXSW keynote is still my all-time favorite.)
3) Denton’s Memo. Okay, this commenting system (Pow-Wow) could be the real deal. However, I doubt that the product itself will be that revolutionary — I mean, how much can we do with comments? But the power will be in pairing it with an editorial agenda. Imagine if something like Reddit or Metafilter were more programmed, had the power of a media enterprise around it.
5) Jack Shafer: Are you reading the best magazine in America? I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that Bloomberg Businessweek is my favorite magazine right now. (Also, props to Reuters for hiring Shafer and letting him write so glowingly about their primary competitor.)
3) CNN: A Social Media Addict Tries to Disconnect. Day 1: “I land at Antigua’s airport, where I’m greeted by warm sunshine, a long customs line and a man playing Bob Marley’s ‘Three Little Birds’ on a tin drum. All of these observations are ones I ache to tweet.” Hrrrrm.
4) The Death of Television. From Evan Shapiro of IFC, who is probably the smartest tv exec I’ve ever worked with.
5) SAY Media. For most of 2011, Aol was the most interesting company on the digital media scene — every week was a new product launch, a new purchase, a new scandal, a new reorg. For 2012, SAY Media could take its place. For several years, people in the industry have heard various rumors of a “blog rollup.” It’s never happened because most of the time these companies stall after buying one or two properties. But SAY Media is really giving it a go. Sure, xoJane hasn’t performed that well, and the mishap with Rookie didn’t help, but by most accounts Dogster is doing well, and snagging Frommer with its purchase of Read Write Web is tantalizing. (And the reported $5M price tag indicates they’re being tactical and might not burn out.) Now there’s rumors of an IPO, plus some chatter about a revved up CMS. You never would have guessed that the merger of a blog platform and a video ad network would lead to anything, but prepare to hear endless stories about it in 2012.
1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, it's about faith!
1) You Say You Want a Devolution? Here's an interesting thesis from Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair: While there have been massive technological changes in the past 20 years, everything looks the same. That is, he suggests, if you looked at a random snapshot from 1991, the people and buildings and cultural objects would mostly look the same as today. So? Well, that certainly isn't true if you looked at 1931 to 1951 or 1951 to 1971. This is one of the broad cultural essays that "seems right" though I'm not sure why.
3) Who's Afraid Of Lana Del Rey? I'm glad someone wrote this, but isn't the artifice of "authenticity" itself the bugbear to be slayed?
4) Fast Co Design. Fast Company has a design blog that tries "to bridge the fuzzy border between design and business."
5) New Walker Website. Waaaay back in the day, The Walker was one of the earliest organizations (and for sure, the first museum) to take up blogging, but the effort seemed to only get partial internal support. Last week, a site redesign revisited the idea of museum as a locus for content generation (or "idea hub"). Congrats, Schmelzer, nice work. (See also: The Atlantic and Artlog discuss the redesign.)
12) Richard Lawson in Atlantic Wire. How fast did this become the best writing online? In just weeks, we've received thought pieces like When Fans Attack and movie reviews that read like the best of the New Yorker (so: Anthony Lane not David Denby), while still satisfying us in that off-hand impulsive bloggy way. (See also, this post on Gawker that isn't at all about Lawson but somehow the commenters turned it into a rally cry.)
2) Serious Business. That’s Alex Blagg’s new “intertainment firm.” (Oh how soon they become what they parody!) His partners include a former UTA agent. Their first video is Drive-Thru, an 84% funny parody of Drive that is an Arby’s commercial.
5) The Greatest Movie Ever Sold box office totals. Remember that Morgan Spurlock movie from this summer? The amount of money it made wouldn’t even buy you a decent apartment in Manhattan. At the box office, at least — it made millions in product placements.
2) This sentence in Vanessa’s profile of Arianna Huffington. “It’s a feat — Huffington’s characteristic gift — to aggregate childbirth, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tiger Moms, a cow, Nancy Reagan, and unconditional love into one surprisingly intimate, seamless skein, and it makes spending time with Huffington a pleasure, even if interviews with her can be stultifying.” (Also, this accompanying graphic.)
4) eBay buys Hunch. This one’s about as obvious as it comes. I know nothing of the back story, but I’m sure Amazon had a chance and passed because Bezos doesn’t overpay for anything. While I hope Hunch still seeks a consumer-facing solution, I’m pretty sure it will end up being integrated into eBay and slowly disappear.
4) Sylo. I love when people do creative things with their VYou accounts.
5) Gawker Redesign Second Thoughts. Appropos of nothing, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Denton had gone in a different design direction. If, as he said, he believed so much that the traditional reverse-chronological order of blogs was broken, why didn’t he go with a information-dense gridded design (like Vulture and The Verge) instead of the two-pane iPad-inspired layout? That also seemed to have been Steve Jobs’ feedback. (Btw, traffic across Gawker Media right now is even lower than when he lost the bet.)
1) This Nick Denton Quote. "The problem is the boring people online -- they're incredibly difficult to get rid of, because theyre often really nice."
2) ThinkUp 1.0. Finally! (Sorry, Gina and Andy, but a lot of people are excited for ThinkUp, which allows you to back up all your personal/social data to a web server.)
3) Nymwars. Once it gets an official name, you know trouble is brewing.
4) ASOS iPad App. This is the end game of the merger of editorial and commerce. Amazing experience and content integrated almost perfectly into a purchase environment. (There are mens and womens issues.)
5) Minneapolis, Mark Mallman. The amazing bit here is at 2:15 where Mark turns the city into a spaceship. (Also, Minneapolis people really like Minneapolis things, dont they? Its nearly as bad as Portland.)
2) OKFocus. An agency-type-thing from Ryder Ripps. This is the other internet.
3) ScoutMob. The deals app that everyone suddenly seems to be using. Seriously, ask the person next to you I bet theyre using it.
4) Pinterest. Everyone knows how fast this is growing, but its fun to wonder how Tumblr might react.
5) EW Viewer & TV Guide Watchlist. Sure, Umami and GetGlue have a head start, but it's good to see that the magazines arent just sitting around waiting for social tv to eat their lunch. Everyone seems to acknowledge this is going to eventually be a huge industry. My guess is that some futuristic AppleTV/Twitter integration takes the market, but maybe someone else can get a mindshare first.
(#Flashback! This is what blogging used to be. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's any better either.)
So I walked into Fimoculous on Christmas and started blogging anonymously, without telling Rex, the owner, beforehand. Which -- you guessed it -- means that pretty much everything posted here since then is by me, not him. (How: I spent time as a house-guest here about a year ago, and the keys were still under the mat.)
Just after I started, I learned that Rex had recently been in a kerfuffle in which someone accused him of saying "anonymous blogging is bad," and that he was later characterized as saying "blogging is dead." Even better. My Operation: Goldilocks was evolving into A Scanner Darkly -- turning against itself, or at least appearing to. It seemed like a good opportunity to indirectly engage both of these issues.
Is blogging dead? I don't want it to be, which is another reason I tried to revivify this blog, which was about 10 years old and staggering around like a zombie. In my opinion, there should be room in our online discourse for blogs like this one -- offering a consistent, often thoughtful perspective, collecting and observing things of interest to its readers. But being consistent, thoughtful, and observant requires effort and time, and it requires the same of its audience.
And that, I think, is why blogging, for the most part, appears to be moribund: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, etc., are media that have evolved such that there is no expectation of prolonged engagement with pieces of content on the part of their writers or readers. Consider the recent widespread use of the shorthand "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). This dismissive assessment is commonly interpreted as fair, expected criticism of the author, not the reader who offers it because he couldn't be bothered to read the content simply because it was long, regardless of its undiscovered merits. The media that are replacing "traditional" blogging value brevity above all, so much of the incentive to write anything that is both long and thoughtful diminishes (since few will bother to read it), and the self-motivation required to do so will only increase over time.
It's funny to be talking about blogging -- which for its entire lifespan has been dismissed broadly for being superficial and narcissistic -- as being a besieged outpost of well-developed, thoughtful writing, but I think that's exactly what's happening. It's no one's "fault" -- it's just the natural evolution of popular content production and consumption towards the most frictionless state: from books to periodicals to personal websites to blogs to Twitter to the Like button. When a medium comes along that's easier than clicking the Like button -- maybe thinking you Like something -- you can be sure everyone will speculate about and then bemoan its death before moving on.
But, even blogging isn't dead yet. There are some people out there who are still committed to the form, even if it seems no one else is, regularly posting smart, thought-provoking analyses and observations of their respective interests. A few that come immediately to mind:
Errol Morris and his "too long," multi-part monographs, some of which are probably the best things ever published originally on the web
And there are others who take the time to put together coherent, original posts:
Star Wars Modern, where I'm not always sure what's happening, but I appreciate the effort involved
Nav at Scrawled in Wax, usually correlating academic concepts of post-modernism with pop culture
Amy at Amy's Robot, who has been writing witty, thoughtful posts on pop culture and politics for NINE YEARS. Collaborators (like me) have come and gone at that site, but Amy is still there. Someone oughta be reading her.
A confession before I continue: for every one of those sites I mentioned, I have often found myself getting the gist of a post, thinking "that's a good insight," and then skimming the rest of it. Does that matter?
Continuing, let me also mention some more widely read sites that I think demonstrate originality and effort:
John Del Signore at Gothamist, whose humor brings color to stories without obscuring them
Yeah, what the hell -- I'm leaving it on this list: even Boing Boing can be pretty good sometimes, when it's not being a caricature of itself...
Maybe you have your own suggestions to share in the comments
And lastly, if you miss Fimoculous now that it's zombified, just replace that section of your brain with Pop Loser, which I've been ripping off mercilessly for the last month and which strikes me as the blog that is the spiritual inheritor of this one.
Will any of these blogs still live in 5 years? Will new ones rise to take their place? So far, trends appear to indicate no: aggregation, automation, voting up, "liking," etc., seem to be resulting in a hivemind where thoughtfulness is replaced with promulgation and sameness. Maybe we need a "link aggregator in reverse" that shows the links of interest to you that everyone else like you hasn't Liked yet.
And what of Fimoculous? You'll have to ask Rex. I'm leaving the keys on the counter and heading back to my cabin in the woods. It's so relaxing there! Especially in the easy chair.
Thanks for reading, or skimming. And thanks, especially, to Rex. See you next time.
Over at the NYT's "Ethicist" column, Randy Cohen is out, and Ariel Kaminer is in. But I don't think any ethical considerations are raised by a person taking over the writing of something that is so closely associated with someone else. [via romenesko]
This correction needs a correction: Appended by editors to Carr's "Skins" takedown: "...It is thus not the case that the youngsters cast in 'Kids,' the British film that was the model for 'Skins' and was rated NC-17, 'could not legally see it.'" Kids is American, not British.
NY Post says the anonymous author of the new political novel O is probably Mark Salter, the former aide to John McCain. NYT looks at the evidence. Maybe he should've tried harder to be anonymous: Kakutani hates the book, calling it "a thoroughly lackadaisical performance: trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny."
NYT's new "Frugal Traveler," who should know better -- a lot better -- got scammed while trying to rent an apartment for his stay in London. Hint: If the email includes the word "wire," it's a scam.
Yesterday, Fortune revealed that Steve Jobs went to Switzerland for "unusual radiological treatment" last year. How did they know this? It turns out that an Apple board member told them -- off the record. But, says Fortune, that board member died, so the "off the record" arrangement no longer applies. This raises some questions -- is any journalist free to reveal everything you told them "off the record" once you die? And attribute it to you? Columbia Journalism Review explores the issue, and it's a thread on Quora. [via Romenesko]
MG in TechCrunch: In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite. I have a quibble with this: I would like to take a poll and see -- how many people learned about the Arizona shooting through Twitter? My guess is a small percentage. I suspect that most people heard through breaking news alerts -- email, text, and apps. (After that, the second-most-common was probably word-of-mouth. And then probably tv and traditional news.)
Okay, you might say that alerts are part of the real-time web too, but that's Web 1.0. (Advice to all the new News 2.0 services: devise a strategy for notifications!) Twitter was full of hearsay (perhaps created by news orgs). However, Twitter was valuable in one regard: providing links to mainstream news outlets who were reporting on the story... in realtime.
NYT's profile of Girl Talk is a good read and has some fun anecdotes, but check out this online audio feature they put together to accompany it: musical mash-ups from the last 104 years. Mostly just excerpts, but you can find almost all of the full tracks on YouTube.
Frank Bruni on ephemeral/crowdsourced restaurants. The guy from Dovetail and other successful chefs can feel encumbered by their big places and out-sized expectations, so they go back to basics, with a twist or two (at least temporarily). Possibly related, but also more complicated: Grant Achatz of Alinea (America's best restaurant?) plans a new restaurant that will change every quarter, as part of his new year's resolution for 2011.
A few months ago, a writer at Vanity Fair called me to say the editors had just seen The Social Network, and there was a problem. Now they wanted a story that was "just like that internal story of Facebook." I rubbed my head for a while, but I couldn't think of anything even remotely like that, so we talked for a while about other ideas that might work instead. Now, months later, it appears that those Vanity Fair editors found their story, because this story about two people suing Arianna Huffington over the origins of HuffPo just dropped from the sky.
A few weeks ago, Elvis Mitchell dropped out/was canned as co-host of the new At The Movies. Now, his replacement has been named, just three weeks before the show premieres: "Roger Ebert announced Tuesday that he had chosen a young and relatively unknown Russian-born movie critic, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, to serve as a host of his new movie-review program, Ebert Presents At the Movies, which will have its premiere Jan. 21 on public television stations around the country." Read a few of his posts... The kid has to dial back his academic tone or it's going to be flat.
Writer and editor Ed Park, who is himself the author of a 16,000 word sentence, assembles (with the help of his readers) a list of other very long sentences, many of which are novel-length. Some whoppers there, sure, but it's a bit of wanking, isn't it?
Recently noticed: if you click on a link on the nytimes.com that goes to a print-ready page (like this one) it redirects you to the non-print-ready page. But if you click "print" from there, it works (obviously looking at the referrer). Crafty, that.
I was thinking this morning about how I can remember exactly where I was the first time I saw Napster. (One of the IT guys at work showed it to me. It was mesmerizing.) This got me thinking about other online apps/phenomena that I can recall seeing for the first time with precise clarity. Here's my list of I Know Exactly Where I Was When I First Saw...
Napster
Google Maps
Friendster
Hot Or Not
Wikipedia
YouTube
Dodgeball
Foursquare
Chatroulette
4chan
Bro Icing
Netscape browser
The Paris Hilton Sex Video
lonelygirl15
Goatse.cx
2 Girls, 1 Cup
And for whatever reason, some things not on this list:
I don't know which part of this interview with Fred Wilson I like most (all of which is packed with accidents of success), but I'll pick this one:
How did you start blogging?
I was at a cocktail party at Nick Denton's house several years ago and the founders of Moveable Type were at the party. They convinced me to blog, so I went home, set up a blog and started blogging.
Kill Screen Magazine. Has anyone seen this? It's a video game magazine from prominent writers who have written for the New Yorker, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and The Onion.
If this were still a functioning blog, I'd be writing about the 48 HR magazine project, which, hahaha sigh, just got sued by CBS for trademark infringement.
The Chatroulette kid gets the New Yorker treatment. He likes SF more than NYC; he met Ashton and Demi, and Fred Wilson; it was originally called Head-To-Head; the name Chatroulette was indeed inspired by The Deer Hunter. The end.
Ever feel like it's just one thing after another? Mountains of information to sort through and just do something with? Like it'll never end? Then want to just try to bury it all deep inside until it catches up with you?
So did Peter Ramsdal except he's a mail carrier so that shit was all super literal and now he's in jail on mail hording charges. Just like in Seinfeld. No word on if he was wearing a puffy shirt.
LinkedIn turned 7 today but it feels like 37. The service is a great place to stalk SVPs of mid-size companies in flyover states but any sense of newness or excitement faded long ago. Reference checks are done by looking at mutual facebook friends, tumblr/twitter/(even ew)wordpress are the real online resumes employers check. Happy Birthday LinkedIn, both you and your user base look pretty good for middle age.
Michael says, "You know Dina was praying for it." He did not specify if he felt she was praying for the hit or for the plane to go down.
I was reading this Daily Intel post and first I'm like no...God has better things to do than shake up Michael Lohan. Then I saw that the Time Square bomber had been apprehended and realized no... no he does not.
--SK
That NYT Mag profile of The National was one of the stranger things to pop up in recent years, but they are streaming the new album over there, so there's that.
Vinnie Vincent was such a guitar-soloing egomaniac, he got kicked out of the band known as the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. He was also fired from KISS. Three times. Once for "alleged unethical behavior": Hopeful fans have speculated that he was axed for wearing women's clothing, but really, both bands were probably tired of him (a) insisting on playing his guitar with a samurai sword and (b) repeating one extremely irritating chord for two and a half minutes (as he did on the song "Invasion"). Gotta hand it to the guy: he might not have been reliable, but he sure was consistent.
so when the gorillaz started doing their thing, i was on board, and fascinated by how they would keep up the pretense. last night's stephen colbert reveals the answer - which is to say they keep it up in a half-hearted way - but i do dig the song.
meanwhile why can't i find a video showing me animated groupies at a gorillaz show?
i have a whole thing about how HIMYM is the new SATC, but i haven't had enough coffee to explain it. however, i was at a party the other night and someone told me:
"It gets more right than Seinfeld, more right than Friends, more right than Sex & The City. It's awesome."
I could tell by the glint in his eye he was talking about Neil Patrick Harris.
but right now i just want to celebrate Jason Segal. he writes songs (probably the biggest reason girls crush on him). here's one for the Russell Brand character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. which was a funnier movie than i expected it to be, but has left Kristen Bell, who i loved as Veronica Mars, making crap like this, when she'd probably rather be making a crappy reunion movie. (yes! a nearly breathless run-on sentence!) -- FB
performance art isn't new. what seems (and i am not plugged in enough to know) to be newish is that arts institutions/artists are getting more comfy with people interacting with that performance. turning it into a two-way street, an improvisational experience in which you actually become part of the art/performance. this is not only going on in art - it seems comments, liking, friending, tagging, trending, hacking, reblogging, etc. are behaviors that know no platform. which is both cool and chaotic.
but a year ago, MoMA wasn't cool with thehappycorpglobal getting Posterboy to mash up MoMA ads in the subways. i guess you could have your picture made while jumping in front of art, but you couldn't have a street artist cut & splice it. maybe it's just that they don't mind people interacting with or subverting the art when the art is inside their four walls...
It's sponsored by Lay's, who insists that Happiness is simple. It's a flickr-powered micro-site for sharing happy photos. If you upload a happy photo, maybe it will appear in an ad (for potato chips, natch) in People magazine.
There must really be that InternetNicenessIkeephearingabout if I can go from Joy Division to simple happiness in only one click. -- FB
i am not a glee fan. i've seen one episode, enjoyed it, and then only think of it when i see ana marie cox tweeting about it, which pretty much means i'm always thinking about it.
but this might make me want to watch it - or at least last night's episode. i mean, madonna!
I love games. especially the dark & twisty, screwing with you just to screw with you, make you beg for mercy and wish you'd never been born, totally waste your time kind. I do! But GSN is totally harshing my vibe.
A new show hosted by Jerry Springer, called Baggage, in which contestants get to find out up front all about the baggage of self-proclaimed 'douchebags', 'ratties' and well... watch this:
Finding out up front takes all the fun out of it.
Oh also - I can't decide which version of Carnie Wilson to watch - fat Carnie Wilson on Carnie Wilson Unstapled, or thin Carnie Wilson on The Newlywed Game. So many choices. -- FB
Seriously, is there a genre for behind-the-scenes fanfic yet? Because I kinda want someone to imagine the sexual tension (and its inevitable, completely bonkers resolution) between Joss & Robert Downey Jr. -- FB
I don't have any idea how Google's tablet will compete with the iPad, but the mere introduction of it basically solidifies that this type of device will the new way we encounter computing for the next many years.
William Gibson has been using his blog recently for an extended Q&A. Yesterday's question was: "Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily [be] aware of it, if it had?". [via] -NA
Since I know many of you reading this are in New York, this London Review of Books event there includes a panel entitled "The Author in the Age of the Internet". -NA
The central premise of this essay at online literary mag Wag's Revue - that both the ubiquity and SEO-focus of Google mean that quantity reigns over quality - feels a bit over the top.
But, beyond being really funny, it does make two important points: 1) that "the fact that the internet emerged in an advanced capitalist society where knowledge is intensely privatized and proprietary [means] the valorization of surplus value trumps ethical concerns"; and 2) that SEO depends on finding and tricking 'e-rubes' to fall for AdSense ads that no-one I know ever actually clicks on.
Might lean too far toward the Keen-Carr side of the spectrum, but it's smart and well-written enough to make it worth a read. -NA
Update: PDF of the essay.
Among the many upsides to new Broken Social Scene disc Forgiveness Rock Record releasing on May 4th is that your torrid summer love affair/fling will now have a soundtrack. -NA
Rainer Werner Fassbinder made an insane number of brilliant films before his death in 1982 at 37. Newly restored is World on a Wire his obscure sci-fi movie for German TV. Dennis Lim for NYT calls it, "Head-trip cinema about virtual-reality immersions, its an analog-age 'Avatar,' a movie that anticipates 'Blade Runner' in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and 'The Matrix' in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion." (via.)-JM
The 11th Doctor Who: Justin Bieber! No, not really, but the new Timelord Matt Smith is pretty young. The next season starts on BBC America on April 17. Steven Moffat, who wrote many fan favorite episodes, is replacing Russell T. Davies as the showrunner. -JM
After The Runaways, what music biopic comes next? Don Cheadle has signed on to play Miles Davis. Forest Whitaker will soon star as Louis Armstrong. Someday maybe the Janis Joplin and Jeff Buckley movies will be made. In the meantime, enjoy "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" - JM
Sam Anderson goes behind the scenes of the theaterical adaptation of Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren playing this week at The Kitchen (via.) Director Jay Scheib says, "It took me roughly a year to read Dhalgren for the first time. I would read the same ten pages over and over and over again. You get the feeling that the story has been going on like a fugue for millennia. The second time you read it, its thrilling. The third time, it makes you high. After that its like reading philosophy." -JM
"Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl" by Broken Social Scene is one of my favorite songs of all time. In concert, you never get to hear Emily Haines sing it anymore though. Except at SXSW.
I doubt anyone really remembers how controversial the BMW Films project was in 2001. There was an immense amount of chatter about whether the future of filmmaking would be consumer brands paying filmmakers to produce movies. Beyond the occasional foray of an auteur into 30-second commercials, this dystopia hasn't happened at all. But here's something new from Spike Jonze, brought to you by Absolut: I'm Here.
I didn't see much chatter about this New Yorker profile of Polyvore last week, but parts of it were pretty interesting, especially the bits about it being founded by the creator of Yahoo Pipes (!) and his rather unsexy reason for creating Polyvore:
I felt that it would be great to work on something that has a visual component. If you look at all the different types of visual media, images are the ones your brain processes the fastest.
Anyway, the whole data-invasion-of-the-fashion-world theme is an interesting recurring idea out there right now... Update: Lindsay thought the profile was dumb (she's right about cringing at that "usability testing" bit).
You may recall that PBS rebooted The Electric Company into a hip hop inspired take on the disco reading for kids version from the 1970s. If you are a fan of the show from way back when and haven't taken the time to check out the new version, you should- it's great, and they have a YouTube Channel! I wish I knew more 4-10? year olds so that I could be the hip aunty that turned them onto this awesome show. The music is great, the stories are cute, the cast is super talented, and I find myself singing along whenever I have time to play an episode from the tivo while I'm internetting or whatever. (Also notice how I'm all set with the educational TV ready to go in case any 4-10 year olds DO come over. You should see my nature videos! Anybody need a babysitter?) Here's one of my favorite clips from the new version of The Electric Company, with Chris "Shockwave" Sullivan and Lin-Manuel Miranda rappin about Hard and Soft G. :DS
Props to the Denver Post props for using the scrollable-collection-of-browser-width images format perfected by Alan Taylor at The Boston Globe's The Big Picture. It's really true about a picture speaking 1000 words, and my favorite thing about digital news distribution is the ability to show more photos and video. I HATE the trend towards click through image galleries. Media People, Are you reading this??? Please!!! Stop with the making me click all the time through your photo gallery! Come up with ad units that aren't so obtrusive, and let me scroll past them, and I'll expand if I'm interested. Flipping past an ad in a magazine and having it catch my eye is often an enjoyable experience, but having to click like a rat at a feeder bar for the next photo or next page just so you can display the same three ads to me 16 times is absolutely maddening. You can do better than this!!! Let me scroll! Through of the pictures at once! I'll scroll past ads if i must! Do the right thing!!!
Welcome to DotComArchive.org... If you created or worked at an internet technology company during the 1990s, we invite you to tell us about your experiences. :DS
I highly recommend this addition to your Netflix queue: Kenny, the delightful Australian comedy about a portaloo delivery man. It's been a worldwide sleeper hit since its release in 2006. The accents are a quite thick, so you might find it helpful to watch it with the subtitles on. :DS
This was NYT's their breaking news alert just now:
Mr. Obama affixed his curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and a raft of other lawmakers who spent the past year on a legislative roller-coaster ride trying to pass it. Aides said he would pass out the 20 pens
he used as mementoes.
New York Press film critic Armond White went all pissy in The Post, claiming he was barred from Noah Baumbach's new Ben Stiller movie (huh?) because White once said mean things about The Squid And The Whale. But publicist Leslee Dart says Armond was nixed because he made personally insulting remarks about Baumbach, like "calling him a [bleep]hole and saying his mom should have had an abortion."
Which is just so...I don't lololol-able? Not that I dislike Noah Baumbach, but it's funny to think of this little Wes Anderson protegee being told his mother should have had an abortion. Like the only thing that could make this funnier is if Christian Bale had said it. -- DG
So is Heidi Montag liberal now? Because during the election, she and Spencer were all about John McCain, but suddenly she's making these Ron Howard-directed videos for Funny or Die about creating a consumer agency to protect against big banks. So...she's against mindless corporate growth now? Heidi, get back to me. I need to know where you stand on the health care bill.
Is it messed up to say she got hotter?
--DG
Well, when Rex Sorgatz was asked a while back, How bad do you anticipate Gould's book will be? Rex said he was still gathering his thoughts. In the meantime, Publishers Weekly have gathered theirs:
"On the strength of an exposé she wrote for the New York Times Magazine two years ago about her experience working at Gawker.com, Gould, hailing from Silver Spring, Md., and now in her late 20s, delivers a series of 11 insipid essays about her uninspired youth and general lack of motivation or talent for various jobs she took after moving to New York City. The writing seems intentionally bland, as if Gould is attempting to be blasé."
Rex, have you gathered your thoughts yet? As someone from around the Silver Spring area myself, I can promise there is not much else to do besides listen to Liz Phair and then go to Kenyon (Oberlin). Also, haven't read the book, but based on what I've read of Gould's work, I don't think that being blasé is "intentional" as in something she's faking...shit is genetically imprinted. Not bland though: How can the person who made the Internet coin the term "overshare" be bland? --DG
David Foster Wallace's papers are all going to the University of Texas, including some "juvenilia" like 200 books from his own library, poems, and college/graduate papers. Why Pomona didn't get these is sort of head-scratching, but UT is building up quite the collection. In case you wanted to hear what Chuck Klosterman thinks about this:
"He definitely is the writer I've ripped off the most," said Klosterman, author of "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs," on Monday. "Wallace showed me that you could present ideas that were insightful and complex, but the presentation could still be as entertaining as any sort of writing whose sole purpose was to entertain. Considering how dense his work could be, it was almost never confusing."
Unlike say, having a quote from Chuck Klosterman in your article that has nothing to do with the subject matter of where DFW's materials are ending up. --DG
I guess I'm on the record being annoyed with NYC's recent look-at-me-look-at-me glee over a handful of successful startups. Obviously, it's not that I don't want this fair city to succeed; it's just that I shun boosterism for its own sake, and there's a lot of that here. Go social media!
That said, Jenna Wortham's Sunday NYTimes piece on the scene hits all the right spots, namechecks all risers, and generally feels informed about what's at stake. If NYC digerati can position themselves as the next version of their key fracturing industries (media, fashion, finance, advertising, publishing), it should be poised to find the next versions of those sectors. --RX
NYT's Lens Blog has first-hand account of the Marja battle from embedded photographer Tyler Hicks. Hicks and reporter CJ Chivers filed some outstanding work from the battle. Chivers (a former Marine) and Hicks were on the front lines throughout, and I wouldn't be surprised if they earn a Pulitzer for their efforts. --ADM
The New York Times Magazine has a long article about an online phenomenon in China: "human flesh search engines:" [via Waxy]
They are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It's crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online -- with offline results.
The article opens with the story of a woman who appeared in an anonymous web video stomping a cat to death. Viewers organized an effort to identify her. Shortly thereafter, living in a small town in a country of one billion people, she was identified. And ostracized.
The article suggests such efforts are more mainstream in China than in the US, though identification and subsequent harassment of "people who have attracted their wrath" is common among certain online communities here, too. In fact there are exact parallels: a group of users on 4chan have also tracked down a cat abuser (among many others).
But perhaps all online communities and social networks are essentially human flesh search engines, or easily transformed into them as desired -- although usually with less malice. We might not be much more closely connected than we have been in past years, but with 400 million people on Facebook alone, discovering (and persisting) those connections is becoming trivial. Powered by the data and photos in these social networks, recent technological advancements such as real-time face recognition built into cellphones will soon erode, if not entirely dissolve, anonymity.
With your anonymity goes your privacy. Does it matter? Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg says a desire for privacy is no longer the "social norm." But maybe such social norms were a casualty of his -- and others' -- business models. Uploading a photo of myself doesn't mean I want everyone to be able to identify me on the street. Emailing clients regularly doesn't mean I want them to see the names of everyone else I'm in contact with. But to Facebook, Google, and other companies, it does. This is the bargain we've made: give me convenience and connectedness, and I'll give you my anonymity and privacy.
We know the short-term consequences of this already -- insurers checking up on us, bosses peering into our personal lives, and so on -- but what are the long-term social and psychological consequences? Adults today have had years of disconnection from their pasts and had the option of growing up and evolving outside the gaze of their childhood peers, their relatives, etc. But today's kids will spend their entire lives on the social web. Will this hold back their personal growth in any way? Would you be different if everyone you've known from elementary school and beyond could look in on you at any time? Will today's kids grow up acting more conservatively because they know their behavior (and that of their friends) will be publicly and permanently documented? Or, will this instead cause a greater liberalization of social behavior as they become adults in a generation that accepts everyone acts foolishly, and everyone's foolish acts are publicly and permanently documented?
Or maybe the problem will solve itself. It seems possible that if nearly everyone you've ever met is your "friend" on Facebook, then your social network will eventually become so diffuse and the amount of information available will be so overwhelming, no one will bother checking up on anyone they don't really care about. Sound familiar? Maybe the social network will supplant the role that the internet played in our lives 10 years ago: others could often find you in its vastness if they cared, but they didn't. Just as ten years before that, we all had our names in the phone book, but no one called. The social norms adapt.
How do you see them evolving in the next 5 - 10 years? And how will Facebook and Google respond to or drive the changes? --ADM
Tim Rogers has lived in Japan for several years. He's sick of it -- very, very, very sick of it. So sick of it, he's written one of the longest* blog posts in the history of blog posts to explain all the ways he's sick of it. I didn't read the whole thing, but most of it seems to be because they put meat on everything and scream all the time.
Threat Level reports that the Chinese hackers who attacked Google and more than 30 other high profile companies a few month ago targeted the companies' source code management systems, meaning they had access to -- and apparently the ability to modify -- the "crown jewels" of their targets' intellectual property: their software. The victims of the attack used Perforce to manage their code, and according to Threat Level, Perforce seems to have an extremely weak security model. (For instance, anonymous users with no password can add users to the system.)
Amtrak's Acela Express trains (which run at high speed along the northeast corridor from DC to Boston) will be getting free wifi. It's coming to some of the major stations, too. But the regular old trains will not be getting it any time soon, so you'll still have to make do talking to those Emerson College kids for 5 hours. --ADM
Noted NYC graffiti artist Lee Quinones has responded to readers' questions at NYTimes.com. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, he appears in Wild Style, and he painted Luis Guzman's truck in How to Make it in America. Even if you don't like graffiti, his responses are worth reading just for their musicality. --ADM
In exchange for the content, HuffPo shares the advertising and sponsorship revenue the section generates with the outside company, Causecast. And Causecast gets a platform to promote its services and the nonprofits it chooses to highlight, some of which are its partner organizations.
The section on HuffPo is labeled "in partnership with Causecast," but the third-party authorship is not made explicit:
...despite having a bio and byline like other Huffington Post editors [an author of some Impact pieces] is not a HuffPo employee. He is paid by Causecast and works out of their Santa Monica offices. As part of the arrangement with the Huffington Post, Harris oversees two other writers, who are also Causecast employees, in producing the site's content, which includes short original stories and aggregation from around the web.
The Nieman Lab wonders about the ethical implications of this. Causecast says their clients cannot pay them to place a story on HuffPo. Are there other considerations? If you're reading something you think is authored by HuffPo and is actually authored by a third-party corporation, do you care? What if that third-party has undisclosed relationships with the organizations discussed in the article?
Anyone have additional insight into this relationship? --ADM [via Romenesko]
Google Blogoscoped takes a look at the current state of Google Knol, Google' almost-forgotten, and allegedly more "authoritative" response to Wikipedia. Knol launched with much fanfare in 2008, although plenty of skeptics at the time felt the walled garden approach would fail.
Since the last time you've heard anything about Knol was probably in 2008, it's probably safe to say that it is now a failure. Will it recover? Google Blogoscoped says the developers seem to be "taking a long term view" of the project, and notes they are still actively improving the service. But the post estimates that Knol only has about 163,000 articles on it, many of which appear to be spam or debates about Knol itself. (Wikipedia has 3.2 million articles in English alone.)
As a result, few people seem to be thinking about or looking for Knol. Some Google Search Trends charts included at the bottom of the article dramatically illustrate this point. (The blue line is Wikipedia, the red line is Knol.)
Have you used Knol? Contributed to it? Made any money from it? --ADM
It's interesting to me that no sector of the mass media learned from any other sector as each one got its turn to react to the ongoing digital revolution. The newspaper industry is in the same throes as the film industry was, just as the film industry's struggle mirrored the music industry's.
For the last year or so, it's been the book publisher's turn to demonstrate it has learned something -- anything -- from the last 15 years. But, as the kerfuffle over pricing and DRM have demonstrated so clearly -- they haven't.
You want to buy the book soon after it's published? eBooks take care of that. You can have it a few seconds later, in fact. If the publisher delays releasing it because it's a "paperback," they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
You want a collector's item? Too bad! THEY PUT DRM ON THE EBOOK. Not much resale or nostalgia value there!
He credits fellow developer Kathy Sierra with helping him verbalize something he may have only intuited:
"To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you're using a blog to promote a business, that blog can't be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it's hoped, become your customers...
So, for example, if you're selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don't talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer. If you're opening a restaurant, don't blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You'll attract foodies who don't care about your restaurant yet."
But are corporate blogs necessary or even desirable? Despite running one for 10 years, Spolsky isn't convinced. He observes that many successful companies -- Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- have lousy blogs, and Apple has none at all. Finally (and relatedly), he announces that in a few weeks, he will be retiring his blog. He makes a good case for doing so, but it seems to me that companies who lack a large customer base and name recognition could gain a lot by blogging the way he did. --ADM
The basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency -- or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penelope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital, "they turn out to have a 'one over f' characteristic to them."
Researchers analyzed the length of shots in films and noticed the trend, which Angier suggests may explain why movies are so captivating even when they aren't that good. The researchers also seemed surprised that a montage from Rocky IV showing Rocky and Drago training separately featured matching shots of equal length for each boxer. As with the golden ratio, it seems like pink noise is the sort of thing that artists and audiences figure out before scientists do.
An accompanying graph shows how various films align (or not) with the 1/f ratio, objectively and as compared to the average for its year of release. Of all the films analyzed, Back to the Future matched 1/f most closely. Even so, researchers noted that there is no consistent correlation between a film's adherence to pink noise principle and its popularity with viewers. --ADM
You may have been hearing that chef Jamie Oliver wants to change the world through better food. And he has a show on ABC to help him accomplish just that. In this teaser video, he goes to a school in "America's unhealthiest town" (Huntington, WV) and shows the kids tomatoes, an eggplant, and cauliflower. The kids don't recognize any of them. --ADM
Here's some developing tech that will let you turn your skin into a touchscreen.
The first two questions for any new technology apply here: (1) How does this apply to me? (2) How does this apply to porn? --adm
If I'm reading it right, for each hardcover sold, publishers are left with revenue of $4.05 before overhead. For an eBook, they end up with "$4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances." Hence their reluctance to continue with the $9.99 pricing so favored by Amazon.
Related: Did you see that author Douglas Preston got into all kinds of trouble with his fans for suggesting they had a "sense of entitlement" for wanting cheap eBooks? He eventually apologized and reframed his comments after an outcry. --adm
The Tribeca Film Festival opens on April 21 in NYC. Its stated mission is "assisting filmmakers to reach the broadest possible audience, enabling the international film community and general public to experience the power of cinema and promoting New York City as a major filmmaking center."
So of course Shrek 4 is opening the festival this year. --ADM
The film is a collection of scenes that are completely implausible wrong in almost every respect. This time, its not just minor details that are wrong...More disturbing and implausible yet is the way the protagonist repeatedly endangers the lives of his team members. The soldiers I have worked with over the years are like brothers to one another. Never have I seen stronger bonds between men. Any soldier who routinely endangers his own life or those of his squad members would not be punched, as the movies star is in one scene. He would be demoted and kicked out of his unit.
Serious Eats has a profile of Robert Caplin, the photographer who takes many of the photos that accompany the New York Times' restaurant reviews. FAQ #1: Does he get to eat the food? "We aren't supposed to sit down and have a meal, but the chef often insists you try something..." He also takes pictures of things besides food, and has a blog. --ADM
The Pew Internet & American Life Project, in the news every few months for issuing reports on America's media consumption habits, has just released its latest survey, "Understanding the Participatory News Consumer." Key findings include:
"37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter."
"The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV." But over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and...
Local news is still the leading new source. "78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station."
And finally:
75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
It's a good thing for that, too! How else would my mom know that our President is a socialist Muslim born in Kenya? --ADM [via Lost Remote]
This week's guest editor is ADM, someone who I have known online for, oh boy, nearly a decade. He's already picking up items you'll see talked about in other places all week. I think you will enjoy his curation.
(In the meantime, one of my upcoming and exciting projects got written up in NYTimes' style mag, T: Refashioner. Much more on this later, but this will be exciting.)
Will Matt Damon be in another Bourne movie? His message has been consistent since about the time the last one came out. But people keep asking him about it, so here he is repeating it:
"If Paul Greengrass does it and we have something to say, definitely," said Damon. (Greengrass sounded less willing: "I'm out of it. I'm going to try other things.")
But this time Damon adds an unsettling twist:
"I think the way is to extend the franchise is to create a 'Bourne identity' that different actors can take on. I could pass the identity to Russell Crowe or Denzel Washington or Ryan Gosling."
The hit squad that killed the Hamas commander in Dubai apparently used a fast acting muscle relaxant to disable him before they smothered him. Earlier reports on the execution said the door was latched from the inside when the body was discovered. Anyone have any idea how they might have done that? --ADM
The econ/finance site Minyanville analyzes a recent report from AdMob and notes that "roughly 73% of Android users are male." The iPhone's user base, by contrast, is gender-balanced. Why? Minyanville says it's because of -- surprise! -- marketing. For example, Droid ads include subtle messages like, "It's not a princess. It's a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do." Apparently men, like robots, regularly fall for this kind of thing. --ADM
Why is Toyoda not spelled 'Toyota'? The Washington Post explains. Executive summary: His grandfather started the company, but they changed the name because "Toyota" has a luckier number of brush strokes (8). --ADM [via Consumerist]
So cute: Spoon's Britt Daniel talks to NPR's World Cafe about "found" lyrics and says that sometimes, when he hears something funny in a conversation, he'll text himself so he won't forget it. (Yep. That's all I've got on this most slow of snow days. But the link will take you to a live Spoon performance and that has to be worth something, right? It's only twenty minutes but they close with "I Summon You!") --FD
The Guardian's Daniel Leigh thinks we should stop pretending that Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese are still making great movies. In anticipation (or not!) of Alice in Wonderland and Shutter Island, Leigh examines why he just can't muster up any enthusiasm for either. Here he is on Tim Burton's last six films [I disagree with his assessment of Big Fish, but he has a point--am I breathlessly awaiting Alice in Wonderland because I actually think it's going to be fantastic? Not really. As Leigh argues, we should know better.] --FD
Is the world really so hard up for set-dressed flights of Gorey-esque fancy that we're rewriting history to forget 2005's drably gleaming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory retread? Or that his very finest moments in recent years could best be described as satisfactory (Corpse Bride) or efficient (Sweeney Todd)? And bear in mind that after them we're into Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes and, oh God poke my eyes out with a fantastical curlicued kebab skewer if I ever have to witness it again, Big Fish.
If you like the Flaming Lips, you may feel like an amateur fan when you read this conversation between Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Mark Richardson of Pitchfork about their 90s-era music--but you'll enjoy it anyway. Richardson, who wrote the newish 33 1/3 book on The Flaming Lips' 1997 Zaireeka, discusses the importance of Wayne Coyne's age difference with Kurt Cobain, the band's early theatricals and their consequent influence on bands like Of Montreal, the contrast they set against 90s grunge grimness and much more. --FD
[Note: I originally wrote that Richardson discussed Coyne's "mild schizophrenia" but that was actually in reference to former guitarist Ronald Jones.]
Esquire asks Mary Louise Parker to give up sex for a month. She accepts. Then declines. Then writes about it. Sort of. Seems a bit staged but anything she does or doesn't do is completely forgivable.
See also: giving up the news ("I read novels during my daily commute. I straight-up ignored Chris Matthews. Bliss. Then things got weird") and drinking by Editor in Chief David Granger ("The other hardest thing about not drinking is eleven o'clock"). Smells like the first Esquire feature-turned-book I might even buy--giving up on things as a trend seems like a natural, compelling next step in our excessive "try everything" culture. --FD
Millennials! They're getting harder to ignore/understand by the day!
Yesterday, the President of MTV Networks said that he thinks this generation is "really about authentic reality and family" and that's why MTV programming no longer appeals to Generation X. The Oscars announced that Zac Efron and the Twilight crew will be presenting awards this year in hopes of drawing a tween audience (which won't work on them because it's not like anyone below 23 has seen The Hurt Locker, but will work on me because it's not like I haven't seen 17 Again, twice).
Today, PBS News Hour is livetweeting a Pew Research conference on Millennials with some fascinating figures (only 14% use Twitter) and some mystifying statements with unintentionally ironic airquotes ("What's surprising is how 'conventional' this generation is."). And finally, Pew has a "How Millennial Are You?" quiz, which you can take here. I got a 78, which is probably why I'm actually enjoying the new Ke$ha video that just leaked, but not enough to steal her album. --FD
"If you're a white student and you arrive at the public elementary school building on 95th Street and Third Avenue, you'll probably walk through the front door. If you're a black student, you'll probably come in through the back." --FD
Zach Galifianakis interviews John Wray, author of the excellent Lowboy, now out in paperback. If you haven't read it yet, I bet this clip won't discourage you, unless you hate Brooklyn and/or laughter. [Here's John Wray's "The Making of Zach Galifianakis" in the Times magazine last year, and here's a Q&A with Wray by yours truly.] --FD
Haven't gotten around to reading The Guardian's collection of great authors' "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction" yet? Here are two good best-of lists: NYMag // Flavorwire. The second one even has the quotes Photoshopped onto their respective writers' photographs, ready for some insta-Tumbling, as well as some excerpts so you can judge the authors' words against their own advice. --FD
Great new issue of Wired this month, especially for old-schoolers who miss the early years. "10 Years After" looks back at the moment the Nasdaq peaked, the cover story is a roundup of the new digital currency options that even advances the ball, and Steven Levy's story on the Google algorithm is actually the story you've been wanting to read about the Google algorithm, not another warmed up wonk story on "Google culture." And Kevin Smith does his thing:
My dream is to never have to take a real job again. If my next movie bombs and nobody ever gives me another dollar to make more, I wouldn't care. I don't need to do it anymore. I was never convinced that the film thing would last anyway. It just made me interesting enough to have a Web site.
I'm doing one of those pecha kucha things at Ignite NYC VIII next week. The title: "Why The Hills Is The Greatest Show In The History of Television." Prepare to be convinced. More info to come.... -RX
Jennifer Egan nails it in the Times Book review with a poetic description of our online condition. --FD
I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.
Netflix alert: Fish Tank, which won Best British Film at the BAFTA awards last night, about a teen girl adjusting to her mother's new boyfriend. Fish Tank was in good company: it beat out An Education, In The Loop, and Moon. [Or, if you can't wait and you're super not-lazy, the movie is currently playing at IFC.] --FD
HBO has posted The Ricky Gervais Show pilot on YouTube and Arts Beat has an interview with Karl Pilkington, the third-wheel in this new project from Gervais and his partner in crime, Stephen Merchant. The show (due to premiere on HBO tonight) is a cartoon based on the popular podcast of the same name in which Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington sit around a table and talk. Wait, what?-- MM
Jimi Hendrix's stepsister, Janie Hendrix, let it slip during an L.A. Times interview that a Hendrix edition of "Rock Band" video game will be coming before the end of the year. Any new Hendrix music in the Rock Band franchise will be part of a slate of new products being planned to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his death. --MM
French Connection wants you to be a man and wear bunny ears. Check out the images/videos from their Spring 2010 campaign that was inspired by "the absurdity of french cinema." --MM
"Crash", the new exhibition at London's Gagosian gallery brings together works by artists who have been influenced by the JG Ballard, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, and Mike Nelson. Check out the photo gallery here. --MM
A young lady of 18, wealthy, pretty and agreeable, wants a husband. Not finding any one of her acquaintance who suits her, she has concluded to take this method of discovering one. The happy gentleman must be wealthy, stylish, handsome and fascinating. None other need apply. Address within three days, giving name and full particulars, and enclosing carte de visite, Carrie Howard, Station D, New York.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.
Our most popular new online tools -- Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Digg -- were designed to help us tame the web's wildness, to tag its outer limits and set up user-friendly taxonomies. ChatRoulette is, in this sense, a blast from the Internet past. It's the anti-Facebook, pure social-media shuffle.
It's usually provoking when the academic press gets ahold of popular technology, because it tends to create new sociological, economic, or aesthetic perspectives. But this long New York Review of Books piece on Facebook reads more like an attempt to coalesce everything that has already been written about Facebook, without any attempt to say something unique. But I wonder: is this the fault of the academic press, or is popular publishing already doing a decent job of contextualizing Facebook?
If I were into writing trend pieces, I'd be whipping up something about the migration that's about to happen from west coast bloggers to NYC: Scott Beale, Andy Baio, and Dave Winer should all be in duh big city this summer. What's interesting about this group is that they were all seminal Web 1.0 people who are even more relevant today.
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper's print edition will receive full access to the site.
I kept hearing that Andy Warhol had a show on MTV in the late '80s called Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes, but I've never been able to find it (promo). Much younger versions of Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, Marc Jacobs, Judd Nelson, Courtney Love, and William Burroughs were supposedly on it. I finally found a site that has videos of three of the episodes, including interactions with John Waters, Simon Le Bon, Bo Didley, Frank Zappa, Kevin Dillon, Debbie Harry, Paulina Porizkova, and Pee-wee Herman. It's the most random collection of stuff that you've ever seen, and it's difficult to imagine it on MTV. (There's also something about this that reminds me of "the old internet," where not everything existed at a finger's touch, and you had to search FTP sites to find this kind of esoterica. Now if I could just find those NYC cable access shows he used to do.)
Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
Employee: I'm not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user's user ID, and then the password. I'm not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out 'Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn't as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look.
The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened. He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on the lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings.
But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.
With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?
So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)
29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.
28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast.
(See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)
27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)
26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."
25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what itisnot. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)
23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)
22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)
21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)
20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)
19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.
18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.
17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.
16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internetcommentthread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)
14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer -- and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be "The BoingBoing it's okay to like."
(See also: Hey, It's Noah and Waxy.)
12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense.
(See also: Obama Foodorama.)
11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking -- especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly -- and a reassurance that it's okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren't for those pesky copyright issues.
(See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)
9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn't sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it's also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl).
(See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)
8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn't sound like he has an agenda, who doesn't have a consulting agency on the side that he's pumping his half-baked theories into.
(See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)
6) Harper's Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago -- this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind "the future of books" into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print.
(See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)
5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre's Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now.
(See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)
2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn't ask, "How the hell will they make money?" But let's set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, "Why has The Awl become an internet love object?" I've done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scoccha chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it's just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don't know how they'll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck.
(See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)
1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet.
(See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)
I've often wondered why NYTBR doesn't do more contemplative, thematic essays like this: The Naked and the Conflicted. It's about how "the Great Male Novelists of the last century" portray sex.
I wonder: what is the quality of 'viral' that makes it viral? Some would say it has something to do with the medium -- the way it gets passed around socially, without the aid of traditional outlets. In that sense, the 'viral hit' is somewhat like the 'sleeper hit' -- it starts slow, builds momentum. It doesn't seem much different.
But I wonder if that's not what people mean at all when they say 'viral.' I suspect they mean something much closer to a different phenom from a previous decade: the 'one-hit wonder.' In that sense, is Blind Melon really any different than Tay Zonday?
--Me, quoted in an essay that proposes the aughts were the first decade to be defined by their virality (memes), an interesting theory that I possibly tried to debunk.
I did a 5QQ for Mediate in which I talk about The Hills, BNO News, and Megantereons. Snippet:
Isn't it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare are NYC's major contributions to social software in the past couple years? I have a theory! They share this commonality: they're both semi-closed networks. To wit: Though wildly successful, both platforms still somehow feel clubby and insidery.
In the long run, it will be interesting to see if this distinct (dare I say New Yorky?) quality is a feature or a bug.
(Before I lived in NYC, I had a name for social software like FourSquare's predecessor, Dodgeball. I called it "NewYorkWare" because those apps seemed specifically made for the hyper-urban. Similarly, Tumblr seems made for the hyper-mediated.)
I guess because this blog is sometimes concerned with online civility, I should link to this: The Warm-Fuzzy Web. Tumblr and The Awl exploded with comments, so you can find your side-taking there.
Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr's make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.
The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
These two things from disparate parts of the Sunday Times (Week In Review and Styles) should be mashed up:
It "is one of the most symbolic documents of our age," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote of [Celebrity Register]. "It is an index to the new categories of American society" -- the categories, he meant, that were formed by the media, which had degraded the hero into the mere celebrity. "The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark," Mr. Boorstin observed. "The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name."
A growing number of Web sites now play the role of middleman, connecting aspiring contestants with casting directors. And as the reality genre has thrived, so has the cottage industry of online talent scouts that serve it -- sites like RealityWanted, Talent6 and GotCast, where people can find casting calls for TV shows and submit their resumes, often for a monthly fee.
Just in case it got lost in the shuffle of decade nostalgia, Alex Pareene's Encyclopedia of Counterintuitive Thought, which itemizes all the ways in which convention wisdom has been undermined, reveals what may have been the prevailing intellectual trick of the decade.
Vevo, the new music video site with buy-in from Universal, Music, Sony and EMI (not to mention Google/YouTube), debuted last night with a big NYC party.
This Financial Times article about the downfall of MySpace and its conflict with News Corp is pretty funny for all kinds of anecdotal reasons, but my favorite bit is this:
Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends' pages without having to open a new browser window.
A South Korean holding company has purchased Barbarian Group. If those dudes weren't my friends, I would compare this to the Mad Men takeover by McCann.
So the best thing about David Carr at The Times is that The Times lets him get lyrical, amiright? I feel like this is the kind of stuff that would normally get cut from any non-op-ed piece; either that, or no one else can write in the same bouncy way:
For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It's a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.
We're living in a stylistic tropics. There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all "now," in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
If you're in NYC this weekend, you may want to know about Sasha Grey and others reading from Neuromancerat the New Museum. (In other incongruent news, did anyone see the strange thing on the newsstand this month? There's a Roger Ebert essay in Playboy about Kubrick's Lolita with pictures of Sasha.)
The NYT media desk might be the subject of a documentary. (Side anecdote: I was at a party a few days ago that contained a full video team following around NYC socialite Tinsley Mortimer for a possible reality show. I nudged Brian Stelter and said, "Why don't they make a reality show about you?" He smiled in a way that I didn't understand at the time.)
Arrington weighs in on this whole FoxCorp/Google de-indexing thing. I still think this is going to play out in some interesting way: I predict someone big will attempt to treat their spiderability as an asset in the coming year. Google won't pay at first, but once Bing takes a bid for exclusive rights, it's a whole new game. (And to that "value of traffic" argument from the previous post, I still can only say: 1 billion unmonetized pageviews versus 10 million actual dollars isn't a contest right now. Many companies will try to take that Bloomberg strategy of making their content exclusive in the coming year. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right strategy, but I'm sure it will happen.)
Belle de Jour, the anonymous sex blogger from London, never really became a huge phenom in America. (Most people don't even know that Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the ITV2 show about her, gets replayed on Showtime in the States.) Anyway, she has finally revealed her identity and the best part is that not only is she a she -- but she's a scientist! Dr. Brooke Magnanti, welcome to geekboy adoration.
Clearly the strangest part of the NYT Mag's interview with Ruth Reichl:
[Gourmet] has a legendary renewal rate. They would never tell me exactly what it was. I kept asking: "What does that mean? What are you talking about?" And they just kept saying: "It's great. People buy Gourmet forever."
This reminds me of NYTimes.com's lead editor saying he has no idea of their metrics. I understand why editors might want to shield their publications from the vagaries of metrics, but to completely ignore them seems like suicide.
I'll give anything a chance, which is why my TiVo gets overloaded in the Fall when I allow every new show to get at least three episodes of viewing. It's now the third week, which means it's time to clean out the TiVo. As of last night, I have officially dropped Cougar Town, Melrose Place, Leno, The Beautiful Life, The Middle, The Forgotten, Glee, and Eastwick. That leaves Flashforward and Community as the only new shows that will survive this bloodbath.
This reads a little bit too much like a glowing book jacket cover blurb, but it also looks enticing:
It's the first great novel about the Internet; it's one of the best books of any kind I've ever read about identity on any level. It is brilliant and it is essential; it should be required reading not only for anyone who uses the Internet, but for anyone who cares about contemporary American fiction.
I was already 16 years old when I first set foot in a McDonald's. This was partially because my mother wouldn't let us eat fast food, but also because we lived 80 miles away from the closest one. It turns out that the location in continental America that is furthest from a McDonald's (145 miles) was actually very close to where I lived.
When the Obama administration came into office, utopian hope spread across the digital land: the internet was finally going to be used for governance. More than a mere fund-raising tool, the medium would reveal its true self as an instrument of self-organization, problem-solving, and collaboration. Like Twitter and Google before it, Change.gov would become a verb!
We're now nine months into the administration, and it's time to ask the question: Is the internet changing anything?
In January, I noted that the only time I ever visited a government website was to download tax forms. In the intervening months, that hasn't changed much. Is it just me?
The primary criticism of the Obama administration is similar to my concern: good planning, questionable execution. Apps.gov is cool and noble and interesting... but I'm trying to think of use scenarios where it will be used effectively. Is it my lack of imagination?
It's possible that the limited innovation has nothing to do with the the administration -- perhaps it's the shortcomings of the medium itself. (It strikes me that the Internet and American pragmatism have similar historical tracts.) Or maybe it's just too soon. That's a common answer to much of the anticipation of the past year. That seems to be Anil's answer too, as he closes with a notion that returns us back to that utopian vision:
And it's likely that soon they'll be platforms that spawn their own ecosystem of developers, users and applications, just like Facebook or Twitter or the iPhone. When that does happen, we can safely say that dot-gov is the new dot-com.
Question: who actually uses those "share this" buttons cluttering up all websites? Seriously, who? Sites are increasingly looking more like this graphic that accompanies the NYT story about those social media buttons. While I'd like to say these are complete bullshit (and I try to convince clients that they are), you can't ignore that ~200 retweet count on Techcrunch posts. Do any of those really matter? Are those influencers, or bullshiters?
(Similarly, isn't it crazy that no one has stopped and wondered how the hell ShareThis and Bit.ly, like Pluck before them, became hot startups? It's like once the legitimacy of user-generated web 2.0 companies was accepted, no one dared ever question the importance of the intermediary ever again.)
When Garrison Keillor had a stroke a few weeks ago, about 20 people sent me emails asking if I felt any sort of glee. Of course that's dumb -- this Gawker tag is all the vengeance I need.
The first time I met a writer was the first time it occurred to me that one could be a writer.
I was a college sophomore who, through a random set of instances, walked into a very large auditorium containing a very small audience. Jim Carroll was on a dark stage reading from a collection of stories, Praying Mantis, that he had just put out. His crackling, stuttery, affected voice filled the room as he said, "This is 'Tiny Tortures' (mp3)." I actually counted the number of people in the audience: eight.
Carroll had survived modest success in the '70s as a rock singer. "Catholic Boy," which sounded a little like The Clash meets the Stones, and "People Who Died" (mp3) were small hits in 1980. But after that he lived in relative obscurity for over a decade, until Leonardo DiCaprio came along to play him in The Basketball Diaries.
When I walked into that dark room, Carroll was reading something called "A Day at the Races" (mp3). I grew up in a town about the size of your apartment building, so this was the first time that I ever heard someone read their own work. And I was mesmerized.
I happened to know the student council person who booked him at this random midwest college, so I asked her if I could take Carroll out for the night. Frightened by his stories of heroin abuse, she was relieved that I would entertain him. So at a bar called Whitey's on a cold winter night in North Dakota, Jim Carroll drank with me. He told me a hundred stories about people and places I had never heard of. And he frequently snuck in the bathroom to do I-don't-know-what.
I had never met someone like Jim Carroll, but his writing eventually led me to people like William Burroughs and Patti Smith. I never talked to him again after that night, but every time I walked down St. Mark's -- 10, 15, nearly 20 years later -- I thought of him. It was one of those incalculably small events that probably changed me forever.
The Awl visits the Minnesota State Fair and picks up on the way that agriculture is still presented as the centerpiece, even though most people have no relationship to agriculture anymore. Since the first time I visited the fair in the early '80s, it has transformed from something like a trade fair vibe to a museum of a forgotten lifestyle. Or as The Awl puts it:
They are petting zoos for the 90-some percent of visitors who no longer have any connection whatsoever to the fundamental pillar of local society going back to whatever beginning you're inclined to believe we had.
It wasn't that long ago that agricultural subsidies were discussed with the same rigor as health care is debated today. My sister and nieces still live on a farm in Minnesota. I thought of them the other day when someone casually mentioned Farm Aid, which I'm surprised to learn still exists. Farm Aid -- that was a big deal once upon a time!
Klosterman reviews the new 13 Beatles remasters (out tomorrow) as though they were from "a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes." It's funny.
The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one. When the box arrived in the mail, I briefly considered smashing the entire unopened collection with a ball-peen hammer and throwing it into the mouth of a lion. But then, against my better judgment, I arbitrarily decided to give this hippie shit an informal listen. And I gotta admit -- I'm impressed. This band was mad prolific.
Sorry for the obnoxious personal nature of this... I desperately need to hire an assistant and I thought I'd try posting it here first. Some terms:
The ideal candidate knows a lot about the internet. The super ideal candidate can make stuff on the internet. Any combination of basic design or programming or project management is awesome, but not required.
Writing, too. And research.
This is not a full-time job. It's barely even half-time. So it should be your backup gig.
It very possibly could grow into a fulltime job, soon, if you wanted.
Some things might be interesting (meeting pitches, product invention) and some things won't be (sorry, Zuki needs to be walked).
You must be in NYC, but you can probably work from home some of the time.
NYT Mag has published its big Spike Jonze feature for the eventual release of Where The Wild Things Are in mid-October. It mostly poses studio execs against creative geniuses, or something like that, with quotes like: "Jonze told me that one of his models for the dialogue was the work of John Cassavetes, which may be exciting news if you're a fan of avant-garde cinema, but might not sound quite as good if you're the president of Warner Brothers." [via]
Some people were creeped out seeing Cobain sing in the Guitar Hero 5 trailer, but I don't think anyone was prepared for the sight of him singing Bon Jovi in the unlocked version:
To accompany Kottke's list of 1984 movies, here are some of the album releases from the same year:
Madonna, Like a Virgin Prince, Purple Rain The Replacements, Let It Be Bon Jovi, Bon Jovi The Smiths, The Smiths Husker Du, Zen Arcade Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA R.E.M., Reckoning Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime Metallica, Ride the Lightning Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
I was waiting for someone to write about how Twitter isn't popular among the kids. (The 18-year-old who sounds like a 68-year-old -- "I just think it's weird and I don't feel like everyone needs to know what I'm doing every second of my life" -- has 11 followers.)
Nick's new book, Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, went on sale today. I'm sure some will think it's frivolous, and in some context maybe it is, but it's also a spectacular illustration of how the internet bustles with brief and spontaneous moments of creativity. And contrary to how the supposed controversy was perceived, I'm super happy that someone made this book, because I probably never would have. And the bonus: someone finally cut Nick a check so that he could move to NYC. Welcome to the idiocy.
I've heard this complaint about Mad Men: It forces current events onto the screen in a way that isn't like actual life. History isn't that deterministic, goes the argument. A good example was when Roger Sterling spoke of a "Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep." I don't know if that criticism is fair, but I'm going to try entering "Jasmine Fiore-sized identity" into contemporary usage.
Here's something I think about a lot: In the span of my life, I've seen the coming and passing of many music formats. I vaguely remember 8-tracks, cassettes populate all of my high school memories, walls of CDs took off in college, and records seemed to persist steadily through that entire era. But then there's the MP3. After all of that change in so few years, it now seems likely that I will die with the MP3 as the dominant format. Anyway, this new Pitchfork thing is long, but it's highly recommended: The Social History of the MP3.
Twitter to Add Location. Was wondering how this would ultimately be executed. It's at the API level and users can opt in to add location metadata. The teaser:
For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city -- whether you follow them or not.
Just imagine if a service like Foursquare was able to send your actual location to Twitter alongside the name of the place you are at. That would save the people who follow you on Twitter but don't use Foursquare the hassle of looking up the location of the place you are at if they want to meet up with you.
North Dakota is home to protectionist policies ranging from agriculture co-ops to state-run insurance to a law demanding that all pharmacies be locally owned (banning the only advantage of a Wal-Mart: cheap drugs). There is the state-run Bank of North Dakota, which in a year that saw private banks taking federal bailouts, returned $30 million to the state's general fund. More importantly, these state organizations operate in competition with private business, a fact that keeps everyone honest and is a system that, while quite successful and popular here, is clearly going to destroy America if partly implemented on any national scale, such as with health care.
This nails the contradiction of the state, which has two of the more progressive senators -- Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan -- yet is culturally more red than Utah. If you ever wondered what a libertarian socialist economy would look like (and who hasn't?), North Dakota is basically it.
Conrad, the senior senator, was on Charlie Rose recently, speaking about the glories of social co-operatives. Co-operatives!
20-year-old Hayley Williams of the band Paramore has not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six Tumblrs dedicated to her. Vulture just went out on a limb and asked, "Is Paramore the greatest lady-fronted rock band in the country?"
I've become conditioned to saying that everything the AP does is stupid, so maybe I have to reserve judgment on this one: How The Associated Press will try to rival Wikipedia in search results. At least it's tactically an idea, rather than fantasy. Interesting: EveryZing, a company I've worked with that was recently purchased by NBC, seems to be involved.
Despite everyone telling him it's a dumb idea, Hunter is attending Columbia Journalism School to the tune of $47K. His story will be a good one to watch (I bet he gets a book deal, which is a funny way to make j-school worthwhile), but the real reason I link to this: it's a good example of Gawker's new commenting system working pretty nicely. Gawker is the new Metafilter?
I actually own a copy of Lotion's album Nobody's Cool (1996), which infamously (at the time) had liner notes from Thomas Pynchon. Now, 13 years later, it turns out at least part of the back story was a hoax. (Conversely, it seems that the new book trailer is actually narrated by him.) And just to be annoyingly elusive and insinuating, just like the master, I'll add: a prominent dot-com mogul grew up in an apartment right next to Pynchon and describes him as very normal. GUESS WHO!
Lady Gaga: Architecture Personified? I ask not in jest, is there anyone trying harder to bring the avant-garde to the mainstream? (Actually, are we allowed to use the term "avant-garde" any more?)
I finally redesigned this dumb blog. Yay! There's still some clean-up work to be done, but drop a note in the comments if you see anything amiss. (LOOK AT THE BIG SCARY VIRUS GRAPHIC THAT'S GOING TO EAT THE INTERNET!) Update: I've made many changes based upon some feedback. And I made the logo even uglier, just to piss off that one guy. (I'll probably tweak that later this week.)
Have you noticed that we seem to have more "inside leaks" about the reported Apple tablet than any product in that company's history? (Another one today.) I see three potential explanations: 1) There's a new squeaky wheel inside Apple. 2) It's the kind of product that more people need to see, so the risk is greater. 3) They're intentionally leaking it from the inside.
I'm betting it's the last one. This is Apple's way of placing a subliminal suggestion in your noggin that says, "You don't need a Kindle just yet."
So it's great that those American journalists were "pardoned" in North Korea, but isn't the storyline here kinda crazy? The journalists worked for Al Gore (at Current.TV) and after a visit by his former boss, Bill Clinton, they will be released despite his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, being the functional Secretary of State. Bill is presumably involved because Hillary has been playing bad cop with North Korea -- and they called her a "funny lady," which is funny. (And: "Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.") Along for the ride to North Korea? That wacky sidekick John Podesta, who was Clinton's chief of staff. Somehow, I bet that madman Kim Jong-il actually enjoys how this all turned out: like a '90s sitcom.
Let me ask you, what kind of person do you think Scarlett Johansson is?
You have probably never met her, and I definitely have not, yet we both seemingly feel like we could describe her personality with reasonable accuracy.
This is peculiar.
It's not shocking to learn that humans enjoy making personality judgments based upon scant evidence. But with celebrities it seems exceptionally dubious, since we actually know literally nothing about them first-hand. Lohan, Aniston, Springsteen, Cruise -- why do all these people seem to have well-formed personas? How much of it is real and how much is manufactured? What are the sources we use to scrape together these mysterious portraits?
There are a few known mythological origins. Maybe that profile in Rolling Stone had some lasting influence, and perhaps those eight minutes on Leno left an impression. But these sources, mediated and filtered and manicured, seem exceptionally unreliable. So what else is there?
Oh yeah, we have their work. Scarlett gave a lasting impression in Lost in Translation, so perhaps we know a little more about her because of how she gobbles sushi with Bill Murray. But wait -- she was acting. Can we really conclude anything about her personality from these flickering screen moments?
I've spent an inordinate amount of time considering this question: why do we think we know people who we'll never actually know?
Here's my best guess: we trust gossip.
Before mass media, gossip was merely personal information shared about a mutual acquaintance. In other words, pre-modern gossip was the original conversational marketing: valued information shared by reputable sources.
With the onset of broadcasting, publishing, and eventually the internet, the intimacy of gossip bred with the entertainment industry, birthing the hybrid offspring known was celebrity gossip. Of all the animals in the media zoo, celebrity gossip emerged as the most chimerical creature. Every day, hundreds of weird little stories pop up on sites with names like Hollywood Tuna and Egotastic and Celebrity Puke. Sometimes they make outrageous claims (Amy Winehouse just ate a drunk baby!), and other times the narratives are ostentatiously mundane (Tara Reid just ate a taco!). Through these morsels of checkout lane anti-matter, we form lasting opinions about celebrities.
That finally brings us to today's launch of GossipCop.com, a site that I did the strategy/design/development on. The premise is simple: investigate the accuracy of the daily anecdotes, the rampant rumors, and the cubicle grist known as celebrity gossip. Think of it as TMZ meets Smoking Gun. Or maybe Perez Hilton meets Columbia Journalism Review. Whatever -- the prevailing idea is that even seemingly unknowable information can be investigated in today's info-rich economy.
My three favorite features on the site:
+ Truth Meter. Every post investigates a piece of celebrity gossip and provides a rating, from 0 to 10, based upon the likelihood of the story.
+ Paparazzi Patrol. Rather than churn out more celebrity video, Gossip Cop looks at the underside of the celebrity gossip business. By turning the camera back on the paparazzi, the site reveals the gossip creators for what they are. (This feature was originally dubbed "Papsmeared," a name I really loved but which was ultimately dropped.)
+ Twit Happens. With its direct interaction and unfiltered access, Twitter could end up being the greatest invention in celebrity journalism since the camera. It is quickly becoming the ultimate device for determining how impressions are made, rumors are debunked, and celebrity battles are fought. This hand-picked list contains the best tweets of the day.
Truthfully, I'm not much of a celebrity news consumer. But I hope this site adds a new angle into the salacious, rumor-driven celebrity culture.
From an NYT story about some new crazy thing the AP is trying to invent to prevent copyright infringement:
Each article -- and, in the future, each picture and video -- would go out with what The A.P. called a digital 'wrapper,' data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.
Could that description be any more confusing? Does anyone know what it actually is? I'm guessing some sort of markup?
Only one thing struck me as odd about today's much-discussed Observer piece about how the NYTimes.com is constructed each day: the lead editor apparently has time to read every story in the paper, but has zero time to check his traffic stats?
One of the first products from FourSquare's API: Social Great. It's pretty simple -- it shows the locations that are hot in nyc by hour, day, week, and all time -- but it's easy to imagine the potential.
This will likely be good: Will Shortz, the NY Times crossword puzzle editor, is answering questions this week. Update:
For my major in enigmatology at Indiana University, I took courses on "Word Puzzles of the 20th Century," "Construction of Crossword Puzzles," "Popular Mathematical Puzzles," "Logic Puzzles," "The Psychology of Puzzles," "Crossword Magazines," and related subjects. Not surprisingly Indiana had no existing courses on puzzles, so I made them all up myself. In each case I'd find a professor willing to work with me one on one on the topic I proposed. For my course on crossword construction, for example, every two or three weeks I'd take a new puzzle I'd created to my professor's office and sit at his side while he solved and critiqued it. This was my first experience creating professional quality crosswords. For my course on the psychology of puzzles, I studied how the brain works as well as why people feel driven to solve puzzles. My thesis was on "The History of American Word Puzzles Before 1860," in which I traced original American puzzles back to 1647 -- almost the beginning of printing history in the colonies.
Trope is the New Meme. "A few years ago it felt like one could scarcely read a think-piece in any newspaper or magazine without coming across some mention of the word 'meme.' Now it seems as though the new meme is the word 'trope.' Trope is everywhere." See also: recent xkcd.
NYCers, your new favorite iPhone app: New York Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App. Watch the video. It looks sorta meh at first, but then it goes crazy awesome augmented about 25 seconds in. It's not out yet, but here's more info.
Jay-Z made that "Death of Auto-Tune" thing into a video? Why does he look like Lenny Kravitz in it? And why is there a poker match in the middle? [via Faris, who has an "augmented" version]
The nerds behind Memetracker, which builds maps around news streams, have a new paper, "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle," which claims, according to a NYT story, that "the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours." I would say the methodology looks flawed, but it just so happens that this story came out exactly 2.5 hours ago.
[Books] help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.
Argh! It's not that this form of nostalgia is unworthy of some passing historical fascination, because I'm sure digitization actually does represent a drastic change in how we perceive cultural objects. Rather, the obvious annoyance in this sentimental prose is its complete lack of awareness of just how silly the fetishized cultural object was in the first place. Shouldn't we be suspicious of anyone who thinks that showing off your CD collection was ever really the point? Update: Continued on Snarkmarket...
Today we announced the launch of Mediaite.com, a new site that covers all dimensions of the media world. I advised on it, including doing the design and development. Most of my previous launch projects had the support of a media entity with dozens of employees, so this was a different kind of challenge, involving such wonderful tasks as recalling the inner-workings of DART and building WordPress plugins. It's been a while since I was involved in a bootstrappy startup, so this post is for the few people who are interested in the nuances of moving between big and small media, for however long that historical distinction remains.
Power Grid
Although a lot is going on with the site, this feature will probably garner the most attention. The Power Grid ranks 1,500 media personalities in a dozen categories. It will predictably get criticized for some sort of navel-gazing, but just as with pageview counts and most-emailed articles lists before it, the index will also predictably be ctrl+refreshed by industry obsessives. All new metrics go through their hazing periods, and media hazing is the worst form of it.
As this month's Wired overtly suggests, the abundance of data should pose a new frontier for publishing. As personal data migrates online, accusations will arise about the narcissism of measuring thyself, perhaps even yanking in some conservative trope about the decline of society, or some liberal invective about the end of privacy. Everyone will eventually settle down, and we will all learn a little more about each other. The world will go on, and no one will take Twitter Followers that seriously. (Except Dan, who is on a mission to pass me. Please don't follow him.)
The Power Grid itself posed many technical challenges: how to build an extensible algorithm, how to gather the data, how to differentiate industries, how to eliminate outlying factors, how to display the information. Watching the launch of Tumblarity, with its mercurial display and confounding numerical obfuscation, was a lesson in information design. (It took me days to figure out if you wanted a big or small Tumblarity number.) While the Power Grid doesn't reveal every single data point (mostly because that would be visually overwhelming), enough data is available for surmising the gist of how rankings are calculated.
And it's more than just a game. If you want to get a snapshot of Joel Stein or Kevin Rose, there is some interesting data to investigate. If you have an active, data-focused mind, you can imagine future iterations of the Power Grid: new data sources, APIs, visualized trending data, other industries. Who knows...
Voice
The tone of Mediaite is opinionated, but factual. It will be more reported than most blogging today, yet it will take stances where it needs to. The site's editors (Colby Hall, formerly of VH1; Rachel Sklar, formerly of HuffPo; Glynnis MacNicol, formerly of Mediabistro; Steve Krakauer, formerly of TVnewser) provide the corpus of the site in TV, Online, and Print, while user contributions end up in the Columnists bucket.
I'll be writing occasional columns too.
Identity Design
"Nostalgic futurism," "pixelated pop art," "newspaper retro" -- these were some of the early identities we toyed with. After running through iterations of each, we ended up with something calm, simple, flat.
Information Design
If you follow online design trends even marginally, you've seen the grid take over the scene. It's a fine system, especially when applied to data-rich sites. But it also suffers from a deficiency: it makes you think vertically. Take a look at the NYTimes.com, undeniably one of the best designed news sites. Here's a test: Start scanning the page while thinking about how your eyes move in conjuncture with scrolling. Do you see a pattern? Your eyes are forced to move up and down with your scrollbar. This unnatural movement is because the site is built as stacks of content. Grid design implicitly enforces this kind of thinking, because it tries to build nicely aligned columns.
This is problematic, because I don't think people actually want to scan content this way. Blogs have proven they read content this way, but it seems easier to scan content horizontally.
This was a small innovation we discovered in redesigning msnbc.com, which was was reconceived in other prominentsites. These "horizontal sites" build a new kind of importance hierarchy. Designers don't realize it, but unaligned vertical stacks are a remnant of the way that newspapers were designed -- in columns, up and down. These new layouts are more like movie screens and wide monitors, with action moving left and right.
Platform
Except for the Power Grid, it's all built on WordPress, which I haven't used in five years. Some hacking was required to get the front page to have a non-blog layout, but enough advancements have occurred over the years to make it only mildly painful.
Conclusion!
If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.
The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is "launch another blog," which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.
Mediaite is a hybrid model, borrowing some successful formats of the past and mixing it with some new ideas.
I don't know if I've ever seen anyone so excited with a book as when I ran into Caroline last night toting around an advance copy of Accidental Billionaires. Her review.
There's a new video of Leighton Meister on the internet. No, not that video! This one, a video from Cobra Starship [snicker]. The plot is pretty much an episode of Gossip Girl, and except for that breakdown bridge at the end, it's pretty good, right?
I've been thinking a lot about a comment that Rick Webb made in my post last week about unpaid writing gigs. "Just accept it's like photography, and that you'll never make a living off of it." I have a instinctual desire to say, "No, writing is different." But I'm unable to come up with any intelligible way in which it is. Will writing just democratize itself into ubiquity, leaving only a scant few people who can call themselves writers by profession? And would that be a bad thing?
Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia: "For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia." Wales contributed to the "sanitizing effort," which I'm frankly surprised ever worked. Isn't it surprising that no blogs picked up on this? NPR questions the ethics.
Gmail Ninja Tips. I didn't know some of these, such as that you can sign out remotely or that you can add "+anything" to your address (rexsorgatz+awesome@gmail.com) and it works like your normal address.
Kottke's right about Twitter litter, which is why I want an app that will just give me friend recommendations. Update: NYT story about Vark.com, a revved up Yahoo Answers that uses your Facebook friends and their extensions.
NYC puked all over itself this week over this question: Should you write for free? (My answer, which is meaningless without a wordy explanation, but nonetheless: No, except for limited circumstances.) For anyone who cares, I'll fulfill my duty as link rounder upper: Simon Dumeno in Ad Age probably got the ball rolling, but Foster Kamer at Gawker picked it up and pissed off everyone, most of all Rachelle Hruska (whose Guest of a Guest had a Styles profile last weekend) who gave the best smack-down you've seen in a while, even though Maura Johnston dissented/quibbled, but meanwhile Emily Gould was forcefully explaining why she writes for free, and by that time everyone with a Tumblr had something to say about everything from The Awl to HuffPo. The end.
I was expecting Bill Wasik's And Then There's This to be the most-discussed book of the summer, but so far there's only this Vulture Reading Room, with your favorite viralogists like Anil Dash, David Rees, and Virginia Heffernan.
"Purple Rain really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it that way or not. You have Prince himself, a very unusual-looking figure, five feet tall -- pretty much anybody considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of odd physical feature, i.e., Biggie's lazy eye. And then the whole idea of beefs -- Prince and Morris. Morris' whole pimp attitude, that was something you didn't hear since the blaxploitation films of the early '70s. Prince sang about sex and he worked with drum machines."
That's ?uestlove in this month's Spin cover story, which is an oral history on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain.
So I watched the first episode of It's On, MTV's new show to replace TRL, starring the extremely likable Alexa Chung. Probably the most surprising thing: it's basically a talk show. There were a couple sketches (Jack Black and Michael Cera painfully talking over the trailer to their movie), some interviews (Spencer & Heidi), a performance (Soulja Boy). They didn't play a single music video. Anyway, they seemed to handle the twitter/facebook integration into the show pretty seamlessly, which was the biggest question going in. So I think it worked and I'm ready to now ask: Alexa, will you be my friend?
Bill Maher holds a special place in my heart. There has never been another living person who I politically agree with so much, yet despise personally. That's success! So this thing on Obama is funny.
Every NYT Styles story should be like this one: Bartender, Make It a Stiletto. There's really some guy out there who gets his jollies by lying down on bar floors wrapped in a blanket and asking people to step on him? Has anyone ever encountered this dude?
"Yes, but I can make [flatulence] noises." Huh, the NYTimes really can't publish the word "fart," even if it's only online? (That interview occurred before anyone saw the video. It's funny to see how nervous and defensive the Times seems before even seeing the piece.)
As JJ Abrams recently pointed out in Wired, it's easy to forget that J. D. Salinger is still alive. The nonagenarian (that's 90!) popped up in the news last week when he filed a lawsuit against some moron writing a "follow-up" book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye ("moron" because he's doing it; I suspect it might actually be legal). Anyway, Rosenbaum at Slate runs through the conspiracy theories about just what the hell J.D. has been up to all these years. He hasn't published a story since 1965, in The New Yorker.
If you missed it, Kim Gordon sorta slammed Radiohead's In Rainbows biz model last week. "They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn't catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don't sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever."
Because it was Internet Week here in NYC, I ended up missing most of what happened... on the internet! But I'm sure Digg Ads got some attention. I was intrigued by this nice bit of counter-intuitiveness: "The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system." I like the idea of being punished for bad ads.
This is pretty great... there's a British game show called Golden Balls that concludes with a segment called Spilt or Steal that directly borrows the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. There are many YouTube clips, but the best has to be this one.
My favorite part of the new video for The-Dream's "Walking on the Moon" (directed by Hype Williams) is not the strange recreations of the Millennium Falcon. It's when Kanye teleports onto the holodeck with the confused Barbarella supermodel.
When it comes to music videos, is anyone out there even still trying to create the epic? Kanye tosses out the occasional ode to MTV yesteryear, but no one else seems invested in the grand narrative arc. With that prelude, say what you will about Lady GaGa, but her new video for "Paparazzi" is conceptually.... something. Perez Hilton himself says: "It is her strongest work to date. It is a mini-film. It is art. It is visual pornography. It is satire. It is commentary. It is brilliant! And, we are NOT exaggerating." Okay then! See also: GaGa channeling Madonna channeling Warhol, and big dicks.
Yesterday I randomly wondered: who are cab drivers talking to all day long on their phones? A few people responded that they are actually all talking to each other. They reported that there are party lines where groups of cab drivers all chat together. If this is true, it sounds amazing! How many people are in these "rooms" at once? What is the nature of the conversations? How long has this been going on? Do the cabbies know each other in real life, or is it completely virtual? I'm unable to find any reference to this online, but Talkee.com seems like one such resource. If anyone knows more, please leave a comment.
The best thing you're going to read on the internet for a while is Errol Morris' seven-part series on frauds and fakes for NYTimes.com. Part 1 is about art forger Han van Meegeren; Part 2 is an interview about the Uncanny Valley with Edward Dolnick; the rest are forthcoming.
Forbes has a decent little story about what NYTimes.com is doing with advertising innovation. Three bullets: they have an in-hour creative advertising team, they are developing non-standard ad units, and they are going after brand advertising rather than direct response.
I heard a rumor that NYT's controversial new Social Media Editor, Jennifer Preston, had never heard of Twitter before she started her job. Maybe that's a little hard to believe, but she definitely wasn't using Twitter before that. Anyway, PaidContent has some advice for her.
Proceeding Heffernan's column last week about Mint.com, a number of commenters voiced security concerns about the site. The CEO came back with a pretty interesting response about the level of security, which includes biometric access, video surveillance, "man-trap" doors, encryption, and other things straight outta Ocean's Seventeen. But here's something that's never exactly been addressed by Mint: read the fine print and you'll see that you're essentially handing over right of attorney to Mint. (They need to do this to get this level of access.) It's kinda creepy, but I still use it.
TechCrunch: "Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? [...] This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article."
NYT computer superbrain thing covers Singularity, Terminator Salvation, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Arthur C. Clarke, Google, Moore's Law, and some other stuff.
Predix: Krysten Ritter is the next big something-or-other. She owned the second-best Gossip Girlepp, and just missed that almost-happened spin-off; she's recently had the best drug and sex scenes in Breaking Bad; she's the only thing saving the otherwise ignorable The Last International Playboy, BuzzKill, and How to Make Love to a Woman; girls loved her in Confessions of a Shopaholic; I loved her in Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls; and her band might be better than those three other Gossip Girl bands -- and probably able to catch some Bats For Lashes zeitgeist. Best part: like no one is following her on Twitter.
One of my most vivid childhood memories was watching that terrifying twin alien birth in the original V miniseries. (It's not so terrifying anymore -- it looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle coming out of the womb.) Based upon the trailer, I am completely stoked for the new ABC miniseries, which will star Elizabeth Mitchell (the other in Lost), Morena Baccarin (the hooker in Firefly), and Laura Vandervoort (the supergirl in Smallville).
For those of you who liked the almost-certainly-canceled Dollhouse (hi, second-person-singular you!), the DVD has been announced. Funny: it will contain the pilot you never saw and the finale you never saw. FOX aired everything in between!
Another new cool NYT display: Times Wire. It stacks up everything coming out of NYTimes.com as blog-like/rss-like feed in reverse-chronological order. [via]
The greatest comedy album of all time*, I Have a Pony, is being re-released on Tuesday. To aquaint you kids, Paste's 25 Best One-Liners, or follow the fake guy on Twitter. (*For stoned midwestern kids in basements.)
Esquire's Jezebel-bait: Where Have All the Loose Women Gone? "From Tina Fey's fake prude to Sarah Palin's real power play, here's why strong women just aren't that into having sex with you anymore."
Is Twitter finally doing something new? "Twitter has some very interesting plans for its newly-unveiled live search function: soon it will activate crawlers that will index the links users include in their Tweets. In one fell swoop that turns Twitter into an even more powerful news and opinion aggregator." [via]
NYT: Amazon to announce a large-screen Kindle as early as this week. The story also adds additional speculation about a large-screen iPhone later this year.
Is there any innovation left in online news design? Let's look at the experimental msnbc.com story page which creates layers for text, photos, data, videos, etc. Craig Saila describes how it's attempting to forgo pageview-driven logic in favor of "capturing the intent of what a page view is."
Didn't see this one coming: You've Got (Hate) Mail. Keith Gessen and Emily Gould get the long Vanity Fair dual profile (online only). This graph will determine whether you like this story or not:
At this stage in its evolution, the Web is like an endless novel populated with characters who reveal way too much about themselves, sometimes purposely, sometimes half-knowingly, sometimes unwittingly. It's a junk shop of human emotion and behavior, a forum for advanced people-watching. Day after day as the Gessen-Gould affair unfolded, I turned on my computer and went a-Googling for the latest development. Like any good reality show, it made me sick sometimes, and I tried to tear myself away from it, only to find myself helpless against its crack-like power.
I'm still sitting here overthinking The Awl, trying to decide if I have anything interesting to say about it, confused and worried that my only observation is trite: it's Suck meets Kottke, right? Update: alright, I unwisely choose to say some stuff in the comments.
Wait, I was actually going to pitch teaching this class at NYU! Except this part is broken: "Is Amazon's wireless reading device the Segway of handheld gadgets? Should it be smaller, come with headphones, and play MP3s instead of display book text? Students will discuss." Kindle already plays MP3s, silly.
Editor: So which of you hasn't written about Twitter yet?
Writers: [blink]
Editor: How about you, Dowd?
Maureen: Ah, fuck.
And things that sound like every nyc-based journalist/blogger from 15 months ago: "I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account."
In addition to that Talk of the Town piece, Brett Easton Ellis is also this week's A/V Club interview. He disses his own movie: "Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don't need to talk about why that didn't work. And American Psycho -- that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there's that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn't want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that's all I want to say about The Informers."
Last week in the New Yorker, Gary Trudeau used his mythical Fox News character, Roland Hedley, to poke at journalists using Twitter, which as The Times points out, in some cases were actually too long to be on Twitter. (See also: @roland_hedley.) WebNewser has an interview with Trudeau about twittering. "Look, all of us are narcissists to some degree, but most find it embarrassing enough to at least try to hide it. What Twitter and its social media cousins do is disable inhibition. We expect narcissism from our movie stars and politicians and teenagers, but it's a little surprising to encounter so many otherwise personally modest journalists oblivious to how they're presenting."
The World's Top 100 Restaurants. Per Se (NYC) and Alinea (Chicago) are the only two American entries in the top 10. Others: The French Laundry (Napa), Le Bernardin (NYC), Jean Georges (NYC), Masa (NYC), Momofuku Ssam Bar (NYC), Daniel (NYC), Chez Panisse (Berkeley), Babbo (NYC), Manresa (Santa Cruz), and Del Posto (NYC).
The new issue of Wired is guest-edited by J.J. Abrams, so one should expect some mystery. But that mystery manifests itself in literally dozens of puzzles within the pages, many of which Steven Bevacqua was the first to solve. But he confesses in an NYT story that he is still stymied by some. On the Wired side, Tom gets the quotes: "Blog posts can effectively summarize a story and give you the takeaway idea. [But print publications are still better suited to conveying] the nuance and effort of understanding the complexity of an idea and why it matters -- what the riddles and wrinkles are within an idea." LOST viewers take note: numerological hints!
WSJprofiles Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans. At ROFLcon NYC a few month back, he found the perfect tone of humor and self-deprecation about his odd claim-to-fame.
From Jenna's NYT story about blog books: "But the latest frenzy is over books that take the lazy, Tom Sawyer approach to authorship. The creators come up with a goofy or witty idea, put it up on a simple platform like Twitter and Tumblr, and wait for contributors to provide all of the content. The authors put their energy into publicizing the sites and compiling the best material."
Beyond the /btards, is anyone still using Omegle? Because now people are launch apps that sit on top of it, such as Mobozo.com, which is kind of a Digg for your anon chat sessions.
Heffernan's column is complex this week: Let Them Eat Tweets. It riffs on an idea from Bruce Sterling's closing address at SXSW: networked people are actually poor people. Counter-intuitive! Or as Sterling put it, "Poor folk love their cellphones!" This becomes a set up for a discussion of Twitter, beginning with a confession: "I'm not sure I'd use Twitter if I were rich." This networked class divide is not a bad idea to ruminate on for a second, but it also happens to be completely undercut by Oprah today showing up on Twitter and getting 150,000 followers almost instantly. As it turns out, Twitter is probably doing the exact opposite: allowing celebs to take over.
I couldn't sleep last night. I don't know what sorts of thoughts occupy your mind at 4am, but I was recalling the blog/news coverage from 3.5 years ago when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It was nearly all positive at the time, but I was calling bullshit. Today, YouTube is still pulling in nickels on its investment, and reportedly losing another half-billion to bandwidth costs. This is a stupid thing to lose sleep over, but this morning I awoke to the news that YouTube will be setting up a payment program for premium content. Yawn.
Your favorite Sasha Grey link on this site for the next five minutes: The Girlfriend Experience trailer. If this movie isn't good, I will go on a murderous rampage against high-end hookers.
For the cognitive psychologists out there: Why Minds Are Not Like Computers. It's long and heady, and it took me at least five subway rides to finish, but it's also insightful for anyone interested in brain/computer stuff.
I finally got around to reading Grigoriadis' NYMagcover story on Facebook from last week. No new ideas in there, but she again comes up with the phrasing to make everything seem slightly more interesting than maybe it is.
Last night I finally saw We Live In Public, in which Josh Harris tries very hard to make anyone who has used a web browser think he's a dick genius visionary. A surprising number of people were fooled by the "attack" that occurred during the Q&A, but people like to succumb to myth-making. Despite all that, I highly recommend you see it, as it makes pre-9/11 NYC look exciting and interesting in a way that nothing since has. (Various cameos in the film: Gabriel of Gawker, Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Julia and Meghan, etc.).
So let's see if this starts any debate.... my pal Matt Haughey recently wrote a little ditty called This Is How Social Media Really Works where he essentially argues that this new marketing force is completely unnecessary:
So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all.
I've been known to rant about this new breed of internet expertise too, but that's probably because NYC seems to have more social media experts than rats. But for the sake of argument, a counter-example of Matt's attempts to find a swingset, here's a story from Ad Age about buying an air conditioner. It makes a compelling case for a more subtle presence for brands to exist in online social spaces. Thoughts?
New news browser thing: JPZenger. It organizes news via quotes. Carr likes it. Confused by the name? Me too, but okay:
The website is inspired by a great American John Peter Zenger (1697-1746). Mr. Zenger, who lived in the English colony of NY, was the publisher and printer of New York Weekly Journal. His paper printed numerous articles critical of the English governor. Zenger was sent to jail and charged with seditious libel. He was put on trial and later acquitted in 1735. This case represents one of the most important events in the history of American journalism, and became a landmark for freedom of the press in the founding of the United States of America.
I've been in North Dakota for the past five days. Did I miss anything? Oh, that new Steven Soderbergh / Sasha Grey flick is looking hot. (Also on steady rotation: Sasha's Twitter account, which is usually boring until it's suddenly great, just like porn.)
I missed this one: there's a controversy about Britney Spears' song "If U Seek Amy" because it actually sounds like she's saying "F.U.C.K. me" when she sings it. (Slate explore similar uses, which apparently go back to Joyce!) See also: a peculiar NYT op-ed rant, Pun for the Ages. So... pro-pun or anti-pun?
Old time (very old time) readers of this site know that the last time the Red River of the north flooded (12 years ago), I lost everything I owned in the fire that started in the middle of the flood. (People have short-term memory for these things, but it was the largest evacuation of an American city in the 20th century. Brokaw broadcast live on location for two nights, and it was the only time Bill Clinton ever cried on national television. This Pulitzer-winning photo shows the block with my apartment and the newspaper I worked at.) I've been hitting refresh on local news sources and contacting old friends all weekend. It currently looks like the damage won't be as bad, but that doesn't make The Big Picture's slideshow any less eerie or reminiscent.
My probably favorite session at SXSW this year was Merlin Mann and John Gruber just chatting about being passionate about what you do online. That sounds like a bland proposition, but it turned out funny and illuminating: Obsession Times Voice.
Annie Colbert, a 26-year-old freelance writer from Chicago who is one of [Guy] Kawasaki's ghost Twitterers, said she judged her performance based on how often her postings for Mr. Kawasaki are "retweeted," that is, resent by other users of Twitter.
Recently, she said, she had a coup when the actor Ashton Kutcher repeated her post about a YouTube video showing someone getting high from a "natural hallucinogen."
"Facebook is like Cheers, where everyone knows your name," she said. "Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people."
She said she had been considering trying to get other ghost Twitter clients. "I don't think I could ghost Twitter for 100 people," she said. "More like 10 clients. I think I would have to get to know them."
New Metric video, finally: Gimme Sympathy. I used to adore this band, but this is kinda meh. But the video might look sorta familiar for anyone who has seen Olivier Assayas' Clean. The opening scene is at a Metric show and it segues into a cameo for Emily Haines -- watch it here. Their new album, Fantasies, drops in a few weeks.
1) Has anyone else noticed that the blowhards are becoming increasingly irrelevant? Just a year or two ago, it felt like Calacanis and Cuban were required reading -- however begrudgingly. But now they seem as important as any other random blogger. Is it my imagination, or has the blowhardosphere become more diffuse?
2) I've had some interesting discussions about why women weren't included on this chart. The two who I considered including were Sarah Lacy or Kara Swisher, but neither really seemed in the same blowhardish category (that's a compliment!). I definitely think it's difficult and complex for women in this industry, but I'm not sure about the contention that only women get called names. To clarify: Michael Arrington is a douchebag asshole fuckwad; Kara Swisher is pretty smart!
P.O.S. is a Rhymesayers (i.e. Minneapolis hip-hop) act who deserves to break out -- listen to his most recent single. His Mercury Lounge show last month was packed with midwest refugees, but I've been trying to convert the coasties. His background is in hardcore, which he brought with him when he crossed over several years ago. All of this would suggest that covering Pearl Jam's "Why Go?" in his basement would ultimately be the worst mistake ever, but it's surprisingly great. [via]
Best show on TV right now? The Office lost its edge when Jim and Pam went lovey-dovey; Gossip Girl fires as many blanks as bulls eyes; Battlestar Galactica found earth; Heroes got lost trying to be Lost; and Lost... okay Lost is still pretty fucking great. But the big surprise on TV right now is Dollhouse. When the first episodes of Joss Whedon's new series started making the rounds in critics' circles, it was roundly panned. Rumors spread that FOX execs were to blame for meddling with the pilot, which actually was pretty terrible. But that old Whedonesque subversion has slowly crept back in, particularly with clever dialogue and plot trickery. (This week's episode drops those vintage hip-hop Whedon lines like "my first check had more zeroes than the luffwaffa.") If you want to sample, I suggest either last week's epp where the dolls infiltrate a religious cult or the one where they join a girl band -- doesn't it already sound good? Update: good comments inside, some of which echo the recent Atlantic piece, Joss Whedon and the Real Girl.
Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night. Update: best comment on this site evah... "Well, he did run the copy shop." True!
I guess the personal highlight of sxsw was the "Bikini Flashmob" that Foursquare and I threw at the Omni Hotel pool, where I wore the worst Japanese-tourist-trapped-in-Texas outfit one could possibly assemble at the souvenir shop -- David Carr describes the scene in today's NYT. Post-Austin, people ritualistically debate panels versus parties, but for me the best part is the space in between: dinner with groups of eight or so smart people and spontaneous conversations in the hallways between sessions. The booze is fun, but you forget it in the morning; the panels are theatrical, but seldom revelatory; that leaves you with the conversation, which is always why we always trek to Austin in March.
I haven't seen Watchmen yet, but here's Anthony Lane: "The good news is that you don't have to stay past the opening credit sequence -- easily the highlight of the film."
Old Man Stewart Shakes His Fist At Twitter. Jon: Why is Congress and the media jumping on this? Samantha Bee: Because we're rotting corpses grabbing for any glimmer of relevance, Jon, hoping that one of these retarded thing will be the vine that can rescue us from this quick sand."
Conversant Life: Are You a Christian Hipster? If you don't like contemporary Christian music, megachurches, and mimes, yet do like "Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important," then yes, you are a Christian Hipster!
So now we can add this to the canon of newspaper-saving stories: App Out Of It, Paper-Boy! At over 6,000 words and starring many of the city's brightest meta-media bylines (John Koblin, Matt Haber, Gillian Reagan and Doree Shafrir), this should -- finally? -- be the think piece that identities the problems and presents the solutions. However, if you read closely, it's more of a "throw everything against the wall" approach than a cohesive web strategy.
Some of you might recognize the rhetoric. It feels like one of those "brainstorming sessions" that marketing/editorial execs love to hold. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know exactly what I'm talking about: every six months, it's the same dozen people trying to predict the future. (I enter a guilty plea: I've held as many of these as anyone. You know why? Because if you work for a lumbering big media company long enough, the only catharsis is trying to imagine the impossible.)
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's first admit that this story is fighting the good fight. This sort of cultural rhetoric is juicy and readymade for the <blockquote>:
The media of the 21st century is one that is blogged -- not a negative thing, see later in the piece! -- and merged with the users' own experiences and viewpoints synthesized with the original. If postmodernism came to literature in the '80s, it's got to come to journalism now.
That sounds right! But what does this future look like? That's where you start to see the gaudy side of postmodernism, a pastiche of the greatest hits of the past decade. It's basically the Girl Talk version of product development, including all of the following:
+ Personalization. "How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page."
+ Hyperlocal "A combination of local news and location-based technology has the capacity to be the foundation of this kind of distribution system."
+ Audio Stories. "Maybe Times reporters should file mp3s of their articles, reciting their reporting, along with their print stories, so people riding on the subway, and listening in their cars can participate."
+ Flashy Advertorial. "FlipGloss, a California-based ad start-up that just launched their beta site last week, is one company offering a model for high-end publishers and brands. Their interactive Web advertising translates the visual experience of flipping through a magazine on the computer screen."
+ Mobile. "The idea is this: The news must go mobile."
+ The Live Web. "Everyone in the new world has a status. Newspapers can take a lesson from 'status culture' by integrating it into their sites. What are readers reading right now? How many people have their eyes on one story? Who are they emailing it to? Where are they blogging it? How are their friends using the site?"
+ RSS Readers. "If they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well."
+ Audio Comments. "Users could comment on the article, by calling into the Times and record a comment, which will be automatically transcribed and posted on the website."
+ Subscriptions. "Premium access -- one better than the failed TimesSelect project -- will bring in revenue."
+ Applications. "The Times already has an application that is free for download on various devices including the iPhone and the BlackBerry -- with simple headlines and easy reading. But applications with added data, personalized content and social media would be more valuable."
+ E-Ink. "Perhaps more newspapers should be meeting with mobile device manufacturers and designers to make sure they are catering to consuming news on the go. Can you imagine the next Google/New York Times Android-powered portable reading device?"
Wheh!
Although none of these are bad ideas (some are quite good!), none are particularly novel. It presents this mashup as innovation, even though all of them have been around for a decade. But nostalgia-as-futurism is not really the big problem with this story. The fundamental concern is more prosaic: this story proposes that doing everything is the solution.
This spaghetti-throwing exercise accidentally reveals the actual looming problem inside media companies. Contrary to popular belief (propagated entirely by people who have never worked there), good ideas are not in short supply within big media companies. (You want to meet an aspiring futurist? Stop by the online department of a media company.) By far the biggest problem is focus.
Let's put this simply: there's a management problem inside big media, not an innovation problem.
But in fairness to this story, I am glossing over the prevailing thesis, which does deserve some attention: applications are the future of news. ("If news sites entered these other areas -- became social, hyperlocal, mobile -- perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?") That bit of futurism is worth contemplating, but it also deserves some scrutiny. We have some hardware-as-future precedent to discuss. Until recently, the software industry also thought it should build itself into hardware. But Google came along and nuked all of that. If the Mountain View idealists taught us anything about application development (and the word "Google" appears 27 times in this story, so they must, right?), it's that the browser is still the king. iPhone apps are cool, and they undoubtedly should be explored, but will newsy-retrofitted hardware and custom applications ultimately be the savior? TimesReader, anyone?
Despite all of this, I still recommend you trudge through the theorizing in here. The industry quotes are decent, and the thesis holds up most of the time, except when it's subverted by its own gizmo doohickey fascination. There are clearly some good ideas in there, if you can dig them out from the busy thicket.
p.s. This piece also happens to coincide with a lackluster redesign of Observer.com. It's unfair to hold the writers up to the mirror of the tech/biz units of a company, but it also makes the whole thesis a little suspect.
Finally catching up on some reading from earlier this week, this NYT story about Google's "deep web" initiative seems to have been overlooked. This bit was new and intriguing:
Google's Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms -- "Rembrandt," "Picasso," "Vermeer" and so on -- until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.
The idea that Google is spidering via search queries is fascinating itself, but that it's building database models from this... this seems to be creeping us toward a semantic web future.
I've been thinking this too: Twitter = YouTube. The argument: YouTube is now the second-most-popular search engine and Twitter Search (as we've previously mentioned) has immense potential to become the next big thing in search. Small prediction: Twitter hasn't released any new features in a long time, but the next thing we'll see is a fancy new search feature (geo stuff? retweet/favorite filters? something....) that includes a revenue model. (More info: Borthwick had similar musings about Twitter Search a couple weeks ago.) Update: more context from Honan in the comments.
The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is all dancey, which might explain why Kanye is now the official leaker for such things. Rather than release a video, you're getting something called "The Scientist" instead.
Examined Life, a new documentary from Astra Taylor (interview; she last directed Zizek!), features interviews with philosophers Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Sunaura Taylor. The conceit is that the all interviews are held in motion -- walking, driving, boating. The trailer has Cornel West talking in the back of a cab. (For New Yorkers, it's opening at IFC Center on Wednesday; for Minneapolites, it's at the Walker on next month.)
Monocle, that ridiculously expensive magazine, opened a ridiculously expensive store London, and is planning new stores in Los Angeles and Tokyo this year.
A month ago on the eve of ROFLcon, I interviewed the founder of 4chan for a magazine story that never ended up running. He chatted about everything from the techincal complexities of keeping 4chan alive to the anxieties of operating the most controversial site on the internet. By the end of the interview, I was thinking "This kid has seen stuff that would make my eyes burn, but he seems so smart and sweet about it all." (He started the site when he was 15; he just turned 21.) It seemed like insightful stuff that should run somewhere, so here it is....
Like many successful internet phenomena, 4chan is a shockingly simple idea: an online bulletin board where anyone can post pictures.
This simplicity is deceptive.
4chan is actually one of the most robust, complex, annoying, disgusting, illuminating, perverse, fascinating online communities ever created. It is the direct or indirect source for many of the strangest internet memes: RickRolling, LOLcats, Sarah Palin's email hack, Anonymous, Chocolate Rain, and many other minor and major feats of esoterica (i.e., fucked up weird porn). Most of these viral specimens arose from the site's most popular image board, /b/, which can be the source of considerable hand-wringing and fist-clenching for anyone who has dared navigate its murky, anonymous waters.
Scariest moment?
"Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking."
4chan's founder is a 21-year-old New Yorker named Christopher Poole. Known as "moot" to the site's devotees, Poole is disarmingly well-spoken and pragmatic about what he has created. "It's my belief that the community should dictate its norms, standards, and rules," he says. "I've left /b/ to its own devices, with very little intervention."
Of all the memes spawned from 4chan, is there one you feel most attached to?
At the last ROFLcon [in Cambridge last April], someone asked "Do you like RickRolling?" I said something to the effect of "Screw RickRolling!" Everyone gasped because that was the cool thing at the time.
But then I remembered that my favorite was something called Weegee, and only two people in the crowd were like "Yeah, Weegee!" That's a good sign -- that no one knows what it is.
What is it?
Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.
Sounds harmless. Does it bother you that most people think of 4chan as only being the most controversial board, /b/?
We have 44 image boards at this point, so in that sense it's a small part of the site. But /b/ accounts for 30 percent of our traffic. That's where the attention is, that's where the headlines are coming from. That's also where a lot of the rowdiness and lawlessness goes on.
What do you think of that lawlessness?
Some of it can be healthy, as long as it remains within certain boundaries.
What boundaries?
Like that we don't actually break that law. Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there's a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it. But at the same time, when people go out and do crazy things...
Which kinds of things?
The best example is when Jake Brahm was arrested for posting a bomb hoax. [In October 2006, Brahm was arrested for threatening to blow up multiple NFL stadiums. He was sentenced to six months in prison.] And after that we saw a lot of copycat stuff. People were getting arrested for saying they were going to do the same thing. Law enforcement was coming every week and asking for our help.
When you started the site, did you expect any of that?
Strangest thing you've seen?
"I'd be happy to email you something. I've seen some horrible shit."
Absolutely not. Its popularity has been entirely an accident. I was 15 years old and into anime. I threw up one image board, which was the original /b/. At first it was all anime. As people started posting other things, I added more boards and /b/ remained the random board.
4chan has blown up over the past five years. It's gone from 100 people to 4.75 million per month. And /b/ is pushing 100 million pageviews.
What makes it so big?
At the time, it was very unique. Image boards and anonymous BBS had been big in Japan, but not in the West, where we were used to bulletin boards and blogs. When 4chan started, the format was new. And it was unique because of the anonymity aspect.
What was your scariest moment running the site?
Probably the first time I was contacted by law enforcement. At the time I was 16 and I was living with my mother. That was shocking.
Given your user base, are you worried about your own identity theft?
Yeah, I originally hid behind the moniker because I was 15. It was not appropriate to use my real name at the time. My friends didn't know, my parents didn't know, my educators didn't know. Back then, people didn't appreciate the site so much, but now I can point to good things like LOLcats. Back then, they would have just seen porn.
When did your family find out?
Only when thosearticles came out last year. I kept it a secret from almost all of my friends and family until 2008. It was five full years of living a double life.
Was your mom shocked?
I don't think anyone was put-off. Four years ago, it was just a porn site. It's matured a lot into something a little more presentable. Now I think they can appreciate it as more than that.
One of the most interesting things about 4chan is that nothing gets archived. Threads disappear within an hour. It's a contradiction -- 4chan is known for creating memes, yet it's designed for them to die so quickly.
The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what's posted has been posted before. So it's survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.
The reason we're seen as a meme generation factory is because of the unique qualities of the image board and the lack of retention. On other bulletin boards, threads are archived indefinitely. All the big threads have been around for months or years. But with 4chan, something has to be really good to keep getting posted.
How involved are you with Anonymous?
I'm not involved at all.
What do you think about it?
I think it's interesting. When Scientology tried to make the Tom Cruise video disappear, there was this instant mobilization of thousands of people who banded together overnight. They had plans to stage a worldwide protest. I thought that was pretty incredible. I was fascinated by it.
Are there situations where they go too far?
I would say so. Submitting bomb threats -- stuff like that is going too far. You need to be smart about it. You can't just throw it all away with threats, you have to be proactive and productive.
Because there's no membership policy, it seems like anything can get attributed to being an act of Anonymous.
Yeah, now it's become more of a buzzword for the media. Now anytime something happens, it gets labeled as "an act of international hate group Anonymous."
The future?
"I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself?"
That's why I always personally felt that the movement was destined to fail. You've got two types of people: You have the Anonymous members who are genuinely passionate about dismantling Scientology, but then you have the casual hangers-on who are just there to troll. Because you can't filter it and because the membership is open, Anonymous will always be held back by the bottom rung who are pelting Scientology with eggs and bomb threats and these mischievous juvenile acts. They are holding back the people who take it more seriously. For every step forward Anonymous makes, they can go 10 steps back with one negative headline.
You must feel something similar. 4chan has a mixed public image too.
4chan certainly has a stigma.
And Anonymous seemed to emerge out of 4chan.
Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case. Anonymous culture emerged out of image boards. The rules of these communities spawned some of the original thinking behind the group. But once the Scientology protests started, people outside of 4chan joined. At that point it diverged into its own thing.
How much does it cost to run the site?
About $6,000 per month. That's actually not too bad for a site that is all rich media and has 300 million pageviews. I don't have any overhead past that. I don't have any employees. I don't have an office.
Are you making your money back?
Just barely. We're trying to convince advertisers that our community is worth their ad dollars. That's been a really uphill battle because of our content. Advertisers will Google us and see that we're huge, but they'll also see all these threats and hacks. It scares them away. Overcoming that stigma is difficult.
Have you thought about dropping the controversial board?
People have suggested dropping /b/, but that's the life force of the site. I can't do that. It was the first board, and it will be the last board to go.
I imagine you've seen so many strange things doing this site. What's the most demented thing you've seen?
I'd be happy to email you something. [Laughs.] I've seen some horrible shit. I like to think that I've grown as a person, but at the same time I think a little piece of me continues to die every year.
What have you learned from all this?
I'm still trying to figure that out. I need to start thinking about getting a job. I don't have a resume. I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself? At this point, I've been unable to articulate that.
Hirschorn on tv: The Future Is Cheese. "None of this should be shocking to anyone who has watched TV elsewhere in the world. Italian prime-time TV is filled with vapid variety shows featuring improbably hot chicks cavorting with goatish older men. British prime time is a parade of reality competitions and variety shows of the Donny & Marie type, all produced on the cheap and instantly disposable."
My micropayments post was picked up by AlleyInsider. (I want to again say that I'm not yet a micropayments advocate. I just played with the idea of developing a better product.)
Allow yourself to flashback to the late '90s, when the future of internet media being scrawled on the white eraser board was a battle between a "pay to play" and "information wants to be free." Too bad it wasn't even a close contest: the communists won.
Haha, it was actually an unfair battle. There were too many factors working against micropayments back then: clumsy technology (no AJAX, awkward logins), hefty media pocks (NYT was selling at $40/share, compared to its current $5), and, most importantly, the giddy hope of a free media future.
But here we are today, struggling with a plummeting ad economy and the increased (but necessary) stress of moving everything digital. So micropayments are back on the table -- just ask all of the heavies who announced their support in the past week: Walter Isaacson, David Carr, Henry Blodget, Steven Brill, Stu Bykofsky, and Gawker (sorta).
And surely, an equal number of people came along to trouncetheidea, as they should.
So what do I think?
I have no fucking idea. I don't like being on the wrong side of history, and I really don't know if the New York Times should revive some version of Times Select. I don't mind if you call me a chicken on this one.
But here's something I do know: micropayments could be better. With no interest in entering the fray, I would instead like to offer some design/product/business solutions that might influence the debate. My secret belief is that good design and infrastructure could address some of the valid consumer concerns. No one seems to be approaching the problem from the critical perspective of simplicity, searchability, and scalability. In other words, no one seems to design a good product. I have a proposal. Here's my idea...
Click image for full-size view.
And here's how it works...
1) When you click a link to a story -- from Google, from a blog, from NYTimes.com, from whatever -- the article appears as it normally does, except the Subscription Center lightbox appears over it, with the text opaquely visible in the background.
2) You are given a few options to quickly choose from: pay for the single article or buy a weekly/monthly pass.
3) If you already have an account (and if you're a NYTimes.com user, you do), clicking "Buy" will cause the lightbox to disappear. You can begin reading the story. Instantly.
4) You will not be charged for anything until you accumulate $5 of charges. At that point, you will be asked to enter your credit card or PayPal information, if you haven't already.
So what's new with this? What problems have I tried to solve?
1) Search / Conversation. By far the largest concern with adding subscriptions is being left out in the cold when it comes to search. (Google can easily account for half of the traffic on a media site.) This is the common criticism of the Wall Street Journal subscription model: bloggers don't link to it because it's behind a firewall and Google can't find it because most of the text is not indexed. WSJ ends up being left out of the larger conversation online. This solution addresses the problem by making all of the text still available on the page, so search engines can still "see" it. It's not behind a subscription firewall -- it's just slightly shielded. It keeps the stories in conversational circulation.
2) Surcharges / Cost. The other large concern with micropayments is related to the transaction charges incurred. This argument suggests that you can't charge $.20 for something and handle all the surcharges incurred from it. My solution addresses the problem by delaying the charge until the user reaches a certain threshold. As people like Steven Brill have pointed out, even $3/month from users would catapult revenue beyond anything ever seen by the company.
3) Scalability / Business. When NYMag did a story on the digital smarties a couple weeks ago, some voices on the internet claimed that these boys should be set to the task of inventing new business. If executed correctly, this micropayment system could actually be the start of that. This system could be scaled up to become the micropayment system for all news consumption. By becoming the backbone for media micropayments, The New York Times could have an entirely new income model. And then the network effect comes into play: the more media companies that join, the more pervasive the technology becomes, the faster users reach their $5 checkout.
4) Persistence / Features. I've had the same NYtimes.com account since approximately 1998. I'm hoping that somewhere deep in the bowels of the system, it knows every article I've ever viewed with that account. Any articles that I store in my locker are kept forever, so wouldn't it be awesome if all those were automatically added to my Digital Locker? This small personalization feature could be the beginning of an entire new set of features -- search, bookmarks, personalization, etc.
And now, some potential criticisms...
1) Can't I game this? Couldn't I just keep signing up with new accounts once I get close to $5? Answer: Sure, but I think people are willing to deal with the hassle if the payment are small. And to borrow from the Flickr model, if you offer special features with "pro" accounts, the incentive becomes even greater.
2) Couldn't someone come up with a Greasemonkey script that blocks the lightbox overlay? Answer: Sure, but things like Adblock are used by <1% of the users, so I'm not too worried about that.
3) Will Google eventually block this from their search index? Answer: I'm actually not sure, but I suspect no. This is for a variety of reasons, but the most important is that Google doesn't want to look like a bunch of assholes right now.
4) Would other companies actually adopt this micropayment system? Answer: A few years ago, around the time Google introduced Checkout, there was the brief fascination with the notion that Google could become this middleman for media micropayments. Today, there's not a media company alive that would surrender this to Google. However, if this were handled in a way similar to FOX and NBC joining forces for Hulu, maybe they would.
And finally...
The goal of this exercise was to think about ways to minimize the greatest concern with micropayments: consumer anxiety. I propose that the combination of low cost, simple interface, and clear information display could greatly minimize that concern.
Twitter gets the NY Mag treatment, but with the mark of Will Leitch: How Tweet It Is. It leads with some discussion of the innards of the company and its future revenue models (the traditional story line), but it ends on a future-looking bit about the Hudson plane crash.
The College Humor Show, which premieres tomorrow at 9:30p on MTV, sure made the media rounds the last few days: NYT, NYO, WaPo, AdAge. The last one, a Dumenco interview with Ricky, is the best. "I haven't asked Barry [Diller] about being on the show, but it would obviously be great to have him do a cameo. He's one of the funniest people I know -- not funny for a guy in his sixties, or funny for a media mogul, but legit funny." And then: "Knowing Nick [Denton], I think he'd much prefer to be a character in Battlestar Gallactica or Friday Night Lights." Trailer.
Another A+ from Heffernan: Choose Your Illusion. "A venerable philosophical concept, the real has been more commonly set against the false, the fake, the ideal, the temporary, the romantic, the contrived, the staged, the illusory or the imaginary. But such a robust concept of reality would not suit television, where greater definitional leeway is needed to produce this oxymoronic thing, a reality show." What's she talking about? VH1's Celebrity Rehab, of course.
Several people have noticed that I've been getting interesting commenter spam on my site over the last couple days. I've deleted most of it, but I kept it alive on this one post. Why interesting? Because the spam appears to be (actually, almost certainly is) written by actual humans, rather than by spam bots. You can tell because the "commenters" actually seem to address the topic of the post. The only quality that makes it spam is including links to spam-o-licious sites. And now it's gone to an extreme: the spammers are commenting on my comments about spamming, including more spam links. And another reason it's interesting: there must be some significant investment in hiring these spammers. It makes you wonder, is it some sort of off-shore gold farming generating this stuff? I'll continue to delete it, but it does raise an interesting question about actual commenter motives: if you're responding to an issue in a comment, is putting a product in your sig file any different than linking to your personal blog? Is this a case of commenters merely reinventing the product placement?
Playboy hires Duff McKagan to write a blog about finance, because, seriously, like any of those other fucking guys know what they're talking about. Sample: "And as for the second one, I am sick and tired of hearing of these Wall Street assholes getting huge bonus packages from our bailout tax dollars. What a lot of these people did to all of us in the first place is just plain criminal. I have never been keen on executives getting golden parachutes; I'm more apt to give them a golden shower." Okay!
Nussbaum is kicking it up with her new NY Mag television column, this week about United States of Tara: "Now it seems that the era of the outrageous outsider chick may be upon us, in her various manifestations as protofeminist rule-breaker and shit-stirring catalyst, with subcategories of sex-rebel, crazy lady, and artist."
Calacanis goes all emo in his post on We Live In Public. While trying to coin a new term, Internet Asperger's Syndrome (IAS), he says: "The classic argument when someone 'famous' gets beat up is to say 'Didn't you ask for this?' Well, actually, no. The reason I got into blogging was not to be famous or to get attention. It was simply to have an intelligent discussion with people I respected. The people I thought were interesting were debating stuff in the blog format, so I was drawn to it." Is there anything left to say in this hatah/empathy, snark/criticism, trolling/creating debate?
So not to be snotty about this, but what does the new Muxtape offer that MySpace doesn't? Does "less is more" apply in this case? UPDATE:Sasha interviews Justin in the New Yorker and asks a similar question: "But the beauty of MySpace is that anyone can start a page and put music up quickly. I can't think of a musical act that isn't on MySpace. Will acts be able to make Muxtape pages easily, or will they have to go through a submission process?"
The neurochemical version of The Game: NYT Mag's cover story, What Do Women Want? (Okay, not really. This piece kinda rambles, misses on its few points, and could generally use a big structural edit. But there are a few good bits in there.)
n+1 has released an online-only book review: n1br. Included: luminous Molly reviewing Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds. "The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997. Gauzy coronas of pubic hair, technicolor dreampubes of every shade. You forget how assertive a healthy growth of hair can look. It comes as a pleasant shock in the midst of a creamy-smooth expanse."
Continuing my admitted over-interest in the reactions to Denby's Snark, here's a Flavorwire interview with him, where he takes up the Sternbergh review: "He says snark is an appropriate response to a corrupt and dishonorable world in which lies have been passed out to us in the past eight years in particular. I wouldn't quarrel with his description of the world. But the idea that snark is the appropriate response to that is just inane. The appropriate response to it is criticism, analysis and best of all, satire." Update: everyone in the fray here.
On cell phones during the inauguration: "I found myself wondering if any technology might replace the camera now that it is more essential today than television -- and constantly with us."
A follow-up to yesterday's post: In an article in Newsweek, I mention that the first post on the new Whitehouse.gov is hopeful: a message of transparency. But actually, even before we get to the administration's goals with the site, isn't it fascinating that people actually care about Whitehouse.gov? Know what I mean? When I put the before/after shots of Whitehouse.gov on Flickr yesterday, it didn't occur to me that it would take off quite that way. But now it has 219,000 views, and people suddenly seem to care about a website they probably never had reason to visit before. This seems like a radical break. (After all, when was the last time you went to a federal government site for actual information? I download tax forms sometimes, but that's about it.) For the first time in our digital lives, the internet might actually fulfill one of its earliest utopian ideals. There are many obstacles, but it feels like a hopeful time for the hive mind to finally get its true test. If the Obama administration can shift their webefforts from providing information to creating knowledge, we could be on the precipice of something radically different: people participating with governance. Update: Oh, I guess this explains the Flickr traffic.
Tyson: I'm getting over all this, all these cameras. That's a straight ticket back to picking up cocaine. All of this is very frightening and intimidating.
Carr: Will you tell me more about how that becomes a trigger. I just walked down the street with you, and I couldn't stand being that closely observed, I couldn't stand people swarming around me. How does that impact how you see yourself?
Tyson: You being a former addict yourself, I don't know how it works in your particular situation. But I never get high because I'm depressed or sad. I always get high because everything is going great.
Carr: Right. Everything's going your way.
Tyson: Do you understand that?
Carr: Oh, absolutely.
It's not often that database journalists get even an inch of press, so NY Mag's profile of the NYTimes.com guys is fantastic for that reason alone. "The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you've been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism." Congrats to Andrew and co.
So if you want to dabble in this Tumblr thing, here are the Tumblr Award Winners (mysteriously without links, probably because they can't do anything that isn't a reblog -- kidding!)
Snarkmarket rewinds a year and looks at last year's miserable predictions. Jim Cramer's prediction about Goldman Sachs closing the year at $300/share is particularly spicy.
"Why would anyone pay a dime to read professionals' advice on breaking into an amateur medium that rewards people who make up their own rules?" Good question.
Another Twitter thought: people love to mention when someone notable shows up on Twitter, whether that be Shaq or Diablo. But no one ever says, "Hey, did you see Shaq has a [MySpace|Facebook|FriendFeed] page?" Anyway, Kurt Anderson is on Twitter.
In the comments of this post, my friend Rico makes an interesting comparison: lexapro on Twitter Search vs. lexapro on Google. Very different results! It suggests an interesting question: could conversational knowledge eventually usurp search knowledge -- and doesn't it already, in many ways?
NYT Styles: "If absinthe were a band, it would be Interpol, third-hand piffle masquerading as transgressive pop culture. If absinthe were sneakers, it would be a pair of laceless Chuck Taylors designed by John Varvatos for Converse. If it were facial hair, it would be the soul patch. If absinthe were a finish on kitchen and bath fixtures, it would be brushed nickel."
I finally finished CJR's long interview with Clay Shirky (Part I | Part II), which focuses on media consumption -- and along the way, he drums out all the doomsdayers. There are several good sections, but I most like where he talks about relearning: "One of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist." See also: CJR's feature, Overload!
Heffernan on online ads: "An ad that keeps telling you how unobtrusive it is like a friend whose greatest virtue is that she leaves you alone. Her absence might be appreciated, but it doesn't make her much of a friend."
If you missed it, Adam Sternbergh reviewed David Denby's new book, Snark, in NY Mag. "Denby's book invites -- even begs masochistically to receive -- a snarky response, but he won't get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark."
Everyone is doing their predictions for 2009 right now, and everyone who isn't is claiming that the future is too bleak or complex to predict. What you see below takes both perspectives into account and says: fuck it, let's have fun with this.
However, don't mistake this satire as an empty gesture. If not literally true, I believe most of predictions below in some metaphoric sense. In other words, to hell with the Black Swan!
So here we are again -- playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture -- with 36 predictions for 2009:
Hatahs. 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.
Facebook. By the middle of summer, you realize that you're logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it's so damn convenient.
Politics. After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.
Newspapers. At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Yahoo. Fuck it, Lycos buys it.
Twitter I. Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter's big plan "to make money."
Twitter II. But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the "Twitter professional" will somehow become a reality.
Twitter III. A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed "Twitter Shock."
Starbucks. After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new "buffet" option, which is a surprise hit.
Daughter Moguls. In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.
Magazines I. Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of... yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark's apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.
Magazines II. Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.
Magazines III. Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.
Gossip Girl. In the Christmas '09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.
Subscriptions. Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.
Where The Wild Things Are. You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don't get it. They're kinda right.
New York Times. After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.
Online Video. Something's gotta give. Two of the "big" three -- Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks -- cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider's headline is "Funny Or Dead In 24/7." Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.
Terrestrial Video. Something's gotta give. One of the "big" five is morphed into a cable outlet.
Daily Beast. Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.
Tina Fey. First woman knighted. Now Oprah's pissed too.
Google. They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.
FriendFeed. Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don't either.
Publishing. 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.
Music. Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island's album debuts platinum -- the only album to do so this year.
Lara Logan. Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.
Gawker Media. Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.
Mad Men. After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.
Diablo Cody. Released in September, Jennifer's Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.
Words. Webster's Dictionary names undershare word of the year.
Online Media. Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of "me too" small startup publications launch. They will call themselves "online magazines," but they will be blogs.
Microsoft. They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won't. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)
Apple. After Biz Week's "Is The Innovation Over?" story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.
Education. 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.
Digg. It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.
Rupert Murdoch. He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O'Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch's cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney's frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.
If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.
In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.
Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:
30) New York Times Blogs Given the variety, it's probably unfair to group them all under one heading, but the old gray lady boldly stuck her neck further into the blogosphere guillotine during a year when retreat would have been forgiven. Old mainstays like Krugman, Freakonomics, DealBook, and City Room continued to drive daily conversation, while new additions like Proof (drinking), Laugh Lines (comedy), Measure for Measure (songwriting), and Ideas (their first foray into link blogging) proved big media could still navigate the niches. The most consistently important, however, was probably Bits, a disarmingly lucid tech-biz blog that proved you don't have to be bombastic or supercilious to win the category. (See also: L.A. Times Blogs.)
29) Boner Party If you operate a celeb/entertainment/snark blog, you know how you are supposed to talk. The voice, now deeply entrenched in the genre, must be mimicked by any new entrant: bitchy, sneering, unimpressed. Boner Party somehow hit REFRESH on the whole genre this year by instead being celebratory, horny, fanboyish. Unlike, say, The Superficial, which is all attitude and no love, Boner Party is pure happy-happy-boy-boy. Imagine remaking Cute Overload but with pictures of girls next to giddy prose, and you've got yourself a boner party. For instance: "For guys, vaginas are like a cross between a pocket knife, a really cool nightclub, and a wizard. It can do SO many things, you REALLY want to get into it, but you have no idea how it works, and therefore it must be magical." (See also: Street Boners and TV Carnage, Golden Fiddle, and Tumblettes.)
28) Newsless Matt Thompson packed up his belongings this year and moved to the middle of Missouri to think about the future of news -- not a bad gig if you can get it! (Matt is also known for being half of Snarkmarket, the voice of EPIC, and the founding editor of Vita.mn.) His fellowship at the University of Missouri provides time to explore the issues that many of us in online media are grappling with: poor news filters, a top-down approach to news gathering, the lack of pertinent local information, a broken breaking news model, and so on. While he's been researching these problems and writing about them on Newsless, he also put his ideas into action by launching The Money Meltdown, a site that aggregates the most essential information about the financial crisis. Though his research proposal involves Wikipediaing the News, he isn't naive enough to believe that simply turning on wikis will necessarily produce anything of value -- the right solution will be more complex than that. With the news industry in crisis, it's good that someone is trying to find models for maintaining an informed populace. (See also: PressThink and MediaShift.)
27) Urlesque Shouldn't someone really be keeping track of all these memes? Oh good, Urlesque is. (See also: Pop Candy, Metafilter, and Listicles.)
26) NonSociety While a vocal minority of stoic internet enthusiasts screamed bloody murder when she landed on the cover of Wired (and others advised to just don't look), Julia Allison did something this year that many people have failed at: living a publicly transparent life -- or at least as close to it as possible. The snark machine may resent this, but it has been nothing short of notable. (See also: Reblogging Julia and Jake and Amir.)
24) Gannett Blog Have you ever wished there was an official record of the downfall of Rome? Welcome to the 20th century newspaper version. (See also: McClatchy Watch, Journerdism, and Romenesko.)
23) Know Your Meme A subset of Rocketboom, the "Know Your Meme" series has been one of the few beacons of hope in the inspiration-deficient genre of videoblogging this year. The genius is that the episodes are funny while being actual history lessons -- sorta like the Daily Show for the internet. Personal favorites include Magibon, Reaction Videos, and FAIL. (See also: ROFLcon, Internet Superstar, Pop 17, and Internet Famous Class.)
20) Ta-Nehisi Coates In one of a few areas that it seemed edge out The New Yorker this year, The Atlantic maintained its provocative blogging tradition with Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and James Fallows. But it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who leapt from the monitor like no one else writing about politics and culture this year. In his remarkable profile of Bill Cosby, Coates took on one of the most complex areas of race (comedy) while teasing out Cosby's occasional similarity to Obama. In a political season strangely devoid of genuine race commentary, Coates was one of the few keepin it unreal. (See also: TNR's Blogs, The Assimilated Negro, and The Root.)
19) Magic Molly Of course, we need a Tumblr in here somewhere. The Tumblr Awards highlight the idiosyncratic characteristics of the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative. Magic Molly embodied all of these things, as her itinerant persona flitted around the internet, from penning the definitive piece on adderall for n+1 to contributing to This Recording. If the Tumblrverse seems like high school, Molly is the smartest girl in the class -- the quickest with the Phillip Roth quote but never hiding her Sasha Grey guilt. (See also: TopherChris, CatBird, hrrrthrrr, Kung Fu Grippe, Soup Soup, Dear Old Love, Mediation, AntiKris, Frangy, and so on and so on....)
18) What Would Don Draper Do? and I Am Chuck Bass After serving as a useful foil for the past couple years, the fake personality blog expired this year. But a new form arose from its ashes: the blog inspired by a character. Rather than feigning a famous person, these sites explored a character through a different set of criteria. The outcome was such projects as What Would Don Draper Do?, which imagines the Mad Men mad man as a self-help columnist, and I Am Chuck Bass, which invokes the notorious boulevardier's name to explore the inner-torment of Gossip Girl. (See also: Fire Nick Douglas and Rex's Scarf.)
17) Tomorrow Museum Responding to last year's list, Kottke made a semi-plea for "blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck." He's right, of course -- many of those sites get lost in the fracas of the mega-blog. One of my favorites this year was Tomorrow Museum, which contained nimble think pieces about such topics as Microcelebrity and Frienemies and New Media in Fiction. (See also: Marginal Revolutions and The Morning News.)
16) Buzzfeed After first landing on this list in 2006, Buzzfeed has been slowly transforming from a blogger favorite to a legitimate cultural force. It has also become unbelievably fast at identifying online trends before they happen. (See also: Radar Archive and Stuff White People Like.)
13) The Big Picture It seems illogical that a photoblog using generic wire service photos and sitting atop a MovableType installation could possibly cause such a stir, but The Big Picture did one simple thing right: super large photos. After its June launch (by Kokogiak), the design/photo blogs instantly sent their link love, causing Boston.com's traffic to reportedly skyrocket. (See also: Media Storm and Getty Moodstream.)
12) Gawker & Radar Fourteen months ago, not long after the Grigoriadis story, I guest-edited Gawker for a few days while Choire went off to Fire Island to feed his demons or some such thing. Everything was chilly at the office, but I had no idea I was living in antediluvian times. Since then, too many things have transpired to even count. But let's try: Denton introduced a pay-per-click model for bloggers, Emily quit, Choire quit, Josh quit, Denton hired himself, whoa -- NYT Magcover story!, Josh responded, Emily landed a book deal, Moe had that unfortunate incident, Moe went to Radar, no wait she didn't, ack, Denton axed pay-per-click model, Choire hopped to Radar, a new Gawker editor joined, Moe was laid off, poor Balk, oops Radarfolded, Denton predicted the end of the world, Sheila published photos, not you too Pareene, and a few redesigns happened. What'd I miss? If this all seems like some sort of horrid bukakke ritual performed by the blogomedia on you -- it is! And yet, we somehow ate it up. So give the guy credit -- he knows how to turn his empire into a compelling, twisted tale.
(See also: Fake Nick Denton and Cover Awards.)
11) The Technium Kevin Kelly seemed determined this year. The mission: to use technology as a stick, or perhaps a poker, to shake and jab at society. No one has written more clearly about how technology is shaping -- and can be used to shape -- culture. In influential essays like 1000 True Fans and Better Than Free, Kelly showed how to use an emerging network economics to your advantage, while Cloud Culture, Screen Fluency, and Tools For Vizuality illustrated a future that is more evenly distributed. (See also: Metagold, Text Patterns, and TED Talks.)
10) Alley Insider I'm as surprised as you are. When Alley Insider launched last year, it seemed like another unessential tech/biz blog whose purpose was to clutter the internet with more rewritten press releases. But Henry Blodget, the infamous former Wall Street analyst taken down by Eliot Spitzer in the first dot-com boom, had something else in mind. What immediately differentiated Alley Insider from the fracas of other also-rans was analysis -- sometimes provocative, generally accurate, and occasionally funny. A Wired profile chronicles Blodget's difficulties with living down his past, but the empire is growing with spin-offs like Clusterstock (financial dish) and The Business Sheet (business gossip). (See also: Paid Content and Techmeme.)
9) This Recording From what I wrote in July: "What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice.... It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup." (See also: Public School Intelligentsia, Fey Friends, and Hipster Runoff.)
8) xkcd It's been around for a while, but the pithy cartoons on the unpronounceable xkcd seemed especially poignant this year -- especially after YouTube took one joke and turned it into a reality. Known for poking at our peculiar online passions, some of this year's best strips involved pointing out the obvious weirdness of Wikipedia and the Large Hadron Collider. (See also: New Yorker Cartoon Lounge and Gaping Void.)
7) The Daily Beast I don't know if it's really a blog either, but Tina Brown is creating, well, something over there. She has claimed in interviews that the site's intent is to sift through the online detritus for the best information -- a noble cause, but it already seems to be busting at the seams with its own information overload. Then again, features like The Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, and Big Fat Story are at least trying to winnow the data flow to something manageable. (See also: Culture11 and AllTop.)
6) Kanye West At some point in October, I made the most difficult decision of the year: I finally unsubscribed from Kanye's blog. The fatigue of trying to keep up with his 50-posts-per-day pace had finally set in. But I still say everyone should be forced to ingest all-things-Kanye for at least one week. And I mean everything -- including the random cut-and-paste jobs from IMDB and Google Image Search. And the comments -- oh yeah, you gotta read the comments. And you know what -- who cares if he's really writing all this stuff! You don't think Warhol made every painting, do you? (See also: Aziz is Bored, Lovely Package, and Pretty Much Amazing.)
5) Fred Wilson Although there's no way to prove this, it seemed like the tech/media blowhards finally became less relevant this year. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the old guard of Scoble/Winer/Calacanis/Arrington/Cuban seemed to lose influence, while more sober voices emerged -- those who weren't creating incestuous diurnal feuds with each other to game Techmeme. In the vacuum, Fred Wilson, who has been around the scene for a long time, became the analyst to turn to. Though he is a venture capitalist (with investments in del.icio.us, Outside.in, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, FeedBurner, and Disqus), he uses his blog (and Twitter and Tumblr) to address everything from his music tastes and Halloween costume to investor liquidity and google juice. (See also: Shirky.com, Rough Type, and Steven Berlin Johnson.)
4) Waxy & Ana Marie Cox Whattup, old skool? Andy Baio and Ana Marie Cox are blog pioneers, which means they would be forgiven for getting crotchety and sedentary like several of their grumpy peers. But this year they adapted to the changing landscape and invented new ways to deal with it. Andy tore apart the data-centric stories that no one else was bothering with -- by using Mechanical Turk to collect Girl Talk data, by visualizing one-hit-wonder trends, and by investigating pirated Olympics video. (Along the way, he also coined "Supercuts" and tried to end FAIL.) Meanwhile, after losing her job at Radar, Ana Marie launched a pledge drive to cover her travel expenses on the McCain trail. Both of them repurposed old-fashioned blog ideas -- the tip jar and the online investigation -- for modern times. (See also: Young Manhattanite, ASCII, Alex Balk, and Tony Pierce.)
3) Twitter Though it came in tied at #1 on last year's list, Twitter gets a rare repeat appearance because it made a big jump this year from a chatty novelty to a legit news stream. Toward the end of the year, people were still struggling to define the microblogging platform on a continuum between publishing and communication -- a debate that only illustrated the complexity of a such a simple platform used differently by so many people. (See also: Posterous and 4chan.)
1) Single Serving Sites More than any medium before it, the internet is fueled by gimmicks. This particular gimmick, the single serving site, has been around for a while, manifesting itself in odd forms like YTMND and The Hamster Dance. While amusing, these sites were mostly inside jokes for the Goatse Generation. But then something happened last year when the concept was applied to a useful binary question -- IsLostARepeat.com and IsTwitterDown.com, for instance. These sites provided the kernel of an idea that exploded at the onset of 2008, beginning with Mat Honan launching BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com in February. Three days later, Jason Kottke officially coined the term, which unleashed the craziness. (In its own way, you could label Sergei Brin's one-post abandoned blog a single serving site.) This all concluded with the brilliant and inevitable IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com, the definitive academic investigation on one of those short-lived phenomena that makes the internet feel continuously new, even if hitting refresh changes absolutely nothing. (See also: RickRolled and ICanHasCheezBurger.)
Jon Pareles story on using music to sell products, which mentions that three-fourths of Santogold's songs have already been licensed by advertisers, is a decent survey on the scene, with a new nostalgic twist: longing for the record label.
NYT on NBC's internet strategy. "One area in which NBC, and its sister cable channels in the NBC Universal family, have consistently provided more than the other big networks is online: they're the only reliable purveyors of true Webisodes, if we define the genre narrowly as minidramas produced in conjunction with an existing television series."
It was a year that chimed in with idealism, and clanked out with pragmatism. "Hope" began the political season as an optimistic revelation, but concluded the year as a is-that-seriously-the-best-we-can-do? mantra right up there with "don't be evil."
Perfection was the goal, so music set itself to the task of eliminating the blemishes. Auto-Tune diluted the rough edges, but the economy fell apart and Kanye's mom died while undergoing plastic surgery. So much for perfection.
By the end of the year, we were searching for compromises. Once garish, Will.I.Am's take on "Hope" ended up sounding down right utopian.
There's a lot of fun to be had in the albums below, my picks for the best of 2008. Some of you will be disgusted by the likes of Lady GaGa, whose filthy rich party lifestyle is more gaudy than throwing a potlatch outside a homeless shelter (which is not that dissimilar from Kanye's Gucci soliloquy on SNL).
But compare that party-with-what-ya-got materialism to whatever "hopeful" nostalgia that the cosmoblogosphere was scolding you into: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. When asked to pick between a luxury simulacra and faux authenticity, I'll take the loot any day. I have no idea where these indie kids found cause to overuse the word "beauty" in this weary pastoral, but this year's Pitchfork bands felt more like a retreat from the future than nothing else since -- fuck, I dunno -- prohibition. Fantasy, indeed.
Then again, I banged my head to Chinese Democracy, so what the fuck, right?
Here they are, my favorite albums of 2008:
1) Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
Depending how you want to construe it, Girl Talk is either the most cynical thing happening in music right now or the only relevant culture for our time. Or you can just ctrl-alt-delete the historicizing and declare it the Finnegans Wake of pop music: a difficult mashup classic that is as fun to discuss as to ingest. (And as my Joycean college mentor would proclaim, dance to.) Nothing this year made me think more about music: how it's created, where it's distributed, how it's discussed, who owns it, how fans have become critics, and how critics have become artists.
3) Santogold, Santogold
It felt like an eternity between the moment you first heard "L.E.S. Artistes" in 2007 to when the album finally became available. And then another eternity between the album and the inevitable Bud Light commercial. The elongated backlash sine wave was the funnest roller-coaster ride of the year.
4) Juno, Soundtrack
There's a little Mark Loring in all of us. Who? Mark Loring -- that would be Jason Bateman's character in Juno (and one of the many coded references for Minneapolitans -- a memorial to the famed posthumous Loring Bar). Trapped between eras, Loring couldn't find the right place between his rocker past and grown-up future. Like the Alice in Chains tee that his wife (Jennifer Garner) splotches in eggshell yellow, he's ill-equipped for the upgrade. That tension, which is also a prevailing narrative of our time, is the essence of this soundtrack.
5) Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
Kanye is your needy friend, Kanye is your worst blog commenter, Kanye is your John the Baptist, Kanye is your spoiled crybaby, Kanye is in your closet, Kanye is your form swallowing your content, Kanye is your everything, Kanye is your new bicycle.
6) Lykke Li, Youth Novels
Blonde, Swedish, design-damaged girl makes blippy, sullen, vulnerable album made for dancing around your apartment on a rainy day while waiting for your lipdub to finish uploading to Vimeo. Forget Suicide Girls, she's like the Tumblette of my dreams.
7) Lady GaGa, The Fame
Downtown NYC desperately needs a new hero. The hipsters, who eat their young faster than they can become zygotes, have already chewed up and spit out Lady GaGa, but she's the last great hope for a Madonna-esque crossover from naughty street creature to shiny pop diva.
8) Guns 'N Roses, Chinese Democracy
On the last page of the extensive liner notes, Axl gives his thank-yous for an album that he began recording before Dakota Fanning was born. Like the music itself, it's a hodge-podge of mysterious choices, with recognizable names and places jumping out of the jumble: Donatella Versace, Hoobastank, Suicide Girls, Ferrari, Weezer, SoHo House, Mickey Rourke, Bungalow 8, Apple Computers, Lars Ulrich, and Alice In Chains. If you stare at this list long enough, cross your eyes, spin around a few times, and throw some Hail Mary's at the Falun Gong -- Chinese Democracy sorta begins to makes sense.
9) Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
This year I almost ceded victory to the music blogs, MySpace, and HypeMachine. The single seemed to finally drive the nail in the jewel case coffin of the album, so I nearly replaced this annual "best albums" list with a "best songs" list. (How else can I tout Teyana Taylor's "Google Me" or The Count & Sinden's "Beeper" or Kid Sister's "Pro Nails" -- songs all released in early 2008 but still have no accompanying albums.) With producers rushing out tunes and leaks fueling an embeddable culture, the time gap between hearing the song and getting the album now seems agonizingly long [see above]. But so what? No one will care about Crystal Castles this time next year, but "Crimewave" was the best Depeche Mode song never made.
10) Beyonce, I Am... Sasha Fierce
Slinging "fierce" into your lexicon at this point is like lighting the fuse on the ticking timebomb of obsolescence. Unless you're Beyonce, who can slap on a robot glove and look like she just dropped in to say hi! from 2012. The futuristic, angry Beyonce songs are always her best, and half of this two-disc package is throw-away R&B, but the other half is loud, bitter, and -- okay sure, whatever you say, Comandante Knowles -- fierce.
My favorite part of Slate's excellent music mega-roundtable extravaganza (beware: 20 pages printed) is near the end when Christgau says: "Do you ever fantasize about being a movie critic? How many releases a year do they suffer through? Five hundred, something like that? Plus some righteous moaning about how the evil mothers at Miramax are holding up the new Kiarostami? Boohoo." (The joke is funny, but I also like the idea of critics thinking about what it would have been like to pick a different field.)
Chuck's "What I've Learned" in Esquire. "When I read criticism, I never learn anything about the record or the movie or the book. I mostly learn about the writer."
There was a rumor floating around that Obama might pick Lessig to run the FCC. Um, guess not -- he wants to demolish it. (Anyone else notice Larry becoming increasingly libertarian lately? It seemed to start with his apology for getting Microsoft wrong in the '90s and more recently we've seen a drastic shift in stance on net neutrality.)
It looks like Franken is going to win the Minnesota Senate seat. Many years ago, when it was highly improbable, I made this t-shirt -- I hope the 50 Minnesotans who bought it are pleased with themselves.
4000 Words From Axl. Good to see he's back to competing with his nemesis Courtney -- but now with crazy internet writing! Or maybe not -- he sounds more like a lawyer than anything else.
If you're gonna make the Approval Matrix, the place to be is the Brilliant/Lowbrow quadrant -- not too far from Shaq's Twitter and Jizz In My Pants, but regrettably closer to Hugh Jackman's gay porn in Australia. (List of lists is here, if you're looking.)
New Yorkers: we are throwing a party on Tuesday night at Barramundi (67 Clinton St. -- Lower East Side) to commemorate the launch of the show and my survival in NYC for one year. You're all invited -- rsvp on the Facebook page.
This readable thing in The Observer has various tech pundits (Craig Newmark, Micah Sifry, Lawrence Lessig, etc.) speculate on how exactly Obama could use the internet to assist governance.
Who's not totally getting fucked over by the economy? North Dakota! (My family is small-town bankers from NoDak. This quote from the story is pretty much them: "Our banks don't do those goofy loans.")
Sternbergh on Quality Show Fatigue: "Maybe the furor around shows like Mad Men is not the product of some rampant mass hysteria. Maybe it's the expression of a yearning for the last remnant of the traditional viewing experience we once shared. Long gone are the days when we would all sit down on Thursday at 10 to watch L.A. Law. So instead, to retain some sense of communal experience, we cling culturally to a single show. We don't want to admit we're splitting off in a million directions; we want to believe that all our eyes still occasionally turn in the same direction. (For the past year, the election campaign served this purpose -- the one great show we all tuned into.) So it doesn't even matter that not many people, relatively, are actually watching Mad Men. What matters is that everyone's talking about it."
When NYT Magchoose to recently cover 30 Rock, it highlighted the show's incendiary structure, comparing it to pomo literature like Gravity's Rainbow (whoa!). The corollary position comes from this week's New Yorker, which sees the same fragmentation but doesn't appreciate it: "30 Rock doesn't have the neat structure of most sitcoms; its roots are in sketch comedy and in improv, with their set pieces and their eagerness to keep you entertained every second without worrying too much about the story." I'm not sure where I land on that continuum, but I have noticed a different sort of distraction: despite being splendidly written, the perplexing thing about 30 Rock is that you could actually watch it as a series of compromises to exist as a show. The product placements (Verizon), the guest-stars (Oprah), commercials as content (AmEx) -- all of these pieces end up taking up a massive amount of the show's public mindshare, perhaps to its detriment. Update: Maureen Dowd profiles Tina Fey in Vanity Fair, where she finally reveals where that scar came from. Plus video.
The NYT Mag story on Google's international legal quandries is worth reading. The backdrop is how free speech is defined country-by-country (holocaust denial, for instance, is illegal in France and Germany), especially as it pertains to removing content from YouTube. Lest you think that America is free speech oasis, it also tells the story of how Joe Lieberman has been trying to get YouTube to take down videos produced by Islamic terrorists, even if they don't feature hate speech or violent content.
Because everyone seemed to completely forget about The Hold Steady this year, which is only more proof that history is dying and long-term memory has become short-term memory and short-term memory has become a dream: video for The Hold Steady's "Stay Positive," which is something of an homage to NYC streets.
Several things that don't make sense together: Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky + former Onion editor Robert Siegel + Wild Orchid actor Mickey Rourke + Jersey singer Bruce Springsteen = The Wrestler. [via]
It has been busy times around here, so I overlooked mentioning the consulting company that Rachel launched last week with Dan Abrams. The NYT story explained it pretty well: "The firm, Abrams Research, may resemble a narrowly focused version of 'expert network' firms that connect investors to industry experts. Journalists and bloggers retained and paid by the firm could consult with corporations, conduct media training sessions, or conduct investigative reporting for corporate clients." You might have seen Gawker pounce on this with calls to ethics (gotta love when they do that!), but this only served to prove what a limited sense of self-awareness some people in the profession have of themselves. Seriously, I work with all kinds of different clients, and it takes only a modest amount of common sense judgment to know where you draw lines. I sense that ethics was held up as a straw man to keep others in the profession in their place. If self-proclaimed journalists really want to survive, they'll need to start thinking of themselves in a sphere that includes researcher, pundit, entrepreneur, speaker, performer -- actually not too different from the whole "public intellectual" thing espoused in the '90s. As Felix pointed out today, it turns out that a lot of them already get it.
Chuck reviews Chinese Democracy. Grade: A- (At midnight on September 16, 1991, Chuck and I waited in line outside Budget Tapes and Records in Grand Forks, ND to buy Use Your Illusion I & II. Standing outside a Best Buy in New York, NY on November 22, 2008 sounds less enticing.)
On the Media has a crazy little story about whether playing Enya as background music to a video montage of a murder victim's life is "unduly prejudicial." The U.S. Supreme Court won't take the case, but the California Supreme Court has issued a judgment that differentiated the music of Enya from that of James Taylor.
Not only can you buy the print edition of the New York Times with the OBAMA headline ($15), but you can now also get The Onion's BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION'S WORST JOB front page ($10).
Two new comedians join SNL. "New York Magazine's Vulture blog was the first to report the news on Wednesday, based on a Twitter post from media blogger Rachel Sklar." It's an ouroboros out there! MSNBC.com <-- Access Hollywood <-- NYMag's Vulture <-- Rachel's Twitter <-- ....
I went to a panel a few days ago that had 10 Daily Show writers talking about their craft. Moderated by David Remnick, the panel showcased writers revealing all sorts of secrets of the trade, which NYT's City Blog wrote up.
You don't care as much as I do (unless you are Aaron), but now Nate Silver thinks that Al Franken is a favorite to win the recount. (See also: NYT profile of Silver today.) [via]
Over the past week, I've had at least one conversation per day about whether the news satire industry (The Onion, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Weekend Update, etc.) is going to stay relevant in an Obama administration. Vulture runs through the options of what we might see out of The Daily Show, which I suspect will return to heavy media criticism.
I sure wasn't expecting to see Derrida invoked in the financial crisis debacle in this week's New Yorker!
For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always "deferred," moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings -- a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an "aporia," from a Greek term meaning "impasse." There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.
Buried in an otherwise skippable story about primetime television is some bad news about serialized shows. ("Serialized" shows are the ones with the long story arcs that we like -- Mad Men, Sopranos, Gossip Girl, Lost, 24. "Procedurals" are shows where most of the logic is contained within a single episode -- Bones, Fringe, Law & Order. With some small comedy exceptions -- The Office, 30 Rock -- the rise of serials is the main reason the quality of television has improved over the past decade years.) The story speculates that a combination of DVR culture and re-runs make procedurals more desirable for networks "both because viewers may increasingly store episodes of serialized shows to watch them in 8-to-10 episode bursts, and because the shows have no repeat value at all." (One thing this overlooks is DVD sales, which I presume are much higher for serials. However, I wonder if the studios -- not networks -- might be getting the bulk of that money.) Only modestly related: Slate on The Future of Sports Television, which is about that user-controlled, multi-camera dream we were promised.
Amongst all the gloom stories about newspapers, my old friend Rusty pops up in a NYT story about Scripps to predict that his newspaper sites "will sell enough ads to support the staff and costs of the print and online newsrooms by 2012, without staff cuts."
The Supreme Court's first indecency case in quite some time begins debate on Tuesday. FCC v. Fox Television will debate whether every permutation of the word fuck is sexual. (The examples include the time that Bono described his Golden Globe as "fucking brilliant" and Cher said of her critics "fuck 'em.") I've never been an advocate of broadcasting courtroom proceedings -- until now.
The NYT Mag's cover story profile of Lauren Zalaznick -- president of Bravo, Oxygen and iVillage; producer of Kids and Swoon; another Brown semiotics grad; masstige's greatest impresario; and ultimately the person behind Top Chef, Pop-Up Video, Project Runway, and so forth -- is actually pretty fascinating. Snippets: "Like a softer version of its MTV cousin Beavis and Butt-head, Pop-Up Video was television that let the viewer enjoy the medium while also enabling him to feel a little bit superior to it." And: "Zalaznick's innovation was to make the actual narrative itself about people selling stuff, and buying it too"
While Jezebel adeptly stems off Tina Fey backlash, NYTcelebrates the return of 30 Rock. But there's a whiff of a second backlash in this line: "As with her Palin impersonation, Ms. Fey is an expert borrower: she reworks classic formulas from the past and mines her own experiences. Her satire hews so closely to the original that it is almost mimicry." Update: Gawker Biting the Hand That Feeds?
I snapped some pictures of the neon signs sprinkled around the party for The Atlantic's redesign a couple weeks ago. Now the mag has launched Think Again, which aggregates the various neon interrogatives (Is Porn Adultery?Is Google Making Us Stupid?) onto a blog that is "devoted to the idea that asking questions leads us to better answers." [via]
I told Carney last night that I'd like to do a YouTube show with him where we sit around and review movies like two old curmudgeons. But then I realized that the Glynnie & Carney financial show would be much better.
In a NYT profile by David Carr, Charlie Kaufman reveals, among other things, that he worked in the circulation department of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the late '80s.
Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" from The Atlantic will probably be the most quoted thing on the internet for the next few days. So here are a few quick excerpts for faking your way through conversations:
A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.
The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is -- more than any writer of the past -- a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader. The proximity is palpable, the moment human -- whatever authority a blogger has is derived not from the institution he works for but from the humanness he conveys. This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship. And it is a relatively new thing to write for thousands and thousands of friends.
A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.
To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm's length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.
The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, bloggings gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.
So who remembers JFK (the movie)? And who remembers Nixon (the movie)? And who remembers The Doors (the movie)? All of those historical events predate me, but from '91-'95 the filmic versions dominated my cultural thinking. This week, W. opens in theaters, in a moment incredibly more important than any of those films. Nonetheless, I get the feeling no one cares. Am I wrong?
Ad Age: Dumenco's funny column about the clusterfuck/circlejerk that is Tina Brown, Michael Wolff, Barry Diller, Harry Evans, Arianna Huffington, and Dumenco himself.
So yeah, since the cat is crawling out of the bag, this is my answer to the question "What the hell are you working on right now anyway?" (You can run from NBC but you can't hide!)
I seem to have at least one conversation per day about Mad Men -- there's always at least one person in my life who wants to talk about Draper's lechery, Peggy's baby, or Joan's bosom. Lately, many of those conversations meander toward questioning the psychology of advertising, which is of course what Matthew Weiner wants us to be thinking about. Eventually the role of product placements comes up, which is the perfect manifestation of contemporary advertising's darkest psychoses: deception and desire.
Since the episode where Betty buys Heineken, I've been obsessed with the singular question of whether Heineken was an actual product placement. (This question nagged me more than what the fuck was going on with Peggy's baby.) Finally, New York has published a story that answers this question and several others about the product placement game: What Tina Fey Would Do for a SoyJoy?
Among other things, it reveals that Heineken was indeed an embedded advertisement. Doy, of course it was, just like Snapple in 30 Rock and Staples in The Office. The author, Emily Nussbaum, goes on to say that within the top 10 shows alone, there were 26,000 product placements on network television last year. The first half of her piece prepares us for the inevitable:
If two decades ago music fans raged when Nike co-opted the Beatles' "Revolution," these days the most "independent" musicians vie to be on Gossip Girl. James Bond drives a BMW, Carrie Bradshaw drinks Skyy vodka.
So just shut up, this is the future.
The second half lets you down with more examples to embarrass your heroes: that Ben & Jerry's bit with Colbert? Yep. That SoyJoy sketch on 30 Rock? Yep.
SoyJoy becomes the example to eventually make Nussbuam's ultimate point about how product placements might not actually be helping the product. She talks to Joss Whedon who confesses that he didn't know that SoyJoy was even a product, much less a placement. She concludes:
It occurs to me that the 30 Rock integration was a failed experiment. After all, the product looked to me (a woman 18 to 49!) like a punch line.
And so it is a return of the repressed -- Mad Men. The entire show is one big game of sublimated knowledge: Who knows what about who slept with whom? Lust and greed are the currency at the offices of Sterling Cooper. When mixing power and sex, desire and deception are the emotional outcomes. Advertising is merely the by-product of this formula applied to capitalism.
If there is one prevailing tone in Mad Men, it's the fraught tension of not knowing. This also happens to be the exact tension of product placements. And now that my curiosity has been satiated about Heineken, I must seek out a new victim to interrogate. Or to put it differently: Are Utz better than nuts?
"At these times, an incongruous vulnerability presents itself in the reptilian Draper. Accidentally, Hamm seems to flash on an exaggerated look of melancholy or distance -- as if the actor were thinking, I don't want to be this man. Perhaps Hamm, like many Hollywood stars, wants to be liked above all, and Draper is written as less likable in nearly every episode. If the show is to mature and last, Hamm will have to risk being hated." -- Heffernan on Mad Men, anti-heroes, and acting.
The other night while we were, ugh, group blogging, Katie noticed that I have a tattoo on my right arm -- a small Chinese character. "What does that mean -- irony?" she asked. The idea of a tattoo of the Chinese character for irony struck me as the best idea ever! Anyway, BoingBoing has a post that explores the question of who owns the copyright of the tattoo -- the tattooed? the tattooer? third parties?
NYC imports from Japan which imported from Victorian England: New York Lolitas, an NYT audio slideshow (more). The interviews are strangely fascinating. They hang out in Chinatown, there's a Meetup Group, and the beginnings of a documentary.
My story on John Berryman is out this month, the U of M professor/poet who jumped off the Washington Bridge in '72. All the indie bands are writing songs about him these days (Okkervil River, Hold Steady, Nick Cave). I spent a lot of time with his third wife Kate, who lives in Prospect Park in the same fucking house they bought together with Dream Song money back in '68. Coincidentally, this writer out east, Janet Groth, wrote a story on John that was published this month in The New England Review. She actually knew the man, took classes from him, was proposed to by him, etc. Loved her account -- she talks about partying with Berryman and Robert Giroux. Anyway, we both titled our pieces, "Homage to Mister Berryman." (Cheap play on the title of his famous long poem, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.")
Though it did make the urban dictionary, the term fauxparazzi never took off like I hoped. Wired, however, discovered that the phenom has been taken to its logical conclusion: hiring people to photo stalk you.
[This post is for four people.] For most of the winter and spring, when people asked me why I moved to NYC, my sarcastic answer was "To fix it." This was clearly a coping strategy since NYC was obviously breaking me into itsy-bitsy pieces. So I changed the goal to "I came to fix NYC, but I'd be happy just fixing Krucoff." New York, I'm now ready for the rest of you.
A.O. Scott on D.F.W. in N.Y.T. "Again and again, he returned to a basic, perhaps the basic, philosophical question facing anyone with a blank screen and a story to tell. What am I going to say? How am I going to say it?"
"Wealth fantasies now constitute a genre of their own, one that is matched at the other end of the spectrum by a doomsday literalism also prevalent on television." Comparing Gossip Girl to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a clever way to discuss two shows that most people aren't watching. And like the teen drama, the women in the Terminator redux -- a mom who is more like a superhero robot, and a robot who is like the dream girlfriend -- command the narrative. With themes of corporate power, technological alienation, and evangelical yearning, it's the best show on television that people are missing.
Last night at the Web 2.0 Expo party I took on a futile cause: trying to correct anyone who claimed that Gawker somehow either a) hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account or b) brokea story involving it. (The story was on this blog and dozens of others before Gawker got to it. Whah-whah.) Today, Choire frames the storyline of how the internet works -- packaging.
Google has released Gaudi, an audio search engine, with an index that currently only contains political speeches on YouTube. But this could be enough for you to soon create supercuts like Jon Stewart's last night, which obsessed about the word "blink." This technique is usually considered Stewart's strongest rhetorical device, but does anyone else think it's starting to tire? And is it just format fatigue, or has the wonderment become less mystical as technology makes the ability to cull clips across years more common?
The Big Money, Slate.com's new business site, launches today. As NYT suggests, it could be the best worst day in recent financial history to launch a financial publication. Features will include a blog dedicated to Google, an ad comparison engine, and a Twitter account that takes jabs at WSJ. (Disclaimer or whatever: I might write for it.)
ONA (Online News Association conference) is this weekend in DC. I still haven't decided if I'm going. I've been to it something like eight years in a row, and end up complaining about it every time. Is anyone who reads this site going?
Klosterman in Time Out. "People talk about how strange it must have been growing up on a farm in North Dakota. But I think kids who grow up in Manhattan have the weirdest understanding of what the world is like. They essentially don't even live in America. They live in this place where nobody drives, where you can get anything you want at any given time, where diversity is normal. A political moderate here is somebody who, like, doesnt want McCain to die. To me, that would be weird."
The Economist notes a cybernetics study involving a sociology classic, the prisoner's dilemma. The gist: people trust robots who look like humans. But how human? No mention of the uncanny valley.
Sorry to ruin your weekend, but you have another internet-related NYT Magazine story to read: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. (It's Clive though, so it should be okay. But it can wait until you're back from shooting wolves from airplanes.)
My final post from RNC for Radar: Chad Hurley At The Google/VF Fete. Excerpt: "On television, political conventions looks like infomercials. In reality, they are like summer camps. They're like the Super Bowl without the game, or like SXSW without the bands. But everyone watches the big game for the ads, and uses music as an excuse to rub bodies. Conventions will always exist. You can't uninvent anything in politics."
The process of writing a feature story for Wired is unlike anything else in publishing. Part of it is like a doctoral defense -- "rigorous" would be an understatement. Now a new blog, Storyboard, chronicles that process of one upcoming story making it into the magazine.
Funny: Press Release for Las Vegas Las Vegas. "Slated to open in 2014, the Las Vegas Las Vegas will bring all of the glitz and glamour of one of the world's preeminent vacation spots, Las Vegas, right to the heart of beautiful downtown Las Vegas."
My favorite part of Rachel's performance of "American Pie" at the 23/6 event in Denver isn't that she's wearing Obama Girl's bra (true) or those Digg signs behind her or that she wrote it all in like five minutes, but that she reads it off her Blackberry.
Haughey on the demise of commenting over the years. It's tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I'm starting to think there's this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you'd never say anything in a comment that you wouldn't say to a friend's face. Yes.
Here's an unexpected move: The Onion has launched a CitySearch/Yelp competitor called Decider. It's only available for Chicago right now. I've heard rumors that several of the local papers (now in 10 cities: NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, DC, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Denver, Austin) are performing poorly and some might be shut down.
Through a circuitous route, Katie Bakes discovers the "magnum opus on Pen & Pixel." (Example: "This is just a cornucopia of photo-shopped crappiness. Pyramids sit next to crashed space shuttles. Vultures stalk used Chevy Cavaliers. Mysterious floating direction signs. The secrets of the Illuminati can be discerned from studying the mysteries of this cover.") The Houston-based design firm notoriously pioneered the tricked out album cover style prevalent in so many '90s rap albums. It concludes with a video of Louis Theroux interviewing a Pen & Pixel designer.
Trailer to New York I Love You. Directors include Scarlett Johnansson and Natalie Portman. Cast includes Robin Wright Penn, Isabelle Adjani, Kevin Bacon, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christiansen, and Ethan Hawke. From Moe's take-down: "New Yorkers are conned -- by their permalancer gigs and their sperm donors and their pretentious/prodigious collections of books written by misanthropic pervs and the commodity fetishism (not to mention the materialism!) and the constant distraction of mere survival when you have so many parties to attend and an overabundance of self-esteem -- into thinking that they are actually 'independent,' and that the last thing they want to be is 'codependent' when interdependence is the operating principle of human civilization."
Yay! My pal Gavin is moving to NYC to work on Jimmy Fallon's new show. Several of you have had contact with Gavin as the exec producer of G4's Attack of the Show, but to me he'll always be the guy who dumped me for Fallon.
5 Ways the Newspaper Botched the Web. A nice little history of early newspaper consortium projects starting as far back as 1983, including one ugly company I was involved in.
Lindsay and I were chatting yesterday about the conversation Draper had with his kid in last week's Mad Men. While talking about his dad, Draper said, "And his candy, it tasted like violence. In a beautiful silver and purple package." Whoa! Or at least that's what I thought he said. It actually was probably violets not violence, a reference to C. Howards violet gum and mints. Lindsay posted the video, so judge for yourself. Sure, it sounds more like violets, but I still feel it was intentionally oblique. (More esoterica: It reminds me of Malkmus eliding career and korea in "Cut Your Hair.")
If you're one of the many people who finds themselves asking "What's all the fuss with Gossip Girl?" find out tomorrow when the DVD drops. The interesting element: the DVD contains an audiobook -- no wait! -- an abridgment of the original novel. It's read by Christina Ricci and can be transferred to an iPod. [via]
Spore hatches in a few weeks, so expect a bombardment of Will Wright interviews and profiles over the next month. Here's an interview in Fast Company: The Simemperor.
Spam is sometimes funny, but it's seldom intentionally funny. I haven't actually received any of the fake MSNBC breaking news alerts that everyone else seems to be getting, but it does make me wonder: Is this the first attempt to deploy a large-scale spam attack for the purpose of media satire?
Esquire doesn't publish most of its content online, so we can't talk about this intrepid "Almanac of Steak" spread in this month's issue. (It begins with this delicious bon mot: "It seems so simple, steak.")
What little it does publish comes out several weeks after it has been printed. So I'm going to run a little bit from my friend Chuck's column this month, which may or may not eventually show up online. It was written in Germany, where he had been living for a few months, but it's about American media, which is why I want to repurpose it here. Here's how it starts:
Like a cop in an unmarked car across the street from a meth lab, I watch America. I am not in America, but I start at it. I stare at it all day and much of the night, compulsively, over the Internet and on TV stations I only intermittently understand and through newspapers I cannot read at all. I moved 3,960 miles east of New York, unconsciously hoping I would forget that America is there. It was a horrible plan. American became pretty much the only thing I have thought about for fourteen consecutive weeks. Which would be totally fine, I suppose, except that nothing ever happens.
It then goes on to argue that most media is filler. I end up disagreeing with some of what he says ("filler," for instance, which might be mistaken for "niche" in other cirucmstances, is a completely relative term -- more relative than even everything else that seems relative lately). At one point he says "Everyone I've ever met seems completely aware that the mass media is a) too large, b) mostly bad, and c) getting worse." Perhaps.
The dismay eventually winds its way around to this conclusion, which will likely bristle media professionals but resonate with media consumers:
The mass media is the single most detrimental entity within the United States right now, and it's having the exact opposite effect of its theoretically intended one -- it's making people less informed and less complete. It is much more harmful than I originally perceived. But it's more interesting than I initially realized, because the people who are most acutely aware of this problem are the people making the problem worse. Bloggers blog about how blogging ruins their lives. Newspapers deliver insignificant reports on the declining significance of newspapers. Entourage is a commentary on shallow celebrity-driven entertainment such as Entourage. A writer named Nicholas Carr wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet is making it difficult for people to concentrate on long essays, which was subsequently published on the Internet. I'm writing a column in a magazine that could essentially be read as an essay against magazines, and I don't think anyone will find that strange.
I don't know why this bothers me. It doesn't seem to bother other people. And it's not like this revelation is going to change my life; I'm still going to write essays and profiles and "idea!" articles, because that's a good job and an okay life. My involvement (or lack thereof) in all of this is irrelevant. Yet as I sit here, across the Atlantic Ocean, browsing random online reactions to fake news I have not seen (nor need to see), I find myself growing more and more depressed of all the things I used to love. It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. Maybe the lab will blow up. But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people sitting inside lose their teeth and get crazy high.
NYT story on Unconvention, an attempt to do non-partisan political art around Minneapolis for the Republican Convention. That "non-partisan political" description may sound like a contradiction, and Eyeteeth has photos of confrontational graffiti showing up around town.
Someone finally wrote the behind-the-scenes story of The Daily Show that you've been waiting for: The Most Trusted Man in America? Never would have guessed that NYT would give it to Michiko Kakutani, but after 3,000 words, what's the big reveal? They use 15 TiVos! Not much else new in there.... UPDATE: a whole lot more enlightening than those 3,000 words is one single amazing comment on PVRblog, written by a former Daily Show researcher who describes the entire TiVo process.
The only McInerney novel that I haven't read is movingup the sales charts because of the Edwards scandal. Anyone else notice that McInerney has been silent about this? I bet he's working on a story for someone -- my guess is NY Mag
Heffernan knows my beat: Kanye on Keyboards, on my boy's blog. It skips over my favorite elements (the insane commenters and the girl profiles) and glosses over the controversy about ghost-writing, but is otherwise a decent overview.
The Hip-Hop Gods have answered your prayers. Jay-Z stopped by Kanye's Madison Square Garden show to perform something from the previously-rumored-but-now-true Blueprint 3 album. Sounds like Black Album-era Jay-Z, and includes a diss of Oasis. With the crummy sales of the last two albums, this is exactly what Jay-Z needs.
Congratulations, David Brooks, you've finally made it onto Fimoculous: Lord of the Memes. My favorite part: "It was necessary to have a record collection that contained 'a little bit of everything' (except heavy metal)." I was with ya up until the parenthetical! Okay, here's the thesis statement: "On that date [the release of the iPhone], media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status." And then: "Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art." Pareene asks: "It's not a bad column at all, except that we cannot figure out why the hell it's under David Brooks' byline. Are people really trying to sell him on some hot new indie band? Did he get caught up in the Black Kids hype?"
How many people bought that $999.99 "I Am Rich" iPhone app before it was removed? 8!!! See also: Kottke thinks it should not have been nuked from the app store.
Dammit. It looks like the Montauk Monster actually was a viral marketing hoax. I will never believe anything ever again (until next time). Update: Spinterheads. This movie is going to suck more than Snakes on a Plane.
Uh-oh. NYT gives Girl Talk the full feature, focusing on copyright, which could be the beginning of the end. Andy thinks the lawsuit drops with the physical album next month, which seems like a decent bet.
In my favorite strange connection in quite some time, NY Post somehow connects the dots between John Edwards' love child and America Psycho! (Just rewatched the film version last night. I know a lot of people appreciated what Mary Harron did with the book, but I think she made it simplistic and moralistic by turning Patrick Bateman into a cartoon. Also, horrible editing.)
NYT: Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call. The story uses SlyDial, a service that allows you to leave a voicemail without letting the person hear their phone ring, to set up a thesis about "tools that let users avoid direct communication." Clever thesis, but it rubs dangerously close to falling apart when it cites other tools (including Twitter and Facebook) which create more direct communication, not less.
Uh-oh, I saw this trend story coming: Night Life Reprogrammed. It's summed up in this line: "Something new is happening in the Silicon Alley night." (The audio slideshow is full of friends.)
New book: Reading the OED, about a guy who spends a year reading that big-ass dictionary. I've added it to My Year As..., my (probably not definitive but still long) list of books about people doing something for one year. Nicholson Baker reviews it in NYTBR.
I confess: this whole Montauk Monster story, which has now creeped its way onto national television, has me riveted, mostly because we are nearby most of the summer. My guess? It's a raccoon. But! I think there's a small possibility that it is a viral marketing campaign, but not the one originally proposed. I don't think anyone has mentioned this theory, but it might be related to the X-Files movie release. I have some anecdotal evidence: Nearly a decade ago, I was the editor of the conspiracy and paranormal magazine FATE (strange but true!), where I once interviewed X-Files creator Chris Carter about his upcoming FOX show Harsh Realm (don't worry, no one else remembers it either). During the interview, I asked him about The Montauk Project, which was a favorite yarn among conspiracy nuts. I remember very clearly talking for 10 minutes about the nuances of the conspiracy -- a favorite of mine at the time. Although animal experimentation wasn't necessarily part of the lore, contact with extraterrestrials definitely was. So the Montauk Monster? It's clearly a fucking martian. I WANT TO BELIEVE.
Pretty much designed to explode the internet, NYT Magazine's story on trolls: Malwebolence. Who knew these people were self-identified? Welcome to backlash to the backlash to the backlash. Link stream: Metafilter | NY Mag | Slashdot | Digg | Gawker | Weev.
Kottke notes the term micro-tampering used in this NYT article about a woman who was stalked by an ex who would break into her house and move small things around. Finally, there is a term to perfectly describe the plot of the second half of my favorite movie, Chungking Express, which interestingly flip-flopped the genders and involved a cop as the victim (and it's a romance!).
Ad Busters: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. "The hipster represents the end of Western civilization -- a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new." [via]
Repo! The Genetic Opera is an upcoming rock musical movie starring Alexa Vega, Paris Hilton, and Paul Sorvino. They all sing, and if the trailer is any indication, it will be bat shit crazy.
Irony alert: 3,500-word NYT story on how kids don't read anymore because of the internet. "Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."
I've often wondered about the legal difference between prostitution and pornography.
It seems an obvious paradox that both acts are essentially the same: sex in exchange for money. However, there is of course one key difference: a camera.
Culturally speaking, this appears to be an extremely revealing detail of the modern psychology. Sex for money is legal only if it's recorded and distributed. The camera, it would seem, validates everything.
But it almost seems like a legal loophole that could be exploited. Imagine this scenario: The vice squad arrests some dude for picking up a hooker. "I wasn't soliciting sex," he claims. "I am making a porn movie." Does his claim to record and distribute the sexual act make it legal? Does he have a First Amendment case? It sounds like a glib question, but it's a legit case!
(Shhh, don't steal my idea, but I want to write a Law & Order script about this. I've already got a title: Get Off The Bang Bus.)
I've talked about this elsewhere, but the tricky part of the First Amendment in the coming years will be answering this question: what constitutes free speech in the age of personal media?
I've ranted about the slippery slope that Josh Wolf, for instance, created by essentially claiming that any act could be constituted as journalism, and hence protected by the First Amendment. If you think about the logical conclusions of that, the danger becomes clear. Would this include corporate security tapes or accidental photos? If journalism is simply saying it is, we're opening ourselves up to some slippery cases. (And don't mistake that remark as fear of actual so-called citizen journalism. That's what I want to make sure we protect!)
There actually is no legal precedent for protecting the creation of pornography, except in California. (Keep in mind that creation and distribution are different.)
Porn creation has never been legally tested in other states, so it might be illegal.
This is why Cali is the porn capital.
The First Amendment will get some tricky questions thrown at it in the coming years, as one of these "personal media" cases eventually trickles its way up the Supreme Court. Given the current makeup of said body, I'm worried what the outcome will be. Sometimes, it may be better to not test the law.
The other day I was questioning the statistical validity of certain lists (while at the same time praising any list that places me above Lockhart!), but now we have this list to contend with. Suck it, Kanye!
Upcoming cover of Esquire: DIGITAL. (Let's just prep the media history ebook entry from 2020: Although intended as a talisman to rebuff critics on the longevity of print magazines, Esquire's 2008 'digital' cover became the harbinger of an industry gasping to upgrade to the digital era but completely mystified on how...)
Ad Age reports on a couple upcoming developments at NYTimes.com: external links on the homepage to competitor stories (dubbed Times Extra and using Blogrunner, which they bought a couple years ago) and a beefed up business site modeled on Sorkin's DealBook (but my guess actually inspired by All Things D). [via]
Everyone's a Narcissist, It Seems. "A term that has deep roots in psychoanalytic literature appears to have become a popular descriptor so bloated as to have been rendered meaningless." Of course, you would think so.
NYT Mag just published a huge excerpt from David Carr's new memoir, The Night of the Gun. As I hoped, it's set in Minneapolis with lots of drugs. This is fucking better than a Hold Steady record!
Let's call it a modernization, but updated with more frustration than melancholy, to Joan Didion's 1967 essay about leaving NYC, "Goodbye To All That," which had been playing on repeat next to my bed, but 40 years later is revealed to have a better b-side: "Au Revoir, New York 'Literary' Scene!"
It's been a while since you've asked -- actually, you've never asked -- but let me tell you... my favorite new blog is This Recording. What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice. Most of the writers are, I think, from LA, or at least it feels like LA. It's not done-with-it-all jaded like NYC or earnestly passive-aggressive like the Midwest. It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup. Whatevski, I could read this Molly person all day. Update: "when Walt Whitman liveblogged Abraham Lincoln's funeral".
Since I'm talking about comment culture too much lately, linking to Gessen's new post seems required. "I think, generally speaking, that every site gets the commenters it deserves... It's disingenuous for people writing online, especially for people who are expert at writing online, to pretend like the commenters they attract (over and over again) are somehow incidental to the work they do, or the context in which they do it... You may not be legally responsible for the things that appear on your site, but you are I think morally responsible." See also: Choire thinks NYT should sue anon commenters. Controversial!
One of my favorite events in Seattle was Ignite Seattle where people gave presentations of 20 slides in 15 second intervals [previously: Pecha Kucha]. The quality was good, and it looks like the event's maiden voyage to NYC might have some moments too, including Joel Johnson on indie games and Charles Forman on, um, "How to date celebrichauns with founder fetish." (If you know Charles, you know the celebrichaun in question.)
Today Julia took over the internet. Of course, this launched (Radar's take is the best). And she has a debate in Page Six with Sklar about defending your online reputation. And more than any of those things, the West Coast will finally (perhaps) stop saying "who?" every time her name is mentioned -- yep, she landed on the cover of Wired. Let the snark commence... UPDATE: Wired article.
Kurt Anderson's new column starts off with an obvious idea (the rise of the commentariat; the punditocracy has won) and eventual winds its way through some interesting points about redefining bias, MSNBC vs. Fox News, and news/opinion hybrids.
I learned yesterday that Noam Chomsky has a column that is syndicated through the NY Times Syndicate service. If you've read Manufacturing Consent, this is funny. I'm told that no daily newspaper in America has picked it up yet.
NYTBR's lead review this week is for Atmospheric Disturbances, a novel that begins "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." It gets a rave, but I was intrigued that the reviewer (an acquaintance) didn't mention the disorder that serves as the inspiration, Capgras Delusion, which I've been obsessed with lately, and am a little disappointed to discover has now been fictionalized by someone else before I could get to it.
Though it might seem that every ounce of nuance has been sucked out of this whole "commenter culture" meme -- yesterday it was Time with "Post Apocalypse" and previously it was NYT Styles with "All-Stars of the Clever Riposte" and NY Mag with "The What You Are Afraid Of" -- I'm still convinced there are some missing pieces, even if I can't put my finger on them....
Jorn of Robot Wisdom, who invented link blogging, takes up Warren Ellis' critique from earlier this week in which he said, "The world does not need another linkblog." It might seem that I'd naturally rally around Jorn on this one, but I'll say this instead: if Fimoc had not existed for the past way-too-many years, and I had to invent something now... I would probably not try to invent a link blog. We are compelled by our histories.
iPhone App Store launched. Too bad you can't use anything until the new firmware comes out. (FRIDAY! TOMORROW! IPHONE DAY!) Update: New iPhone firmware.
At the Ben Gibbard show the other night, Caroline wondered aloud about the origin of yelling "Free Bird" at shows. I said Wikipedia must have the answer, and it does. Strangely, or perhaps not, its origin has to do with Skynyrd not playing the song during an encore at a 1976 show. Crowd chants can be heard on the live album One More From The Road before the band returned for its second encore, when it of course played "Free Bird." So there ya go. (Update: more in this WSJ article, including the Bill Hicks stuff that Mat mentions in the comments.)
Newsgroper.com is a site with a bjillion fake celeb blogs, almost all of which are abysmally bad. (It is funny to see famous people comment on other famous people though.) However, Fake Barry Diller is pretty funny. "His name evokes scurvy-laden cabin boys" -- guess who!
After being on Pop 17 the other day, I mentioned that we talked for quite a while about various internet things. And golly, she put up a second video, this one a little more personal. Thanks for the good conversation, Sarah and Kenyatta!
Recommended: NYT Mag's story on suicide, which focuses on issues like location, historical trends, and method. An interesting stat, among many: twice as many people die from suicide as homicide.
NYT Mag's long Rush Limbaugh profile. Some details about his drug abuse, his deafness, his self-perception as an entertainer, his non-written extemporaneous process, his expensive lifestyle.
I'm spending half my summer near Montauk, which is fighting an internal battle over whether it is authentically quaint or part of the gaudy Hamptons. NYT Styles picked up the theme in today's cover story: The Yachtini Lands in Montauk. (The people in that picture actually look refined compared to the party bus that LIRR was this weekend.)
I was on Pop 17 talking about the microfame thing again. Sarah and I talked for an hour about all kinds of things, but the video is mostly just a quick review of the NY Magarticle. It was fun!
I love NYT's breaking news alerts. Their phrasing, especially when people die, is the most disorienting prose to get delivered on your phone, next to texts that say "WHERRE R U?" Seriously, read this aloud, like poetry:
Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Thursday in Raleigh, N.C. He was 86.
Update: Xeni wrote to point out that the reason the post was deleted was because it was accidentally double-posted to BoingBoing Gadgets. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, which basically invalidates most of what I say below.
LAT's Web Scout on Violet Blue's scrubbing from BoingBoing. I've got an inkling of an idea of what happened, based upon previous gossip I heard. But I'll wait for a while to see what emerges. Anyway, some people have been asking me what exactly BoingBoing deleted about me. I've decided to reproduce the post, which was originally at this location, but is now gone:
Filmolicious [sic] dug a 15-year-old copy of Wired issue 1.0 out and gave it a loving, thoroughgoing examination through the lens of history. My life was changed by that issue -- I read it on the bus on the way to university in Waterloo, Ontario, got off the bus, took one look at the campus, and thought, "Christ, why am I here, when all this stuff is going on out there?" A few months later, I'd dropped out to program CD ROMs for the Voyager company, whose wares had been reviewed in that inaugural issue.
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
My post that they are referencing is here, and the reason I think it was deleted is here.
The proliferation of media has made it virtually impossible to tell the difference between a) what information is unilaterally interesting, and b) what information is merely available. I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong -- they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans.
If you're wondering what all the hype is about, the first season of Mad Men comes out on DVD tomorrow. The new season starts on July 27. I will be having a party.
Honan has outed me. I started a Tumblr a couple weeks ago, while I was feeling depressed about the dating churn, the scenester complex, the image upkeep, the drunken plotting. I'm fine now! But I'm still updating it with occasional conversations: Self-Loathing Nighttime Conversations. It's ridiculously self-indulgent, so I don't recommend actually reading it; apologies to those who are excerpted.
I simply adore how Kanye uses his blog as a receptacle for hot actress images that he snags from other sites. And then he writes a little bit of biographic text, just in case you didn't know who Megan Fox or Sienna Miller were. This man is genius.
Of course the conceit of The Microfame Game was using the framework of the how-to article as a set-up to talk about internet celebrity. Though there are occasional points of advice in there, following it like a guide book would inevitably turn you one of those people, the crazy ones who freak out and quit the internet every month. In that sense, it's as much a cautionary tale as a how-to. However, in writing How To Storm Off the Internet in a Huff, Pareene took the task of service journalism literally, offering up actual advice on how to live semi-publicly online. And it's actually good advice -- news you can use!
I told Choire the other day that he's the anti-Deborah Solomon. Everything about her interviews are sculpted, perfected, edited to these crystalline little moments that end up feeling lifeless. (I've argued elsewhere that the accusations of over-editing never bothered me ethically, just aesthetically.) Choire's interview with Matthew Broderick has the opposite feel, like what would happen if you accidentally got seated next to him at dinner.
How many online ads do you think you see per day? My guess: 3000. When was the last time you clicked on one? Me: 1999. However, I've been noticing those little Facebook ads in the lower-left of the page. I'm not sure why -- targeting? placement? paucity? Anyway, my bestie Jackie sent me a screengrab of an advert that she just saw. Recognize the image? Yep. I wish I had seen it, cuz it would have been the first ad I clicked on since 1999. (It links to some blog called The New Anti-Social.)
When the teenage version of me visited NYC, the destination was always the punk-infested East Village. I don't know if anyone has written about that moment at St. Marks Place, before hip-hop made it to MTV and grunge blew its head off, but it was a weird mix of stuff. Punk, at that moment in the form of hardcore, persisted as the prevailing aesthetic of the region, but it also seemed vaguely interested in the popular music of the time, which happened to be heavy metal and country music. It's a weird memory, but that strange influence created more hairsprayed manes and cowboy hats than you'd expect. It was punk, but it was punk trying to stay current -- somewhat humorously, or maybe ironically. And politically, punk seemed alive because it was a bit flexible, current, pragmatic. Now when I walk through St. Marks, I see something different. The punks who remain, in far smaller numbers, and now peeing on the Chipotle, all look like original '70s punks, with an aggressively retro aesthetic. Perhaps my philosophy of pastiche pragmatism would make no sense to these purists, but I can't help feeling that this reactionary anti-style is only style. Anyway, that's what I was thinking while reading this NY Mag story on the current punk scene at St. Marks.
The internet was spectacular yesterday. Within moments of the photos of the Olsen twin and Nicole Richie party showing up on the internet, everyone's rss readers and chat windows lit up like a Soundgarden show in 1993. Seconds before it exploded, I emailed my online muse, Spencer of GoldenFiddle.com, requesting 30,000 words of analysis. Who else could possibly explain this incomprehensible blend of nostalgia and futurism, celebrity and diary, class and style, party and funeral? "It's like art," I said. He delivered this response, the only poetry worthy of our time:
concept-less art, perhaps.
a flannel party? weeeeeeeeak theme!!!
and the madden boy doesn't even oblige.
weak.
these pictures are actually reassuring and hilarious
because i think it highlights how uncreative these million dollar babies are.
sure they're cute and carefree and cobrasnake and everyone's having a good time, (where are the adults?)
but they've been rich so long they fucking suck at spending it the right ways.
plastic plates and forks? store bought pinata? no art on the walls, no rugs, no nothing.
just cupcakes candles those retarded oversized wine glasses and the worlds ugliest marble countertop for miles.
that little munchkin olsen is living a permanent freshman year, god bless her her caffeine-addled soul.
she's like some g-rated iggy pop, flopping around, everybody telling her she's so CRAZY!!!!!!!!
funny thing is i have pictures that look EXACTLY like these, too. wasted, flannel shirt unbuttoned, untucked, too many cigarettes in my fingers.
i was 15.
nicole richie has the world fooled with her whole mom-routine.
she's the mastermind here. she's the smartest guy in the room.
she's fucking brilliant if you ask me. that smile is deadly. she's so far ahead of this bunch. she has shit mapped out.
and she may be hoisting a smart water, but it's just to wash down the scripts.
so, where's that new born, anyway?
the dudes are just loving it.
fucking slime-balls that don't even know it.
brody jenner jrs in training.
posing, smiling, lying, networking, being the guys.
they're all 5 steps ahead, too. they know where their night is going.
they've got plans. MK has no plans. she has drugs and sychophants.
what the fuck else does she need?
robert downy jr would laugh in these kids faces.
he'd flip the dinning room table over, call them pathetic and main-line their absinthe.
then he'd call charlie sheen over and they'd piss on the curtains.
i bet every girl in that dining room has had 47 abortions.
the sisterhood of the xanax and dark-colored sweatpants.
the sad part is that mary kate has nothing to return to.
rdj lifted himself out of hollywood hell and got back on the A-list.
the olsens don't have that opportunity. they're never going to be actors again.
they never really were. it's just more of this until something bad happens.
Video: I was on Attack of the Show on G4 yesterday, talking about the microfame article. I tried to get through all eight steps, but tv moves so fast! Anyway, the very important footnote: I'm wearing a t-shirt in the segment that shows only two letters (ON) because of the jacket. But I took a photo of it, so you can know my stance on the self-awareness of being on tv talking about microfame.
Beck's Modern Guilt trailer. Yep, that's the way it's being billed -- as a trailer to an album. It's on the internet; it's a music medley; it's a video; it's a trailer to an album -- anything can be anything, everything is everything, que sera sera.
Someone mentioned to me a couple weeks ago that Radar was doing a print redesign. I joked that they probably wasted a million bucks on Pentagram. The funny thing is, I was right. (Okay, I don't know how much it actually was, and I don't hate Pentagram. But I bet it was too much, and I think Pentagram is overrated.)
The news that Reddit is going open-source got me thinking about other sites that have done the same. The three other examples I could come up with are Slashdot, LiveJournal, and Consumating. All seem to be, well, increasingly obsolete. (A different debate might be does Slashdot still matter? I'm sure it's audience is still sizable, but does it matter?) Are there any better examples? And who would benefit from this, if anyone?
Over the past couple months, I've been working with New York Magazine to develop some stories related to internet media. The first is "The Microfame Game", an analysis of how micro-celebrity is generated, with advice on how you -- yes you! -- can use the internet's self-publishing tools along with the new networked media machine to generate well-deserved acclaim. The eight-step plan is intentionally cheeky, but it's also probably helpful, if you're the kind of crazy person looking to create a successful online identity.
My original inspiration for writing about this topic was Kevin Kelly's essay 1,000 True Fans, which is a motivating take on how small amount of renown can be turned into a successful career. In thinking about the idea, I smacked out the three paragraphs below, which never made it into the story but can serve as the spark of the original idea:
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to stand in front of large groups of people and scream at them. I wanted to proclaim my love for their mid-size city and then show them my genitals. I had no interest in becoming a musician, because I wanted to be a rock star.
Before the internet, or before whatever weird historical moment we're in that causes us to overuse the phrase "before the internet," being a rock star used to signify something grandiose. As subcultures arose, the term itself became imbued with meaning beyond music: one could be the "rock star of sushi" or the "rock star of hedge funds."
And now, with an eroding mass culture, and with the internet slicing everything to tasty bite-sized morsels, the "rock stars of _____" are the only rock stars who matter. With subcultures now the dominant culture, the only solution is retreating to the fringes and joining these new niche rock stars, the microfamous....
TimesPeople (FAQ). It's an NYT app (a Firefox add-on) that you can use to "create a network of like-minded readers." You add friends and it adds a social networking bar to the top of NYTimes.com. There's also a Facebook app. Some people will likely criticize the closed nature of this, or the "do I need another social network?" aspect, but I think this is a smart move. UPDATE: Caroline's CNET story.
Aaron confessed to me last night that he and Taylor did a Fake Rex Sorgatz blog last year. He said they stopped updating it because it was too much like Fimoculous. I regret admitting that it is pretty funny.
Anyone else watch the pilot of Swingtown (you can watch it here)? NY Mag and The New Yorker both panned it, while NYT and WaPo were more forgiving. I'll give it a B for now, but I'm not hopeful. It was interesting to see CBS promote Last.FM on-air, in the form of a boring mini-site full of '70s songs. Liz Phair also contributed the show's theme.
As party of Internet Week (HAHAHAHAHA), I went to this IWantMedia event yesterday, mostly because I wanted to see David Carr, Michael Wolff, and Erick Schonfeld go head-to-head. They didn't disappoint: Top 10 Scathing Remarks.
There's a cool graphic on the homepage of NYTimes.com right now called "How They Voted," breaking down Democratic voters demographically. [via, which has a movie, if you miss it.]
It's Internet Week in NYC. Which means posting here will probably be light, but jokes on Twitter will be flowing. (Seriously, "internet week." Hahahah, that's like its own punchline!)
Jane McGonigal at the New Yorker Conference: Saving the World Through Game Design. She's great. A few months ago, I did a Pecha Kucha (definition) presentation related to my life-becoming-a-game idea. Lookie, there's video! I roll out the Prius, speed dating, Run Lola Run, ImInLikeWithYou, Lost, TiVo, EveryBlock, and many others as examples.
I think this, partially, is what I was also trying to say:
It's not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group's open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature -- so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what's, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web's peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.
Paul Graham discusses cities and ambition. The setup, that different cities send distinct messages, works as a decent framing device for discussing urbanism, but some of the messages are debatable. Berkeley ("You should live better") sounds right, as does Silicon Valley ("You should be more powerful"), but New York ("You should have more money") sounds off. I propose NYC's should be "You should have more influence," defined as a combination of power and connections. Interestingly, none of the messages sound particularly attractive, except perhaps Cambridge ("You should be smarter"), which I find sorta boring. Propose your own city messages in the comments...
ROFLcon, last month's internet meme conference in Cambridge, appears to be now taking its act on the road. Events of some sort are scheduled this summer in Chicago, Seattle, San Fran, and NYC. They need to go wherever this kid is.
Promise, last link about Emily's NYT Mag thing... The Observer, which probably felt it needed to say something, dissects the production of the cover photo, suggesting (and then unsuggesting) victimization and proposing that writers need to watch their image. Though it's never invoked, all of this now reminds me of Prozac Nation, with the same debates between sexuality vs. victimization, public vs. private, memoir vs. publicity.
When's the last time you were in a Gap? Me either. There's a new Whitney-curated t-shirt line though, with artists like Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Barbara Kruger, Kenny Scharf, and so forth contributing. Some ain't bad. Buy.
A new "best of Twitter" application: Favrd. From the blog post about it: "By any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks -- unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about -- must and shall be filtered out of view." Perfect.
MuxFind.com, for searching Muxtapes, and thereby pretty much recreating Napster in a browser. (It says that the service is not associated with Muxtape. If that's true, Muxtape might wanna shut it down before everyone gets sued outta existence.) Update#1: Fred likes it. Update: #2: Anthony thinks it should be open-source.
Sunday NYT story on the bloggers festering around the Senate race in Minnesota, featuring some of the pests that used to bother me daily. How Minnesota has become the hotbed from the right-wing blogosphere is a mystery to everyone, but it's paying off for them. Nonetheless, Al Franken versus Norm Coleman will be the most exciting Senate race of the season.
Emily's NYT Magazine cover story: "Exposed." Chat windows across NYC are lit up like ticker-tape parades right now. (I haven't read it yet.)Update: Alright, I've read it. I vomited out a ridiculous amount of nonsense (with footnotes!) in the comments.
Scarlett Johansson's much-maligned album drops today. Quick take: with Tom Waits covers produced by Dave Sitek, it's not as bad as you've heard, nor is it great. The song that one most hopes will be a hit, "I Don't Wanna Grow Up," is emblematic: getting some sort of '80s shimmer treatment, like a down-tempo Pet Shop Boys ditty, is interesting for a couple minutes, but sadly forgettable seconds thereafter. Though not a bad first album, one wonders what this second act could look like. I vote for Leonard Cohen songs produced by Steve Albini. B- (Actual reviews: Pitchfork | Radar | NY Mag | Onion A/V | Rolling Stone.)
This was a strange week for Wired. The magazine held its 15-year anniversary party in NYC last night (FEWER FLASHBULBS, PLEASE), which doubled as a celebration for their purchase of Ars Technica and revival of Webmonkey. NYT responded with a piece vaguely condemningWired's supposed drug advocacy in an issue that's not even on the newsstand anymore. David Carr came away with the smartest analysis, suggesting that Conde Nast is wise for keeping a small digital footprint. Although I question whether this is actually a "strategy" (doesn't "fear" sounds like a more accurate depiction?), spending millions on randomproperties is at least better than spending billions on faltering ones.
Easiest way to get me talking bullshit: start a conversation about the economics of book publishing. This isn't the place to give my speech about the demise of the industry (YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE), but it's worth pointing to this random Forbes essay, How Amazon Could Change Publishing. I disagree with the conclusion -- I don't think Amazon is going to knock out the book publisher any more than iTunes knocked out the record label. But it does lay out some of the broken economics. (Short version of my rant: the internet age will catch up with book publishing, not in a technological sense, as this essay suggests, but in a philosophical sense. Publishing will be forced to adopt a more egalitarian meritocracy. Too many books lose money; authors aren't accurately rewarded on sales; this model can't continue.)
This actually has a lot to do with a NYC-centric vision of media. Very few of my friends back in the midwest watch the show. If I didn't live in New York, I'm not sure I'd watch it. While it's eye candy for those of us who walk by the Beatrice Inn, it's gaudy class warfare for those who don't.
And:
The use of these communications technologies -- the cellphone, the gossip website -- are part of what makes the show so compelling to internet people. The most recent episode was the first to closely dwell on the mechanics of the anonymous site. For those of us who work in the industry, it was fascinating to see someone else use it as a vehicle for revenge, for manipulation... for gossip.
I saw my first live SNL last weekend, and it was fantastic. (I live twittered the show and the cast party, but was thankfully plastered enough to stop sharing anything from the after-after party. I bought Keenan a birthday drink, and that's all I'm sayin.) By coincidence, my pal Mark who runs Defamer ended up sitting behind us. He just posted his review of the show. The back of my head (and Kate's freshly straightened hair!) makes an appearance on the left side of the photo of Claire Danes, who sat in front of us and canoodled Hugh Dancy the whole time. (I only took one photo before the page reprimanded me, Kenneth-like.) If you ever have the chance to see the live production, it will forever change the way you watch the show.
We used to think of music videos as little trailers to albums. Now we have trailers to trailers in the form of "Everyone Nose" Sneak Preview, apparently a Young Jeezy / Lupe Fiasco / T.I. / Kanye West / N.E.R.D. collaboration. Love that chorus! [via, doy]
When Nicholas dished the rumor that HypeMachine had a $10 million bid from Viacom, I said it was perhaps "more complex than that." Anthony has now said the rumor is "not very accurate." And that ends this boring story.... for now.
I don't get many chances at crossover links like this, so here goes... some of you from Minneapolis might remember Taavo Somer, the architect-turned-restaurateur who made a splash in duh big city with Freemans, which cited The Loring (RIP, sigh) as his primary inspiration. (If you've visited from the Midwest, I've taken you there, nostalgically. Taavo also did the whole "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," etc. t-shirts for Barneys, before your mom had a t-shirt line.) New Yorkers know him as the guy who also created The Rusty Knot and Gemma. Now that the table is set, the link: a new NY Mag profile of Taavo, the sorta thing that drives people like me crazy with the bleak feeling that we should be doing more.
Now here we go.... I C U: Where The Boys/Girls Are, LAT's interactive distribution map illustrating where the single people are by age. NYT, your move. [via]
I finally got to meet one of my faves, Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine, last week. When I asked how it was going, he said he wasn't sure what to say about anything anymore. He has turned that basic idea into another great vlog post.
Fittingly, NYT drops its Grand Theft Auto IV coverage in the City section of the paper today. (The other appropriate section might have been Travel.) It's a long tour of the game's version of NYC, told from the perspective of a New Yorker (Dave Itzkoff, also known for covering sci-fi for the NYT Book Review) who wants the neighborhoods to resemble his version of the city. The conclusion is effectively a topographic take of the Uncanny Valley conundrum:
If I truly believed in Liberty City as a functioning community, how could I open fire on my fellow simulated citizens (even if they shot at me first)? How could I tread all over the social contract in a ripped-off truck full of bootleg prescription medication?
And then:
It's not the game's fault that it can't perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.
I just bought the game and have only played a little. But the descriptions here and elsewhere sound like NYC run through the mosaic filter on Photoshop. This geographically-confused, post-catastrophe setting resembles Cloverfield more than anything else. (You know, that scene where they get in the subway at Spring St. and end up at 59th St.) Let's compare these two for a second: look how each toys with class, violence, geography, simulation, reproduction, terrorism, sex, and urban geography. This should be the only bar conversation we have for the next couple months.
But back to this desire to adhere to verisimilitude in game play. It's peculiar, especially given the history of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, notorious for its propagation of violence as the narrative of gaming. Yes, peculiar, but also understandable for anyone familiar with the city's grid. The question seems to be, how close of a representation do we actually want? There it is again, the Uncanny Valley, which even popped up on a recent episode of 30 Rock, in the form of Tracy Jordan (himself a refracted mirror of Tracy Morgan) trying to make the first successful porn video game.
Desire and play. I suspect this is what gets lost in the muddled debate about the interplay of reality and fiction in the super-simulation canon. The new cultural critics are "deciders," sprung from both the left (social realists) and the right (values pundits), both trying to impose "this is fiction" and "this is real" logic onto games and movies. But it's not just them -- it is we who, in various ways, all participate in this debate about reality and non-reality, seeking an answer to whether something is either too unrealistic or too realistic.
All this makes me wonder if the question of realism has been overplayed, or if in fact it is the only question, now and forever. All I really want to know is: what makes playing the game so much fun? And how much does "reality" have to do with the answer?
All you music bloggers should just hand over the keys, cuz Kanye is crushing you. May Day, May Day, he just dropped an exclusive... your favorite video for the next five minutes: Justice's "Stress".
Minneapolis kids: The Daily Show will be in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention in September -- and you can reserve tix now. (If any editors are reading this, I'm looking for someone to send me back to write about the RNC. Interested? Please email me!) [via]
A few months ago, a NYT Mag columnist speculated that maybe the reason Friday Night Lights was a ratings failure had to do with its lack of internet presence. Yesterday, in one of the most buzzed clips in months, the guy who wrote the book that inspired the series (and is a Vanity Fair editor, natch) showed up on Costas Now to go totally freakazoid about blogs. Is there a looming blogphobia sweeping the country? I dunno, but Leitch thinks so. UPDATE: NYT weighs in.
Nicholas says Hype Machine has a $10 million offer from Viacom. Anthony's site is my favorite music project on the internet, but I think the offer is bullshit -- or, perhaps more accurately, more complex than that. Either way, the post is still good because of the conversation about VCs and startups.
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button.
It would be easy to dismiss IT Girls as final proof of a culture gone spongy in the brain, in the final stages not so much of Alzheimers as syphilis. But let's be honest: the concept, three girls are followed by the cameras as they set up an online chat show, a younger version of The View, is positively gripping compared with some of the other reality projects being touted."
But there is an interesting story here that no one's getting to yet, which is how the website and the tv series can/might/should/but-probably-won't interact.
The question of audience crossover is the rub. Some people will interact with Julia's website (a new take on The View) but will hate Bravo's show (a new take on The Hills), and vice versa.
This dichotomy stems partially from the dual life that Julia herself leads -- attempting to persuade the Valley nerds that she's legit while still chit-chatting about Britney on FOX News. Can you imagine trying to look cool to both crowds? Much of the former crowd likes to brag about how they don't own a tv (you'll inevitably see from this post's comments which people these are), while the latter is the entire reason that TMZ is now a successful cable franchise. Demographically, this will be nearly impossible to capture. But perhaps this is one of those rare moments where demographics gets thrown out the window because it catches the zeitgeist.
How? Easy: Whatever you might think about Julia (or, for that matter, Bravo), this should be the place where an interesting experiment happens. This is, if you think about it, like the hyperbolic reality/fiction vision portrayed in NY Mag's Gossip Girl cover story, but times a thousand.
But more than that, this should be where a legit battle between television and the internet is finally staged. Which will be more compelling: the online talkshow or the reality tv series? And when it comes down to choosing the winner, the real question will be: is a draw compelling?
This whole "play the entire album as your set" meme? It was fun for a while, but aren't we tired of it? Hasn't this form of packaged nostalgia -- nostalgia not only for the band but for the idea of the album -- run its course? Anyway, the cast for All Tomorrow's Parties has been announced and it looks like a lost CD changer from 1997: Built to Spill performing Perfect From Now On, Thurston Moore performing Psychic Hearts, Meat Puppets performing Meat Puppets II, and Tortoise performing Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Oh, and My Bloody Valentine is headlining. September 19-21, Monticello, New York (two hours from Manhattan).
Listen people, I get a lot of email too. Probably something like 500 missives per day. But this really isn't that difficult to fend off. Let me help... Tactic #1: Delete unnecessary items as they come in. Tactic #2: Reply to items when you have free time in elevators, meetings, subways, etc. Tactic #3: Don't leave work until you're down to five items. Tactic #4: Stop writing about how much email you get. Done.
Heffernan's NYT Mag column is crackling this week. "Broadcast Spoofs" examines the Onion News Network, noting the distinctly midwestern flavor:
By contrast, fancy, coastal visual comedy -- 30 Rock, The Sarah Silverman Program, Curb Your Enthusiasm -- has a strongly aspirational element to it, with protagonists mired in what Joni Mitchell once called rich people's problems (real estate, restaurants, relationships). They comparison-shop values like consumerism and thinness, glamour and goodness, Obama and Clinton.
The Onion shrugs at these choices. Indifferent and impassive before overblown moral showdowns, The Onion offers only contempt, impotence and blank depression.
Ouch! It's a tepid rave, which is why it's pretty interesting.
Lost Remote: The power of embeddable video. If I leave any legacy, sure, let it be getting that embedded player onto msnbc.com -- the first on a major news website.
Here we go... Pitchfork has the first track you can hear from Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits cover album (out in May). It starts off sounding like a TV on the Radio song (Sitek produced it), but then turns atmospheric. Judgment so far: unsure. UPDATE: track has been removed; you didn't miss much.
I finally got around to reading the NYT Mag cover story on Chris Matthews (thank you, long subway rides) -- when was the last time a profile was so rigorously negative? It's actually fascinating -- not because it's an accurate portrayal of Matthews (who really knows, right?) but because it's completely true of a type of person you encounter over and over again in media circles.
Waxy has coined a term: supercuts. His definition: "Some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage" -- so like the Lost What? thing I linked to yesterday. Buzzfeed and company haven't gotten it yet, but you'll see it in 5... 4... UPDATE: There we go.
People sometimes ask me what it was like to work on the Microsoft campus, and I usually say "Did you ever see Kid Nation?" And then I say that there actually are a lot of cool products being developed, but most of them will never see the light of day. One of them that I first saw a long time ago, Clearflow, which attempts to help you avoid traffic jams, has made it out of captivity, says a NYT story. It's being released on Live Maps.
I'm writing this at 10 pm ET, which is usually around the time that newspapers break their big stories online from tomorrow's papers. Tonight a funny thing happened. WSJ just reported that Yahoo and AOL were close to brokering a merger that would thwart Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. But NYT also just published their story claiming that Microsoft and News Corp were in negotiations to make a joint bid for Yahoo. The stories don't necessarily contradict each other, but they are clearly written from radically different sources. I say we just merge them all and call it Yahooglenewscorpaolsoft.
For Errol Morris' new movie: Standard Operating Procedure, the website. If you play around with it a bit, you start to imagine that maybe the whole movie could be presented this way. [via]
It's hard to imagine a city having a better year than Minneapolis did in 1984, when it witnessed the release of Purple Rain from Prince, Let it Be from the Replacements, and Zen Arcade from Husker Du. That kind of legacy is double-edged: it provides your community with respect and clout, but it also hangs like a heavy nostalgic fog to be lived up to. It can take a long time to recover from the burden of reputation, but this month could be Minneapolis' moment again as three big releases hit the street from Tapes 'n Tapes, Atmosphere, and Cloud Cult. My friend Ross sat down with all three to discuss their new albums, track by track. The music industry is indescribably different than it was in 1984 -- more fickle, more forgetful. Even though these three acts are releasing the best albums of their careers, they are in the uncomfortable position of hoping their audience has not moved onto the newest shiny thing. It's a paradox: once you have finally lived up to your community's past, you become it. I hope their audience remembers. (My pals Tapes 'n Tapes -- oh yeah, good band profile from Marsh too -- are in NYC this week for their record release party and a Conan appearance. More updates later.)
Practically overnight, Red Lasso is suddenly popping up in several interesting places. Red whah? Exactly. Red Lasso is still in beta, but it's an application that constantly records television on approximately 20 networks and provides a web interface for someone (doy, bloggers!) to make embeddable clips. So here's Gawker using it, HuffPost using it, etc. (I'm on the beta list, so I've played around with it a bit too.) It has shockingly little press (blog or otherwise -- a few old, old links: NewTeeVee | SAI | PaidContent), but I bet it explodes on the TechCrunch / Mashable / Scoble scene soon. (Update via Andy: Perez uses it too.)
Today on CNet's The 404, I unveiled the secret project that I have been working on. After months of preparation in NYC, I am finally ready for the unveil: my new super secret project is going to be... a zine! That's right, to hell with digital media! But wait, there's more! It's going to be a zine about... YouTube! Although Conde Nast has turned down seed funding, I am sure this will be HUGE. (This isn't even really an April Fool's joke. Not really. If you would like to submit anything to the zine, email me!)
When people ask what my blog is about, I usually say "I link to Kanye videos and stupid t-shirts." So here ya go, a new Kanye vid: "Homecoming" ft. Chris Martin.
Yesterday, in a matter of about 12 hours, Muxtape, a site that lets you create playlists, exploded all over the place. It's definitely cool, but ya gotta wonder if it can last without any licensing agreements. (Update: My Muxtape. Not a single Rick Roll in there.)
NYT yesterday: "[Rick Astley] has not spoken publicly about the meme and efforts to reach him through his agent were unsuccessful." Maybe no one has tried hard enough, because LATtracked him down for his comments on the most important meme of our time. (Also, Rick Astley looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Rick Astley.)
It's the strangest profile of a news company that I've ever read... but it's also the best recent attempt at historicizing this particular moment in media history: "Out of Print," The New Yorker. Ostensibly a profile of The Huffington Post (which surpassed Drudge in unique audience this month), this monster rambles through everything from complex newspaper economics to that Simpsons"Your medium is dying" clip -- my pal Jonah Peretti even gets his "mullet strategy" theory tossed into the mix. The author, Eric Alterman, has never impressed me in the past -- he's been obtuse, lacking in nuance. So why do I find this piece so important? Because the opposition it sets up between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, which is difficult to parse but ultimately worth the effort, is the most honest historical opposition anyone has come up with so far to describe this moment. The Left really has refused to acknowledge the inherent elitism of the Lippmann model, and now it's paying the price. The entire conflict we're facing right now arises from the return of the repressed: Dewey's conversational model of media. However, a small quibble with the story: How about some analysis of the potentially elitist celeb-blogger model that is The Huff Post itself?
Not content with being hip-hop's greatest blogger, not fulfilled with having the craziest commenters this side of YouTube... Kanye West is now leaking tracks on his blog: new Outkast song featuring Raekwon.
Some random media links this morning: Battelle hints that Federated Media could invest in blogs, publishers are worried about another new Google feature, CNN.com answers some questions about iReport, and Hulu's CEO says it's not in competition with YouTube. (The one-line read on all of those? It's a constant clash of old and new.)
In this week's NYT Mag, my pal Tom writes a profile of Patients Like Me, a networking site where people enter their medical conditions and talk about them. I like the charts.
For anyone looking for cross-over potential between Gossip Girl and Buffy (um, all none of you), Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy's sister) has been cast as the new bad egg on Gossip Girl.
For my Microsofty friends: Microspotting, a blog about the eccentric characters on campus. Nothing yet about pony-tail comb-over guy, who was my personal fashion hero.
Last week, Vulture tried to write an apology for the spoiler, an argument that most people who work in online media have found themselves embracing at one point or another. (I once managed a network of sites that had to time-delay Oscars coverage across the country, timezone by timezone. It was a catastrophe.) It's a common debate among media people, but it's seldom a public one -- until now! The comments of the post have NY Mag scribes (mostly notably, Adam Sternbergh and Emily Nussbaum) spontaneously arguing both sides. More of this, please.
Color me confused by the massive critical repulsion toward Funny Games (someone really needs to write about how the big New York film critics -- yes, all of them, in one way or another -- are so scared of hyper-violence). I saw a midnight showing on opening night and, although it wasn't mind-blowing, I like what it's trying to do. (Has anyone called it "Clockwork Orange for the digital age" yet? If not, I want to see my name blurbed on the DVD.) Anyway, you need a link! So play the Funny Games Game, which involves torturing your friends with phone calls (which I find more repulsive than anything the film could muster!). [via]
For anyone interested in SXSW Music stuff, the Wall Street Journal had a story about clubs that are testing the limits of the event by holding concerts outside of the SXSW brand. As anyone who has witnessed the transition from SXSW Interactive (which is just about as egalitarian as you can get -- everyone knows about the same parties) to SXSW Music (which suddenly becomes about wrist bands and secret parties -- exclusivity reigns supreme) can attest, the corporatization of SXSW is the elephant in the room.
I finally finished The Atlantic's profile of X17 / Britney Spears, which is occasionally insightful and occasionally meandering. (Is there anything better to summarize this age of celebrity than these two bits? -- Britney deciding to date a paparazzi dude and Britney staying up late at night to read the X17 message boards. Who's watching/fucking who now?) The accompanying online-only slideshow essay/interview is better in some ways, because it gets straight to the thinking of the production of celebrity.
In The Clash ... Goin' Up?, The Observer looks at the pervasiveness of music in daily life. "Do we even listen to music anymore? Or is it all just sinking into the background, surrounding us like air-conditioning?" (The "history of Muzak" story comes out at least once a year [The New Yorker's lengthy example from a couple years ago], but this one ties in some iPod theory.)
Several months ago, my pal Steve did an interview with Diablo Cody in a Minneapolis magazine. Somewhat famously (to Minnesotans), he asked when Diablo was going to dump her husband, Jonny. It was a joke. Except Diablo sorta blew up at him. And, well, you saw this coming: they filed for divorce a month later. Awkward! But now Steve has broken the news that Jonny is engaged to a new girl, who was friends with Diablo. (Meta-disclaimer: it's incestuous city -- pretty much everyone in this post knows each other. Which is why only 2% of you probably care.) [via]
I'm the only person at SXSW who doesn't have a business card, mostly because I don't have a job right now (or because I have five jobs right now). Perhaps "Valleywag Commenter" could be my new title. (Also, sorry no updates here until I get back later this week. That other guy's site is better anyway.)
A conversation in the new Believer between two personal heroes: Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. So many great parts, but you MUST READ the part about the "falling out" they had years ago over Ed Gein's mother's grave.
This is a surprise: Play Value is a decent videoblog! Imagine a VH1 show that's about the lost history of video games. Each episode takes up a historical gaming topic, for instance "The Fall of Atari", "Sega vs. Nintendo", or "Tetris: Splitting the Iron Curtain". It's also full of trivia: Nintendo started out as a playing card company, Steve Jobs worked for Atari before a spiritual retreat to India, and so on. [via]
Nicholson Baker's fantastic essay in the New York Review of Books: The Charms of Wikipedia. The first half proposes that the attraction of Wikipedia is its game-like quality, full of characters who play out anon roles on the encyclopedia's stage. "Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons." And later: "Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals -- up to a point -- the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context." And then later, he admits his obsession with fighting against the "deletionists," those curmudgeons who are purging hundreds of articles every day. Baker's profile (username: "Wageless") lists all of his contributions and edits. [via]
Long interview with Mike Arrington. Let me just jump to the part you wanna read, when asked about Denton: "I think he's a total dick. I think he's amoral. I don't think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he'll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog. So I just don't associate with him." Wait, who were we talking about about again? In other news...
Corporate Casual asks of the new Mariah Carey video starring 30 Rock's Jack McBrayer "Just whose fantasy is this anyway?" Not the nerd's -- it's the nymph's.
Gaming The System, an essay that I recently wrote for Wired, initially began as a presentation that I gave a few places around the country. Tomorrow (Tuesday) night, I'm giving the truncated version in NYC at Hall & Partners in SoHo (72 Spring Street, 11th Floor) as part of Fresh Meet, an event that uses the short-form presentation style known as Pecha Kucha -- each presenter delivers 20 slides at 20-second interval. That's less than 7 minutes! It starts 7 p.m. -- you're invited!
New site alert: "Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles." What!? Exactly. Lindsay and I were debating the legitimacy of site -- to my eye, it seemed just crazy enough to exist and it's even having a launch party at SXSW. Then she noticed the party is sponsored by The Onion. Oh. Oh, nevermind. I signed up for the Beta anyway!
There's a whack rumor floating around that Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, and Pharrell Williams are creating a super group, and this video for "Us Placers" (directed by Va$htie and pinching from Thom Yorke's "The Eraser") suggests it might just happen.
So you need your fix of dance-centered hip-hop obsessed with digital communication? Baby, why you even look on those other corners, you know I hook you up with that pshit: The Count & Sinden featuring Kid Sister, "Beeper." Warning: you will be singing "Hit Me on My Beeper" all day. (See also: Kanye titled this post "INCREDIBLE" so you know to check it. Recognize it? Utah Saints, from '92!)
Well, sure, of course I'm going to link to this: Venture Capital Wear. Most of the tees are dumb, but if you get seduced by their 10-slide vc pitch you can buy the whole company for $100K.
The first time you try to describe EveryBlock to someone, it can sound kinda boring. It aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block. Hm, that's interesting, but is it compelling?
If you give it some time, the answer is absolutely. Once you start playing with the site (and "playing" might be the best word to describe the meandering sensation of floating around in the data pools), your mind begins to wander with speculation: how did they get that? what does this say about my neighborhood? what else could be done with all this data? how can I add to this?
Those were just some of the many questions I had about EveryBlock, which launched a few weeks ago with the help of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant. A few stories and interviews popped up when the site launched, but I noticed that the interviewers seldom asked the other questions that I had about the site. So I decided to ask site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, some questions directly. Here's our exchange:
Last year, New York City famously banned trans fats in restaurants. I found a page on EveryBlock that shows all the violations of this ban -- several every day! I love these little hidden narratives inside of EveryBlock. Do you have any favorites?
Great question. Here are a few interesting nuggets:
Also, more generally, it's fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages -- for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose -- you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those "raw" chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.
We've seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a writeup by the newspaper's dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.
One of our post-launch priorities is to clean up the fire-hose of raw information, to introduce concepts of priority and improved relevance -- but I do think there's a certain appeal to that raw dump of "here's everything that's happened around this address, in simple, reverse-chronological order." When significant events happen, they sort of "pop out" of the list.
Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing behind-the-scenes? Are you using Django as a framework?
Sure. The first layer is the army of scripts that compile data from all over the Web. This includes public APIs, private APIs, screen-scraping the "deep Web," crawling news sites, plus harvesting data from PDFs and other non-Web-friendly documents. Some data also comes to us manually, like in spreadsheets e-mailed to us on a weekly basis. For each bit of data, we determine geographic relevance and normalize it so that it fits into our system.
The second layer is the data storage layer, which we built in a way that can handle an arbitrary number of data types, each with arbitrary attributes. For example, a restaurant inspection has a violation (or multiple violations), whereas a crime has a crime type (e.g., homicide). Of course, we want to be able to query across that whole database to get a geographic "slice," so there's a strong geo focus baked into everything.
The next layer is the Web layer, which is standard Django. Oh, and I should mention that we use Python for everything, from the ground up.
What has been the hardest piece to accomplish so far?
I honestly can't decide what the hardest piece has been. A number of pieces were all hard to pull off in their own way.
The user interface was, and continues to be, a challenge. How do you display so many disparate pieces of data together, without overwhelming people? How do you account for the variety of distinct data types? (That's both a user-interface and a backend challenge.) How do you maintain visual interest when dealing with so much raw textual data? How do you make the block page feel like a geographic home page rather than a search result? Wilson, our designer, has done a great job within these constraints, but we all agree there's still much room for experimentation and gradual improvement.
Dealing with structured data is relatively easy, but attempting to determine structure from unstructured data is a challenge. The main example of unstructured data parsing is our geocoding of news articles. We do a pretty good job here, but we're not crawling all of the sources we want to crawl -- again, there's a lot of room to grow.
On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.
How much of your data aggregation is scraping html pages versus getting structured data?
At this point, we're doing more scraping than consuming formal APIs and data feeds, but I expect (and hope) the balance will shift over time. It's been tricky explaining our concept to data providers in government, but we're hoping that gets easier now that we have a public site that people can browse and understand.
Do you have any fears of scaling the system?
Yes and no. We knew from the start that EveryBlock isn't something that can be scaled overnight to every city in the world. There are too many special cases, too many relationships to build, too many local quirks to work out. There's no nationwide database of restaurant inspections or building permits that we can magically tap into; every city is different. Aggregating local information is a deep, difficult problem.
Some companies try to scale pieces of what we're doing -- like geocoding every news story in the U.S., or making maps of blog entries, or aggregating crime, or aggregating restaurant inspections -- but we're the first ones to do all of that. That's why we're taking a depth, not a breadth, approach: I'd much rather do three cities well than 1,000 cities poorly.
Rather than use Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth, you built your own mapping service application. Why?
That, along with "When will you bring EveryBlock to city XXX?", is by far the most frequently asked question we get. Paul, our developer in charge of maps, is working on an article explaining our reasoning, so I don't want to steal his thunder. I'll just say that the existing free maps APIs are optimized for driving directions and wayfinding, not for data visualization. And, besides, having non-clichéd maps is an easy way to set yourself apart. Google Maps is so 2005. ;-)
How hard was it to build?
We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.
In many ways, what you're doing is taking a bunch of data sources and normalizing them for a single use case. Now that it's normalized, I imagine developers could do a ton of interesting things with this data. Are there plans to do an API?
Yes, I strongly suspect we'll have an API eventually -- it's one of the many things on our site wish list. We had to draw a line and call the thing "ready" at some point, so despite the fact that we're launched, we've got hundreds more features and data sources to add.
I was talking to someone recently about all the cool mashups you could do, and we decided that looking for patterns between Republicans and sex offenders would be the best!
Beyond the technical difficulties of creating parsers and algorithms for geotagging this data, have you had any political/legal obstacles? Is there data you'd like to get your hands on but can't for some reason?
Yes, and yes. I'd estimate we only have about 10% of the data we'd like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven't been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we've simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we're keeping at it.
An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer.
I'd like to even out the three cities' data offerings, too. We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities.
We're also working on improving the data we already have. An example is crime in San Francisco. After running into some problems having requested a formal data feed from them directly, we get the data by screen-scraping the SFPD's site -- but that site doesn't publish the location of each crime. In fact, the only location data the SFPD site publishes is implicit in the searches you do. The site lets you search for crimes by police district, ZIP code or neighborhood, so the best we can do is to deduce the police district, ZIP code and neighborhood that contain a particular crime. (If you search for ZIP code 94109, you can safely assume the resulting crimes are in that ZIP code.)
That's why San Francisco crime on EveryBlock, lamely, only geocodes crimes to the ZIP code level: because that's the only data we could get, and something is better than nothing. But, anyway, we're hoping the SFPD will release more granular locations in their crime data.
You've mentioned your hope that EveryBlock could introduce some standards for news organizations to do geotagging. I'm sure you've discovered wholes swaths of civic data that could use standardization. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to do in this area?
The standards we're thinking about are related to the geotagging of unstructured data -- namely, news articles. I guess there'd be some value in standardizing approaches to structured data (like, building a nationwide crime database), but we're more immediately interested in standardizing the geocoding of "blobs." The main premise is that locations in news articles should be defined in a machine-readable way. Look for something from us soon.
Everyblock lets me find everything in my neighborhood... except other people. Why is that? Do you have any plans to incorporate direct input of local voices into the site?
In time, Rex. In time. :-)
If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not --
are in support of that core goal.
Besides, we already have the problem of offering so many interesting data sets and features that people can only focus on one or two of them. The classic example is that a lot of people haven't noticed that we rolled our own maps (your question above notwithstanding).
I know you constantly get asked the question about scaling the site to other local areas, but here's an idea: say I'm an enterprising small town citizen who's willing to plug in data from my city by matching data to similar fields that you are using. Possible?
Yes, that's possible -- we've built the system in a way that would allow that to happen. Again, as in my response to your reader-generated content question, it's just a matter of implementing it. We had to launch with something, and if we'd included every one of our ideas in the launch version, we'd be on target for a launch in mid 2017. :-)
One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?
The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us.
I'll paraphrase something really smart that Wilson, our designer, said recently: We've created a machine that's capable of publishing address-specific news, and our initial launch is a demonstration of its potential. Now that we're live, it's time to improve the machine and improve the demonstration.
On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur.
I liked your answer to whether EveryBlock constitutes journalism in the OJR interview ("People can define 'journalism' however they'd like"). I'm curious, do you have traffic goals for the site? Or let me ask it a different way: how are you evaluating success?
This is cheesy, but I aim to help people, or improve the world in some way. The tricky thing is that there aren't many concrete ways of measuring that, aside from anecdotes. I suppose we could look at traffic numbers, but, no, we haven't set any traffic goals.
Okay, last question. It's a weird one. Your interest in gypsy jazz is well known. (The last time I saw you, it was in a Toronto bar that supposedly had a jazz scene, but was actually a frat bar. We were both gravely disappointed.) Do you ever think about the relationships between your musical interest and your programming/information interests? Is there anything -- structural, cognitive, performative, whatever -- that makes EveryBlock similar to Django Reinhardt?
Wow, a weird question indeed! Hmm. I guess that, in both music and programing, I strive for subtlety, for elegance.
And EveryBlock cannot be compared to Django Reinhardt. That's sacrilege.
Thanks, Adrian!
(Thanks to Ben, Matt, Robin, Andy, and Matt for suggesting questions for this interview.)
The New York Times is trying to gentrify Twitter. A column from a self-confessed parent contends that Twitter can be used to manage household communication. I suppose that's true, but that's like saying Craigslist's Casual Encounters can be used to meet really great friends.
Kanye's new video for "Flashing Lights" is debuting on BET tonight, but Kanye just dropped "Part 1" on his blog. Guess what? It's dope! Spike Jonze directs, a Playboy model strips, and there's an execution in the desert. So it's basically hip-hop's "November Rain."
If you ever want to befriend someone who works in online media, I suggest you just say these words: "I hate my content management system." You will become instant friends, quickly sharing tales of cached pages, ridiculous workflow, outrageous downtimes, and reprehensible slowness. Which is why I love that there's an upcoming NYC media event entitled I Hate My Content Management System. Go there, meet your soul mate!
You might not know this, but the horribly named Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX is actually the best new show on tv right now. Two reasons why: 1) hot MILF, 2) hot robot. But also!... the girl robot scenes are actually well written and acted. Vulture explains more on a show that io9 should be owning but seems to be covering as news rather than culture.
When I revisited the first issue of Wired last week, it was obvious that I had unfortunately glossed over several areas (the design, in particular, got an unfair treatment). But as Valleywag ruefully noted, it was already 1,600 words long.
So I was thrilled when the founding editor, Louis Rossetto, emailed me a lengthy response, which serves as a great Round 2 of the first issue. With his approval, the email is printed below.
Rex,
Liked your piece on Wired 1.1.
A few things:
1. There was a beta. Actually two. Back in April 1992, John, Barb, Jane, and I created a "Manifesto" in a three day-and-night charette in the studio of photographer Neil Selkirk in Chelsea that stated what Wired was about, and set out the design philosophy. Barlow was on the cover, swiped from the New York Times Magazine, if I remember correctly. It had a proposed table of contents, proposed masthead (we still hadn't contacted any writers except for Markoff and Michael Schrage), an ad or two, the opening spread of a story. Six months later, I created a second prototype on my own. Learned how to use Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator in the same month -- and juggle too. Eugene Mosier, who was later to join us as head of production, called in sick to his day job and helped put it together (making him employee number zero since we couldn't pay him anything but cookies). Jane sweet-talked equipment out of Radius (a name from the past) and others, since we not only didn't have money to pay people like Eugene but to buy equipment either. This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive. He did, hence Origin's ads in our early issues.
2. Nicholas's statement about HD was not inaccurate. Resolution is not the big deal -- delivery and access is. YouTube is a bigger revolution than HD by a mile, regardless of how many big flat panels are in people's homes.
3. True, Nicholas's email address was laughably wrong, but I'm not sure even now I know why. It's certainly not because we were shy about printing email addresses. Addresses of writers appear throughout the issue -- a first for any magazine, as far as I know. My email address appeared under my editorial -- got hundreds of replies, each of which I answered. I think there was some kind of screw up in the handling of the text, perhaps someone slugged something in waiting for his real address, and then, in the insane rush to get out the first issue, it ended up being published as is. Nicholas himself was perhaps the most chagrined. It was corrected by the second issue, and yes, that address reached him.
4. I think you radically underestimate John and Barb's design work. As they often said, their job was to imagine what the future looked like, and do it on a medium out of the past. They brought amazing design smarts to the process of putting out the magazine, as well as incredible production chops, which were reflected in Wired from the first issue. That opening multi-page spread illuminating the McLuhan quote which launched the issue, that incredible graphic indulgence which continued for the entire time I was editor, and which is conspicuously absent from the current, was true modern graphic art -- in the case of the first one, a collaboration between John and Erik Adigard (Erik's work would appear regularly in the mag, and, for a while, he worked at HotWired/Wired Digital helping Barb create it's graphic sensibility). John and Barb were the ones who landed us our printer, a company back East in Connecticut John had worked with on slick annual reports. They had just taken delivery of a brand spanking new Heidelberg six color (CMYK plus two spot colors -- ah, that's how it was done!) press as big as a couple of box cars. We were the first clients on the press. The first issue was on press over Xmas 1992, and John, Barb, Eugene, and I were on press check. The pressmen were grizzled 30-year pros. They set up the press, they put on the VW size rolls of our special matte paper, they poured in the gallons and gallons of our eye-burning fluorescent ink, they started the press, they adjusted the print flow, they ripped off the first pages and put it under the calibrated lights to check color, they looked at it through a loop to check the dot gain, they did this half a dozen time, then they pronounced it perfect -- calibration was absolutely nominal. I can still remember how John took one look and said: put more ink on the page. The pressmen were aghast. It was perfect as is, just the way it was supposed to be. John insisted. They ultimately relented. He looked at the new sample. He told them he wanted still more ink. They protested again. They finally relented again. John looked at the new sheet. This time he told them: I want you to turn the ink up until it smears, and then dial back to where it's only just not smearing; and that's how I want the entire job done. The pressmen were appalled, outraged, embarrassed. But ultimately, they did what John told them. That's why the magazine looked and felt the way it did, because it literally carried more and brighter inks than a normal magazine -- they leaped off the matte paper. Later, as the magazine started to get recognition, the Wired job became the one the pressmen all wanted to work on. Under John's direction.
P.S. We collected the opening spreads of the first few years of Wired when we started our book company Hardwired. Called it Mind Grenades. Each of those introductions reflected my trolling through an issue and finding a quote somewhere that seemed portentous enough to be chiseled onto the side of a public building. Funny thing was, taken all together and in sequence, those randomly picked quotes made a coherent argument. As well as a mindblowing visual statement. Eugene did the press check, in Singapore. That book reprinted the original colors used in the intro spreads, which meant, I believe, something like 26 spot colors. Not many printed objects with 26 spot colors.
5. The baby pissing ad got us some shit. We were glad.
6. Wired/Tired was an afterthought, John Plunkett's idea, I think. On the last day of production, we would shout stuff around the office as we were working, and I'd write it down. Utterly subjective. Except, for about the first two years, we made sure that Manhattan was always in the Tired column in some way, trying to stick to the know-it-alls in what they parochially thought was the center of the universe. It was either Clay Felker or Jann Wenner who said that it's not only important for a magazine to have heros, but also pick the right enemies. Course, NY got its revenge at the time of the IPO, but that's another story.
7. The dotcom stock market bubble occurred after I already left the magazine, so I will decline to comment on whether Wired abetted it or not. But while I was there, we frequently indulged our cynicism, as with Chip Bayers' story in our April 1996 issue, "The Great Web Wipeout."
8. The colophon was fun. I wanted to list the stuff we used to make the magazine, because I wanted people to see that it didn't require a huge operation to make a great magazine -- in other words, that you didn't need Hearst or TimeLife or IDG overhead to produce a magazine that looked better than theirs. I think it was Eugene who added the drugs, with some notable exceptions, given that we were figuratively and literally at the epicenter of the SF rave culture. For that first issue, I might have also added adrenaline and optimism.
Thanks for taking the time. Hope your archaeology didn't screw up your issue too much. If so, let me know, maybe I can scrounge up a replacement.
Best,
Louis Rossetto
Thanks Louis!
For anyone who is really into this history, I also recommend Gary Wolf's book, Wired: A Romance, which is basically a biography of the magazine.
Not only did I not know that Steven Wright released an album last year called I Still Have a Pony (22 years after the uber-classic I Have a Pony), but it's been nominated for a Grammy, according to a NYT profile. Time to start updating Fake Steven Wright again.
Wired magazine turns 15 years old this month. This column looks back at the very first issue.
Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release: Issue 1.1.
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can't help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the "Information Superhighway" yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn't even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren't even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn't even a dirty thought yet.
And yet there it was, the premiere issue: that blocky logo and Bruce Sterling peering out from the cover. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the nerds were about to take over the world... right up until the suits showed up a few years later to pummel them with their briefcases of money.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves in this story. Let's take a look at that first issue, piece by piece.
Staff Box
Started by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who moved to California from Holland in 1991, Wired opened with a staff box of unknowns, at least to the traditional media world. Many of them would become the most important technology writers of the next decade.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor, came from the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. John Battelle, who would later found Federated Media and write the definitive book on Google, was the managing editor. The rest of the staff box was sprinkled with names that are now recognized as tech pundits of various stripes: Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, John Markoff, Michael Wolff, and Nicholas Negroponte. And of course, the "Patron Saint," Marshall McLuhan.
(An aside: it's difficult to remember how McLuhan was perceived pre-Wired. Though certainly a revered scholar in his lifetime [let us not forget Annie Hall], I also seem to recall a huckster backlash around this time. But three years after the premiere issue of Wired, McLuhan was on the cover of the magazine. Today, even his worst theories get roundly quoted, especially by blowhards like me.)
Tired / Wired
Magazine editors tend to hyperbolize their craft, and nothing gets deliberated with more over-analysis than the opening pages of a magazine. The conventional wisdom is that the blurby, picture-filled front pages set the philosophical agenda of a magazine. The "front of the book," as they call it, psychologically defines who should be reading this rag by persuading you to join the club of similarly excellent tastemakers. So the Wired/Tired Index probably seemed like a stroke of genius. It was the perfect way to divide the world into two simple categories of people: There are those who are wired -- they get it! And there are those are tired -- they don't!
It's classic hippie logic. And congratulations! Because you're reading Wired, you're in the right category.
In retrospect, it's unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.
Other front-of-the-book items: a preview of a cult film called Jurassic Park, a review of a print zine called bOING bOING, and a report on a crazy new technology that could free up your cable tv lines for phone calls.
But the editors actually turned this stagnant interview into something a little funny by reprinting Paglia's handwritten edits scrawled over the top. From the first issue, one could already foresee that Wired was going to be a good publication, but this bit of whimsy suggested that it might just go beyond being the next Mondo 2000. This brand of self-awareness only comes along in decade-long chunks: a '60s Rolling Stone, a '70s Esquire, an '80s Spy.
Or it was just a dumb prank. Whatever.
The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender's Game, but doesn't leave out video game comparisons. "It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war." Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.
But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff's story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman's obstacles toward free software doesn't include the phrase "open source" because it had yet to even be popularized.
The Ads
Here's the prevailing question when persuing the ads in this issue: were they as unintelligible then as they are now? The two companies that bought this issue's very first ad and very last ad -- Origin and Trans Rebo, respectively -- were probably as unknown then as they are now. And it's unlikely that the 100,000 copies that the first issue of Wired sold on the newsstand helped them in any way.
A few pages in, the most emblematic page of the first issue of Wired appears.
He looks like an old John "I'm a PC" Hodgman! And look closely -- that screen really says "Fax Transmittal."
Oh, to be young again.
Design
Early Wired is often remembered for its edgy design aesthetic. The disillusion of this myth that you will feel in looking back at the first issues of Wired is comparable to when MTV replays those once-edgy Pat Benatar videos.
The Negroponte Index
MIT scholar, Wired investor, and OLPC creator -- Nicholas Negroponte is himself something of a patron saint to the digerati. But he's clearly crummy at making predictions.
In his inaugural back-page column, Negroponte takes on the emerging technology known as High-Definition Television. With the goggles of a decade-and-a-half to look through, the opening line hits you like a DeLorean hurled from the past: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."
Negroponte contends that the future will actually be fuzzy, arguing that it's a mistake to believe "achieving increased image quality is the relevant course to be pursuing." As anyone who's pored over debates about 1080 vs. 720 and counts their HDMI jacks like their children, this looks like the crazy ramblings of a fuzzy-headed college professor.
To be fair, the futurist gets it half right, such as when he prognosticates a burgeoning on-demand culture but mistakingly fetishizing perspective viewing:
What is needed is innovation in programming, new kinds of delivery, and personalization of content. All of this can be derived from being digital. The six-o'clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you. If the viewer wants an old Humphrey Bogart movie at 8:17 pm, the telephone company will provide it over its twisted-pair copper lines. Eventually, when you watch a baseball game, you will be able to do so from any seat in the stadium or, for that matter, from the perspective of the baseball. That would be a big change.
Sounds awesome! Too bad approximately 1 kjillion dollar were spent last year on cramming living rooms with big ass TVs instead.
Colophon
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
It sounds corny, but we loved this magazine because its creators drank the same soda as us. These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!
I don't know if this is surreal or predictable, but it's certainly obvious now: futurism and nostalgia are intricately linked with each other. Revisiting the early pages of Wired reminds one of a time when there was an underground culture -- when not everything was known by everyone else. Can you remember a time when there were secrets? It sounds so naive.
But it also sounds tremendously boring. Thankfully, we'll always have the future.
Sam Zell tells L.A. Times employees that it's okay to watch porn at their desks as long as they're productive. Finally, the breakthrough that mainstream media needed. (Update: here's a bit of the video, but not that part. Instead, it's the part where he says "fuck you" to a journalist.) (Another update: Tony Pierce loved it.) [via]
One of my favorite pastimes is watching Gawker commenters jump on Nick Douglas' case. From the start, the entire set despised Nick's ignoble task: to explain internet culture to a city that just discovered Tumblr. (For context, remember when all of NYC was scared of blogs? And then remember when they were scared of comments? Now they're totally freaked out by Twitter.) The Gawker loyalists have unwittingly become like their old media foes -- resistant to change like nothing I've since the last Tribune meeting I sat in. (Back in Minnesota, I invented a word for this: neu-liberalism. Those are liberals who think they're really progressive but are actually completely freaked out by anything that moves faster than circa-1985 MTV. So think: daily newspaper editors and NPR listeners.) And so it's logical that Nick has gradually become accepted, even appreciated, in the past few weeks, because eventually all change is accepted. His most recent piece introduces a decent concept: Diggbrow, an analysis of what constitutes "art" among the populist areas of the internet. "The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it." Whoa, slow down there, buddy...
The founder of Clean Flix, the Utah-based company that "sanitized" and redistributed DVDs, was arrested for having sex with two 14-year-olds. Why are these stories so predictable?
You saw the NYT story last weekend about the success of cellphone novels in Japan, but The Millions revisits it with a translation and some context that illustrates how the format is uniquely Japanese.
Yes, debating the existence of god sounds as enticing as eating ramen while cramming for a Latin exam and arguing with your stupid dorm mate about abortion. But a couple nights ago, Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach drew a crowd to the 92nd St Y, as recounted by several other bloggers at Jewcy (including me -- finally, a sign from god that this Midwestern WASP had made it! Praise Jesus!). This clip has a few of the great lines from Hitchens, who pretty much destroyed the other dude. Thankfully, theatrical spectacle overpowered any possible chance for metaphysical deliberation.
I have been ridiculously anxious ever since Andy told me that Waxy.org was going to make a triumphant return. Waxy performs a distinct kind of journalism -- part investigative research, part database mining, part cultural hacking. The types of stories that interest Andy aren't topics anyone else would think to cover. And since firing up the blog this week, he's poured out three posts: an investigation into a strange viral animation, an uncovering of an early Dave Winer internet geek, and, most recently and best of all, a probing of The Times UK's social spam media campaign. Like I said, great stories that no one else had -- all in one week. Remember when we used to talk about a future in which everyone became their own micro-journalist?
Convergence! Synergy! Well, this one gets some points for modest ingenuity if nothing else... Celebutantes is a new novel coming out next month that has an accompanying web tv series, which will immediately carve out the lovers/haters of the book (is there really any way to intellectualize superficiality?). Tilzy describes it as "a young Sophia Coppola farce with an exaggerated Entourage and/or Californication aesthetic."
In case you missed it, The Moldy Peaches performed "Anyone Else but You" on The View. I would have given you million-to-one odds on the previous sentence a year ago.
I issued a challenge on Twitter last night: The theme song to The Daily Show is "Dog on Fire," a They Might Be Giants cover of a Bob Mould song. I'll give $5 to the first person to find an mp3 of the original. If it helps the search, Mould's version was used as the theme back when Kilborn did the show. (I have the cover version -- if you want it, I put it here.) Update: Haughey found it! And he didn't even use filesharing! Update #2: Someone in the comments finds an interview snippet from Bob Mould saying the song would have been on his 1996 eponymous album had The Daily Show not used it.
Oscar nominations. Juno made it in for best picture (and director, actress, and screenplay), causing a bunch of my friends to start drinking at 9 am. And since we're dwelling on our midwest past, Pitchfork has a Tapes 'n Tapes interview about the new album, Walk It Off, due out in April. They'll be at SXSW, where I expect to join in the drinking this time.
Virginia theorizes that the reason NBC's Friday Night Lights is a ratings failure has to do with its lack of a salient online fan base, but that could be a bit of misguided chicken/egg analysis.
Go to NYTimes.com or WSJ.com right now. See that Apple ad on the right? OF COURSE YOU DO. Man, that's big. (Also, I wonder if NYT has any problem with WSJ being name-checked?) Update: Adweek story on the campaign.
So Steve Jobs thinks the Kindle is doomed, but not necessarily because it's a bad product -- but because "people don't read anymore." Now, c'mon, that's pretty dumb.
The Observer has a profile of Tumblr founder David Karp. Because NYC is a media town, it's a little slow to everything -- but after years of making fun of Tumblr and Twitter (because they didn't get it), several media types across town are starting to get on board.
So if I somehow talk Anil into explaining how one easily gets to Harvard from NYC, I'll be going to ROFLCon in April. You should go too. See also: I Can Has Rezearch Papar?
I'm mildly annoyed that I'm now getting my Seattle news via the New York Times, but whatever.... Amazon.com has a new office planned in the South Lake Union area. It looks very ugly, which is sad because their old offices are pretty cool. (Also, I still own a condo in Belltown, so I'm denigrating this architecture merely to keep my old neighborhood as the "cool" one. Well, yuppie cool, anyway.)
You undoubtedly saw the fake David Lynch iPhone commercial (it is pretty funny), but you might also have thought there's something a little, erm, precious about his point. Kent Nichols of Ask A Ninja goes even further: David Lynch is a Tool. "You're getting to be a cranky old man. If someone wants to pay you to watch your weird little films on a cell phone or a DVD or a flipbook, just smile and take the money." [via]
The soundtrack to Juno comes out tomorrow. It contains tracks by The Kinks, Kimya Dawson, Belle & Sebastian, Mott The Hoople, The Velvet Underground, and, most notably (if you saw the movie), Sonic Youth's cover of "Superstar" and Michael Cera & Ellen Page singing "Anyone Else But You."
Gothamist and Gawker covered it six months ago, but this week NYT laid out Virtual Lower East Side for the rest of the world in "I've Been in That Club, Just Not in Real Life". Since moving to NYC two months ago, I've had approximately 83 lunches and 1,729 drinks in the Lower East Side. I'm not sure why someone would want to virtualize it, but I don't understand most of what MTV does anymore. (Except The Hills, of course. That pshit's pure virtual genius.)
O!M!G! The movie Untraceable was MADE FOR YOU, ME, AND ALL OF OUR FRIENDS. The plot: a murderer is killing people via website metrics. YOUR HEARD ME! People visit a website that is livestreaming a murder -- an increase in traffic speeds up the process of death. The trailer (WATCH NOW!) is full of such wonderful quotes as "The more people who visit the site, the faster he bleeds" and "Any American who visits the site is an accomplice to murder" and "We ARE the murder weapon." As far as I know, this has nothing to do with Gawker's new pay structure.
I'm probably obliged to link to Radar's profile of Josh Harris. I was once obsessed with We Live In Public (dead link), Harris' long-ago-defunct attempt to do an online reality tv show, which predated other panopticon phenomena like Justin.TV, Ustream, The Hills, and even Big Brother. In the middle of the dot-com boom (and perhaps the most telling sign of that age), Harris, who also founded Pseudo.com (big press and big bomb), famously wired his entire house with video cameras. (One of my most-recommended items of all time is Errol Morris' First Person, which includes an absolutely fascinating episode about Harris and his girlfriend living 24 hours/day online.) Harris is now back with Operator 11 and, more importantly, a movie called We Live In Public, the trailer of which actually puts the whole voyeurism/exhibitionism world under something of a microscope.
Opening SXSW Film will be 21 (starring Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, and Kevin Spacey), which mixes gambling, sex, and math genius -- so a sure hit. The trailer is here. [via]
Kottke started it, but I'll do it too. Cities I visited in 2007:
New York, NY
Seattle, WA
Minneapolis, MN
St. Paul, MN
San Francisco, CA
San Jose, CA
Oakland, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Toronto, Canada
Vancouver, Canada
Portland, OR
Las Vegas, NV
Newark, NJ
Austin, TX
Columbus, OH
Fargo, ND
Bismarck, ND
Napoleon, ND
And a realization: Huh, I didn't leave North America.
The two previous tees from The T-Shirt Project (which you might recall creates shirts around current events) were about Myanmar and the NYC midtown steam explosion. The third one is about the falling American dollar.
I bought myself these hot metallic silver kicks for xmas. When I look down at my feet, I can see a reflection of myself. And because ANYTHING that is even vaguely self-referential gets labeled a product of the Facebook zeitgeist, I'm now calling these my "Facebook Shoes."
Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.
It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:
30) The Informed Reader As mainstream media organizations continue to close their foreign bureaus out of cost-saving desperation, the less expensive version -- "the international news blog" -- has become a staple property on nearly all sites (nytimes.com,msnbc.com, cnn.com, newyorker.com, etc.). Though the foreign news consumer might be tricked into believing these will reveal new forms of international reporting, it actually means that none of these sites stick out above the rest -- except for the Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader, which somehow kept my attention this year by finding the right balance between gathering links and providing context. (See also: Good Magazine.)
28) Paleo-Future If the dictum "the future is now" has any veracity, then what do we do with the past? This blog chronicles how past generations envisioned what the future would look like. With an archive that goes back to the 1880s, Paleo-Future is an essential compendium of a new historical category: nostalgic futurism. (See also: Subtopia.)
27) TV In Japan If ever there were a genre in need of aggregation, Japanese TV would be it. This site (from my friend Gavin Purcell, whose day job is running Attack of the Show on G4) is religious in its pursuit to bring you the best moments of televised weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun. (See also: Neojaponisme and Ping Mag.)
26) BookForum For those of us who have given up on the once-spectacular and oft-praised Arts & Letters Daily, the transformation of Book Forum to an aggregation blog has been nothing less than a savior. (See also: ArtsJournal.)
23) Metafilter Popular Favorites Every year I sneak a reference to Metafilter onto this list. And every year a Metafilter post ridicules its inclusion -- can't wait to see this year's! My longstanding love-hate relationship with Metafilter (check the archives) tilted back toward the negative this year, which is why the Popular Favorites feature was almost a panacea for my frustration. More big sites are adding this "favoriting" feature (BoingBoing, Gothamist, etc.), which I initially appraised as a cheap way of avoiding depth, but now find the only way I can continue reading some sites. (See also: Ask.Metafilter.)
22) Drawn.ca Drawn bills itself at "collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw," but it acts more like a comprehensive guide to visual culture. (See also: Design Observer.)
21) FourFour The overabundant jungle of pop culture blogging leaves little room for new voices to emerge. One can read only so many snarky reviews of every episode of every reality tv show on every network every night (I know!). As an antidote to Perez Hilton's pretty hate machine, FourFour's Rich Juzwiak (whose day job is blogging for VH1) has carved out something unique in the pop landscape by balancing critical insight with a celebration for the lovable. And what does FourFour love? For starters: Tyra, America's Next Top Model, Beyonce, Tyra, Project Runway, and... Tyra. (See also: Golden Fiddle and Best Week Ever.)
20) Reverse Cowgirl Her: "Why don't more sex bloggers make your list?" Me: "Cuz they all talk about the same thing." Her: "Yes, but in many different ways." It's true, sex bloggers don't usually end up on this list, but Susannah Breslin's blog was one of the few sites in the genre to stay in the "to read" pile all year long.
19) Kanye West: Blog Too much was made again this year about famous people getting blogs. Do you really want more insight into these people's opinions? Of course not -- you want to know their passions, their desires, their interest in dropping $7K on a bottle of cognac. Kanye's blog is more like a scrapbook of his id: some links (hey look, the new Lupe Fiasco vid), some photos (hey look, a Delorean), but surprisingly little ego.
17) Strange Maps Does saying "it was a big year for maps!" sound retarded? Well, it was. (See also: Great Map.)
16) Pussy Ranch Several years ago I included Diablo on a "hot new blog!" list. Now she's super famous, and I'm still making this stupid list.
15) Serious Eats Food blogging has always been a blind spot for me, but Serious Eats was the first site to find the right mix of editorial voice and community interaction.
14) Shorpy The photoblog genre is easy to overlook, but this blog puts itself in a curatorial role by collecting photos up to 100 years old. (See also: The Triumph of Bullshit.)
12) Jakob and Julia Jakulia was the worst best (and the best worst) thing of 2007. Don't know it? Just thank your lucky stars and move on. (See also: NYGirlOfMyDreams.com.)
11) The Daily Swarm Looking for an alternative to Pitchfork? Who isn't! But Daily Swarm isn't exactly that -- it's a music news source that somehow seems to break news before anyone else. And it's not "press release" news that Pitchfork delivers, nor the salacious celeb news of TMZ, nor even the industry banter of Idolator; rather, The Daily Swarm's beat is a rare kind of -- dare I say -- investigative work that no one else is doing. (See also: Stereogum and Culture Bully.)
10) A Brief Message Brevity seemed to only increase its role as the ruling doctrine this year (see: Snack Culture), and the designers hopped on board with their micro-manifestos on this site. (See also: Very Short List.)
9) The "Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks You've seen them -- too many times to count. And if you had taken pictures of every unnecessary instance of quotation marks, you "probably" would have made this list too. (See also: Apostrophe Abuse.)
8) emo+beer = busted career When Earl Boykins mixed the infographic with a passion for Brooklyn indie music, he ended up with several pieces in the New York Times that could have passed for art installations. (See also: Infosthetics.)
7) Frolix-8: Philip K. Dick What we once called "the news" is increasingly becoming different filters for perceiving reality. If you think about it, watching the news is just putting on someone else's reality goggles. Philip K. Dick would probably agree, and so this amazing site gives you today's headlines matched up next to which PKD novel the story corresponds with. If it seems that science fiction gets less fantastical every year, then this is the site for you. (See also: Cyber Punk Review.)
6) Snowclones A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it oughta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "No rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
5) Jezebel Gawker Media's modus operandi is to enter a content category (gadgets, politics, sports, music, etc.) by summarizing that industry with enough volume (in both senses of the word) to basically become the essential trade mag in that sector. This is why Jezebel represents the biggest coup in the empire's history. Rather than beguile its way into the women's magazine industry, Jezebel burst onto the scene in May by defining itself in oppositional terms. It isn't so much a thing as it is not those things. To be clear: it is not the celeb porn that Conde Nast and Hearst have been splooging on you from newsstands for decades. Whereas the average Idolator post would fit in just fine in Blender or Pitchfork, Jezebel was an entire take-down of Glamour, Cosmo, and the rest of the airbrushed crew. This is the holy grail of publishing: to find a voice that is completely unique while still appealing to a broad category. Nicely played, Mr. Denton. (Note: By the numbers, Jezebel probably doesn't qualify in the "overlooked" character of this list. But with as many dudes like me reading this "women's fashion" site every day...) (See also: Spout.)
3) Vulture New York Magazine is a perplexing contradiction. It is probably the best magazine on the newsstand right now (Wired is the only competition), but it also has an editorial voice that is occasionally annoying in its sense of privilege and entitlement. On its worst days, I call this attitude "Aggressively SoHo" -- as in, it surpassed believing that NYC is the center of the world by declaring the epicenter somewhere south of 14th St. and north of Chambers St. When my bestest friend Melissa (disclaimer!) said she was co-launching this blog (she has since moved onto Rolling Stone), I was worried that this voice would ring through on its cultural coverage. But the opposite has happened -- Vulture has kept the best parts of New York Mag (the nuance, the design, the clever), while leaving the Aggressive SoHo Tude at the door. (See also: Wired's Blogs.)
2) Ill Doctrine When Ze Frank sadly abided by his promise to shut down his much-celebrated but under-watched show in March (after exactly one year), the internet was left to gasp for unique video programming. Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine has been the only video blog to emerge with a distinct voice, a mature vision, and brilliant programming that mixes essay, criticism, and attitude. Check it: Chocolate Radiohead and Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People. (See also: Epic-Fu and Rod 2.0.)
1) Twitter and Tumblr "Blog" has always been an elastic term, just barely surviving the stress of containing everything from Hot Chicks With Douchebags to DailyKos to your mom's Vox account. But this year the seams of the term finally burst, and out spilled some brand new words, tweets and tumbls, and these two new forms of quasi-blogging that are more personal, more immediate, and of course more annoying than anything online communication has rustled up so far. Twitter and Tumblr are the Rubik's Cube and the Tetris of the blogging world -- simple concepts that are immensely more complex and compelling than they logically should be. I've explained Twitter to a hundred people in a hundred different ways, each time not quite capturing why it's different, why it matters. "You just have to play it to understand," I eventually say, choosing the only verb that approaches the nuanced complexity. And yet, there's another very simple way to say it: Twitter and Tumblr made blogging fun again this year.
If I have any regrets for 2007, it's that I didn't play enough video games. And Slate's sprawling epic gaming conversation (17 printed pages) is full of proof that I missed the year's most important cultural happenings. Sure, I put in my time with Desktop Tower Defense, threw the Wii control around a bit, and dabbled in Halo 3. But I didn't play Rock Band, I didn't play BioShock, I didn't play Portal, I didn't play Super Mario Galaxy... I didn't even play Scrabulous!
Since Drudge is also reporting it, I guess it's safe to now say: the leading contender for the job of new managing editor of Gawker is... Nick Denton. Valleywag was at its best when Nick helmed it, so we'll see how this works. Update: Now NYT has the story.
Similar to how it's nearly impossible not to look into Victoria's Secret when passing by on the street, I'm mildly obsessed with the saga of Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis, who has been awaiting trial for eight months without bond from a jail cell. Last year's LAT Magprofile sealed the deal on whether he was despicable (he is), but today's NYT Styles analysis says that conservatives are defending him.
The last thing I worked on before leaving msnbc.com was the videoplayer. Actually, it was also the first thing I worked on when I started. Sometimes, it takes a long time for change to happen. Anyway, the new player launched in Beta today. Jim anthropomorphizes the video scene.
David Byrne visits NYT Digital. It's almost cute how naive he sounds about the innerworkings of a media company, such as the moment when "a few of the guys came in and proceeded to demonstrate the interactive 'game' called Rockband."
So at the Gladwell lecture the other night (attended with Robin and Andrew), it was pretty easy to determine the topic of his Next Big Book: genius. Or rather, learning. Or education. Or nature vs. nurture. Or some combination of those. Anyway, here's a clip from the exchange.
Greg responds to NYT's 53 Places to Go in 2008. "I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we're supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the 'reason' to go is the opening at long last of that destination's first 'luxury' accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel."
That time suck you feel is the end-of-year lists onslaught. Over the weekend, NYT Mag released its always excellent (though this year somehow a little less excellent) Year in Ideas. Also, both Time and New York Mag dropped their monstrous year-end lists.
If you haven't been paying attention, the temp editor at Kottke.org this week has been lonelysandwich15 -- haha, I mean lonelysandwich -- better known around these parts as the-jerk-who-is-trying-to-be-a-better-Twitterer-than-me (and winning). The best thing so far has been the bit on fictional products becoming real (also covered by Buzzfeed and Karina). Anyway, I'm secretly writing a book about fake things (which I'll probably never finish, so it's ultimately fake too), so I love this little meme and now find it everywhere -- like today when I saw Gothamist report that the fictional grilled fontina cheese sandwich with truffle oil that Serena van der Woodsen eats in Gossip Girl has become real. (Editor's note: If this post had tags, they would be kottke, twitter, defiction, gossipgirl, lonelysandwich, and cheesesandwich. I win.)
This year proved again that when it feels like the entire goddamn world is going to hell -- that's a good time to throw a dance party. Whether you were fist-pumping for Maya's admittance back into America, chanting "We are North American scum!" at the club, or just jumping in giddy delight that Justice somehow landed an MTV Music Video Award nomination, it was a good year to dance in the streets, especially to these, my favorite albums of 2007:
1) Kanye West, Graduation
Take away his ego, and Kanye's music ceases to exist. That's because Kanye is one of a dying breed of artist, like a Bob Dylan or a Woody Allen or a Bjork, who create art out of sheer force of will and ego. Art and life aren't binaries for these people. How else to explain this album's sui generis cocktail -- a sampling of his mentors in dance (Daft Punk), street (Jay-Z), fashion (Louis Vuitton), and art (Murakami). And, I suppose, literature (Nietzsche), by pinching that particularly arch aphorism about surviving adversity. "That which does not kill me..." might suggest that Kanye's force emerges from some sort of Ayn Randian individualism, but it's more clearly the power that comes from treating your life as collage.
2) M.I.A., Kala
The '80s would have been much better if M.I.A. were around to squelch that wretched little phrase "world music" -- she would drop some street on those marketers. Although she would resist this, Maya has somehow emerged as one of the few relevant voices in the language of globalization: descriptive not prescriptive, street not studio, itinerant not stagnant, and most importantly, local not global. This is why I've written before that M.I.A. brings to mind Rem Koolhaas more than anyone else -- one can visualize her building little markets (songs) on the streets of Lagos or Sri Lanka or Kingston. That's what this album sounds like: all the streets in the world playing music at once.
3) LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Though James Murphy's second album will fill your daily dance-punk requirements, it's the fifth track, the ballad "All My Friends," which stands out as the best song of the year. Pretty much the exact opposite of his glib underground hit "Losing My Edge," this song starts with a cold, repetitive keyboard line that's probably pinched from some minimalistic Steve Reich score. And it never really deviates from there, except by layering some lines about friendship, which becomes the song's theme -- not about a single friend, but about the celebration of friendship as a concept. "You spend the next five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five trying to get with your friends again" has been the mantra for a couple hundred 30-somethings who I know.
4) Justice, Cross
Even though they never released an album, one could call 2007 the year of Daft Punk. Between their Coachella appearance, their movie, and Kanye creating their first Billboard hit, Daft Punk was an invisible success story. And to complete the story, we could call this the best Daft Punk album in years -- and get away with it without too much guilt.
5) Mark Ronson, Version
Prepare thyself for a strange reason to like a musician: Ronson exposes the weakness of Pitchfork. The plucky music site has been an aggressive foe of Ronson and his entourage (Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen). The reasons for this are somewhat paradoxical, since the Ronson aesthetic -- let's call it "synthetic retro" -- is usually a Pitchfork touchstone. But beyond all that industry prattle, Ronson is one of the few producers who can put together a cohesive solo album of his own. Some might tire of the ska inflections on a few tracks, but then Winehouse's cover of The Zutons' "Valerie" comes along to make you remember that synthetic nostalgia is the best kind.
6) I'm Not There, Soundtrack
Of course you want to hear Sonic Youth cover Dylan. And Malkmus, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and The Hold Steady, and Karen O, and two discs more of this.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55
Did Charlotte haunt you this year? Because she haunted me. And does she remind you of a long lost love? For me, she does. Are you glad that someone finally found something decent for Air to do? Yes, me too.
8) Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future
Fuck "new rave" -- this is "new Iron Maiden"! The album has enough arcane mythology to fill the new D&D manual. If you caught Klaxons in concert this year, you witnessed this strange spectacle: teenage kids dancing around on stage with a Mello Yello high, quoting Coleridge and Pynchon, and playing their instruments like they invented them.
9) Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release
Let's get this out of the way: there's a lot bullshit on this album. Some of these tracks are the worst offenders of the reductive, repetitive, retrograde kind of techno/house that gives the entire genre a bad name. But in those moments where humanity creeps in -- on "Hustler" and "It's The Beat" -- this turns into something like the best of Bjork's dance work.
10) Battles, Mirrored
What happens when you throw another "post-" in front of "post-rock"? Prog rock! No one expected this segment of the '70s to reemerge this year, but Battles at least added a little head-shaking to the shoe-gazing genre.
11) Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
When I forgot to bring my iPod on a trip to LA this year, I bought this CD to play in the rental car. And then I turned it up every time I started to fight with the girl who was traveling with me. I now know this album by heart.
12) Britney Spears, Blackout
Yep, above Radiohead. Why? Because while Radiohead is obsessed with dystopic futures, Britney actually is the future. Like one of those fake Japanese pop idols, Brit-Bot is the complete cypher that gets invented by producers and the media. This album is like a Wikipedia entry in which everyone -- The Neptunes, TMZ, whoever -- should get a writing credit. You may not like to hear this, but Britney is you.
15) White Williams, Smoke
Since no one seems up to carrying the mantle anymore, the title of The New Bowie could be passed onto White Williams. But more than pure retread, Williams rips '70s glam through a processor that admits the existence of disco, Beck, and laptop pop.
16) The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes
This album caused my dorky friends in San Francisco to actually dance. For getting nerds to shuffle, some might say this album should be much higher on the list.
18) Prince, Planet Earth
Although I didn't make it back to Minneapolis to see him perform at First Ave this year (which was a blessing, because the cops shot it down in less than an hour), Prince put out the album that's aesthetically the closest to Purple Rain that we've seen in some time.
19) White Stripes, Icky Thump
You could almost forget that the White Stripes released an album this year.
20) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is
If it felt like Karen O spent this year trying to figure out what people wanted her to be, this EP didn't necessarily contradict that. Even its title seems obsessed with self-definition.
21) Tomahawk, Anonymous
While we wait for Michael Patton to do something a little more digestible again (We! Want! Lovage!), he put out this strange Native American Heavy Metal album.
22) Chromeo, Fancy Footwork
Ever wished Hall & Oats dabbled in disco? Then Chromeo is for you.
23) Bloc Party, Weekend in the City
Bloc Party have me hanging by a thread. I want them to have staying-power, but this could just be their last relevant album.
24) Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
I think of this album as what happens when you mash together Chicago and Minneapolis. It has the sound of Drag City, but the aesthetic of Tim. Which makes sense, because Bird is from Chicago but the album with recorded in Minneapolis with some of its finest locals.
25) Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy
You know how Beck tends to alternate between doing a rock/hip-hop album and doing a down-tempo/acoustic album? This is like the response to last year's rocking Rather Ripped.
Do you remember how Apple devotees freaked out after Steve Jobs dropped the price of the iPhone by a couple hundred bucks just months after its release? I wonder if there's any change that Radiohead fans will freak out because the physical version of In Rainbows will have more tracks than the online one, for which some people paid primo $$$. (I don't have a link for this post -- it's just here because it was too long for Twitter!)
Diablo in the Sunday Times, written by David Carr. It includes some mention of the bullshit criticism that's occurring back in Minneapolis in The Rake (from Rob Nelson, who I otherwise love, but I get the sense that maybe The Rake put in an order for a take-down piece). If you're following the story, the MNspeak thread where Diablo jumps in is fantastic.
Last year at this time, I made my annual Predictions for Media/Tech/Pop, which somehow even squeaked a bit of praise from Frau Denton. As I wrote in a comment in that Valleywag thread, accuracy is never the goal of these things -- it's more about creating alternate universes that seem plausible.
But that's no excuse to hide behind the veil of science fiction. So let's review how well my predictions actually were. I score them below, on an accuracy scale of 1 to 10, even the ones that were purely a joke.
1) $100 PC will be a failure.
Cha-ching. This one hardly seemed obvious a year ago, but this project has run into innumerable problems, the least of which is that it costs twice the advertised price. Score: 10
2) MySpace will introduce no new significant features.
I was very close to scoring a 10 on this, but Facebook scored the bejezus out of Tom and Rupert by mid-year, so they finally released some new things, including a user update stream. It still sucks. Score: 4
3) Apple buys Last.FM. iTV is a hit. No iPhone.
I should just erase all my points -- I was wrong about every single one of these. Horribly, horribly wrong. To be honest, I only made this prediction so I could write this: "The iPhone is like god -- if it really existed, you wouldn't care that much." Turns out, I was only half right -- it is god, but you do care. Score: -1
4) Google and Apple form partnership.
Nope. In fact, I'm surprised to see how much the two companies were competing by the end of the year -- especially in the mobile space. Score: 0
5) A rumor spreads that Conde Nast is buying Gawker.
This didn't happen, but it totally should have, so... Score: 3
6) Jim chooses Pam on The Office.
Yes! Score: 10
7) Studio 60 catches on.
No! Score: 0
8) A media company tries to buy Technorati.
If by "buy" you mean "runs away from in fear," then sure. Score: 0
9) Your mom is charged with plagiarism.
The year started with more plagiarism accusations, but they mostly fizzled out by the end of the year. Score: 3
10) 1) Brian Williams. 2) Charlie Gibson. 3) Katie Couric.
Flip the first two. Score: 4
11) Vista ships.
But it sucks. Score: 7
12) Google buys Twitter.
Could still happen. Score: 2
13) AOL does nothing.
Ya know, despite all the lay-offs, AOL wasn't as laughable in 2007 as it was in 2006. It may get spun off yet... Score: 5
14) No one buys Facebook.
A year ago, this actually sounded like a bold prediction. Score: 10
15) Terry Semel exits Yahoo.
C'mon, gimme some credit now, eh? This wasn't obvious! Score: 10
16) Zune 2.0 is a sorta hit.
Oh yeah, baby. It's not super huge, but it did sell out on Amazon and other places. Score: 9
17) Second Life begins to sink.
Hitting my stride now. Score: 8
18) The year of mobile.
I say this every year, and it never quite happens. The iPhone and... that's about it. Score: 3
19) Dane Cook hosts the White House Press Corp dinner.
Bzzt. Score: 0
20) Chumby!
Well, it came out. No accolades though. Score: 3
21) More newspaper layoffs.
Ugh, that one was really hard. Score: 8
22) Smartpox won't catch on.
What the hell is Smartpox? Score: 10
23) CBS makes some surprise investments.
Last.FM! WallStrip! Now do you forgive me for those horrible Apple predictions? Score: 10
I dunno if you're watching Kid Nation (you should be -- fuck these writers and their scripted tv!), but Lindsay dubbing super character Taylor as "a world-class media whore, reality television's first true child prodigy" is darn near perfect.
Roger Ebert just turned in his Best Movies of 2006 [sic] list. "Yes, I know it's a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn't get out again until spring of 2007." [via]
While guest-editing Gawker last week, it was pretty easy to tell that something was wrong: IM conversations were quirky, people reacted in strange ways to innocuous comments, and, well, Choire said so. And so, it's no surprise that Emily and Choire are leaving (sorta brilliantly buried in that post), but the job posting (which contains Gawker's first acknowledgment of the NY Mag article by linking it with an "existential crisis" -- errr) does strike a peculiar note: "It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site." New York is weird.
This week's NYT Mag interview: Umberto Eco. On Da Vinci Code: "I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, Foucault's Pendulum."
Oh yeah, my little welcoming present from NYC was being asked to guest-edit Gawker for a couple days. After making a long list of minor media revolutions I would introduce, I spent most of my first day on the job looking for the perfect combination of WiFi and coffee. When I finally got around to writing and editing, my most substantive piece was a weird little week in digital media review (complete with a McLuhan reference in the first graph, for all my fans back home). More next week...
Michael Wolff writes about the media industry the way I talk about it -- spastic, condescending, and full-of-himself (myself). His newest Vanity Fair column, Generals, Gadgets, and Guerrillas, coughs its way through an evisceration of everyone from cable companies to record labels, landing on a strange planet where -- hahahah ha -- the Google Phone triumphs over the iPhone. Get this: "Google's gadget will, undoubtedly, and counter-intuitively, seek to pull the rug out from under Apple, countering Apple's closed system by offering an open-access world, one where anything is permissible -- alongside Google ads -- and thereby achieve super-dominance for itself." Sure, I guess.
A million years ago in a different life, I occasionally booked rock shows. One of the many bands that I booked and that you've forgotten was Trenchmouth. You might recognize the name now as the band that SNL's Fred Armisen was the drummer for. Today's NYTstory on Fred Armisen Presents: Jens Hannemann Complicated Drumming Technique must have done something for DVD sales because Amazon is sold out.
Although I mentioned it a few months back, it's worth pointing to this week's NYT Mag's "Consumed" column on one of my favorite creations of the year, Last Exit To Nowhere, which creates t-shirts for fictional places.
An hour after the weekend has started, I finally got around to watching this week's internet sensation: quarterlife. If you haven't been paying attention, it's a video series appearing on MySpace (profiles!) that users will supposedly be able to control the outcome of. Though it's from the creators of My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, it reminds me more of Reality Bites than anything else (right down to the misuse of the word irony). NY Maginterviewed the lead actress (say it with me: Bitsie Tulloch -- you're gonna hear it all the time now). Karina gave the first episode a thumbs down, but rumors are still circulating that NBC might pick it up. My opinion? It kinda sucks and I love it -- both at the same time. UPDATE: In the comments, Colin links to an amazing MTV promo for something called "The Spot" from 1995. And whaddya know, NBC actually bought quarterlife in the few hours since I wrote this post.
NY Mag puts a twist on the "what are you reading?" celebrity aggregation: What Are Celebrities Watching on YouTube? Also, in case you missed it earlier this week, they also did an awesome curated tour of hot web video.
Unchanging Times is a blog that looks at current New York Times stories and shows how nothing has really changed by linking to previous NYT stories (some almost 100 years old) on the same topic.
The co-creator of Lost penned a NYT op/ed claiming that tv is dying. It invokes TiVo and the writers' strike, but what's wrong about his argument is that tv has actually never been as good as it is right now (or was a couple years ago, anyway).
Romance in the digital age? This one's for you! This dude -- Patrick Moberg -- set up a website called NyGirlOfMyDreams.com after he fell for a girl in the NY subway. The girl -- Camille Hayton -- has found him. The dude, it turns out, works for Vimeo, so of course Jakob Lodwick made a video about the whole thing. If this doesn't make sense, certainly a NYT Styles story will put it in context for you next week! And while this all sounds pretty sweet, it unfortunately is not the way the world works. Please, people -- just resign yourself to unrealized Missed Connections like everyone else. [via]
I was never a Seinfeld fan and not even freebasing adderall could get me to care about Bee Movie, but anyone ripping into Larry King is fine by me. (Actually, Seinfeld kinda comes off like a dick, which is even better.)
If you didn't notice, NYT Mag gave Virginia Heffernan a column about online video culture. "The Medium," now its third week, this time sets up a discussion of GodTube by differentiating between videos that people view and those that people comment on.
I've been telling anyone who will listen to read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, so I'm glad the new guy at Kottke.org interviewed him. (Btw, since a few people have asked, the new guy at Kottke.org is Joel Turnipseed, the author of Baghdad Express and a resident of Minneapolis -- but no, I've never met him.)
"iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up." That, and a helluva lot more (paid $5K for Radiohead album; used OiNK; producing spoken word album), in this Trent Reznor interview.
This week's NYTBR is a special issue about music books, including a review of The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross' analysis of 20th century classical music (Kottke interviewed him last week). Also of note is Reading Room, a new blog subtitled "conversations about great books," which comes in addition to the other book blog, Paper Cuts. And finally, Joe Queenan has an excellent little rant about, of all things, Henry Petroski's The Toothpick. Key quote: "Petroski has mistakenly assumed that merely because he could assemble a huge amount of information about the rise and fall of the toothpick industry, such data was worth compiling in a 443-page book."
I always thought 30 Rock invented the word vajayjay -- turns out it was Grey's Anatomy. And Oprah pretty much owns it. This and other scintillating details about the origin of the word in today's NYT Styles. (UPDATE: In the comments, at least one previous use of the world. I hope the OED references this post.)
I can finally mention this publicly: I'm moving to NYC next month, working on some new projects. Hush-hush, shh-shh, see ya there. (In the comments, kottke turns this into a Valleywag post. Feel free to write your own press releases inside.)
I wrote an essay -- "The Game of Life" -- for this month's Wired where I make a wacky assertion: gaming has become the prevailing narrative of our time.
The whole idea started by noticing how several of my daily interactions -- watching TV, reading RSS, dating -- have become very game-like. At first, I didn't know what to call these instances, but I eventually started using the term gaming moments. And then soon enough, a definition arose: "competitive interactions in daily life that involve play." Sometimes the interactions are social, sometimes they are you versus a computer algorithm. But once you've noticed them, they suddenly become ubiquitous.
"Gaming the system," it seems, has become standard operating procedure for everything from booking an airline ticket to battling your TiVo's automated recommendations.
In some ways, this is an admittedly trite argument. Whether you're watching The Wire or reading Shakespeare, you've heard that life is a game. (Nassim Taleb even coined a word for this: ludic fallacy, "the misuse of games to model real-life situations." His criticism is actually directed at a branch of mathematics and philosophy -- game theory -- but the point is still worth recognizing.) Nevertheless, let's look at the evidence: if you stop and look around, you'll find game scenarios everywhere. Like Poe's purloined letter, the notion of "gaming the system" has become so obvious and pervasive that it's almost invisible to us.
In the closing paragraphs of the essay, I hypothesize why so much of our society (particularly social interaction, online activity, and cultural products) seems like a game. My theory has to do with data. (This will sound familiar to anyone who read my earlier essay on predictions, where I suggest that data availability has led to a penchant for prediction applications.) Because we've opened more data (through search engines, APIs, open records, and so on), we've tweaked consciousness just a little bit: now when we encounter data-centric scenarios, we immediately think about how the information can be manipulated.
Anyway, read the essay for yourself. In comments here, I would like to explore other examples where you stopped and said, "this is a lot like a game." I provided several in the essay (reality tv, search engine optimizers, etc.), but some others that come to mind include traffic, dieting, speed dating, and improv classes.
Also, feel free to throw in some websites -- some examples: Farecast.com (where you "gamble" on the future of airline ticket prices), Reality All Starz (where you make challenges for yourself), and GetHuman.com (where you learn how to game automated voice systems).
I knew that a lot of media companies were creating their own venture funds, but I didn't realize how many until I read this story. Very curious to see where this goes.
My only problem with Sasha's New Yorkerscreed on the de-miscegenation of indie rock (which no one was talking about and now suddenly everyone is talking about) is that it feels like selective modern history. Sure, Arcade Fire is white, and they kinda suck. (Shut up, they do too. And so do The Shins.) But how about the other sectors of "indie rock" -- LCD Soundsystem or Bloc Party or M.I.A. and Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Sasha's analysis feels like choosing the Pixies in 1990 as the representative of everything, and then bemoaning that no one sings in Spanish anymore. That said, he makes great points about political correctness and sampling that I've never seen elsewhere. UPDATE: Sasha responds.
Jason linked to this a couple days ago, but I read it today on the bus and it's pretty interesting, mostly in a meta way: Is the Net Good for Writers? It's a good question, posed to several decent writers (most of them cut from the old-school-hippie Wired mold). But it's surprising to see how many of the contributors truly despise the internet because they think it destroys serious, long-form writing. The irony is that this article is a serious, long-form piece of writing found only on the internet. [My thoughts inside.]
Despite working on this deal for several months now, the exhilaration that one feels when turning the corner to see the future has not dissipated. But the thrill has transformed into a new kind of obsession: thinking about how news deserves to be a better experience -- better to create, better to share, better to participate in.
Youcanreadelsewhereaboutthedetailsofthedeal, but the gist is this: we plan to leave Newsvine alone -- learn from it, integrate little pieces of it, watch it grow. The site will continue to run independently with Mike at the helm; meanwhile, we will incrementally find sensible ways to integrate the "social thinking" of Newsvine into the "big media thinking" of MSNBC.com.
I'm convinced that Newsvine represents a different way of thinking about traditional media -- as merger of gathering, interacting, and consuming. By positing news as an ecosystem rather than a hierarchy, the philosophy of Newsvine is actually an old one. News has always been conversational, but only recently have we begun to rediscover the tools to bring it back to its networked mode. Mike and his team have built an amazing site, and we are excited to turn some of our large audience onto it.
For me personally, it's a moment I have been anticipating for years: seeing how a big news outlet can interact with its audience, how it can learn from its audience, how it can cede control to its audience. And ultimately, how "audience" isn't even the right word anymore.
I've been working for big media for over a dozen years now. And to be honest, I am always close to giving up. While all my nouveau riche Silicon Valley friends cash in their start-ups, I've been preparing the epitaph on my days working in this industry: "Mainstream media is hard."
Very hard.
This is certainly not breaking news, but the media industry is hemorrhaging. As the differences between "big" and "small" media continue to crumble, I cling to the corny, nostalgic philosophy that mainstream news is still a crucial part of democracy, binding us together in ineffable ways. If you've ever worked for a big media company, you know this is not an easy philosophy to maintain. You get bitter, you get depressed, you drink a lot, you have an infinite string of two-month relationships (ahem).
Because big media is hard. And no matter what you do, no matter how much you try to fix it, the media industry still moves slowly. Why? Because the media world has lost its faith, abandoned its roots, absconded the throne. And proving that an empire is its own worst enemy, media companies seem determined to kill themselves, slowly and painfully, pointing fingers at non-existentenemies as theygodown.
Which is why it needs fixing, now more than ever. And fixing it is about finding its roots -- news as conversation, as a network, as a platform. By reconstituting media as participation, Newsvine suddenly makes news fun and engaging again.
For the first time in a long time, I'm actually optimistic about the prospects. Maybe media doesn't need to be so hard after all.
Rex Sorgatz is the Executive Producer of MSNBC.com. This blog has, like, nothing to do with that.
My pal Michaelangelo wrote about the digital magazine archive movement in last month's Good Magazine. (The New Yorker already has a complete DVD archive, while Rolling Stone and Playboy plan to roll out theirs soon.) It made me think of an interesting theory: DVDs have completely (and surprisingly) resuscitated the film industry over the past decade -- is there any chance they could also save magazines?
Ever wonder what a blog newsroom looks like? Here ya go: the NYC Gawker office has a livestream of itself up on Justin.TV. I can't look away. Update: they streamed the booklaunch party last night, and if you happen to look right now, you'll seen Denton is on.
Bill Gates' music taste? Well, there's U2... and then the Beatles and the Stones... and then Broadway musicals. Stop by my office, boss man -- I'm gonna show ya some Kanye, Prince, Daft Punk, and MIA.
Jon Stewart's production company is creating its second show (after The Colbert Report): a sketch-variety show called Important Things With Demetri Martin. Meanwhile, last night's interview with Chris Matthews was a spectacular tv moment. Quote: "I'm not criticizing your book, I'm criticizing your philosophy of life." [via]
There aren't many NYT reporters whose deaths I would note here, but many years ago I was moved by a book that briefly made me want to be an architect. Herbert Muschamp is dead at 59.
Penguin is creating a contest with Amazon.com called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in which people submit their novel manuscripts for review and the community (that's us) votes on which should get published. [via]
Pretty decent analysis over at NYT Styles (didn't see that one coming!) on how some blog commenters are becoming micro-celebrities: All-Stars of the Clever Riposte. There's also a slideshow about a MeFi event in Portland that I actually attended.
Because this wouldn't be KanyeBlog if I didn't link to it: Kanye skit on SNL last night. And here's his performance of "Goodlife" and "Harder Faster" (he can't say "blonde dyke" on tv?!?!?!).
This is one of the weirdest things I've seen in music in a long time: Radiohead has just announced they have a new album coming out... in 10 days. I don't think anyone even knew they were making a new record. Some strange pre-order and format info on the site for the album: In Rainbows. UPDATE: the price for download will be left up to the individual buyer. Amazing.
The NY Times Mag this week is all about college, with several readable pieces, but I'm most intrigued by the college essay "The Posteverything Generation". I often wonder how Gen Y posits itself in relationship to Gen X, simply because there was so much acrimony between Gen X and Baby Boomers 15 years ago. However, this piece suggests that the kids in college today still view themselves, like me, as post-Cold War, post-Boomer. It reads exactly like something I would have written in college, Jameson quotes and all.
You already know that quirk king Wes Anderson has a new movie coming out this week, The Darjeeling Limited. You have also likely heard about this 13-minute "prologue" available on iTunes, Hotel Chevalier. Now, this might sound like something that will just fly under the radar until the DVD comes out -- except that Vulture notes that Natalie Portman is naked in it. I smell a tipping point.
I was actually thinking about proposing an article at the end of 2007 called "The Year of Electronica," in which I make the argument that some of the best albums of the year are direct descendants of that horrible word no one has used in a decade. LCD Soundsystem, Justice, Klaxons, Simian Mobile Disco, Chromeo, Datarock, and, if you stretch it a bit, Kanye, M.I.A., Battles, Mark Ronson. But then Slate published it. Dammit. (I like my examples better, and I would have slipped in that Kanye quote about creating a new kind of electronic hip-hop.) Noted: Idolator quibbles with some historical points.
Among the other things that have fascinated me about Girl Talk, there is the crowd dynamic at his shows. As Elizabeth put it, it's the ultimate crowd-sourcing event in which the audience becomes the spectacle. Apparently the similarly-minded Dan Deacon (who is on tour with Girl Talk) is performing from within the audience and just letting the dancing kids have the stage to themselves. This seems an important [gulp] metaphor for the entire state of music today. (It was difficult not to use the word "postmodern" or reference Roland Barthes in this post. But ya know what I'm sayin, oui?)
"Jean Baudrillard, as any philosophy student will tell you, theorized that, in the postmodern world, 'the territory no longer precedes the map.' In other words, if you are a member of N.Y.U.'s class of 2011, you probably arrived in New York City with a preëxisting web of soon-to-be college friends from Facebook." --The New Yorker (the umlaut gave it away).
And finally, my old friend June Panic has a new album, which was originally recorded back in the days we hung out and fought about girls: Songs from Purgatory.
Luna covers Paula Abdul's "Straight Up," and it's really good. The album that it's from includes Will Oldham covering Mariah Carey, Jim O'Rourke doing the Spice Girls, and Superchunk on Destiny's Child.
It has become very, very vogue to talk about the irrelevance of MTV (NYT does this story every couple months -- here's yesterday's), but they still seem to move in the right direction such as by launching new sites, TheDailyShow.com and SouthParkStudios.com.
I realize it's like we're on 24/7 Kanye watch around here lately, but this link tops all of them: Kanye West's house in Interior Design magazine. Money quote: "It's been my dream to be in Interior Design." Or maybe this one: "The kitchen is definitely dope." Whatever -- just check out the slideshow. Dammit, now I need an aquarium in my bathroom. [via]
People have been asking me for new t-shirt links, but I've been feeling bored with them. It seems the best we can do lately is "Helvetica" tees not in Helvetica. Ha. That said, I'm really into this one right now, probably because it's even less funny. It's so dumb that it sorta seems to be critiquing the entire history of witty, ironic t-shirts. Gnome sayin? [via]
If you bought an iPhone last month and you are now annoyed because they're $200 cheaper, then take a look at this thread of people who have demanded credit and gotten it. (Btw, anyone want a "vintage" 4GB iPhone? Cheap!) UPDATE: Steve Jobs officially offers $100 store credit.
As I Twittered the other day [shudders at just writing that], I love when Charlie Rose has musical guests, because he's the most of out his element. Best example: when he asked Danger Mouse if he ever has writer's block. Anyway, the Beastie Boys were on earlier this week, and it just showed up on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
Perez has the new Britney single. It starts "It's Britney, Bitch." It doesn't quite suck, but it's also impossible to imagine this baby mama being sexy anymore.
Meme watching: get ready, the 10-year anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky scandal is nearly upon us, which is the only way to explain NY Mag's extensive profile of Matt Drudge. Undeniably better than L.A. Timessimilar attempt from a few weeks ago, this one paints Drudge as something of a modern-day Howard Hughes. It avoids banter about Drudge's sexuality until the end (dude's totally gay, and he'd probably flip politically if he could ever out himself). It's full of good material, but this is the money quote: "Amid her snarls about privacy, [Camille] Paglia offers the morsel that Drudge is 'deeply knowledgeable' about dance music." After that quote, I officially declare liberalism dead.
You might have seen the NYT obit of Joybubbles, a savantish phone phreaker (made famous by a 1971 Esquire profile by Ron Rosenbaum) who recently died in Minneapolis. As Virginia Heffernan points out, those charming kids at Chasing Windmills had Joybubbles do a "guest-appearance" earlier this year.
FOX's Half Hour News Hour (remember? that was their attempt at The Daily Show, brought to you by the exec producer of 24, Joel Surnow) has been canceled. [via]
If you walk around Seattle, one of the unusual things you'll notice is the number of Teriyaki joints -- the red & yellow neon signs are seemingly everywhere, with greater concentration than anywhere else you'd expect it (San Fran, Vancouver.... Tokyo). The Seattle Weekly does a little investigation into where they all came from.
Remember when every major magazine started doing "design issues" several years ago? That's so 2000 -- now we're onto fonts. For instance, NYT Mag's story (and slideshow) on the new highway roadsign font, Clearview, is so fawning in its praise that non-designers will likely chuckle their way through. However, it will no doubt have its own movie someday.
I see survey after survey declare that men have more sexual partners than women. And it annoys me every time, because this is of course statistically impossible. The New York Times finally takes up the issue. The answer? Men aren't more promiscuous -- they lie more. Or, perhaps, women lie by underestimating.
It wasn't so long ago that Garrison Keillor got a cell phone. My oh my, he was giddy with delight. Now he writes in Salon about being in NYC and getting calls on it from Minnesota after the bridge collapsed. Of course, he never misses an opportunity to impose his caricatured brand on all my friends ("We are a state of Germans and Scandinavians"... umm, not all of us, yo), and he seems to think the worst thing about the bridge collapse is that it will hinder his trips to the Mayo Clinic.
Fake Steve Jobs revealed as Daniel Lyons via some small-time sleuthing. (Ahem, I was wrong.) Best quotes: the Real Steve saying he has no interest in reading the Lyon's novel (via IM?!?!?!) and "One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag" (Fake Steve).
Amazon has launched a grocery delivery service in Seattle: Amazon Fresh. Since I practically live off Amazon right now anyway, this is pretty perfect. [via]
I take back anything bad I've ever said about Stereogum. Today we get a preview to the next chapter in R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet and some new Atmosphere tracks.
I'm in NYC this week. My goal: investigate why Malcolm Gladwell has not updated his blog in over six months. This could take a while, so expect few updates here until next week...
Chris Nieratko is the porn DVD reviewer for Vice, which is all I should need to say about that. His new book (Skinema) collects 150 of the reviews, which is all I should need to say about that too. Except he did an interview with The Stranger, which makes this all sound more interesting than you might guess -- Nieratko doesn't actually review anything; instead, the book is a platform for some crazy confessional memoir.
I am about to draw a line of six degrees of separation from Bob Dylan to Paris Hilton in the most asinine way possible. Ready? Okay, have you been following this story about Lindsay Lohan's "girlfriend" who betrayed her? (Shut up, you have too.) So that wonderful girl is Samantha Ronson. (I mean, haha, DJ Samantha Ronson. Seriously.) Now, her brother is... that's right, Mark Ronson, producer of Lily Allen and Amy Whinehouse, not to mention having the second-best album of the year so far (that's not opinion -- it's so damn good that Pitchfork didn't even get it). Anyway, as everyone (plus Wikipedia) knows, DJ Samantha Ronson is BFF with DJ AM (because they're both DJs! doy!) who is of course... yep, not the father of Nicole Richie's baby. Done! Oh wait, how do I get Dylan into this clusterfuck? For the first time ever, Dylan has agreed to have one of his songs remixed by.... Mark Ronson! So to repeat: Paris --> Lindsay --> Nicole --> DJ AM --> DJ Samantha Ronson --> Mark Ronson --> Bob Dylan. See, aren't you people glad I'm just a link blogger?
Everyone understands there's a schism between critical acclaim and popular success, right? Sure, it's true for movies, books, and movies -- but, as NYT shows, games are the exception. [via]
This week's NYT Mag "Consumed" column is on Threadless. Though it seems impossible that anyone would dredge up anything new to say, there's actually a little bit here on online communities, with snippets on how celebrity designers have emerged and how ratings counter-intuitively yield designs.
Good (even though Gawker will make fun of it in 5... 4...): 50 Things You Should Never Say. "We met on eHarmony.com." "Bros before hos." "I actually make my own granola."
NYT Mag had built up a ton of personal anticipation for its Wikipedia news story, but it fell short on a few accounts, including mostly that it's only maybe 20% about news (the other 80% is just another Wikipedia story that you've already read). What I really wanted to read is something like Anil's recent post on the future of journalism spread out over 10 pages instead. (I could personally supply a half-dozen anecdotes on open-source journalism that would be better than those in the NYT story.) However, three interesting points: 1) the tension that exists between Wikinews and Wikipedia seems substantial, 2) the factoid that 1 out of every 200 total online pageviews belongs to Wikipedia is staggering, and 3) the notion that Wikipedia "derives a certain degree of authority and trust in the mind of the reader by avoiding original research" is provocative... and, I'm pretty sure, an opening. (If this weren't a link blog, I'd write more on this, but you've already moved on.)
Strange that NYTBR brought out Michiko to review Cult of the Amateur. Also strange that she doesn't really even review the book, and just recites Keen's argument.
New awesome Kanye video: "Stronger," which features a sample from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," which you remember linked here a couple days ago. Kanye's new album, Graduation, drops mid-August.
Slate does a surprising review of Sony's Minisode Network on MySpace, raising the spectres of Susan Sontag, Clement Greenberg, DJ Spooky, and Joseph Cornell to make some interesting comparisons.
Y'all know about the Steampunk meme, right? I haven't linked to any of it because BoingBoing has been all over it like... yeah, that. Anyway, Wired has a decent slideshow to catch you up.
Wanna hear me rant about local media, the failure of community blogs, mainstream media, and anything else that'll come to mind? I did an interview with Minnesota Monitor (conducted by Paul Schmelzer of Eyeteeth). It's maybe only interesting to those of you from Minneapolis.
This movie in which a dorky journalist (Steve Buscemi) hooks up with a beautiful actress (Sienna Miller) is pretty much every dorky journalist's dream and every beautiful actress' nightmare: Interview.
You wouldn't guess that a remake of Invasion of The Body Snatchers would be any good, but the trailer tricks you into it with a combination of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and a Sigur Ros soundtrack. (I can't find any proof that it's Sigur Ros, but it's gotta be.)
Me.dium. Looks interesting -- it's a browser plugin that adds a visualization of recommended webpages based upon a) your current browsing and b) recommendations from your friends. So it's sorta like real-time social web browsing. Expect security people to freak, but who listens to them anymore?
NYT has an epic story on Google's search team, which is huge yet still leaves you wondering about several things. Also, it doesn't get decent until about half-way through.
Continuing my prolonged fascination with pretty much anything on Wikipedia, a few entries I'm currently loving: Laminated List, Technological Singularity, and Retcon. Wikipedia makes me feel both preposterously dumb and ridiculously smart at the same time.
Google Trends has added a teeny tiny little feature: Hot Trends. Every day, it lists search terms that are on the rise and builds pages around their trending.
So I sorta know Derek Powazek. Or rather, I met him once at a Fray event, where we talked about hot dogs and Alaska. I suppose that means I just barely know him. I've never met Heather Champ, but everyone talks about her like a superstar, so I sorta feel like I know her, because that's how the internet works. I have, however, hung out with Paul Cloutier a few times. He's really nice. I like him. His wife, Alana Jackson, is funny and sharp. As with a lot of creative people in the Valley, Paul and Alana make me wish I lived in San Francisco. I sorta hate them for that. A few months ago, I very drunkenly told Paul this at the Rocketboom party at SXSW, which was a little embarrassing. By now, you may be asking: who the fuck am I talking about? I'm talking about a handful of people associated with this thing called JPG Magazine, which blew up into a gigantic fracas this week. I was just going to let it slide by, but then noticed Alana has responded. I'm only linking to it now because I assume many of you never heard the other side, and she makes some interesting points about how the internet makes us think we know people.
I love, love, love posts like this: The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema. Includes clips from Touch of Evil, Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Children of Men, and many others.
I have often wondered why perfectly sane people seem to like Family Guy more than The Simpsons (I'm looking at you and you, though there are many others). I have heard that The Simpsons writers despise the Family Guy writers, which makes absolute sense when you see this video of scenes they have ripped off. [via]
Decent NYTanalysis on why Rupert might actually not be that bad for WSJ, which I sorta actually agree with. But maybe I'm just saying that because of Fake Steve.
My completely unprovable but perhaps interesting theory about why The Office is successful: the creators are also the actors. That is, the actor who plays Toby (Paul Lieberstein) is actually the co-executive producer, Ryan (B.J. Novak) has produced many episodes, and Kelly (Mindy Kaling) is a chief writer. And don't forget Ricky Gervais -- the original "Michael Scott" (David Brent, in the BBC version) -- who is also an executive producer and writer. I would also bet that Steve Carell and John Krasinski influence the show's direction. This arrangement seems fairly unique to tv production. (I thought of this while reading a story in which Jeff Zucker suggests that The Office might turn into an hour-long show. Wacky.)
The New York Observer did an interesting piece a few weeks ago that asked how organizational design influences the news-generation process. One of my 37 unfinished book proposals actually looks closely at this idea by analyzing how media companies organize themselves spatially and hierarchically. (If this sounds uninteresting to you, then you have a better insight into why all these book proposals are "unfinished.") This general notion has been on people's minds recently because a) several companies are trying to converge their online units with their traditional print/broadcast units, and b) the New York Times is moving into a new building (which makes Khoi giddy). Anyway, this post has no point, except to say: I wish writing books was easy.
So best. My pal Melissa has launched a new blog for New York Magazine: Vulture. (Time permitting, I might write an occasional post for it.) UPDATE: It's really good!
Mike is ranting about paginated stories (as Jason has in the past (and as my colleague Jim has grumbled)), but this is one of those things that I've strangely never really cared about. I suspect users don't care that much, and I've just always been willing to find the "print" button. I don't want to turn this into a web design blog, but does this really bother any of you?
Wait, Hal Hartley is releasing a sequel to Henry Fool, staring Parker Posey as a mom? (Trailer.) How come no one told me?! (Update: NY Observer does a little ditty about how Parker Posey -- along with Claire Danes and Chloe Sevigny -- is all grown up now.)
NYT Mag has a fascinating little article on something that I think about constantly: to what degree random historical factors and self-fulfilling markets determine the success of cultural products. A study from the authors suggests that social influence can affect judgments of quality to exponential degrees.
Man, the media scene in Minneapolis (my old hometown) is fucked up. Today, the Pioneer Press sued the Star-Tribune (that's right, two metro dailies -- remember those days?) because the publisher (Par Ridder -- as in the son of Tony, of the ersatz Knight-Ridder empire) left the former to become the publisher of the latter (which is pretty fucked up, though possibly not illegal). Within a year, the Strib has changed owners from McClatchy to some fishy media holdings company, while the PiPress has gone from being part of the Knight-Ridder war machine to being a McClatchy paper to being a MediaNews publication. (Oh, and a bunch of lay-offs and buy-outs in between.) Meanwhile, a major disruption at the very successful alt-weekly (hah! remember those?) caused the editor to leave. Add in the fact that there are four major monthly magazines (WTF?), four alt-weekly papers (that's counting The Onion), and the radio juggernaut known as American Public Media (MPR) -- does any city in America have this much media per capita? [via -- a Minneapolis media website I started!]
On the list of articles that I want to pitch but haven't gotten around to is something called "The Rise of Hatah Culture." (Think: Simon Cowell, Gawker, Pitchfork, etc.) Although not exactly my story, NYT Styles (dammit! trite idea!) has something today on "The Rise of the Takedown."
I've become vaguely confused by what's going on at Gawker lately. The ostensible logic of the chair rearrangement a while back seemed to suggest that The Big G was moving away from insider media reportage (save that noise for the New York Observer!) and shifting toward entertainment coverage (TMZ must be denied!). But this week we've seen long pieces on David Remnick's / Tina Brown's New Yorker and some wacky meta-meta coverage of the NYT Mag Consumed column. As I suggested on Twitter the other day (ugh), Gawker has become almost impossible to read, so I should probably welcome whatever they're doing to mix it up.
Ya know how you wonder if a new actor is anything like their character or completely different in real life? Somehow, it seems that Mindy from The Office is both: exactly the same and completely different.
I keep saying I'm gonna talk about my actual day job here, but it's all been lies so far. Well, today marks the beginning of a very long process to relaunch MSNBC.com. This is just a small step (basically a logo change), intended to coincide with the launch of a marketing campaign (spectrum.msnbc.com), which WSJ did a story about. For anyone who actually cares about the good old mainstream media, I'll try to talk a little here about how this evolves over the next several months.
It was a big mock battle: me versus anti-Twitterite Natali Del Conte (who is a former TechCrunch writer and is now at Podshow). The gist of the show was asking if Twitter is a fad, but I didn't even get around to making my most salient point on this matter: who cares!
I've already blabbed about Twitter more than enough in many different places, but I want to address this idea of "fads" in social web applications. Some people may eschew the comparison but I'm not afraid to admit it: Twitter actually does remind me of Friendster.
When Friendster burst on the scene in the summer of 2003, it seemed like so many things at once: 1) a giddy little experiment in the radical conflation of communication and publishing, 2) a disorienting visualization of your friend and your friends' friends, 3) yet another chink in the armor of privacy in her battle against transparency, and 4) something that would probably get you in deep trouble when you noticed that girl was one-degree of separation from that other girl.
And yet, during the entire Summer of Friendster, everyone seemed to sorta agree: "This is ridiculously fun, but I probably won't be doing it next month."
Surprise, surprise: you weren't.
The truth is, even though I predicted last year (#12) that Google would buy Twitter, I have no idea if Twitter is the next MySpace. Fuck, I don't really even think MySpace is the next MySpace. The thrill of Twitter is actually that you feel like you could quit using it at any moment. (I've heard a rumor that some people also say this about crack. But I don't trust rumors.)
I think we've entered a stage where web apps might just be like tv shows -- exhilarating for a while, but gone tomorrow. And you know what? I'm totally cool with that. Why do we resist it? In other words, I contend that Twitter is basically like the first season of Lost.
And finally, a note on production: it looks like I'm giving Natali suspicious looks during the interview, but in reality I can't see her. I'm in a small room staring at a camera, with a strange backdrop of the Space Needle behind me. I have no idea what any of the people on the show even look like. Truth be told, if I had known what Natali looked like, I would have flirted more.
Bonus points: I use the phrase "death by croutons" in the segment. Score!
Anyone notice how Malcolm Gladwell has pretty much abandoned his blog? A few of his first posts turned into comment maelstroms, so I wonder if he just gave up.
Neal Stephenson has a NYT op-ed piece about seeing 300 (at a Seattle theater a few blocks from my house, actually). He argues that only the "less politicized majority" get the film, meandering his way to geekdom: "The growing popularity of science fiction, the rise of graphic novels, anime and video games, and the fact that geeks can make lots of money now, have given creators and fans of this kind of art a confidence, even a swagger, that -- hard as it is for some of us to believe -- is kind of cool now."
This flick about the making of a tv pilot looks like it might be good: The TV Set. Stars David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, Justine Bateman, and others you'll recognize.
Many of the SXSW Podcasts are already up. If you listen to the Blogebrity one, you can hear Nick Douglas repeatedly stumble while mispronouncing my name. (Love ya, Nick!) Bruce Sterling's rant was totally crackpot... but mildly genius. And stay away from Dan Rather's exceptionally tedious boilerplate. (Will Wright stole the show, but his speech isn't up yet -- transcript here.) Summarizing all that I saw and heard at SXSW would be futile, so I'll just say thanks to everyone I got to hang out with.
Recently trapped in the Columbus, OH airport, I opened up my MacBook to discover that I had free WiFi. Huh, that's weird, I mused. But apparently I completely missed the trend that has led to so many airports offering free WiFi -- according to this chart, it looks like about two-thirds. (A story in the Times about Starbucks and WiFi elicited this irrelevant post.)
I caught up with the onslaught of Jeff Wall coverage over the weekend. (If you somehow missed it, the photographer just had a retrospective at MoMA open. You can catch up, too! NYT Mag, New Yorker, NYT, NY Mag, NewsDay.) Only somewhat familiar with the Vancouver artist's work, I needed a refresher: while MoMA's website for the exhibition lacks depth, it is rich in zoomable detail; meanwhile, the site for last year's Tate retrospective is almost perfect (navigate via the room boxes on the left). The exhibit moves to Chicago in June and San Fran in October.
Lately I've been thinking about how writers enjoy making declarations like "We live in an age in which..." or "New Yorkers are the kinds of people who..." or "Paris Hilton is representative of our time because...." Statements like these are addictive in their simplicity, creating the appearance of aphoristic profundity. And I'm more ridiculously guilty of this form of generalization than anyone. (I recently looked back at the columns I wrote in my college newspaper. Nearly every screed declares how we live in a new era of [whatever].) And that's why I really enjoyed Chuck's Esquire column this month about stereotypes.
Although I'm certainly not the only one who has been aggravated by the increasing appearance of the "This video is no longer available" message from YouTube, I didn't know how to quantify my frustration. So I decided to do a little test... do you remember Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos post from last summer? There was a brief moment where these types of posts opened our eyes to the potential of a new form of curatorial criticism of video, with a mashup of moving illustrations that were controlled by users. Suddenly, you could image whole new ways to conceive of writing about the history of visual culture. Now, just months later, that vision has been practically erased, as over half of the clips from the above post have been removed from YouTube -- to be exact, 54 of 100 are gone (I counted). I try not to be polemic about these matters on this blog, but I find it hard to believe this is good for anyone -- artist, label, critic, fan, and, especially, the marketplace of ideas.
Mildly interesting: in the online version of the NYT story on what an author appearance on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report does for book sales, they have embedded video clips from ComedyCentral.com.
Google has launched Google Apps, a business suite that includes GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs, all one one domain for $50/year. [TechCrunch | NYT]
Esquire.com redesigned (or perhaps, designed) and now includes some fresh bits, including Chuck on Britney's hair cut: "Because she is a celebrity, it is always assumed that what she does is driven by motive. I see no evidence of this.... Think of the dumbest, goofiest, richest 25-year-old woman you've ever known: Did her day-to-day decision-making process reflect anything about her ambition, her self-awareness, or her ability to deal with reality?"
Just when you thought hoped boomer nostalgia had become passé, along comes the film Across the Universe, which strangely fetishizes the Beatles while still looking not quite horrible.
So the NAA -- that's the Newspaper Association of America, punks -- decides it needs a literacy campaign. And what's a literacy campaign without a celebrity spokesman? Nothing! So who do they pick? Optimus Prime. No, seriously. I officially declare this the end of media irony. [via]
Anyone else notice how Veronica Mars has made two disparaging references to Maxim magazine in recent episodes? The irony, of course, is that Kristen Bell was in Maxim. Anyway, there's a much more tasteful profile in Geek.
New video sites: Nick Douglas launched Look Shiny, Vice launched VBS.TV, mash-up site Cut.com launched in beta, and TMZ wants to set up shop in DC. And that's just over the weekend. Maybe this whole online video thing will catch on.
My pal Melissa has an awesome essay on the back page of Spin this month about How Ryan Adams (Of All People) Became an Internet Visionary. If you don't know, Ryan Adams recently released 13 albums on his website all under different pseudonyms -- chill rapper DJ Reggie, screamo outfit WereWolph, and bratty punkers the Shit, etc. It's just the kind of preposterously genius thing that the internet allows. Just a small excerpt from the essay: "Strangely, the biggest complaint people have posted about Adams is the same argument out-of-touch pundits once used about the Internet: There's too much information out there, and not enough of it has been edited. It's surprising that the same people who celebrate the Web for breaking down mainstream media's cultural gatekeeping now want something very old-fashioned: a new filter to tell them which of this stuff is any good." Rock.
Is exhibitionism the new generation gap? That's what Emily Nussbaum argues in a crafty analysis of Kids, The Intenet, and the End of Privacy in NY Mag, which argues we are witnessing the greatest generation gap since the invention of rock 'n roll.
Am I the last to know that Stephen King has a son named Joe Hill who just wrote a novel named after a Nirvana album (Heart-Shaped Box, which was positively reviewed in NYTBR) that is apparently about a man who bought a haunted suit over the internet?
A long list of book-oriented web 2.0 sites. Interesting that I've never heard of these, and also interesting that I have no interest to sign up for any of them. Not sure why that is...
Man, my friend Keith's review of Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape is wonderful. Just one snippet: "As with Pavement's Steven Malkmus, Sheffield's quick quips have long been mistaken by dumb people for straight-up glibness. Make no mistake -- those people are our enemies. They would have us deny that there was a time sincerity and irony were not mutually exclusive options, before the gaping chasm between snark and emo swallowed up any ambiguity of emotion. That time was the '90s, a decade whose flimsy promises were always already broken. We could only afford to approach our future with such irreverence, after all, because our dreams were so pathetically limited."
How many new products has Amazon launched in the last couple months? Amapedia is "a community for sharing information about the products you like the most." Basically: wiki + tagging = search + filtering.
This one's gonna cause even more than the normal amount of NYT Styles backlash: Truly Indie Fans is about black people who like indie rock. It tries to find the right note, but still smacks of essentialism.
When I moved to Seattle, I assumed every corner market would offer fresh options for my favorite hand-food delicacy: bahn mi. These little sandwiches, which I occasionally describe as "the delicious side of colonialism" or "history visualized as food," are basically a mashup of French bread and Vietnamese nummies, invented during the French occupation of Vietnam. Alas, you might think this delectable wonder would be readily available in culture-rich Seattle, but the bahn mi is actually segregated to the International District, which is one of those neighborhoods you never end up being near. Anyway, a Seattlest post got me started on this rant, which leads me to only one conclusion: I must start a bahn mi shop in Belltown.
Top 10 Songs About Wonderful Cities. Includes Kiss on Detroit, Sinatra on NYC, Elvis on Las Vegas, The Clash on Brixton, and of course They Might Be Giants on Istanbul.
Someone asked me the other day why I don't post t-shirt links anymore. The answer: because I buy them all, and I don't want to run into you wearing my goddamn cool t-shirt. But I'm letting you have the newest Gawker tee: I Hate Your Kids.
Ever since the dickhead tried to sue me, I've hated Garrison Keillor. No wait, I hated him before that. Anyway, his latest column argues that the way to look cool is to carry around a newspaper. This guy is so fucking old that he makes Andy Rooney look sane. [via]
It's strange to express glee that your favorite tv show is about to announce its end-point, but that's exactly what Lost needs. "The X-Files was a cautionary tale for us," says the exec producer. "It was a great show that ran two seasons too long. Lost has a short-half life." You really have to admire this approach, which ABC probably hates but which should bring the recent naysayers back on board. UPDATE: NYT says it could be a five-season show.
Living a few blocks from The Walker's enviable sculpture garden in Minneapolis had spoiled me on the elision of public space and art projects (not to mention providing an impressive place to take girls on first dates). Much is being made about a similar project, The Olympic Sculpture Park, opening in Seattle this week, which happens to be less than two blocks from my current condo -- you can actually almost see into my window in the photo atop the Sunday NYT review. The Seattle Times provides beaucoup multimedia and an overview of the major sculptures in the park (the usuals: Kelly, Serra, Nevelson, Calder, Oldenburg, Smith, Bourgeois) while Seattle's best art critic, Jen Graves, notes in The Stranger that January is not the best time to open a sculpture garden. For out-of-towners: Bill Gate's step-mother, Mimi Gates runs the Seattle art scene as director of both the Seatle Art Museum and Seattle Asian Art Museum. The official opening is next weekend, after which I'll post some more thoughts.
NYT's decent reflection on what David Byrne is up to lately includes a nifty little clip sampler that compares his work to contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
While in SF for a conference last summer, I dropped in to see Matthew Barney's newest, Drawing Restraint 9, at SFMOMA. It was fascinating and, I suppose, a little tiring, but also surprisingly simple, not nearly as ponderous as some people suggest. Nonetheless, while Barney's style has kept me engaged enough to seek out his work while traveling, his distribution methods have always annoyed the fuck out of me. His insistence on not releasing these works on DVD has always struck me as more pretentious than anything involving dressing up like a bird-satyr-angel-fish thing. ANYWAY, apparently a copy of Drawing Restraint has leaked onto the internet. Up next: the edited version for Blockbuster.
A new Whole Foods recently opened a few blocks from my place in Seattle. I've only been a minor fan in the past -- there's something too precious about getting carrots there. But this new store is so full of delicious stuff that exists nowhere else, so it will probably become my regular grocery store. ANYWAY, Slate has a story about Whole Foods' stock tanking even though it shouldn't be. [via]
Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder, Colbert's "black friend" character ("character"?) writes an editorial ("editorial"?) in the Washington Post. [via]
In NYTBR, Itzkoff reviews the new Michael Crichton book, Next, which "completes the author's metamorphosis from steely-eyed augur of the not-too-distant future to unabashed demagogue." Last month, it was revealed that Crichton turned one of his real-world critics into a fictional character who just happens to be a child rapist. Which is, well, despicable, but also pretty fucking funny.
Even though I don't use it all that much, I'm a huge fan of my Slingbox, which basically streams my DVR to my computer and phone. Now, it sounds like Sling Media will launch a reverse product, which brings internet video to your tv. It's interesting that we've been asking all this time who would bring tv to the internet when the real question might be who will bring the internet to tv?
What the world needs is a YouTube that's live -- just full of people (okay, kids) doing whatever behind their computer. Oh, it exists: Stickam. [via scare-mongering NYT story.]
The usual caveats apply: I have no inside knowledge on any of this stuff. I talk to media+tech people about trends all the time, but nobody ever tells me anything important. And I only have mutual funds, so don't try to play that angle.
Besides, I'm just taking cheap shots anyway.
1) $100 PC. Finally, computing in the Third World! But priorities are reassessed when someone does the math and realizes that the One Benjamin PC could feed a single African for 37 years.
2) MySpace. Despite (or because of) News Corp's ownership of MySpace, unique users start to disappear. Someone at the New York Times realizes that your friend Tom has released absolutely zero new features to the community since Fox's takeover. In a scramble, MySpace releases a bunch of bad features that everyone hates. However, they sell several more sponsorship deals for movies, tv shows, and bands that you don't care about.
3) Apple. Apple buys Last.FM. Finally. And iTV is a hit. Finally. And the iPhone? Nope, never. Why? Cuz the iPhone is like God -- if it really existed, you wouldn't care that much.
4) Google. By partnering YouTube and Apple's iTV, Google has you watching Ask A Ninja on your plasma. Hello, Google Video ads.
5) Gawker. A rumor is leaked about a Conde Naste buy-out that involves a digital unit built around the new WiredNews.com. Nick Denton is too busy updating Lifehacker to respond.
6) The Office. Jim chooses Pam. Forgetting this is fiction, I attempt to drunk-dial Karen.
7) Studio 60. Sorkin's new show sorta catches on. Gloating until my pancreas explodes, I try to explain that Studio 60 is the first example of middle-brow camp. You call me a moron.
8) Technorati. A media company takes a shot at buying Technorati. Maybe Tribune, maybe NYT, probably Wash Post. By the end of the year, people are talking about a Newsvine purchase.
9) Publishing. Your mom is charged with plagiarism. Her book skyrockets to the top of the best-seller list.
10) TV News Anchor Ratings. 1) Brian Williams. 2) Charlie Gibson. 3) Katie Couric.
11) Windows. Vista ships. You try not to yawn.
12) Twitter. Google buys Twitter. A bunch of media organizations sigh deeply over not thinking of this first.
13) AOL. I have no idea. And neither do they.
14) Facebook. That snotty Harvard kid tells Yahoo, "Tell you what, I'll buy you instead."
15) Yahoo. Ba-bye, Terry.
16) Zune. Version 2.0 of the Zune is launched. A small group of converts start to form, while Engadget asks "too little, too late?"
17) Second Life. Robots invade and kill everyone. Turns out "everyone" is 5 kids in Tallahassee.
18) Mobile. 2007: the year in mobile. If I keep saying it, eventually it will be true.
19) Comedy. Dane Cook gets invited to speak at this year's White House Press Corps dinner. When Cook jokes about fucking the Bush Twins, G.W. laughs more than he did at Colbert.
20) Chumby. This little nerd toy you've never heard of becomes a huge hit.
21) Newspapers. More lay-offs, more shrinkage, more free weeklies, more navel-gazing.
22) SmartPox. Add it to the list of great ideas that won't catch traction. (See also: Open ID, micro-payments, free city-wide wireless.)
23) CBS. The digital unit will make a few acquisitions that seem peculiar. But by the end of the year, they will look hipper than Unkie Viacom.
24) GNR. Klosterman spreads a rumor that Axl will release Chinese Democracy on April 24. Thousands of thirty-somethings show up at a record store at midnight only to discover... ha ha, fooled you, old man.
25) Courtney Love. Comeback album, comeback movie, comeback fragrance.
26) Celebutantes. People talk a lot about Britney's comeback, but the new summer album does as well as releases from Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and K-Fed. Meanwhile, Nicole Richie accidentally eats herself.
27) Ze Frank. The funniest guy in America lands a deal at Comedy Central.
28) Amanda Congdon. While the blogosphere wonders who's watching, Amanda's ratings go up, up, up. When you go home for Thanksgiving, you realize your dad has it bookmarked.
I've got a unique idea for a tv blog that I don't think anyone else has explored. However, I've got ideas that will never amount to anything within pretty much every cultural genre. In the meantime, maybe someone should apply to be a paid tv blogger at TV Squad or join The Venice Project.
So Jon Pareles' Sunday NYT Arts cover story on user-generated content was fine (most of us live with -- and spread -- this propaganda all day long (though the comparisons to folk culture are sorta new (and the references are medium fresh))), but isn't it sorta weird that it's basically one long essay without any reportage?
Valleywag and Techcrunch peed all over themselves last night with posts about the shakeup at Yahoo. Meanwhile, NYT was pretty fast (for a lumbering old paper) to publish, and Semel even pushed out his own blog post about it (I wonder who's moderating those comments?).
Every year around this time, I attempt to summarize what's been happening online by publishing my list of the best blogs of the year [2002, 2003, 2004]. But I abruptly stopped last year because the list had become annoyingly redundant. Yes, dear blogosphere, after only six (or so) years of existence, you already have your canon, created either through fiat, power laws, or meritocracy -- you decide!
Sure, new sites break through (such as Techcrunch and Valleywag did this year), but a glance at the Technorati 100 shows that things aren't really that different than they were a few years ago. So do you really need me to prattle on about the significance of Kottke and Waxy, Romenesko and Gawker, Engadget and Scoble? I think not. Instead, this year I've gathered 30 blogs that you perhaps aren't reading.
Caveat: no human on the planet is qualified to do this, and the 500 blogs that I follow probably represents how many blogs are created in a second.1 On the other hand, this is not a list of esoteric blogs that you'll smirk at and never read again. I actually read all of these, because I think they're great.
And finally, please add your under-appreciated blog suggestions in the comments. Because really, aren't the overlooked ones the reason we're all here anyway?
29. TV Squad Blogging about tv sounds hard -- you're always a day late, yet you're always a spoiler. This surprisingly good Weblogs Inc. blog finds the right balance between last night's TiVo and tomorrow's buzzed show. (See also: Television Without Pity & Tuned In.)
28. Ballardian Sorry, this isn't actually J.G. Ballard's blog. As possibly the only science fiction writer who merits the adjectival form, Ballard is synonymous with technology, body enhancement, organic architecture, dystopia, car crashes, and other generally weird stuff. This blog is about those things, sorta. (See also: William Gibson's Blog & Bruce Sterling's Blog & City of Sound.)
27. T-Shirt Critic I've got this theory that the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media -- informative yet dispensable. Probably the most frequent email query I get is "where do you get all those t-shirt links?" The answer is all over the freaking place -- but this site is one of the best. (See also: Preshrunk & iloveyourtshirt.)
26. Pruned Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it, usually by gathering all sorts of randompieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.)
25. Ypulse You can count the number of people making a living by blogging on a couple of hands, but be sure to add a digit for Anastasia. If you think you know what teenagers are talking about today, you may reconsider after reading this blog, which tracks everything that the kids (Generation Y) are into. (See also: Agenda Inc.)
24. Eyeteeth & Offcenter Through some bad twist of misfortune, I never met the multi-talented Paul Schmelzer when I lived in Minneapolis. But I've been collecting all the marvellous little spores he leaves behind on various sites around the interweb, including these two. (See also: Greg.org.)
22. Dethroner Not that you care, but 2006 was a crummy year for the lad magazine. Could it be that the social internet is invading dude-ness too? This one-man site (from Joel Johnson, former Gizmodo editor, recently interviewed by Matt Haughey) is a good example of what one person can do in a niche topic. (See also: Daddy Types.)
21. Cute Overload Yes, hipster, I know -- you, your sister, and your mom have seen Cute Overload. But have you bookmarked it? Have you returned to it every day just for some cheery bunnies? You have not truly experienced Cute Overload until it has become a ritual. I dare you. (See also: Flickr: Interestingness.)
20. IFC TV Picking the best film blog is difficult. Luckily, picking the best one you perhaps aren't reading is easy! This link-heavy blog is the perfect mix of news and views on film culture. (See also: Cinematical & GreenCine Daily.)
18. Metafilter Joke, right? No, not really, because I bet everyone reading this post has at one time or another given up on Metafilter. And unlike the time you gave up on Slashdot, you eventually came back to Metafilter. (See also: Ask.Metafilter, the real reason this site deserves to be here.)
17. videos.antville.org You're going to see a huge surge of video link blogs this year, but this one has always stood above the others for good community contributions of quality music videos. (See also: ClipTip & Digg: Music Videos.)
15. Josh Spear Cool Hunting and The Cool Hunter are, well, cool. But they tend to track international trends that seldom seem to intersect with your life. Josh Spear's cool hunting includes stuff you might actually be able to afford getting your hands on. (See also: NotCot.org.)
14. Data Mining Yawn, right? Nuh-uh. Everything that's happening today in areas around buzz tracking, social media, geocoding, data visualization, and countless other subjects is tracked on this blog, where I consistently discover new ideas. (See also: Blog Pulse & Micro Persuasion.)
13. Make Magazine Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I'm including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make's philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)
12. 3 Quarks Daily 3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)
11. Screens I've had a boyish crush on Virginia Heffernan's writing since her days as Slate's tv columnist. This year, she started this peculiar little blog for the New York Times, covering the cultural side of the internet video industry before anyone realized there was such a thing. She was the first mainstream media writer to snag lonelygirl15 as a storyline (which I -- still boyishly -- think she first saw here), writing in a cozy vernacular that you were surprised in the old gray lady. (See also: Lost Remote & Carpetbagger.)
8. Subtraction An editor from The Atlantic who was doing a story on buzz-building recently contacted me about finding the source of a meme he saw on Fimoculous. He asked where I got it, and I said Subtraction, to which he replied, "that's what everyone else said too." A blogger's blogger, Khoi Vinh is the new design director at the NYTimes.com, which might sound high-brow, but his personal site has the quality you most desire from a blogger: curiosity. (See also: Anil Dash.)
7. Pop Candy I'm as surprised as you that a USA Today blog makes this list. Beyond the cute Chuck Taylors in her pic, what makes Whitney Matheson better than the slew of other pop culture blogs out there? Simple: while everyone else is there to out-snark and out-upskirt-shot each other, Whitney seems to actually like popular culture. (See also: Stereogum & Amy's Robot.)
6. Future of the Book Ostensibly about exploring the shift from the printed page to the networked screen, Future of the Book stumbles across a variety of new ideas along the way, such as creating a wikibook on gaming. Although occasionally windy, Future of the Books is on the precipice of something big. (See also: Read/Write Web & Smart Mobs.)
4. Information Aesthetics I suspect we need a chart to explain why this blog is so great, because just saying "this blog tracks instances of data visualization" sounds like it could be a weapon to kill terrorists with boredom. But this site is essential reading for anyone interested in the ways that engineers and designers turn the messy world into a clear visual representation. (See also: Visual Complexity & xBlog.)
Dammit. I'm a huge fan of NY Mag's Approval Matrix, and was planning on turning the concept into an interactive app, but they did it first: The DIY Approval Matrix.
Now that the 2006 lists of lists is growing to a respectable size, I'll mention that you should email me lists that fit in that genre: about 2006. Occasionally, people send me lists that have nothing to do with 2006, such as one of my recent favorites, Top 10 Servers In Movies. Yes, that's computer servers, not the who tell you to watch out for the hot plates at restaurants. Anyway, it's an excellent list.
Generally speaking, I'm a big supporter of Pitchfork, mostly because I don't buy any of the reasons that the careerists give for not liking it. But this Slate piece, Die, Pitchfork, Die!, does a good job at getting to the one thing that does irk me about Pitchfork: its overtly self-consciousness stance as an industry cool-maker.
For me, 2006 was the year of inconsequential hype. Wasn't this the year of Snakes on a Plane? And what ever happened to Pearl Jam's big comeback? And weren't The Raconteurs s'posed to be the best rock band ever? And don't even get me started on what the bloggers were telling you to like. Whatevah, you were too busy watching Journey on YouTube to care.
Despite the odds, this was a pretty good year in music. I've got 21 albums to prove it:
21) The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon No one realized it at the time, but Party Music was probably the most important album of 2001 -- but like everything else after 9/11, it had to be sublimated for a few years. Boots Riley returned this year to "laugh, love, and make love" -- while wearing camo. When the apocalypse comes, you know The Coup will be playing the soundtrack.
20) Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom The cast of characters alone -- Norah Jones, Amon Tobin, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, Massive Attack, Kid Koala -- make this a seductive record. But even after the novelty wears off, Mike Patton's obstinate weirdness and whispering/screaming vocals make this album continually engaging, if not terminally perverse.
19) Be Your Own Pet, Be Your Own Pet This is the kind of punk rock that your pre/post-cool skater friend in high school liked but you didn't understand. Then she made a mixed tape for you with a noisy mess called "Fuuuuuuun" on it, and even though it included a wink to "Stairway to Heaven" you still didn't understand, but you adored her for playing a song called "Fuuuuuuun" -- I mean, how couldn't you?
18) Sparklehorse, Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain I have no idea why people ignored this album, but I predict the hipsters will trackback to this release next year when DJ Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous collaborate on something called Dangerhorse (I'm not making this up). Linkous makes the kind of raspy pop static that everyone has forgotten is the reason that recorded music still exists.
16) Cold War Kids, Robbers and Cowards The first four songs on this debut record are so ridiculously good that it makes you suspicious of their ability to maintain it, which causes you to unfairly judge them on the potential of future work that you've never heard, which is grossly unjust, but is also the strange state of music today.
15) Bob Dylan, Modern Times He hates technology more than your grandma, but that's probably why he makes albums better than your kids.
14) Joanna Newsome, Ys This will take a moment to digest: Diamanda Galas meets Bjork and June Carter Cash in a dark alley. They magically morph into a harpist who makes an album engineered by Steve Albini that has only five songs but is still an hour long. And yet you love it.
13) The DFA Remixes, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2 No one asked for another version of Fischerspooner's "Emerge" or NIN's "The Hand that Feeds," but you couldn't pick anyone better than DFA to reconstitute nostalgia as futurism.
12) Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon It's the strangest thing in the world to leave town and watch your friend's band explode like this. One second you're playing Katamari Damacy and listening to GNR, the next they're trying to get time off work to tour Japan.
11) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale If you didn't know, fishscale is super-high quality uncut cocaine -- sparkly and glimmering like a fish's scales. This album is singularly obsessed with coke -- kilos and bricks, snorted and smoked -- all of it, in multiple different forms, which you can view as a metaphor of quality or race or economics... or not.
9) Girl Talk, Night Ripper One ritalin-and-coffee-induced diatribe about how this album is perfectly of its time yet paradoxically timeless is more than enough.
8) Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not Just when you think the dance rock thing has hit the windshield, along comes the best of the genre -- from a bunch of kids slamming on the gas pedal, no less. Two of the songs on this album include the word "dance," yet they're the least danceable songs on the album.
7) Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped The only thing that makes less sense than these old-timers writing what might be the most relevant love song of the year ("Do You Believe in Rapture?") might be the same fogies writing the best rock song of the year ("Incinerate"). "Do you believe in a second chance?" Totally.
6) The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living At the beginning of the year, Mike Skinner was in rehab; at the end of the year, he was preparing to run the New York City marathon. This sums up The Streets -- slacking yet overachieving, a bad decision that always turns good, a big story yet a complete fuck up.
5) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones I'm likely rating this album higher than almost anyone else will this year, but it probably deserves even higher. Why do you all hate Karen O for wanting to make a Blondie record? Sometimes I think you're bigger than the sound, too.
4) Mickey Avalon, Mickey Avalon Rock critics fucking hate Mickey Avalon -- my friend Missy thinks he's egotistical scum. But this is my kind of punk-rapping scum bag: he stylizes like Kool Keith, he narrates like Eminem, he snags the aesthetics of L.A. glam rock (but bi), and packages it all like Beck-on-meth-not-Beck-on-scientology. And despite that description, he sounds absolutely nothing like Kid Rock!
3) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain Can you imagine the pitch to the record label? "Okay, we're gonna make a doo-wop punk album. But it won't sound anything like that. It will sound more like a lazy day in the Prospect Park. Oh, but you can sorta dance to it. Got it?"
2) Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere The second you heard it, you knew it was going to be the song of the summer. By the second bar, you could visualize the sin wave over the next couple months: the pre-buzz, the raves, the saturation, the backlash, the overhype, and the backlash to the backlash (because you read NY Mag too). It was a crystal clear moment, which so many will remember as defining the summer of '06, when everything seemed to have a thrilling predictability.
1) The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America During a year that I moved away from the Midwest, no other record could possibly top this list. I'm not sure what non-expats do with all the Lyndale, Penn, and Nicolet references (cross-check them to their Replacements records?), but this will always be one of those records that will be impossibly linked to my life in mysterious ways that make me equal parts sad and hopeful. Every time Craig roars "We walked across that Grain Belt bridge / Into a brand new Minneapolis," I wonder why every city can't be so lucky as to have such a perferct homage. And then I remember only one city deserves it. I miss ya, boys and girls.
Lately I've been thinking about how celebrity culture has taken a strange turn over the past decade: we now have a flotilla of celebrities that exist exclusively to be hated. Seriously, who likes Paris Hilton? No one. She exists to be despised, and an entire economy has developed around this hatred. Saying you hate Paris Hilton is about as original as saying you like The Beatles. (And realizing it is the definition of snark.) A new Consumed column looks at this from a different angle: how online communities are formed around that hatred.
Even though the entire premise of the NYT profile of the TV Newser kid is how tv execs are fans of the site, it can't possibly convey how unbelievably glued to it they are. I've witnessed it first-hand and it's seriously weird.
The other day at the office, I noticed someone carrying a copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations, the idea of which completely infatuated me. It's basically a guidebook to teeny-tiny nations with self-declared sovereignty, oftentimes established in someone's backyard. The Empire of Atlantium, The Principality of Sealand, and The Republic of Molossia are such example. NPR has an interview and BLDG BLOG has another. (One of the authors of the book, Simon Sellars, is interviewed in the latter. He also runs one of my favorite blogs, Ballardian, which is its own micronation of sorts).
Khat is the new craze drug, yet one Village Voice writer can't seem to find the stuff anywhere. People talked about it in Minneapolis (the home to the largest Somali population in the U.S.) all the time, but it never seemed to be on the street either, probably cuz it sounds about as strong as caffeine.
Believe it or not, I make a living as a futurist -- in the same way that nearly all of us (writers, entrepreneurs, bookies... Miss Cleo) bring home the butter by trying to predict what will happen next. The Prognosticating Class has become so large that you now can't click 'empty trash' on your desktop without a futurist falling out.
Last year was the worst -- I made 33 Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture. It's time to look back and see how well I did. In fairness to myself, this wasn't really a true attempt at clairvoyance -- several of the predictions were just meant to be goofy. Oddly enough, those were the ones that turned out to actually be right.
Next month, I'll publish some predictions for 2007, but in the mean time, let's review last year's effort, with ratings of 0-10:
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo....
Um, not so much. Score: 0.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder....
Oh boy, this is getting ugly. Score: 0.
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv"...
Wellll...30 Rock is a hit, My Name Is Earl still does okay, and the relocated Office is stellar. But, well, no one is exactly shaking the presents under the tree at NBC this Christmas. Score: 5.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
See, that's me being funny. Score: 5.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
Tricked ya. That was written after he actually did "enigmatic and frustrating" things. Score: 1.
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development.
Um, yeah. Well, MSN picked up the reruns. Score: 2.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
Doy. Score: 10.
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN...
Okay, wrong about Veronica Mars (how cool would that be?), and wrong about CBS and UPN... sorta -- instead, she'll be on sister company HBO. And ABC. So I get some points. Score: 7.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
Sorta yeah, sorta no. Score: 5.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
Can I get negative points? Score: 0.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
I can't prove it, but I'm sure this has happened. Score: 6.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile....
Maybe next year? Score: 3.
13) Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
Well, not yet. But they got closer. Score: 2.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions...
Maybe I should have kept them all this vauge. I was thinking something big would happen, but nothing really did. MTV got older, CBS joined the YouTube revolution. Score: 2.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR.
Not quite. He announced iTV. But still... Score: 6.
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2.
This is getting painful. Does Zune caving to Universal Music count? Score: 1.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
They started the year with 3.3 million and ended with over 5 million. So close. Score: 7.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement.
I'm a moron. Score: 0.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
Hah! Score: 0.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis....
One word: wikiality. Score: 2.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
Is this even measurable? Score: 4.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return.
Shoot. Me. Now. Score: 3.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base....
I'm still not sure this has happened. Score: 2.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
You wish, blogger. Score: 0.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
What the hell happened to DayLife anyway? Score: 0.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album...
Rock out. Score: 8.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
It didn't, but it still could. Score: 3.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
Well, he almost wrote some stuff for Wired. Score: 3.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
Fuck yeah. Score: 10!
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
You wish, Andy. Score: 0.
Average score: 3.27. Before you get all schadenfreude on me, please consider that some of those predictions were intentionally outrageous. As will next year's predictions. Tune in soon...
I know you're going to hate me for this, but I'm sorta obsessed with the new Courtney Love book (forgiving NYTBR review). And if that didn't make you hate me, how about linking to a nude spread for Pop magazine (nsfw! nsfw! nsfw!)?
The lead story in the Sunday Times Arts section was on interactive television, making iTV officially the soccer of the tech world -- always and forever the next big thing.
I was chatting with a friend today about startup ideas. He joked: "How about networknewscast.com? We only offer content at 6:00-6:30 p.m. It'll have autoplay network news video. It will not be customizable and will not have any feedback. The other 23.5 hours will be 30-sec pre-roll promos for the next 6 p.m. broadcast. It'll be so counter-programming that retro teens with flock to it." I love it!
Those friends and lovers (difference? none!) back home are doing such cool stuff. Matt and Margaret launched Vita.MN, a social calendaring/entertainment site in Minneapolis a couple months ago. Then yesterday, the print edition of the site came out with a cover story from Alexis (who will also be a columnist). Meanwhile, Steve, Alexis, Cristina, Juan, Leigha, Paul, Johnny, and everyone at Chasing Windmills (and Chuck at MNstories) were profiled on MPR's Morning Edition for their pioneering videoblog work (which will also be featured on an upcoming episode of The Tyra Banks Show). And last month, Sarah became the music editor of City Pages. Wheh, nice work.
I believe the New York Sun is actually the first to publish a review of Pynchon's newest, Against the Day. Wait, did he say lists? I happen to like lists.
So I went to the Zune launch party in Seattle last night -- unexpectedly, it was hottie overload. Anyway, Engadget is collecting stories about getting social with Zune. (Also noted: video sharing is coming soon.)
The weird thing about this Pitchfork interview with Cat Power isn't anything Chan says -- it's that the interviewer is Fred Armisen, who I had no idea was the drummer of [early-'90s hardcore band] Trenchmouth. I booked that band once! And I don't remember him at all.
New York Mag thinksLost is starting to suck and argues for something I've also said: change the format. Given the money involved, it seems unlikely that we'll get our way -- so there's always the theory from Amy's Robot: put the characters on other shows.
Need an alibi? Contact the Alibi Network. (On the left, it lists all their news coverage -- it's awesome how local tv news totally loves to hate this company.) [via]
I don't know what percent of Richard Siklos' Sunday NYT biz columns are about Google, but it's gotta be above 50%. This week he asks media companies if Google is a friend or foe.
Three (at most) of you will care about this post, but maybe someone at MIT will read it. Has anyone else gone to one of the many MIT websites (say, Center for Collective Intelligence or Media Lab or Senseable City Lab or any of the limitless others) and said "This looks cool, but I wish there was a way for it to alert me when new stuff is posted"? Why is there no MIT blog or MIT email dist list or MIT RSS feed -- or anything that would alert me to new MIT stuff? Will someone please go wake up Negroponte? Thanks for listening.
So I've been telling anyone who will listen that Local.Live.com is the most interesting thing happening right now on the Microsoft campus (yes, more interesting than Zune), and today'srelease of 3D maps in a browser in a huge step, despite the fact that a) I could be heard screaming for 10 mins in my office about the number of downloads it took and b) it only works in IE. So now I have the conundrum where I never used Google Earth because it wasn't browser-based, but I probably won't use these 3D maps because it doesn't work in Firefox. Sigh.
The "editor of television and video" at the New York Times (which really means NYtimes.com) fields questions from users. Many of the questions are about ads, and I don't think she understood the question about YouTube.
NYT Maglooks at the process of choosing words for the new OED. My favorite addition is wonky, but no mention is made on whether a word I swear I invented will make it: arm candy.
PBS' Frontlineis preparing an episode called News War, a three-hour special the examines the "political, cultural, legal and economic forces" impacting the media.
The Studio 60 / 30 Rock / SNL update: Tina Fey gives a pointed "no comment" to her opinions of Studio 60 in an Onion interview. Everyone linked to the Fox News story about how Studio 60 is about to die, but the L.A. Times is reporting it ain't true. And in an article that strangely mirrors the fictional Vanity Fair article in Studio 60, The Village Voice goes behind the scenes and asks if SNL can even be relevant today.
Notice any strange bulletins atop MySpace lately? The infamous Tom of MySpace had his own MySpace account hacked. The culprit? He fell for a phishing scam. This guy invented the online social revolution?
Slate has a great review of The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy's new book about the iPod. "Here's the rub: After reading Levy's book, I'm not convinced that the iPod has changed anything at all. Levy, a senior editor at Newsweek, is a prime example of the boomers who think the iPod is revolutionary. But really, they're grateful, because it's made them feel cool again." I totally agree with this.
It makes me sad the Studio 60 is dying. Sure, that bit with Sting was reprehensible, but it's the best new show this year. Marketwatch says the online marketing tactics didn't work, Slate says the problem is sermonizing, and The Post just says it's too smart. Sigh.
File under: "Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories." I wonder if the most recent episode of Studio 60 -- the one that revolves around an act of comedic tv/internet plagiarism (and which has probably been the best hour of tv this fall) -- was inspired by the recent act of unverified tv/internet plagiarism in which The Colbert Reporthad a few lines that appeared to rip off Ze Frank. Maybe that sounds like a crazy theory -- until you read in the long NY Mag Colbert profile that Jon Stewart's brother is now a writer for Studio 60. Hmmm....
Big controversy in the Seattle music scene, in which it is discovered that someone in The Stranger's advertising department was writing reviews for the paper under a pseudonym. Dan Savage canned her and the editor, Dave Segal.
Discovered on the same day: dontclick.it, which tries to build a navigable interface in which you don't click anything, and History of the Button a blog that traces "the history of interaction design through the history of the button."
What I love about the story of the self-effacing third founder of YouTube is that he acts exactly how I wish I acted if I were a millionaire a hundred plus times over. Except, I know I wouldn't act anything like him, and for that, I hate myself.
So a newspaper (L.A. Times) realizes it's a dying form that needs rejuvenation -- who does it hire to investigate how to react? It's own investigative unit.
Apparently, there's a rumor floating around that Google is buying YouTube. While the deal makes sense in many ways, I suspect in the long run this would hurt Google's ability to work with mainstream media sources, who they will eventually have to play ball with.
NYT: Netflix will award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations by 10%. How about: add porn DVDs. Gimme my million.
After playing around in Second Life for many hours, I still don't know what the hell to think of it, but it's noteworthy that Leo Burnett is buying ad space there.
Barry Diller didn't get to buy Daily Candy, so he started Very Short List instead. Although that sounds like a lame knock-off, it has amazingly managed to enlist Simon Dumenco and Kurt Andersen as contributors. [via]
Radar has an interview with the funniest man alive right now, John Hodgman. I didn't realize that he edited the "True Life Tales" section of the NYT Mag.
NYT Magtakes up the game Disaffected, an anti-advergame that parodies the Kinko's experience. The discussion moves toward a notion called "semiotic disobedience" (pdf).
I can't even count all the conversations I've had about the relationship status choices on Friendster and MySpace. One of them was even with Diane Mapes, who's quoted in a NYT Styles story all about the public status signifier.
My original lonelygirl15 theory may not be true, but since I never revealed it anyway, you don't have to worry about it. However, my second theory is very close to the one espoused here. In other words, it's the Blair Witch Project of 2006 -- a semi-brilliant marketing scheme created by nobodies.
"The sexual compatibility questionnaire is a way for you and your partner to discreetly and easily compare your sexual interests without any of the embarrassing chatter and looks that may come up by doing so in person."
I like asking people how many best friends they have, and then asking them to compare it to the number of best friends they had at different points in their life. The Times Maglooks at a study that reveals people say they have fewer confidants than 20 years ago, but then opens up the reasons to some good speculation.
This week's Consumed notices an interesting cellphone development: the wireless headset jumped right over youth culture and into middle-management. Can it work its way back, despite the Star Trek factor?
Even before reading Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail, you and I -- we, the people on the internet -- are of two minds about it. Part of us has been waiting with zeal, with a virtual palpitating heart, for a new "big idea" book to debate for the rest of the year -- and also, a treatise that will elucidate for our workplace parents (i.e., bosses) why small is the new big, why this niche economy is different than anything ever before, and why this wisdom-of-the-crowds gibberish actually has some evidential support. The other part of us -- the part that has waited so long for this seemingly-eternal-work-in-progress, which, by now, we've already heard our boss, and our boss' boss, and our boss' boss' secretary, repeat the title of so many times (usually, as an inaccurate reference) that we want to retreat to Second Life for the rest of the summer -- yes, this part of us has already deduced this blogged book will be repetitive and cloying and, well, long in the mouth.
Ah, the fragmented public.
For those of you who haven't been gripped by every nuance of the internet economy over the past few years, perhaps some rewinding is in order. Stating the thesis of The Long Tail requires merely a few words: the mass market economy is turning into a niche economy. That's it? Yep, that's it. I suspect those of us who fall in the middle of Gen X will smirk at this proposition. Since approximately the day I left high school, I've been told I'm part of a new micro-marketing culture, that the difference between me and my parents is choice, that fame will be doled out to my friends in tidy 15 minute portions. I've been walking and breathing niche for so long, it's probably time somebody stopped and asked: is all this true?
One thing is true: just the introduction of The Long Tail will zap you with enough aphorisms to instantly transform you into the hottest internet bon vivant at the next Valleywag-crashed party. Simply toss out these maxims over Web 2.0 martinis: "Scarcity requires hits." "The mass market is turning into a market of niches." "The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes." "If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first century will be equally about niches." Are you writing these down?
But you realize an odd thing about 50 pages into this book: you're not bored. You suspect you should be bored by either the pop economics or the glib utopianism or perhaps, alas, the hash tables. But, somehow, you enjoy the stories that illustrate the overall economic theories. And, most of all, the data points are simply delicious. You want to memorize them for the next time you argue with your friends about topics that feel true but which you don't actually know are true. Did you know...
+ A quarter of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 100,000 titles.
+ 74 percent of tv households in 1954 watched I Love Lucy; CSI now, 15 percent.
+ Toll-free calling was invented in 1967 by AT&T. By 1992, 40 percent of all long-distance calls on its network were toll-free.
+ Online shopping accounts for 5 percent of American retail spending. It's increasing 25% per year.
+ In the 1960s, the Chevy Impala sedan accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. car market.
+ Yahoo's music video viewership lands somewhere between MTV and VH1 in audience share.
+ 724,000 Americans report eBay as their primary or secondary source of income.
+ 20% of the population lives 8+ miles from a bookstore.
And so on.
You might think that Anderson's purpose in using the bevy of data would be to whip up some evidence to push the overall narrative, but the data actually becomes the story. Anderson (who, we somehow haven't mentioned yet, is the editor of Wired) nicely weaves it all together in a way that makes you realize that he's one of the few people who actually gets the holy triumvirate: culture, media, and economics.
The question that nagged me -- and perhaps it will you, too -- is whether all this fragmentation of culture is actually good for us. It would have been wise to close the book on this topic, but Anderson gets to it a couple chapters before the end (he reserves the final pages for an annoying "how to make a long tail company" list, probably to justify placement in B&N's business section). I'm someone who has previously ranted about the infuriating bullshit of Republic.com, which purported that personalized technologies (i.e., those that expose the long tail) would hurt the spread of information. Nonetheless, I've become worried recently about the loss of salient and persistent talking points even within my little clique of media-savvy culturati. Lately, I've been hearing conversation-enders like this with more frequency: "No, I didn't hear that [too-obscure-for-Pitchfork] record" or "No, I didn't see that [famous-to-hundreds Web 2.0] website" or "No, I haven't rented that [Japanese anime import] DVD." Without getting mealy-mouthed, Anderson scrubs away my apprehension, revealing a world in which you and me -- we, the people on the internet -- are "not so much fragmenting as we are re-forming along different dimensions."
I feel defragged now.
Rex, who is currently working on a book very tentatively titled "Everything You Know Is the Wisdom of the Long Tail Tipping Point," was nominated for a Wired Rave Award in 2004 but has never met Chris Anderson, even though he totally stalked him at the awards party.
Get ready for it: bloggers are gonna harsh hard on this week's Modern Love about a girl who lives her life almost completely on social networking sites, IM, Dodgeball, and Second Life.
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
I'm not on Second Life yet, though I know I should be. I've been watching the site pretty closely for years, and it's fascinating that it's finally taking off, though I have no idea why now. Anyway, there's some reportage that Amazon.com is planning on extending their web services to support virtual stores within Second Life.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
The Nerve.com Future Issue, which will feature writing from Joel Stein, Walter Kirn, Jay McInerney, Douglas Rushkoff, Rick Moody, Ana Marie Cox, and others.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
I'm not on Second Life yet, though I know I should be. I've been watching the site pretty closely for years, and it's fascinating that it's finally taking off, though I have no idea why now. Anyway, there's some reportage that Amazon.com is planning on extending their web services to support virtual stores within Second Life.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to drink only beverages from Amazon's Sports & Energy Drink grocery category.
ARCHITECTURE
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
So in Minneapolis last weekend, I saw both the new Cesar Pelli library and the Jean Nouvel theater. L.A. Times has a good review of the latter. Those two plus the new Walker and new Michael Graves MIA expansion make Minneapolis the hottest architectural city of the last couple years. (UPDATE: Newsweek's "Design Dozen" drops Minneapolis as #1 in its Design City issue.)
So that little movie that got me in a little t-shirt trouble last Fall finally came out this weekend. I wish I still had enough agitprop in me to call for a boycott, but I'll probably go see it this week.
MUSIC
I doubt you watched VH1's Story of Heavy Metal last week, but the best part was a puffy, wasted, maudlin Jani Lane saying he could "shoot himself in the fucking head" for writing "Cherry Pie." Dude, Decline of the Western Civilization was decades ago!
North Dakota continues to befuddle me. I don't know how one can measure this, but it must be the most conservative state in the union, yet it still somehow elects Democrats to congress and has occasional socialist streaks. The latest is the North Dakota Farmers Union opening a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Agraria, which cost about $4 million to open, will feature home-grown product shipped directly from farmers -- about a third of it from North Dakota and the rest from family farms in 25 states. AP has somephotos.
Using Cobain's suicide note to see what Google Ads turn up. Ouch.
Awesome history of a ubiquitious six-second drum break, sampled in everything from NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" to jeep commercials. You've heard it a million times but never even realized it.
This is weird. Both The Times (Sia Michel) and The Sun write up Tapes 'N Tapes and cite blogs (positively and negatively, respectively) as the primary reason for their success.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
Ya know, I haven't seen the Al Gore movie yet, but how fucking awesome is it that a gigantic powerpoint has been getting raves? It give nerds hope.... too much hope. On with the links:
Guardian Magprofile of Douglas Coupland, in which 1) he subtly disses Steven Berlin Johnson's game book, 2) we learn he has a movie called Everything's Gone Green coming out, and 3) he delivers his definition of irony.
I was just thinking the other day how strange it is that Amazon hasn't significantly monetized IMDB.com. Then along came this NYT profile of the founder.
Is Lost the best thing on TV, like, ever? There are too many topics to link to (Dickens?), but here's a strange interview on Jimmy Kimmel with the Communications Director of the Hanso Foundation?
Amazon.com has launched a grocery section. In other news, a certain nerd in Seattle decides his entire life will consists of the Microsoft cafeteria and whatever he can buy off Amazon.
ONLINE
PopURLS.com aggregates the aggregators, or something like that.
Brian Grazer and Malcolm Gladwell have a hair-off on the Charlie Rose show. Among other things, they talk about Gawker.
MEDIA
At the end of last year, I chose Arianna Huffington as an "artist of the year." My lede: "The Huffington Post should completely suck." David Carr notices the one-year anniversary of The Huffington Post in The Times. His lede?
"When it began a year ago, The Huffington Post seemed like a remarkably bad idea." Yo, just sayin.
WORDS
NYT Mag: Scan This Book! Surprisingly polemic towards the end, but spot-on.
Klosterman texted me from the ooh-ooh-big-deal GNR show in NYC ("Axl got thin again!"), but the big news is that Axl is obsessed with his online persona.
MNstories has a couplevideos of Mark Hosler of Negativland setting up his exhibit at Creative Electric in Minneapolis. Hosler has been hanging out in MSP for a few weeks now -- makes me miss home.
Excellent Daily Showsegment on Mini Kiss versus Tiny Kiss.
Remix David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
The Lloyd Dobler moment for a new generation, from The Office finale: Jim says "I'm in love with you." Response: "What are you doing?"
ONLINE
On the page listing the NYTimes.com blogs, I see they've given Stanley Fish an education blog called "Think Again," but it's barred in behind Times Select.
Back in Minneapolis, the new Ceasar Pelli library is opening, which could rival the Seattle Koohaas library. Alt-Text has some pics.
MUSIC
The new Gnarles Barkley video for "Crazy," from the album, St. Elsewhere, which comes out this week. It will be the best album of the summer. (See also: performing live on Top of the Pops.)
Syndey Pollack has made a documentary of Frank Gehry. Trailer.
The movie that almost got me sued has premiered in St. Paul. Back when the movie was being filmed, I published some exclusive photos of a sickly Lindsay Lohan from the set. She looks so much... less sickly now.
While recently packing my belongings to move across the country, I unearthed a box of wallet-sized high school photographs. I'm not actually sure if the rest of the country did this, but back in the Midwest we would all write little phrases on the back of these photos (similar to the yearbook phenom) and hand them around to our friends. Gathered below is a collection of actual inscriptions from every high school photo I still have:
"Even though it may not seem like it, I think your a real cool guy and good friend." -Kevin
"I'm glad I'm getting to know you better. You're fun to be with." -Diana
"Don't forget we're drinkin' J.D. at the graduation party." -Tom
"To a real loser with the ugly shades. Keep rockin' and breakin' curfew. You have a nice car. I had fun running with and against you. If you want to be backstabbed, just call." -Devin
"To a crazy guy who has a heap of shit for a car, if you call it that. Good luck in the future & hope you party more." -Tommy
"To a pretty cool guy that I have gotten to know a little better this year. Hopefully we can get out and party together some weekend. Take it e-z on the girls and stay out of trouble." -Steph
"To the biggest dirtbag I know who has nothing going for him except a severe case of the herpes and a tight-ass girlfriend who is a dyke. But I still hope we can be butt-buddies. Don't suck too much dick and take it EZ." -William
"You're such an original. You really changed over the summer; I feel that you did, anyway. I consider you a close friend of mine, even if you don't. May God Bless You." -Sandra
"To a funny guy in school. Stay away from Todd in the future and if I will stay away we'll be friends." -Kasey
"To one cool ass guy who knows how to party and get into Deep Shit. Good luck trying to get something off Mac." -Mark
"To a neat and very cool guy. We have had some good times. We can maybe get another Santa. We have to party more." -Danny
"To a real nut who I feel like killing sometimes. But a funny guy. People change, I have told you that. But I hope you don't change too much. Hope we can party together sometime." -Connie
"You are the oddest S.O.B. I know but it's cool I guess." -Troy
Finally, a follow-up to my very old Amazon list "College Friends Who Punched Me," I have created "My Year As..." in response to the spate of recent books in which people do something (strip, change genders, read the encyclopedia, etc.) for a year. Let me know what's missing from the list.
Do you remember Bill Paxton and Judge Reinhold being in the video to Pat Benatar's "Shadow of the Night"? And that it has a Nazi theme? And that it has Pat as a Dancer In The Dark-era Bjork-like character fantasizing in a Rosie the Riveter get-up? Is this really what the '80s were like?
Kerouac onThe Steve Allen Show, interviewed by William F. Buckley, and eulogized by Walter Cronkite. Is this really what the '60s were like?
SODA
I'm obsessed with Coke Blak in the same way I was obsessed with OK Soda.
Nearly a dozen years ago, Douglas Coupland published his third novel, Microserfs, at a moment where everyone knew the future was about to happen, but no one knew quite what it would look like.
After moving to Seattle a month ago to work on the campus depicted in the novel, I returned to the same book that many years ago intrigued this Midwestern twenty-something, to see how the world (and my perspective on it) has changed. I have several conclusions, which I'm aggregating for a longer analysis. In the mean time, I have gathered the notes that I scribbled in the margins of the book. Below is a mish-mash of observations about cities, companies, and Microserfs, then and now.
+ The basic plot arc of Microserfs is that an ensemble of 'softies quit their jobs and move to San Fran to create a new software start-up. They begin building something called Oop! (can this sound any more like present?), which actually is a pun off object-oriented programming, but is essentially a 3D modeling program which you can use to create pretty much anything. The idea is loosely inspired by Legos, but in the intervening decade nothing has been invented to compare it to -- until I recently saw Will Wright demo his new game, Spore.
+ Even though the inaccurate predictions are less numerable, they say more about the mid-'90s than the accurate ones.
+ The descriptions of Microsoft campus life -- right down to the soccer fields and hidden paths -- are still quite accurate. The detail that seems to have changed the most is the relationship of employees to Bill. He was apparently a Geek God in 1994, whereas now he's more of a beleaguered Yoda. It's good we skipped over the anti-trust days though.
+ There's a great observation early in the book about how Microsofties don't put bumper stickers on their cars. This is still startlingly true, and it gives campus a sort of post-political feel. Or at least as post-political as 20,000 Audis lined up in a cement parking garage can be.
+ Except for occasional baby pictures and markup boards, Microserfs don't decorate their offices. At all.
+ At the beginning of the book, Apple is at the top of the world -- the computer company that all geeks aspire to. By the end of the book, the boys from Cupertino are sliding into oblivion, rumored to be bought out by Samsung. How many times has Apple died and been resurrected?
+ Quick quiz: what was the subtitle of Coupland's first novel, Generation X? Bzzt. "Tales for an Accelerated Culture." So much for slackers.
+ Off-topic: Has anyone else noticed that Ginsberg's "Howl" needs an update? I'll take a shot at it: "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by Aeron chairs, tattooed hyper fresh, dragging themselves though Ikea on Sundays looking for an angry futon." Perhaps this is where a Wiki could help. Wiki Howl!
+ It seems unfathomable now, but this book was published before Windows 95 even came out.
+ Know what else people forget about this book? It's written in diary form. And you know what else? Less than a third of it happens in Seattle -- the rest occurs in Silicon Valley, except for the second-to-last chapter which is in Vegas (at CES).
+Microserfs places Seattle in opposition to San Francisco. While there is still a tension between the Emerald City and Silicon Valley, Seattle now posits itself in relationship to Los Angeles.
+ Since moving here from Minneapolis, I constantly find myself appending rows to a grid that I've drawn in my mind with two simple columns: Minneapolis | Seattle. When I decide which city has "won" a particular feature, checkmarks get added to new rows of the mental grid. Traffic, for instance, of course gets a Minneapolis check, while food goes to Seattle. Daily papers, Minneapolis; weekly papers, Seattle; malls, Minneapolis; record stores, Seattle; pizza, Minneapolis. I already have hundreds of rows in my micro-niche grid. By the way, Seattle's Ikea totally sucks.
+ I am convinced this book could not exist today -- not in its current form, as fiction. Our first-person culture would undoubtedly force it into a memoir. Or perhaps Scoble is the modern equivalent. Microserfs even hints at its historical future by being structured like a journal. We all speculate about how blogging is changing journalism, but one should ask if memoirs are doing the same thing to fiction, especially in light of Freygate. Exploring this, you see, is partially why I moved to Seattle, and I hope to devote more thinking in this space. To be continued...
Traffic is to Seattle as weather is to Minneapolis. People love to talk about hating it, but they're all resigned to its existence. Alright, here are a few links:
MEDIA
So I'm listening to last week's On The Media via podcast, and I hear Bob Garfield start swearing at an FCC official. It's both really funny and really good. But I'm thinking, "This can't possibly have aired. This must just be on the podcast." But no, it turns out that it actually was broadcast. There appears to be no fall-out yet, but I can't wait until next week's reax pieces, which seem inevitable.
I have much to talk about, but first here are some updates from various Friends of Fimoculous:
Tapes 'N Tapes were on last week's Best Week Ever. After taking SXSW by storm (and landing an 8.3 on Pitchfork), last night they played the last show on this tour here in Seattle. They were awesome.
Michaelangelo Matos has exited his perch as the music critic at the Seattle Weekly to join the up-and-coming eMusic. For his final goodbye, he gives a farewell mixed tape to Seattle.
Whoa, did you know Andy Milonakis is 30 years old? According to The Times, he has a growth hormone condition. He's the Gary Coleman of our times!
In addition to VH1's Web Junk 20 and Bravo's Viral Videos, other upcoming projects include a show on USA based upon eBaum's World and a show on NBC called The Net With Carson Daly. In the future, everyone will create a viral video.
Which is more peculiar -- that Terry Gross' interview with J.T. LeRoy is online without any notation of recent events, or that J.T. LeRoy sounds so obviously like a chick in the interview?
Enter the ISBN number of a book into BarnesAndNoble.com and get a quote for how much they will buy it for. Cool.
I've been busy alphabetizing my CDs and running to Ikea for book shelves, so somewhere along the way I missed that Malcolm Gladwell started a blog.
Although I'm morally obligated to read every book even remotely related to the internet (especially if it has something to do with blogging), I haven't decided whether to dive into Kos' Crashing The Gate. The decent NYTBR review includes the first chapter, so maybe that's a good starting point.
FILM
[Insert Snakes on a Plane link here.]
Well, at least William Gibson likedV is for Vendetta.
One of the many things I like about Wired is that it truly is a magazine. That is, for all the talk about the death of print, Wired stories are the best example of the perfection of a medium that doesn't easily translate into other mediums. You can, for instance, read most of Will Wright's game issue online, but it's not nearly the experience that the magazine is. (See also: Wright doing a walk-through of Spore.)
Every side-street around Microsoft campus seems to have one of those create-a-home-meal shops, so I'm not surprised to learn that Seattle is home to one of the biggest chains. From the NYT story: "The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction." (Old MNspeak thread on the MSP-based versions.)
I'm moving to Seattle in a few weeks and can't decide whether to change my phone number -- from a 612 area code to a 206 area code. NYT Styles tells me this is the existential crisis of our times, or something like that.
Similarly, there's also this little trend piece about girls taking pictures of themselves. I've asked girlfriends about this peculiar obsession, and they all claim that it's somehow liberating.
Did anyone else think that the scene in last week's Lost in which Hurley was caught with a stash of food was simply a ploy to explain that he wasn't losing weight on the island? Well, according to a Maxim interview, he has lost 30 pounds.
Could this be my first link to a William Safire column? Let's just assume so: Blargon, which looks at blog jargon. Some people are already looking for errors.
Good interview with The Smoking Gun regarding the Frey scandal.
FOOD
The real reason that people like a New York Times food critic should have a blog is so that they can occasionally write about Hooter's.
City Pages this week has interviews with Craig Newmark and... ME! It reads pretty nerdy, but it sprawled into an interesting citizen journalism conversation on MNspeak.
USA Todaygives props to our Olympics videoplayer strategy, but points to a future in which everything will likely be online. (This topic is huge, and maybe I'll write about it after the Olympics.)
Fox Reality is a new entire channel dedicated to reality tv. Reality Remix is a show -- staring Kennedy! -- that is now completely available online.
FILM
When did this sneak up us? Basic Instinct 2, starring MILF-ish Sharon Stone. Who knows, it could even be okay (I actually love the campiness of the first). No Michael Douglas though.
I've ditched my Netflix account because I had stopped using it (too much TiVo, too much DVD buying), but now I see they are testing a $5/month plan, which could bring me back.
DRUNKS
Nerve.com: Last Night on Earth, a photo-essay inspired by the wrtings of Bukowski.
MUSIC
Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the New Yorker. Would you like to see the video for the first single? Okay.
Did you skip the Olympics to see the last two hours of Arrested Development? Thank you, TiVo. (The show finished fifth in ratings for the night -- after the Olympics, Dancing with the Stars, WWE's Friday Night Smackdown, and a Ghost Whisperer re-run. Go America!)
It was pretty good, but it's also a mystery why the Pamela Anderson roast is being released on DVD.
TiVo is holding a Wishlist Mixer in San Fran. Dammit, I'm moving to the wrong city.
The editor of Modern Love give his stake on the state of love in contemporary America. I seem to disagree with half of it.
Mike Figgis made a short film, Tied up at the Office [not safe for the office], for lingerie peddlers Agent Provocateur. I get it as much as I got Demon Lover.
I don't care what you say, these last few Madonna vids have been good. Her new video for "Sorry" has more street dancing, this tine looking like crumping-meets-Barbarella-meets-Mad-Max.
Look at all this: 1) NBC is producing an internet-only reality tv show called Star Tomorrow. 2) Bravo will launch a site, OutZone.tv, with original gay programming. 3) AOL and Mark Burnett are working on an internet reality tv show called Gold Rush. 4) NBC is greenlightingCarson's Cyberhood, a showcase of homemade videos. 5) Amazon is starting an original talk show hosted by Bill Maher called Amazon Fishbowl. All of these online-only -- no broadcast.
Occasionally funny: MySpace: The Movie. "Why am I not in your top eight?"
Or how about fake trailers? Tarantino and Rodriguez have crazy ideas.
What was the weirdest part of the Super Bowl? Noticing during the Mission Impossible III trailer that Philip Seymour Hoffman is the main villain in the movie. Here's a PSH interview with David Remnick.
SPORTS
Klosterman's ESPN.com Super Bowl blog was quite fun, right? He talks about blogging here.
MEDIA
The editor of the SF Bay Guardianthinks that Craig Newmark isn't the hero you think he is. Anil responds.
TV
Time's tv critic, James Poniewozik, has a blog: Tuned In.
FAKE NEWS
A new journal for cross-disciplinary studies in plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification: Plagiary. [via NYTstory.]
Next time. Next time I'll live blog Frey on Oprah too. Kick it:
PERSONAL
Hey, I sold my community website, MNspeak.com. Now if I could only sell this dumb thing...
ROCKETBOOM
Psst, Amanda is going to be on this Thursday's episode of CSI.
Andrew has decided to auction off his first Rocketboom advertising on eBay.
ONLINE
So I had been away from the blogging world for a few weeks and I come back to see embedded video everywhere via You Tube. Looks like this could quickly become what Google Video and Current.TV and Brightcove (and several others) wanted to be overnight.
Wow, someone did the research that I've been dying to know: how much is a viewer in advertising revenue versus download revenue? The answer: $.57 for advertising to $1.44 for download (with a ton of caveats applied).
Media pundits are flopping around like suffocating carp over Soderbergh's new movie, Bubble (trailer), which will be released on DVD (now available for pre-order on Amazon) just a few days after it comes out in theaters.
From last month, a Rolling Stone profile of the guy who created NowThatsFuckedUp.com, which is extremely fucked up -- among other things, the site contains gruesome unedited photos of people killed in Iraq.
Anyone else notice that nearly all the skits on this weekend's SNL contained musical numbers, including the intro monologue by Scarlett Johanson? Lazy Sunday, what have you wrought?
Did you catch the first episode of Web Junk 20, the new show created by Viacom for VH1 after purchasing iFilm (VH1 link | iFIlm link). Why does it suck so much?
Think your a hot shot in forecasting the big events in 2006 culture? Take the USA Today quiz to make your predictions.
BOOKS
I've had several conversations with people who so greatly misinterpreted Gladwell's Blink that it seemed they never read it, but I never realized someone could write a whole book about his misinterpretation: Think.
Apologies for the navel-gazing nature of this post, but a lot has happened in my life lately, and since this is ostensibly a personal blog (hi Mom!), here are some notes on recent personal events:
+ At work, we recently launched this new little site: NBCOlympics.com. The winter games are in Torino, Italy in February.
+ Friends, family, and pretty much all of Minneapolis already knows this, but I've never officially announced it to the estranged readers of Fimoculous: After the Olympics, I will be moving to Seattle, where I took a new job at MSNBC.com. As you probably know, MSNBC.com is co-owned by NBC and Microsoft, so I'll be working on the Microsoft campus in a fun new capacity. I'll have more to say about it later, but in the meantime... Seattle, holla fo' me, yo.
+ I was hoping to make an exciting announcement on the future of MNspeak (my local citizen journalism site) by now, but we're still sorting that out. Soon....
+ I have an essay in the new book Digital Think from the New Media Institute.
+ Random quote in a Pioneer Press story about the effect blogging will have on the '06 political season: "I'm not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."
That's all for now. My '06 resolution: Make Fimoculous cool again.
Although I'll continue to add lists as they come in, it looks like List of Lists: 2005 is winding down. As a final punctuating coda to the year, here are my Top 20 Lists of 2005:
Okay, it wasn't a great year, but at least you didn't hear anyone use the phrase "year of the blog" anymore. So just thank your lucky stars the whole friggin world didn't blow up, and prepare yourself for next year when it undoubtedly will.
And with that shot of optimism, I present my idiosyncratic mix of Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture.
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo. Since I obviously should be drawn and quartered for last year's prediction that Apple would buy TiVo, I might as well double-down on my bet.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder. C'mon, would you?
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv," while the rest of us have no idea what network or time the shows are even on because our TiVo neglects to tell us.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development. And then Showtime will announce a deal with iTunes in which the show becomes the first of its kind to have more viewers watching via portable player than on tv.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN. That's Viacom-owned UPN, peeps. You know, CBS. So get ready for the Katie and Amanda show in '07.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile. No, for real this time! The big change will be that carriers open up the deck to external providers. Why? Because Google releases the killer mobile apps that everyone needs. Seriously!
13)Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions. Okay, that's vague, but I predict no less than three essays from Marketwatch.com about the failure of the split.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR. That one's a no-brainer, but the big deal here is that iTunes video downloads will skyrocket. No wait, that's a no-brainer too. Fine, I predict...
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2. Oh hell, another no-brainer.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement. Or at least I hope so, because right now it's like watching your favorite band from the '80s do a reunion show.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis -- this time, in areas that actually make sense.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return. Where the hell did they go, anyway? Some upcoming indie film director will cast them in a "quirky New York film" with Parker Posey playing their mom. Gen-Xers suddenly realize they're the next Baby Boomers.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base, sparking over-use of the word "mashup" by Slashdot nerds.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
27) FBC -- Fox Business Channel -- will launch. Pundits describe it as "more fun" than CNBC.
28) Ten major cities will release city-wide WiFi.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album. It will be Entertainment Weekly's worst album of the year for 2006.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
Note: I have zero insider knowledge on any of these predictions. And except for the last one, I actually believe them all, if only metaphorically in some cases.
The teaser on the print edition of this NYT story was "Pamela Rogers Turner was 28; her lover, or victim, 13. Discuss." I've had about a dozen conversations recently about these cases.
So best. Amazon has put up a page for GNR's Chinese Democracy -- check out the release date. It seems optimistic that Axl will be dead by then. (Update: drat, it's already been removed. For those who missed it, the release date was listed as December 31, 2025.)
Someone did a parody of Jakob Nielsen's infamous 2000 column about Flash1996 column about frames and pretty much just supplanted "Ajax" for "Flash" "Frames" -- even the Slashdotters got tricked for a bit.
iTunes now sells more music than Tower Records, Sam Goody, and Borders (but it's still behind Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Amazon, etc.).
Who's gonna play Janis Joplin in that new biopic? Pink!
Here's a clip of Kanye on BET in which he talks about his Bush-hates-black-people remarks, plays a strange game of name-that-historical-quote, and introduces his new video for "Heard 'Em Say."
TV
Remember the guy who won a bjillion dollars on Press Your Luck? Here's the video from the episode.
1)The Boondocks is much better than you've heard. Some dude on NPR said he didn't like the show, but wondered aloud whether it was because he was a politically correct white guy. Word.
2) No fibbing, Breaking Bonaduce has been one of the most amazing reality tv shows of all time. The night in which Danny goes ballistic and the producers are all scattering around, dropping their cameras, and trying to prevent him from killing himself or others -- it's that Man Bites Dog moment you wished would happen on every show. The fourth wall has fallen.
3) Talking about Lost is better than watching Lost.
4)Prison Break is less believable than Harry Potter, but ya gotta love these kinds of confined structural puzzles. Marti Noxon of Buffy fame is a producer on the show, and I credit her with every harrowingly claustrophobic moment.
5) Did you watch the short movie that the kids on the Real World created at SXSW? It sucked so hard that they only put it on the internet.
6) There was the briefest moment in the last episode of The Girls Next Door where the lead hen quit playing her role and blurted out something about being a clone who was probably too smart for Hef's taste. Then she cocked her Stepford head back into place, and with a quick giggle was a blonde bimbo again. Those two seconds have made the show the most important reality tv show of the year. It is the definition of simulacra.
7) Because America isn't as classist as Britain, The Office isn't quite as good here in the States.
9) Did you see that episode of Veronica Mars where Joss Whedon and the lesbian chick from America's Next Top Model guest starred as coworkers in a car rental shop? More of that, please.
10)Invasion is still on the TiVo sked -- just barely. At any second it could take a red state turn, and it's bye-bye baby squid martians.
11) Though it took a while to get used to, shows like Politically Incorrect and The Daily Show have made us accustomed to this kind of joke interview where media celebs are asked a mix of funny and serious questions. The Colbert Report has extended that idea into some sort of hyperreal fantasy of what talk shows are like in another dimension. Let's get this straight: Colbert interviews serious people in character -- and not only that, but pretending to be a real character from another show (Bill O'Reilly). Yes, we live in an era in which no one finds anything odd in what is effectively Space Ghost: Coast To Coast for the Charlie Rose set. Can he possibly do this 200 times per year? I hope so.
12) When did Letterman stop mattering? And why can't Conan stop that humility shtick? And can we possibly say that Jimmy Kimmel is the best thing on late night network tv? Is there any chance Chappelle comes home and saves us?
13) I told you that the new Daily Show set would eventually grow on you.
For those of you who read this site via RSS, I've launched the 2005 List of Lists page. (Previously: 2004 | 2003 | 2001.) As usual, email me if I'm missing something.
DATING
Is it true that Match.com had its employees go on bogus dates just to keep people subscribed to the service? And do they post faux-profiles that present flirtatious intent? Yes, according to a lawsuit...
GalleyCat has an excellent first-hand account of last week's New York Public Library debate between Google and publishers groups. (Also in NYT.)
I didn't even realize that NYT gave Marjane Satrapi (the author of Persepolis) a blog which apparently illustrates her experience growing up in Iran. I say "apparently" because it's behind Time Select.
MUSIC
The only good thing about reissues is getting to read contemporary rock critics on classics. Pitchfork, somewhat surprisingly, rolls out a 10.0 for Springsteen's Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition.
Biz Week's interview with MTV's Jason Hirschhorn covers a lot of interesting ground, including Comedy Central's Motherload, MTV's Overdrive, and iFilm.
MEDIA
NY Mag's long look at Mike Lacey (New Times' exec editor) and the history of the Village Voice is the best piece so far on this whole alt-weekly skirmish.
ONLINE
WaPo does a conspiratorial Google rant, but it's also the first mention of Google's dream to make your DNA searchable. You read that right: "Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as 'Googling Your Genes'."
While being interviewed the other day, someone asked me about my political affiliations. After stammering for a bit, I said, "Do you know the phrase 'South Park Republican'? I suppose I'm a 'Daily Show Democrat'." You heard it here first.
TV
Metacritic.com (which you might remember was recently purchased by CNet) has added tv reviews. So far, Prison Break has been my favorite show of the year, while critics haveEverybody Hates Chris as the best.
So you're watching Lost, right? At first all this talk about the curse of The X-Files / Twin Peaks seemed a worthwhile concern, but season two has been great so far. So "4 8 15 16 23 42," right? The site 4815162342.com has been the best for gossip and theories, including one that concludes that the numbers are GPS coordinates. Damn, that's so... post-Google.
ONLINE
Back when my pal Andy launched Upcoming.org, I asked him what he'd do with all that money when Google bought him out. I was only wrong about one thing. Congrats, man.
Biz Weekprofiles Google hottie Marissa Mayer but doesn't mention that she's rumored to be Larry Page's girlfriend (which is revealed in a footnote of Battelle's The Search, which I'm just finishing up).
Gawker opened up to invite-only comments. I'll give you one if you sneak me into a Kate Moss bathroom party.
SaveMyAss.com: "a personal assistant that keeps your girlfriend or wife happy by sending her flowers on your behalf, on a regular but semi-random basis." Created by James Hong, a HOTorNOT founder.
The Million Dollar Homepage is cruising along. I can't decide which I hate more: the idea, or that I didn't come up with the idea.
This happened a while ago, but I'm finally getting around to reading CBSnews.com's new blog, Public Eye, which is supposed to bring transparency to CBS News. Oh, the magic of blogs.
MUSIC
Golden Fiddle reports that the new Gang of Four CD comes with an actual $1 bill inside. Ya gotta love that Marxist marketing.
Listen to a stream of Metric's new album, Live It Out, which comes out in a couple weeks. Or watch the video to the first single, "Monster Hospital." I've been hoping that Metric breaks through for a long time, and this might finally be that moment.
A lot of people are talking about Yahoo's recent forays into content, including hiring Kevin Sites (who some people know as an intrepid Iraq blogger, but I know as the guy who beat me for the Wired Rave Award -- I kid). Yahoo has already launched a promotional page, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, which hints at some of what he will be doing.
Google Earth used to discover Roman ruins. Up next: WMDs in Iraq.
MUSIC
It took a full month for the New York Times to retaliate Salon's heavy-metal-is-smarter-than-you-think feature with their own heavy-metal-is-smarter-than-you-think feature.
Please, someone else read the NYT Magcover story on Bono and tell me if it's worth it, cuz it's just going to lay untouched by my bed for a week otherwise.
PRODUCTS
A while ago, The Onion did a parody of the Gillette vs. Schick battle over blades on the razor. Then it became real.
The new Danny Bonaduce show coming to VH1 in September sounds like the best celeb reality tv breakdown ever. Although the details about binge drinking, vicodin, and steroids might be the most interesting to some, I'm most enamored with the story about how he married his wife, the co-star of the show: drunk, on their first date, because she wouldn't have sex with him unless they were married. Awesome.
The NYT Magcover story on Les Moonves is okay, but for its length, it left out several things, such as his tepid public relationship with Letterman (those are the only good episodes Letterman does anymore) and any crafting of how splitting up Viacom will affect CBS. For instance, look at something like Rock Star: INXS, which started on VH1 but eventually migrated over to CBS -- that kind of, er, synergy won't happen in a split-Viacom world.
If you still somehow don't have a TiVo, just follow Haughey's instructions on how to get paid to own one.
EW's Fall TV Preview is out. Unlike last year (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Veronica Mars), nothing looks great, except for maybe Martha Stewart's Apprentice.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Waxy.org says exactly what I think about the state of music videos online (and I've even thought about starting a business around this gripe). With Feist videos!
When News Corp announced it was buying MySpace for $580 million, there was some speculation that Murdoch would use the site as a backdoor to competing with Viacom's MTV. News Corp execs shrugged this off, saying they were just interested in audience, not in changing MySpace. Then comes NYT Styles (yes! NYT Styles!), which throws MySpace as its lead story this week, with a final line quoting co-founder Tom Anderson (the guy who is friends with everyone who joins MySpace by default): "It's kind of like, who cares about MTV anymore?" Also revealed: MySpace will be creating a new record label, which will work under a major label's supervision. So with one purchase, Murdoch managed to sneak in a way to compete in three industries (internet, cable tv, and music).
For the second time this summer, business coverage of MTV lands on the front page of NYT Sunday Arts. This time, it's basically a look at MTV's "multi-plat-fornication" efforts disguised as a profile of the network's president, Van Toffler. The focus is on MTV Overdrive, which I predicted a while back would quickly disappear, but last night's VMAs were an attempt to prove the "broadband video channel" (blech) is a real competitor. I suppose this is one prediction I wouldn't mind being wrong about.
TV
Iraq has adopted Western-style reality tv in many forms, including Materials and Labor (basically Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) and Iraq Star (basically American Idol).
The lead review in this week's NYTBR is Jay McInerney. He reviews a new novel that I've never heard of, but it's an interesting essay on first novels and the bildungsroman.
I don't know if these are new, but I recently found links to some funny Ze Frank featurettes (i.e., commercials) on my Amazon wishlist: "History" and "Use".
Score one for our pals at Rocketboom who got on CBS the other night. Chuck has the video.
Joss Whedon lovesVeronica Mars too. See, I told you.
Engadget has pics of TiVo's upcoming download service. Looks like the first partner will be IFC, which is awesome because they happen to not be part of my Time-Warner cable package.
I've been talking a lot again about trying to start a restaurant. I'm rather enamored by this idea to mix tv and dining, although it would play horribly in Minneapolis, which has the lowest tv-viewing rates per capita in the nation.
The Strangers with Candy movie appears to be no more, which is odd because Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris are pretty much at the top of their game right now.
MUSIC
Bjork's soundtrack to Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 comes out Aug. 23. There's also an import.
So Microsoft is back in the content game? Color me confused! Filter is apparently a blog network. After poking around at them for a bit, I can't even get into how horribly executed they are.
And I have no comment on that thing in Gawker, Current.TV, or Robert Novak.
Quirk ensemble indie film or trite remake of the genre, you decide.
An excellent list of good upcoming movies. (New ones by David Lynch, LaBute, Aronofsky, Tarantino, Linklater, etc.) Looks like 2006 will be a good year for film.
Big news! Because I really didn't have enough to do, I launched a t-shirt line on my local (Twin Cities) site. The options are mostly -- but not exclusively -- local, but you'd be surprised how many snarky t-shirt buyers we have. In addition to plugs in both localdailies, the New York Timeseven mentions one of our t-shirts today in a profile of the movie version of our little home-grown radio franchise. To quote: "The movie [A Prairie Home Companion] is being shot digitally, so the Altman crew has managed to feather itself into the old theater with a minimum of impact. And because it is a local boy's project, the locals have taken to the filming with calm and equanimity -- give or take a 'Prairie Ho Companion' shirt -- even though Major Hollywood Stars are in downtown St. Paul, a little city that takes pride, not offense, in its general reputation for sleepiness." That tee -- "A Prairie Ho Companion" -- is our best seller, so buy now before they run out.
Alright hipsters, now's your chance to wrangle with your midwestern nightmare. I will be in New York City very soon -- July 15-19. Each day already has an event attached to it (HiFi on Friday, Siren Music Festival on Saturday, Eyebeam on Sunday, Chuck's book launch party on Monday), but if you drop me an email, we can probably find a place to meetup.
TV
So I'm watching the Daily Show yesterday and I'm instantly concentrating on the new set. I understand what they're trying to do -- move away from being a night time talk show set (think Johnny Carson) and be more of a conversation set (think Charlie Rose). That part doesn't bother me. But the graphics are just weird. Dana Stevens at Slate was freaked out.
Who cares that Paris and Nicole aren't on speaking terms -- they're still being forced to do a tv show together.
Today I downgraded my Netflix account to the two-movies-at-a-time option because I was using my three-movies option enough. But now, HackingNetflix discovers that Netflix' download service may be coming soon, which makes me wonder what the pricing would be.
I haven't watched much yet, but I'm immediately excited by some new machinima: This Spartan Life, which is a live talk show using the Halo engine. Future of the Book has a profile.
The trailer for Wedding Crashers lets up you upload a picture of yourself and become one of the characters. It's gimmicky, but it also has beginnings of a good idea.
Trailer to Shopgirl, based on a Steve Martin novella, also starring Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman. Funny, I didn't think of Lost in Translation until the font for the titles appeared.
Somehow Newsweek got ahold of the Cooper/Rove emails, and Isikoff says that Rove was the source but probably didn't knowingly reveal Plame's name. Dude, I've tried that excuse so many times, and she's never bought it....
On The Media has a decent piece (audio) starring Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's coverage of the London bombing.
The New York Observer redesigned their website, which needed it very badly.
ROOFTOPS
You know already these two things about me: 1) I hate New Yorkers who talk about their stupid rooftop parties (I even said so on Rocketboom), and 2) the Sunday NYT Styles section makes me reach for the revolver. Put those together and you get The High Life. That sound you hear is a growl.
Amazon.com is 10 years old. USA Today did an interview with Bezos, and NYT gave him a (mildly negative) full-length profile.
TV
Hooking Up, which is sort of reality-tv-meets-documentary look at online dating, premieres this Thursday on ABC. NYT has a quick interview with the director.
What did I do over the long weekend? I saw both War of the World and Star Wars: Episode Three, so that you don't have to. But mostly I waited for the "Karl Rove is the Valerie Plame leak" plot to develop -- but it hasn't even made it onto NYT yet. Please God, let it be Rove.
BLOGS
Someone should write a crazy-murderer-speech-algorithm that catches things like this blog, which was written by Joseph Duncan, who's being held for murder in Idaho. I have a ton more links over at MNspeak.
Reading NYT's piece on writers who are using blogs to help write books, it's immediately glaring how many of these books are exactly what my friends and I are reading right now (including Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You) and are looking forward to reading (including David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, and John Battelle's The Search.
In a wait rivaling Chinese Democracy, the release of the movie Prozac Nation is finally upon us today -- but it went straight to DVD.
MEDIA
Wired has most of its Remix issue online. It's my favorite issue in many months.
NYTreports on Romenesko's salary, a cool $169K/year.
MUSIC
NME has a bit about Franz Ferdinand's new album, due in September. And another bit about The Darkness' new album, due in October.
127 is a Iranian band that has been trying to play in the U.S. since at least SXSW, but hasn't gotten in yet. And they don't sound bad. Here's one profile from the Chi Trib about them.
Missy Elliot's new album, The Cookbook, comes out today.
Am I a blog casualty? Heck no, I've just been busy over at MNspeak. You have to understand, we have Lindsay Lohan in town right now, and the whole state is a-twitter.
TV
Did you watch the first episode of Stella on Comedy Central? The promotion machine has been gigantic (I heard that somewhere here in Minneapolis they were giving away free Stella Artois to promote the show). Here's Slate.com's view. My thoughts: I didn't laugh once. Sorry guys, it's not even as funny as The Office remake.
Lately, I spend several hours a day reading what other dot-com media companies are doing (today, I read at least a dozen different articles on Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 ). It takes something like this NYT story to remind me of all the stuff that's happened in the last couple weeks -- and since that article yesterday there has been updates to Google Print, Yahoo's Map API, Amazon's A9, etc., etc. It's a crazy time.
I completely missed this... did everyone know that the new iTunes supports videoblogs too? Rocketboom on my iTunes, delish. And since you can charge for feeds.... could this be intro to micropayments?
The first couple months of college sucked. I was a pre-med student at a boring midwest state school who hung out with other boring pre-med kids from the midwest. It was like high school, except everyone wanted to be valedictorian. The best thing I could say about my doctor-to-be friends was that they were as exciting as organic chemistry.
One day, I accidentally walked into a dorm room where a couple slacker kids were on the floor playing Nintendo. Not even bothering to notice what game they were playing, I immediately focused on the poster hanging on the wall. It was a standard-issue Michael Jordan dunk shot -- the kind of poster that has no purpose other than to hang in a dorm room. Except the ingenious Nintendo players had taken a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, cut a 3 x 3 hole in the center, taped it over the poster so that the hole highlighted one player in the fuzzy background on the bench beneath Jordan's splayed legs, and scribbled "Detlef Schrempf" on the poster.
I instantly knew that these guys were going to be my friends.
And now, let's have Chuck give his version:
I met My Nemesis in November 1990. I walked into somebody's dorm room to play Nintendo, and he was sitting on the bed, holding an acoustic guitar on which he could play only one note -- the opening note of Tesla's "Love Song." He was wearing a denim jacket, and he had used a black Magic Marker to draw the symbol for anarchy on the back. It was just about the silliest thing I had ever seen. We immediately became friends.
The first story is how I remember meeting Chuck Klosterman; the second is how he tells it in his new book, Killing Yourself To Live, which officially comes out today.
I'm not here to tell you Chuck is lying about how we met. For his last book, I did a point-by-point response to what he wrote about us, and he almost seems to concede fuzzy historical remembrances this time around by subtitling the book "85% of a True Story." Actually, I might be completely wrong about what really happened. In fact, "what really happened" is probably a useless concept when discussing drunken Nintendo battles.
(But just for the record, let's get a parenthetical in here. I am resisting the temptation to tell you the 15 percent that is inaccurate in his telling of our times together -- which you can hear for yourself in this MP3 of him reading from that chapter. But again, that's not what I'm here to talk about, because, for the most part, it's "true" (especially when you put it in quotes), and whatever isn't true is better this way anyway.)
Here's where I should tell you about the book. KYTL is basically a travelogue disguised as a memoir. First devised as an article for Spin, the ostensible narrative is Chuck travelling around America and visiting the places that rock stars died -- but that's all subterfuge for reflecting on various relationships and friendships from the past (and that's all subterfuge for reflecting on life and death). When he comes to Minneapolis (in theory, to visit the place Bobby Stinson died), the book recounts how a group of music critics (plus me, "someone who probably should have been a music critic") go to the Kitty Cat Klub, drink too much, argue way too much, go back to my house, drink more, climb on the roof, and nearly kill ourselves. And yeah, there's some stuff about the fist-fights we had in college.
Now that's out of the way, so let's get back to what I wanted to say. Look at the two different stories at the top of this page -- now ask yourself this: Which story is better? In college, this was the kind of thing that Chuck and I would have argued about for a week -- not just whose story is better, but what percentage of other people would think each is better, and who told the story most economically, and which story was more historically true, and if historical accuracy even matters, and who would play the parts in the movie of this story, and what Kant thought "better" actually meant, and so on. It was completely nuts.
But it was also probably the most important time of my life. Even though there were several occasions where I literally wanted to strangle him, nowadays my emotions about Chuck are pretty simple: I think he's funny, and he only occasionally pisses me off. As for "what really happened," it's all a blur, some of it intentionally so. But I now know this: I learned more about friendship from him than anyone else in my life.
Little Lost Robot likes my "Send To Proof" button!
Whenever someone uses the word juvenile to describe some piece of cultural junk, I immediately want it. That said, I've never really understood the appeal of NewsBreakers.org, the pranksters behind the tv live-shot media stunts. However, NYTchooses to stack them next to Howard Stern and the Merry Pranksters. I guess if there were more of a point to what they do (like, say, The Guerilla Girls), I might be more sympathetic. Then again, saying that these pranks lack a point is, well, missing the point. I guess.
In college, Lawrence, Kan. was synonymous with William Burroughs (for me, anyway). Now, in my new media work world, it's forever associated with online news innovation. NYT looks at what The Lawrence Journal-World is in The Newspaper of the Future.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Billy Corgan has taken out an advert (pdf) to reunite Smashing Pumpkins on the very day that his new solo album came out. Billy, why didn't you just become a contestant on Rock Star?
This is sorta interesting... to synch up with the release of the Bewitched movie, the first season of the tv show has been released in both color and black and white.
I have been ignoring the debate about whether Google is a media company (such absolutist categorical thinking -- similar to "are bloggers journalists?" -- bores me), but here's NYT mentioning it in their "What's Online" column, which is clearly struggling at this point.
Have you seen the essay question that has been added to the SATs? Being a kid today sucks: "A sense of happiness and fulfillment, not personal gain, is the best motivation and reward for one's achievements. Expecting a reward of wealth or recognition for achieving a goal can lead to disappointment and frustration. If we want to be happy in what we do in life, we should not seek achievement for the sake of winning wealth and fame. The personal satisfaction of a job well done is its own reward."
FILM
Did you hear that Johnny Depp tries to act like Michael Jackson all the way through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Seems to be true: a new trailer.
In Spin, Chuck dissects music genres. "IDM: This is an acronym for 'Intelligent Dance Music.' Really. No, really. I'm serious. This is what they call it. Really."
For unexplainable reasons, the Lost Remote thread about Lost (the tv show) goes ape shit with comments. Also, there are two viral websites related to the show: Oceanic Airlines (the airline in the show) and Drive Shaft (Charlie's band).
It's weird how I completely forgot that FuckedCompany.com (who were sorta important at one time) existed. The L.A. Times has a profile of its creator, who has a new dot-com venture.
It should be that time of the week to roll out the Times Styles section and ridicule the cover story. Except this week, the story happens to be something that I've been saying for a while: the joke is dead. There was a time when people told jokes all the time at parties, but now everything is situational humor and nuanced wit. I will even occasionally tell jokes at parties, wait for people not to laugh, and then launch my shtick about the death of the joke. Yeah, that's right, I use the concept of jokes to set up idea humor. So anyway, NYT Styles, I applaud you for not being one big joke again this week.
Richard Linklater to direct movie version of Fast Food Nation (that isn't Supersize Me).
New documentary on the history of women's wrestling: Lipstick & Dynamite trailer. (This would have been the perfect opportunity to finally have a female voice do the trailer.)
What would it look like if the Times started to blog? Like this. Not bad, really.
The trailer to David La Chapelle's Rize is finally out. If you've forgotten, this is the documentary about Krumping, which is basically clowns meet hip-hop.
NSFW
What's up with the recent trend of R-rated music videos? Here's one Louis XIV did with a few Suicide Girls.
Get paid to watch (and write about) The Daily Show.
If you missed it, here's the hilarious Daily Showspot about cable news and blogs. The "Inside The Blogs" show on CNN is a favorite laughing point for me at work every day.
Today's the big day: the season finale of Veronica Mars. Here's a new interview with the creator, Rob Thomas, which contains a question about the DVD release.
Some video involving Paris Hilton and Fat Boy Slim. I'm told this is a viral video to promote the release of Fat Boy Slim's new video. Which is the most hyper-real thing I've heard this month.
Apparently because they haven't put Gawker on the Business page yet (next up: Travel?), NYTchats up the Gawker gang. What's the scoop? Blogs are over-hyped. Yeah, tell that to Calacanis, who is being stalked.
Since there's no such thing as linking to an Esquire column, I'll point to Stereogum's large excerpt of Chuck's 21 CDs From the Past 3 Years. I think several of these are actually inspired by real people, and #10 is very likely me: "The Thrills, So Much for the City (2003): You will like this album if your apartment is actually a bar." And #1 couldn't be more perfect: "1. The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me (2004): You will like this album if you used to like AC/DC but now you just read a lot."
A new Chuck Palahniuk book, Haunted, is out today.
INTERACTIVE SHOES
Nike has a new towering presence in Times Square -- 22-story digital screen that you can control by calling a phone number build a personalized pair of shoes. A friend sent a picture.
Many of you have written to ask why I haven't said a word about Tina Fey's baby announcement. Yes, okay, I am a little upset that she didn't tell me first. Now that the humiliation is out there, let's check in with the scary & sexy nerds known as the blogosphere:
INTERNET/SEX
Nerve.com does Sex Advice From Bloggers. They never asked, but my answer to "What's the best way to get a blogger to go home with you?" would have been "tell him he looks hotter in real life than in that weird picture on the blog."
In Wired News, Regina Lynn take a look at HighJoy, a melding of dating, chat, and teledildonics.
Amazon.com is trying to clean up the way they look -- no more infinite tabs.
MEDIA
File under: New York Post is doomed. Google is developing an algorithm for determining quality in news.
Unless you're in the creepy parts of the blogosphere, you don't see people linking to The Nation much anymore. But there's a decent story on the challenges that Al Gore's new network, Current, faces.
TV
Did anyone see the last episode of Wonder Showzen? The theme was patience, and until half-way through the show, the joke was that everything was going to be drawn out to stupidity. It was as funny as tedious gets. Then the second half of the show was the entire first half of the show played in reverse. There hasn't been anything this weird on tv since Andy Kaufman.
Over on MNspeak, we've got news about the only two world-famous Minnesota Jews: Tom Friedman and Al Franken. (I know, I know, Dylan is sometimes Jewish too. But he doesn't write or call home anymore.)
Here I was talking about the Steven Johnson and Tom Friedman excerpts in magazines, but I completely overlooked that I was excerpted in Wired this month. Well, it's a blurb excerpt of this piece I wrote about viral marketing. Here's a picture of the excerpt, which you'll find on page 89 of the current issue on newsstands (the Star Wars one).
The Guardianpretends to get a peak on the new Huffington blog. And here's a list of 47 of the supposed 250 super-bloggers lined up. In what could be the strangest list of people of all time, we have Bill Maher, Christie Hefner, David Geffen, David Mamet, Diane Keaton, Gary Hart, Gwyneth Paltrow, Harry Shearer, Jann Wenner, John Cusack, Larry David, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mike Nichols, Norman Mailer, Nora Ephron, Tina Brown, Vernon Jordan, and Walter Cronkite.
LOCAL
Over on MNspeak.com, we have news about Best Buy and some crazy ESPN.com guy.
It's a few things, yet it's also something very simple: a one-site stop for Twin Cities conversations about culture, media, politics, and entertainment. MNspeak.com's primary function is to answer these two questions:
1) What are people in the Twin Cities talking about today?
2) What is going on around town tonight?
So yes, it's a blog -- or partially a blog. But it's so much more! The left column works like a traditional blog (but with a community of participants). In addition, there is an events calendar, a community feedback device, a local blog/media aggregator, and sponsorship opportunities. And if all goes well, there will be more soon.
I've been working in digital media for almost a decade, and I've seen a website or two in that time. A "community site" could mean innumerable things to innumerable people (photo-blogging, topic-driven bulletin boards, etc.). But we think MNspeak.com has crystallized the possibilities down to a few essential features done well.
Perhaps the best way to describe the site would be to compare certain parts to sites that have influenced me. Here are some of MNspeak.com's main features, with mentions of sites that influenced the idea:
Writing -- No one realizes quite yet what a huge effect Gawker is having on the way we talk to each other. I'm respectfully describing the tone of MNspeak.com as Gawker Minus The Mean-ness. If that doesn't grab you, try Putting The Irony Back In Minnesota Nice. In other words, expect information plus attitude, but we'll try not to hurt your feelings, unless you're Norm Coleman or CJ.
Email Newsletters -- There is no Flavorpill in the Twin Cities yet -- and now there never will be! We are offering two simple email options -- an every-day calendar email and a week-day blog email. Click here to sign up.
Calendar -- If you've known me more than five minutes, you've probably heard my rant about the media sector that's really missing the boat on the digital publishing revolution: the alt-weeklies. I honestly believe CityPages.com is doing interesting work with Babelogue, and VillageVoice.com seems to be giving it the college try -- but the rest are trapped in the dogmatic slumbers of a weekly publishing schedule. The goal of MNspeak.com's calendar is not to compete with the gigantic comprehensiveness of an alt-weekly -- rather, it's to offer a clear resource for answering this simple question: "What's going on tonight?"
Participation -- We are so lucky to have one the leading "open-source journalism" thinkers in America in our city (don't let the scatological humor fool you!). Chuck's Blogumentary has been getting accolades wherever the film screens, and it's a pleasure to finally be working on a project together. We'll be adding in more voices to the site, so stay tuned for some surprises.
Aggregator -- The problem with blogs is there's just too much. Aggregators like Kinja are doing a nice job of condensing the blogosphere into digestible units. Our aggregator still needs some work yet, but it has the potential to be -- and I don't mean this hyperbolically -- the leading community news source in the Twin Cities.
Design -- Often cited by big media as the little site they wish to be, Lawrence.com is the "disguised" entertainment site of a daily Kansas paper, The Lawrence Journal-World. The design has gotten a little messy lately, but the general structure is something that pleases me. (There are rumors that many daily papers -- including local ones -- are considering similar sites. How much you wanna bet on them "getting it"?)
Interviews -- When I met Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin at SXSW, I talked him out of launching a branch of his growing empire in Minneapolis. Actually, he mentioned some mumbo jumbo about "market size," and I knew he'd never bother with our mini-metro. Seriously though, one of our favorite Gothamist features is the interviews, which we plan to blatantly steal.
Business Model -- Oh, bring that up, will you? Yes, we're selling ads right now. If you'd like to advertise with us, click here. You'll be shocked how inexpensive they are. I can't reveal much more, but we're also talking about creating revenue opportunities for other Twin Cities bloggers. If you think about it, you can imagine how that might work. More on that later...
We're obviously excited about the site. Check it out, leave comment, sign up for the newsletters, take out an advert, check out the aggregator, and tell your friends.
You've certainly heard by now that the White Stripes released a new single exclusively on iTunes. No? Then here's the link.
The audio to the Lawrence Lessig / Jeff Tweedy conversation is finally available.
It looks like it finally launched: MTV's Overdrive, which is basically a video portal with videos/trailers/etc. My guess is it'll be gone by the end of the year.
Two new releases this week: Orson Wells' F for Fake and Charlton Heston's Soylent Green. There's also a new $21 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind / Lost in Translationvalue pack.
We've got a lot to talk about today, and I'm not not even going to link to Lohan's new blonde hair. Deep breath... ready, set, GO!:
TV
The TV season hasn't even come to the moment of finale spoilers and already ABC has scheduled the DVD releases of the first seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives.
TVCarnage.com. "Hundreds of hours of exceptionally bad TV lovingly fused together into hour plus, glorious cesspools of retardation." Amazing clips. NYTsays DVDs are available for free, but it looks like the link might be gone.
NewsBreakers.org. They break into local tv liveshots. Is it a sign of getting old that what once seemed funny is now lame? [via]
A look at the new TV Guide spin-off, Inside TV. Certainly no shocker: TV Guide's revenue's are plummeting.
The Gladwell-esque Opus Of The Summer is certain to be Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You (released next month). The ususal suspects are already excerpting it, including NYT Magazine (with a section about narrative tv) and Wired (not online yet).
GAMES
In Guess-the-Google you see 20 images from a one-word Google Images search, and you have to figure out what the word is. Deceptively difficult.
Rappers love to make liquids that you consume. Here's a sample of real hip-hop energy drinks: Lil Jon's Crunk!!!, Ice-T's Liquid Ice, Nelly's PimpJuice, and Russell Simmons' DefCon3. The new issue of Wired reviews them all (not online yet).
The Onion A/V Club wishlists "war" on TiVo and records the results. Lots of Nickelodeon, ABC Family, and VH1.
Video: Jon Stewart's appearance on Oprah. Why the hell Cameron Diaz is sitting there is the biggest mystery since... since... since they gave Jimmy Kimmel a tv show. (Sorry, I know I can do better than that.)
Many months ago, I was actually thinking the best localite to review the new Walker would be Peter Ritter. And there he is in CP today. He nicely conjures the Death Star, the Cheshire Cat, and an REI climbing wall to describe out new fave ediface. Hoorah, our first readable Walker review.
Today is either huge day in Fimoculous history, or it's a brief moment of crazed myopia. After avoiding it for 4+ years, I've finally added comments. The little link appears at the bottom of the posts -- and it will probably disappear the second I start getting comment spam. Be kind, young netizens. (Oh, and you probably noticed the Google Ads. I'm making about $.08/day on those, so they also might be short-lived.)
TV
I know some of you are having a hard time seeing Wonder Showzen, which MTV2 buries in the after-hours. So I've uploaded a video of the entire first episode. Download it now before my ISP (or Viacom) calls. Yeah, that was short-lived. Server slowed down to a near dead-stop. I'm sure you can find a Torrent out there.
A friend of mine worked on the market research for the new prescription bottle that Target is hoping will turn pharmaceuticals into destination shopping.
So best. Jimmy Kimmel is hiring for a "TV Watcher" who will watch the tube all day looking for the best clips for the show. If a blogger doesn't get the job, something's wrong.
In a little ditty about ending the whodunit on Veronica Mars, this story also says UPN has renewed the show for a second season.
FILM
Trailer to the new Gus Van San movie, Last Days, a fictional account of the demise of Kurt Cobain that includes appearances by Kim Gordon and Harmony Korine.
Interview with EW's long-time film critic Owen Gleiberman.
MUSIC VIDEOS
"The Sad Song", "created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects."
If you missed it, here's NYT's architecture review of the new Walker from Friday. Best part of the opening party? Most people will tell you open access to Bjork (or Kim Gordon, or Yoko Ono) in the Target tent was cool. I'll tell you that the blinking red LEDs were attrocious.
Google has released a video upload tool. As the FAQ says, you have to own the rights to the video, but you will be able to charge people to view it. This completely breaks open the doors for micropayments.
According to NYT, the Spy-ish Radar Magazine is making a comeback next month in the form of a website. Although the site has some interesting ideas (such as a 15-minutes-of-fame image uploader), I have a bigger question: will my subscription from two years ago finally be validated?
Yes, I realize it's a little silly to show up here at the beginning of every week to watch me get upset about the lead story on the NYT Styles section. But c'mon, the man date? Dear New York Media, why must you write trite trend pieces that cause the rest of us to consider molotov cocktailing Michael's?
NYT Mag's cover story, "Our Ratings, Ourselves", tells the suprisingly fascinating story of the Portable People Meter -- a device that records all the media you've consumed in a day for marketing purposes. Pioneered by Arbitron and implemented by Nielsen, the PPM, which is about the size of a pager, accomplishes this by having all media encoded with an audio watermark. A broad range of other topics covered in the long piece: personal media device consumption, the arcane life of Nielsen labs, the shift from active to passive measurement, cable box innnovations, and direct measurement of advertising success. Two related items:
CJR asks Can Nielsen Keep up with the Way America Watches? NPR's Bob Garfield foresees the Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.
MEDIA
Fun idea: ask four people -- Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show), Don Hewitt (founder of 60 Minutes), Mark Burnett (creator Survivor and The Apprentice), Al Primo (creator of Eyewitness News) -- how to reinvent CBS's evening news. The results are chaotic. (Reminds me of the time Wiredasked for Google redesigns, and the results were a mess.)
MUSIC VIDEOS
I pretty much never have to link to a music video again after looking at this page.
BitTorrent link for the newest Daft Punk video of "Human After All."
IDEAS
William Safire's critique of privacy is a good place to jump into understanding ChoicePoint and other nefarious data-collection agencies. Sample quote: "The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A... But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research."
Huh, did you know that City Pages owns a local adult website, TC Uncovered (nsfw). The meta keywords include "escorts" and "domination," and there's employment and personals sections. Naughty.
NY Observerhas more about the Huffington Report, with copious comments from Drudge.
And that story launched today's juicy announcement -- a new Denton blog, Sploid.com, a tabloid site in direct competition with Drudge. Editors include the inimitable Ken Layne.
Sure, Sploid made a splash today, but the real action is this new cupcake blog.
This is pretty neat: The Annotated New York Times. The site lists NYT stories with real-time reaction from the blogosphere. Curious if NYT Corp will frown on this.
Last time I saw Robin [blog], he wouldn't even whisper to me what the real name of INdTV would be. It officially launched today as Current TV. (C|Net story.) Looks exciting, even though The Post is being all playa-hatah about it.
If you like Hal Hartley, you might want to check out the DVD collection of his short films. Includes an obscure short with Adrienne Shelley and Parker Posey as roller-blading, lip-synching cupids. (Trailer.)
The best part about this Google piece in Newsweek is where Google claims they just "forgot" to put ads on Google News. Uh-huh.
REALITY ENTERTAINMENT
I fell for Best Week Ever's joke on Friday. In the recurring segment "Who's having the best week ever?" they name-checked Frantina Dulee. I was Googling her name 30 seconds into the segment, but by the end it was obvious she's, duh, not a real person.
The interesting proposition in this Chicago Tribune piece is that while sports has become increasingly scripted, entertainment has become increasingly competitive.
TrueDater.com is a date-rating service. That's right, people who frequent date sites are reviewed as though they were Amazon.com books. I feel so violated. [Via a Wired News column.]
In a review of The Hookup Handbook, NYT Styles tries to explain girls who aren't into relationships and aren't into casual sex either. I don't know where the hell these girls live (New York, you say? Never heard of it), but it sure is nice to have an article lying around that provides a definition of hookup.
It seems odd that NYTMag did a long Murakami profile without a news peg, but it's not bad at using otaku as a means to talk about Japan. (Previous profile in Wired.)
LOCAL
KSTP and Star-Tribunefell for an April Fool's gag claiming that a Three's Company remake was coming to St. Paul.
Eek! Someone stole my modus operandi for meeting girls and turned it into a website. At Consumating.com, you "show off your quirky personality with zany answers to our constantly rotating questions." It also has some nicely-executed tagging functionality that allows you to sort people by their interests. Ba-bye, Friendster.
Slate.com reviews Applebee's. Contains interesting info, and nails the success with this scrap of analysis: "How did Applebee's and its heavily sauced pork chunks make it to the top of the casual-dining heap? By treating sit-down dining establishments like fast-food outlets."
Someone please call the insider police -- the Minneapolis alt-media just jumped the whole damn ocean. Okay first, a strange Rake Mag blog post gushes all over Wonkette (who would stoop to such a low?!) and casually drops reference to publishing her pre-fame. Okay, whatever, right? But then Steve Perry (editor of City Pages) jumps into the comments to... get this... line edit a blog post. Guys, guys, take it outside!
I would do anything to make NY Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers (which mentions the word "blog" 19 times -- hoorah!). Well, except move to New York.
This is the weirdest dot-com news we've seen in quite some time. Arianna Huffington is starting something called The Huffington Report, a culture and politics webzine that will have a group blog with a strange cast of characters: Larry David, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tina Brown, and more.
FILM
Thank god Courtney Love is back. She will be playing Linda Lovelace in a biopic.
SCIENCE
This New Scientist article was a fun read: 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense. Includes the placebo effect, dark matter, and cold fusion.
Slate reviews Make, which I have to confess I had a very hard time reading, and I'm probably the market demo.
LOCAL
To coincide with the smoking ban, City Pages did a printable guide to the only remaining smoker bars in the Twin Cities (all in St. Paul, of course).
Wow, that Strib story on punk rock glasses sure was fun, eh? I'm not going to say anything more than that because I see all the people in this story around Uptown, and I don't want any of them to punch me and break my non-retro glasses.
CP's music writing sure ain't slowing down with Missy Miss flying the coop. First off, Julianne Shepherd calls Beck's newest album his best ever. Whoa there, cowboy! And then there are Bridgette's and Lindsey's nice SXSW accounts, parts of which I got to see with them.
The America Spectatornames Jon Stewart's America the worst book of the year. Can't wait to read the rest of the conservative's four-month-old recap of 2004. Maybe the Spectator staff will finally reveal what they think about this whole Franz Ferdinand phenom!
Across the pond (did I just use that phrase? oh fuck it), the blogger Belle de Jour was a pretty big deal -- well, to pervs. The hidden identity of this supposed call-girl memoirist was even in the tabloids (yes! tabloids wrote about bloggers!). It seems she's been pegged as Lisa Hilton, a British author based in America. This was the blog that ostensibly revealed her identity. It's not really stated, but I think this means that the escapades were fiction. At least oursecret salacious journals were real (well, probably). Update: of course the bloggers had her pegged months ago.
I am almost certainly the only person who gets giddy to see Lizzy Spiers write about the Tina Brown and Ana Marie Cox quasi-feud via a Liz Smith column. Move along.
Guaranteed punchline headline for Weekend Update, Daily Show, and every late-night talk show: Rappers are being asked by McDonald's to name-drop big macs.
Closer came out on DVD today. Buy it for your girlfriend, and she'll always wonder how messed up you are.
If you watch the trailer to Bewitched, you'll get to see Nicole Kidman wiggle her nose, which is all you really wanted to see, so you can now skip the film.
Salon pepper-sprays and then pees onPoweR Girls, the Lizzie Grubman reality tv show that I simply can't stop watching. And since you're waiting through the day-pass over there, might as well read an interview with the creator of Veronica Mars.
So there's a name for those "enter the word to verify you're a human" things you see on consumer websites: Captcha, which stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." What I really hate about these is that some of them are completely unreadable.
I wish there were a way to scientifically prove or disprove the recent string of NYT arts trend stories (such as the one a couple months back that posited that SNL was more issue-oriented in the past). Sunday's lead music story is about the instant cover -- the proposition that musicians are covering more songs from their contemporaries than from previous generations. I feel obliged to come up with contrary examples (weren't Dylan and the Stones always covering each other?), but that seems to also be missing the points of these trend stories. I guess it's better than obsessing about band names like they do across the pond. Anyway, in addition to mentioning nearly every band recording music today, the story also name-drops Stereogum and Fluxblog.
Although my first reaction was "people still care about Gore Vidal?", CP's interview with him has been getting lots of blogosphere attention. Okay, I promise to read it this week.
Rocketboom included the secrets to my blogging technique in a post a couple days ago. (It's toward the end of the segment.) You crazy vloggers! See also: some video of Chuck and I drunkenly quizzing Amanda about her role on The Restaurant at a strange house straight outta the movie Slacker in Austin at SXSW.
Anil pays tribute to Suck.com. I've been telling anyone who would listen that Suck.com doesn't get the cred it deserves. Everyone fondly remembers Spy and Might and even Inside.com, but I honestly feel that the attitude expressed in Suck was more influential than all of them.
ONLINE
Having crashed hours after launching, OurMedia.org is back online. And another social media site launched today: NowPublic.com.
Wired News story about the Decemberists releasing their newest video via BitTorrent.
This could pass for parody: Beck intereview in Elle. Sample questions: "So do you cry at movies?" and "If tomorrow you became a woman, who would you be?"
POLITICS
Don't ask why I have a Maxim subscription (it was free, honest), but I also stumbled when I saw the Bush twins.
This Is Not Really A Review Of Soul Asylum's After The Flood. And While We're At It, Please Ignore Any Perceived Attempts To Compare A Natural Disaster To A Music Scene, Because That's Just Silly.
Even though we naturally resist reducing our lives to simple anecdotes, we all have had one momentous event happen to us that comes to completely summarize our life, typify our personality, or recapitulate the rest of our existence. You might try to deny this, but I'll call you a liar, because most of the time you are like me and resent that this event happened against your will.
My event was a flood, and then a fire.
You probably have a fleeting memory of the flood and fire that hit Grand Forks, ND, in 1997. Maybe you remember the famous picture of an apocalyptic downtown, or perhaps the "Come Hell And High Water" headline on the daily paper, or possibly President Bill Clinton coming to town and crying on live television (Monica notwithstanding, the only time that has ever happened).
For you, this is a scrap from the memory dustbin of natural disasters (although maybe a prominent one -- for two nights in a row, it was the lead story on all three networks' nightly news). For me, it completely changed my life in ways that I still feel I have no control of. Even as I type this, I'm resisting the urge to tell you the story -- I've told it so many times that it now seems like taking advantage of a community's tragedy. So let's modernize the story by reducing it to bullet points under the heading "Strange Things that Happened to Me Because of the Flood and Fire of 1997":
Near the geographical center of North America, a scary stat. The largest evacuation of an American city in the 20th century -- over 50,000 people -- was foisted upon this little town in the Midwest when a dike broke in the Spring of 1997 and flooded 90 percent of the town.
I was rescued from my apartment by the coast guard when a downtown building caught on fire in the middle of a flood. Firemen couldn't put out the fire because they couldn't get to it -- there was six feet of water in the street.
I watched my apartment burn down live on CNN. I was positioned about a half-mile away, so I could see the flames in real time, but I could also glance up at the tv that was beaming it to me from a helicopter that could be seen on the horizon.
Within hours, I was interviewed by Time, NPR, the New York Times, the Star-Tribune, and many of publications I've long forgotten. My story was resonant because I had stayed behind during the flood despite a city-wide decree of mandatory evacuation. There are now three books in print that contain parts of my narrative.
I won a Pulitzer prize. Actually, the Knight-Ridder-owned paper I worked at won the Pulitzer for community service, but I have a very nice certificate because the website that I managed was given "special notation" for using the internet in a unique way. (To this day, no other website has been mentioned in a Pulitzer award.) Even though the press burned down, they never missed an issue of the paper, which was printed out of the Pioneer Press plant.
I received $2,000 from the heiress to the McDonald's fortune. Joan Kroc donated money to the city that was divvied up into $2,000 endowments to nearly every resident.
I did two different video reenactment shows. Late at night on the Discovery channel, you can still occasionally see me recreating my escape from the fiery inferno -- easily the funniest re-enacted tragedy ever put on television.
Soul Asylum played the prom. Of all the strange events that happened, this somehow seemed the most otherworldly.
"Hi, welcome to, uh, the prom," were the first words Dave Pirner gave the teenagers that night almost eight years ago. I remember his intonation perfectly -- it was the line that began my live review for the local alt-weekly at the time.
+++++++++++++++++
This is where this story should end, and I should be banned from talking about any of this ever again. But then (you didn't see this coming?), completely by accident, while dumpster diving the used bin at Cheapo Records in Minneapolis, I happened upon After The Flood: Live From The Grand Forks Prom, June 28, 1997, which I instantly assumed was an obscure bootleg. But apparently Capital released the show earlier this year as a live album. It seems no one really noticed -- including me, and probably you.
There's Pirner again, sounding even more bemused than before: "Hi, welcome to, uh, the prom," just before launching into Alice Cooper's "School's Out," which has never made a group of kids more happy than it did that night at the Grand Forks Air Force Base (the school gymnasium -- and most of the city -- was still in post-flood disrepair). You see, we kids in the hinterlands probably never experienced Soul Asylum quite like you wise city folk. Even though they were beginning their descent from fame by this time, in our minds Soul Asylum was still the band the Village Voice dubbed "the best live band in America." We all knew and repeated this phrase all the time, even though we had nothing to compare this to, other than a guess that they sounded better than the Bad Company show at the Civic Center.
Soul Asylum plays the prom? It seemed an inconceivable fairy tail -- like a story about losing everything you ever owned in a fire that couldn't be extinguished because of too much water.
+++++++++++++++++
Although people like to say that music is best when it evokes certain memories from your life, it's a completely different scenario when a musician is literally attempting to elicit a specific memory out of you. After The Flood is packed with these moments, which is why it's nearly impossible for me to tell you whether this is a good album or not. It's just too strangely historical and personal, at the same time. When the line about "drama queens" in the hit "Misery" is changed to "prom queens," I'm not sure whether to grin or grimace. And in "Black Gold," the lines "This flat land used to be a town" and "This place just makes me feel sad inside" are intoned with such heart-felt anguish that I want to find somebody to shove.
But here's what I'll concede: the album perfectly captures that time and place, both in Grand Forks and where alternative culture was at the moment -- coming off a exhilarating and infuriating high that probably never should have been.
And what would a prom be without covers? There were strange ones: "Tracks Of My Tears" (the Smokey Robinson song about a dealing with a breakup) and "I Know" (the 1995 Dionne Farris hit that you instantly know when you hear it). Throw in Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now," and Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" -- you've got yourself the strangest cover set the prom has ever seen. All of them are on the album.
+++++++++++++++++
Here's the weird thing: this is the only Soul Asylum record I own now. Before the flood, I had all of them. For reasons that seem vaguely unjust, every Replacements record eventually made it back in to the collection after the flood. So did all those little Husker Du's. And you can't live 'round here without the Prince oeuvre.
But Soul Asylum is left as a sad memory of commercialization gone bad -- a big sparkly burst of popularity followed by dismissal and anonymity. Would it be trite for me to say that last sentence is also a fair description of both the entire '90s alt-rock scene and my little college town? Perhaps. But I know two communities who synchronously lived through a burst of fame, and at least one wasn't so sad to see it go.
New Line Cinema picked up Klosterman's new book (not out until July) for a potential film. I'm a "character" in the book again, and am demanding to be played by someone no less handsome than Giovanni Ribisi (which I'm sure means Steve Buscemi will be Rex Sorgatz). I'll do some kind of review of the book here in a couple months, but if you're curious, it's Chuck's modern-relationship-cum-dead-rock-star opus. (Previously: Rex Rock City.)
Pedro's house in Napoleon Dynamite is up for sale.
Everyone's talking about Old Boy (trailer), which won Cannes this year.
Finally a Joss Whedon comeback? He will direct the next Wonder Woman movie. Radosh predicts the lead.
Woody Allen interviewed in... SuicideGirls.com? Huh.
ONLINE/TECH
Yahoo bought Flickr. A great move for Yahoo, which is kicking Google's ass in the user-generated content arena.
And Ask Jeeves is being bought by Barry Diller.... for $1.9 billion. Jeesh, Jeeves.
Somebody please stop Christine Rosen from publishing this story again. First in The New Atlantis, she wrote about how cell phones and TiVos are ruining our lives. Now she's done it again in a NYT Mag essay.
Agence France Presse is suing Google News. Although I'm sure this will quickly get settled out of court, this raises an interesting spectre around Google News, which makes no money because there are no ads -- and this almost gaurantees it never will.
The upcoming Microsoft typefaces for the next version of Windows.
SHOES
Pimp my shoe! NYT Mag story on shoe customizers who will turn a pair of Nikes into $500 collector's items.
Firefox advert or Franz Ferdinand video? You decide.
Everyone who wasn't talking about Flickr/Yahoo rumors at SXSW Interactive last week was talking about the Tivo/Comcast deal. Here's a good follow-up interview with the CEO of Comcast, which clears up some of the questions. [Via LostRemote.]
GAMES
For those who don't think Vice City is gritty enough, here's a preview to the new 50 Cent game, Bulletproof.
They love us! Both Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times wrote about our new museum expansion this week. In Newsweek, The Walker is called "probably the leading American venue for cutting-edge artists (both visual and performing)." Description: "The tour de force of their building is the silvery five-story cube, with its daredevil cantilevered corner hovering over the entrance -- anchored by hidden tons of steel and concrete -- and the whole shebang wrapped in shimmering aluminum-mesh panels that look as light and luscious as crumpled silk." In NYT, The Walker is dubbed "a place that prefers artful provocation to blockbuster entertainment, privileges the obscure and experimental over the tried-and-true, and cultivates a willful insouciance about the forces that govern most big museum establishment." And many arty lavishes are dished on our fair city.
It's sad that the problems that The Varsity Theater is having sound like something out of Kafka. The only good (if selfish) news is that the TC ElectroPunk Show might be rescheduled to a date that I'm in town.
I will be in Austin for SXSW the next 10 days. I have a platinum pass, so I'll be at all three segments: film, interactive, and music. The plan is to blog about all of them -- we'll see how much time there actually is. Update: There's just so many people to see, so much to absorb, so much to drink... I'll never be able to keep this site updated over the next week. Later.
TV
PVRblog has the video of Bruce Willis on The Daily Show talking about how much he loves TiVo. Interesting sidenote: Bruce was acting very strange on this episode -- talking about how he hadn't even changed clothes from the night before, full of innuendo. Then yesterday the NY Post does a gossip blurb about him possibly hooking up with Lindsay Lohan. Connect the dots?
Audio of Daily Show's Stephen Colbert on NPR's Fresh Air.
MUSIC
Looks like Spin is planning a redesign of the website. Here's the current site; here's a new site. (This isn't leaked information -- Spin sent out an email that [accidentally?] has the URL in it.)
FILM
Yowza. Tarantino might direct the next Friday the 13th movie.
Trailer to Herbie Fully Loaded, starring Lindsay Lohan.
WORDS
Another Eggers interview, this time in Salon. Topics include the start of 826 Valencia, the animosity directed at the McSweeney's crowd, and the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are with Spike Jonze. It's really pretty good.
I was going to tell you that MSNBC was ahead of everyone else in their blog reportage -- especially with things like the web-only Hardball Blogcast. But then Wonkette reminded me of the "The Blog Report" on CNN. Funny ha-ha.
WatchingAmerica.com is a real-time collection of links to news stories about the United States by media organizations outside the United States. When necessary, they are translated into English.
North Dakota pops up in this Marketwatch interview with the CEO of Sportingbet, an online casino. It speculates that the casino might move to North Dakota if the legislature legalizes (and the public accepts) online gambling.
In Dot-Con Job, the Seattle Times dissects the lies behind InfoSpace.com, which PaidContent.org calls "perhaps the most amazing piece of business journalism to come out in years."
MEDIA
Hot girl is the face of democracy in the middle east -- at least on American magazines.
ONLINE
About.com CEO on why NYT spent $410 million to buy the company.
WASAW (Writers And Artists Snack At Work) is a good spot for junk food reviews. The delish Take 5 (9.3 rating) just showed up at the vending machine at work.
I'm not sure what to make of Blogologue, "a live web browsing sketch comedy multi-media stage experience" (in other words, a play) at the Bryant Lake Bowl.
Looks like there are two geek conferences coming to Minneapolis in June: Podcasting World (for Podcasters) and Flashbelt (for Flash developers). And of course there's CONvergence in July.
CP has a bit of breaking news about the Star Tribune hiring a conservative columnist.
Oooo, music critic fight! (or the closest we come to it), in which The Rake takes issue with Dylan Hicks' review of Kings of Leon in City Pages. And Reimenschneider's name is evoked for some reason or another.
In the 5+ years that I've been doing this site, I've never run advertising or asked for donations. I'm not quitting my day job or anything that ambitious, but if you feel like dropping me a few dollars of appreciation, you can do so through PayPal or Amazon. That's the beginning and end of this pledge drive.
MUSIC
Oh boy, you simply gotta hear Usher's new single, "Dot Com". "Oh, I love the way you dirty type. Oh, I need your back space in my life.... Oh baby, if you log on, I'll make you dot com... I can't wait to give you megabytes. I got all the memory you need." I would call this a hoax if it weren't on AOL. This is so bad it's post-bad.
Long NYT Magprofile of Beck, which is somewhat boring until half-way through when he starts talking about Scientology and his posse -- he's married to Marissa Ribisi (Giovanni's sister) and hangs with Adam Goldberg and Christina Ricci (who contributed a Japanese-inflected line on the song "Hell Yes").
Axl is the cover story of the Sunday NYT Arts section.
ONLINE
Fred Durst suesGawker . (And I can't even think of anything snarky to say. Well, except maybe a pun about having a Limp Bizkit.) See previously: Felix Salmon thought Gawker jumped the shark.
Exactly 48 hours ago, I was having a beer with Chuck Olsen and he told me about Plum TV (a new tv network for rich people), and I thought, "This would be a good story to pitch to the New York Times." Then the Sunday paper showed up.
Profile of the Korean animation studio that produces The Simpson's.
We've got a local girl on the next America's Next Top Supermodel. ("Favorite movie: Snatch. Favorite TV Show: Poker Championship." Grrrowl.) Anyone know her?
Over the weekend, I did a segment about online viral marketing on public radio's Weekend America. Here's the audio file (mp3 - 6.3mb).
Although most of us sentient beings think of advertising as predominantly evil (or, if forgiving, necessarily evil), an interesting contradiction arises out of viral marketing -- it's both detestable and fascinating at the same time. In that sense, viral marketing introduces complex issues about how we relate to media, how we want to believe in fantasy, and how we still cling to the notion of authenticity. Sometimes it's strangely addicting (Subservient Chicken), and other times it's like watching your parents dance to Outcast (Raging Cow).
As a compendium to the radio show, below are links to some online viral marketing campaigns. (If they aren't hyper-linked, that means the site no longer exists.) It's a long list, so skim it as you see fit:
Chicken Fight -- Burger King
http://www.chickenfight.com
Trying to follow-up the buzz behind Subservient Chicken, this was a game with a boxing bout between two chickens. It was pretty dumb.
Pimp My Burger -- Burger King http://www.pimpmyburger.com
A recent take-off of MTV's Pimp My Ride. Long but mildly entertaining.
Angus Diet -- Burger King
http://www.angusdiet.com
Another BK one. A fake inspirational speaker and personal interventionalist espouses the benefits of eating beef.
The Beast -- A.I. Artificial Intelligence http://www.cloudmakers.org
The Beast is the respected grandfather of the movement. The story: Evan Chan is murdered in the fictional world of the movie A.I. Clues are available on the internet on approximately 30 interlinked websites (disguised as universities, businesses, personal homepages, etc.). Over 7,000 people combine their knowledge to figure out the murder mystery.
I Love Bees -- Halo 2 http://www.ilovebees.com
Perhaps the most ambitious example of a new medium called "alternate-reality gaming" (which includes The Beast, above). Participants go to a website to learn what pay phones will be called that week (to make it even more geeky, they're listed by GPS coordinates). When they answer the phone, a message is given with a clue. Back on the website, you enter the answer to a question and then hear a 30-second clip of new material. Sometimes when you pick up the phone, you talk to with a live person, and what you say can be incorporated into the online game. The final episode, which had a War of the Worlds feel, was timed to the launch of the videogame. Millions of people came to the site.
MSN Found -- Microsoft/MSN http://www.msnfound.com
MSN Found has six fake online personalities in their mid-20s (with profiles more stereotypical than MTV's The Real World) write blogs and post video clips. The blogs contain words ("hypnodragon" and "define vertigious") that are intended to drive you to use MSN Search for clues. The hook is that you're supposed to get interested in the personalities, and then use MSN's new search product to find out more about these people. Strangely, the site doesn't use Microsoft's own blogging software, Spaces.
The 2-Headed Dog -- MTV2
http://www.the2headeddog.com
This came about because of MTV2's new branding strategy to compete with the upcoming music video station, Fuse. The site (now defunct) didn't contain much more than strange visuals of two-headed dogs, but it made you scratch your head if you stumbled across it before the station redesign. MTV hired people to spread the word on message boards, which caused a backlash.
The Lincoln Fry Blog -- McDonald's http://lincolnfry.typepad.com/blog/ http://lincolnfry.yahoo.com
A Super Bowl commercial about a couple who discovers a McDonald's french fry that looked like Abe Lincoln triggers this escapade. A fake blog chronicles the couple's adventures. After the ad ran, McDonald's decided to sell the fry online, where an online casino (GoldenPalace.com) paid $75,100 for it. So it's like buying someone else's viral marketing scheme to create your own.
Counter Counterfeit Commission -- BMW Mini http://www.counterfeitmini.org
This somewhat clever campaign is a fake "detect a fake Mini" site, which contains photos on detecting a fake Mini and a $20 documentary DVD on the Mini counterfeit underworld.
Elite Designers Against Ikea -- Ikea http://www.elitedesigners.org
Another fakie. Elite designers are against Ikea because their stuff is so cheap. I mean, inexpensive.
HalloweenM3 -- Mazda
http://halloweenm3.blogspot.com
This short-lived experiment from Mazda had a fake blogger talking about the new Mazda M3. The internet community generally disliked this disingenuous attempt. (NOTE: I somehow misidentified this site's name on the radio show. I called it "Raging Cow," which is below.)
Raging Cow -- Dr. Pepper http://blog.ragingcow.com
Dr. Pepper enlisted six blogging teens to promote the product Raging Cow, a new milk-based drink. The strange thing is that the bloggers aren't paid, yet they enjoy talking about the product -- a clear precursor to the persuaders.
Find The Message -- GM Onstar http://www.findthemessage.com
17 different words plus the URL FindTheMessage.com are placed on billboards around the country. The goal is to put all the words together to figure out a message. Pieced together from L.A. to New York, it turned out to be "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways," which advertised GM's OnStar navigation product. A prize was to be given to whoever figured it out first, but someone cracked open the site's flash file, and revealed the phrase before actual terrestrial sleuths could figure it out.
Pump Up The Movie -- Best Buy / Nokia http://www.pumpupthemovie.com
It too me a while to realize that this was a fake movie site which includes a "toss the cheerleader" game. (Created by Space150.com.)
Fight Big Overcoat -- Transglobal Vacations
http://www.fightbigovercoat.org
Another one involving billboards.
Rubber Burner & Super Greg -- Lee Jeans
http://www.rubberburner.com
http://www.supergreg.com
These long-gone fake homepages of out-of-touch losers were modeled on Mahir, the dancing Turkish hipster from 1999. Fallon was behind the project. (Sidenote: This one was first brought out into the open by Kottke on Metafilter, which seems like a million years ago.)
Who Ordered Room Service -- Not Bryan Adams http://www.whoorderedroomservice.com
And now there's even parody viral marketing campaigns. At first this looked like a viral campaign by Bryan Adams for his new album, Room Service. Except he had nothing to do with it.
Sasha Frere-Jones on ringtones in The New Yorker. Contains surprisingly detailed info about the development of polyphonic ringtone and true tone, and some good-to-quote-at-parties information about such topics as the most popular genre (hip-hop -- 56%). My personal ringtone right now is the theme to Cops -- "Bad boys, bad boys, what'chya gonna do?" It's instantly recognizable. My last ringtone was the theme to Six Feet Under, which was also surprisingly recognized by anyone in their 30s.
A strange mashup of The Beatles' Revolver, which includes tracks with Beck, Madonna, Portishead, Coldplay, Genesis, Hendrix, Deeelite, The Who, The Cure, The Monkees, and Goldfrapp. This is what the kids call "good."
Alright, who photoshopped all the real media celebs into the FishbowlNY Launch Party pics? Ariel Kaminer, Ira Silverberg, John Homans, David Carr, Maer Roshan, and whoever-the-fuck else? When the hell did launching a website make you famous enough to dine at Michael's?
Almost a year-and-a-half ago, I did a post about what Friendster can do to keep its users, and perhaps develop a subscription model. Sixteen months later, some of those features are finally starting to show up. Yesterday, they added a subscription-based blogging tool powered by Typepad. (It kinda sucks.)
No! It looks like NYTis cancelling Circuits [second item], the Thursday tech section. Actually, the section, which used to be a must-read, has been on the slow downward slide toward irrelevance for the past year.
AIM At Work allows you to synch your AIM Buddy List with Outlook.
TV
NYThas more on the reality tv show about the art world mentioned here a couple weeks ago.
FILM
WSJreports that Green Cine Daily (which is one of my favorite blogs) "sparked a 20-fold rise in hits" for Green Cine (the rent-by-mail DVD service). See also: Netflix' corporate blogger, The Rocchi Report.
I completely missed the story about a screenwriter who took out an advert in City Pages to contact Josh Hartnett about his screenplay. I almost hate to tell the guy that Josh regularly gets orange juice at my neighorhood coffeeshop.
You a nerd? Then MarsCon, which is going on this weekend, is probably for you.
A friend of mine from college has published her book about the Grand Forks disaster of 1997, where I lost my apartment and everything else in a flood and fire. (Previously: Ashley Shelby's book, where I'm a prominent "character.")
I haven't made it over to Creative Electric for the new poster show with Squad19 (CP story), but it looks like Minneapolis has another great design collective to add to the list.
The past five days have involved sleeping in a different city every night, in this order: San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toledo, Ithaca, and New York City. I have only one piece of advice from this experience: don't attempt to drive a Uhaul into Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel. Just trust me on this. But I'm home and safe, and here is where we left off:
Copyright issues are preventing shows like WKRP in Cincinnati from showing up on DVD.
CELEBRITY
In what must be a first, Halle Berry picks up her Razzie in person. (Update: A reader writes in to say that Tom Green showed up for his Freddy Got Fingered Razie.)
Wired mag profiles Yahoo as the UnGoogle. It's a good comparison the strengths of each company.
GADGETS
You'd expect a T-Mobile backlish with the newest Paris Hilton scandal, but the exact opposite happened.
MEDIA
Now Michael Wolff (through a proxy) has told Felix Salmon to take down the speech text. Now it's on Cryptome, therefore guaranteeing its legacy and creating even more controversy. Silly Wolff.
Profile of the Vice empire, which is now multi-million dollars strong.
Slate.com has started a column called Today's Blogs, similar to the Today's Papers concept. Dumb thing: no permanent index page to link to or bookmark.
New blog: Purseuing, "a blog obsessively covering purses, bags, totes, clutches, and just about anything else you can carry on your shoulder." (See previously: Wrist Fashion.)
LOCAL
Did you see the detailed piece that Pitchfork did on The Current? Good stuff, including some speculation that the model could spread.
Blogging might be light for a while, as this week marks the beginning of Rex's Pre-Spring World Tour. Over the next month, I'll be in San Fran (Feb. 21-23), NYC (Feb. 25-27), and Austin (March 12-20). Holler if you wanna hang.
TV
How convenient! The Parent's Television Council keeps a gallery of what it considers the "Worst Clips Of The Week." In other words, the best tv of the week.
In a story ready-made for every site in the Denton network, Paris Hilton's phone was hacked, revealing naughty cam pics of her making out with Nicole Lenz and a gigantic address book of celebs, including Anna Kournikova, Vin Diesel, Victoria Gotti, Stephen King, Usher, Ashlee Simpson, Lindsey Lohan, Avril Lavigne, Lil John, Seth Green, Eminem, Russell Simmons, Christina Aguilera, Nicole Richie, Pat O'Brien, Fred Durst, and countless other strange aliases. Don't bother calling though -- no one's answering.
BLOGS
The video to the Charlie Rose special that featured bloggers.
The godfather of blogging, Justin Hall, stops updating his site and SF Chronwrites about it. Includes mentions of other bloggers who have quit, including Andrew Sullivan, Peter Merholz, and William Gibson.
In addition to new instant messenger features, Friendster has added discussions, which have Craiglist-ish qualities. But ya gotta wonder: does anyone even notice or care anymore?
Beatallica (the Beatles-Metallica mashup) has been issued a cease-and-desist from Sony.
Ryan Adams has either lost his mind, or he's working a marketing angle in which you're supposed to think he has. His site now is just a big ball of worms -- literally. A couple of the worms make noise if you click them. A small area in the lower-right has a hidden link to a crazy recorded phone conversation between him and his label, which is probably staged.
GAMES
NYT Circuits hangs out with the designers and developers of America's Army while they are in turn hanging out with the U.S. military.
Of all the features to make available in video games, it's actually surprising that it took so long to add pizza delivery.
It's about time that the art world got its own reality tv show. Artstar is an unscripted television series about trying to make it big in the New York art world
I wonder if I should post the copy of the Michael Wolff speech that he demanded be removed from I Want Media. Does this remind anyone of, oh, say, Eason Jordan? And isn't he smart enough to realize that now everyone will seek out this speech? Or might he actually know that, hoping dumb bloggers like me give him more attention for a couple days? Oh, whatever, who cares, here it is. And that's the weird thing -- it's pretty good.
Hanging out in Roger Ebert's four-and-a-half-story Chicago town house.
PUBLISHING
NYTprofiles the site InsideHigherEd.com, "the first significant competition in higher education publishing since the intellectual-if-gossipy Lingua Franca folded." The site was started by two Chronicle of Higher Education alums.
At Salon.com, Laura Miller profiles H.P. Lovecraft, "America's greatest bad writer."
MEDIA
Rolling Stoneprofiles the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is more to the right than Fox News.
In an otherwise unessential read, the first paragraph of this NYT story reveals that Armstrong Williams' partner in the Graham Williams Group was Stedman Graham -- yes, Oprah's boyfriend.
Jeff Jarvis was on Reliable Sources this weekend, talking Eason Jordon and Jeff Gannon. Here's the video.
Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me has a new film tv show in development in which a group of mothers drink what the average college senior drinks over the course of a month. Gawker has the casting call.
ManiaTV, a streaming tv network with music videos. I watched during the Grammy's and it wasn't bad.
It seems Pazz & Jop comes out later every year. Everyone knew Kayne would win, but Brian Wilson and Loretta Lynn coming in next was a surprise. Plus Green Day and U2 in the top 10 makes this the most conservative P&J that I can remember. The ballots.
Friendster added a chatting service (one-to-one chat, like IM). I have no idea if this will save the company, but I suddenly have a bunch of friends using it.
IPOD
Sirius is trying (and failing) to hook up with the iPod.
GAMES
Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is pegged to do the movie version of Halo 2. Ridley Scott was rumored before. [via greg.org]
A Yahoo Slideshow for a Lucien Freud painting (it's of a pregnant Kate Moss).
MEDIA
After its first profitable quarter ever, Dave Talbot is leaving Salon.
Paris Hilton is on the cover of Playboy, but her publicist says, "I don't even know where they got that photo." Is this a first for Playboy -- throwing a celeb on the cover without having pictures inside? The cover story -- "25 Sexiest Celebrites" -- seems like a shift toward a Maxim audience.
LOCAL
CityPages.com redesigned. What do I think? Well, let's just say I think they're under-playing what people want from a site like this: daily content. Too much "cover story think" for the wrong medium. Editor's note.
Someone slow them down. Just launched: Google Maps.
Kottke noticed that Google switched their Dictionary.com link to an Answers.com link. (How does he always noticed things like this before anyone else?)
Wanna buy an internet company? About.com is for sale. Bidders include: Google, Yahoo, NYT, and AOL.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
CNN just reported that Marcia Cross is a lesbian. She will come out in The Advocate, and apparently her character (Bree Van De Camp) will come out on the show.
Waxy's annual investigation into the Oscar-nominated films leaked onto the internet.
Wired News reviews the documentary 24 Hours on Craiglist (trailer), which chronicles the outcome of more than 80 craigslist postings from a single day.
Even though my friends chuckle when I say it, I don't think of myself as a gadget person. "Rex, you carry around your email in your pocket everywhere you go," they say. "And you move music videos from your TiVo onto a cell phone just so you can show them to people at parties."
Okay, maybe that's a little nerdy. But I don't identify with morereputablegadgeteers because I only believe in technology that makes my life better. I have a simple set of criteria for a gadget to make it into my world: if it makes my life more complex, slow, or tedious, I don't want it; if it creates new, quick experiences, I do.
With that in mind, here's an average day in my life, with digital devices being the organizing principle.
The best thing about my Treo is that I need fewer devices because of it. In addition to no longer tinkering with an alarm clock, there's no longer a home phone. And, for a long time, I didn't have a digital camera either. (The Treo's cam is pretty sucky, so I eventually bought a Sony Cybershot.) Some people think that forcing gadgets into a swiss army knife device will ruin them, but I actually long for the day that I can get a phone with a bottle opener.
Saving me the messy tedium of moving coffee grinds from grinder to maker is almost enough to make this device worth its money. Additional cool features: the timer, a filter-less setup, and the R2D2 look.
I sit down at my home computer and am instantly controlling my work desktop.
I'm not sure how I lived before GoToMyPC. Through some kind of miracle in engineering, I'm allowed to remotely take over my work PC. If someone were sitting in my office while I do this, they would see my mouse moving around and emails being typed. I could turn on iTunes for them, and play the new Daft Punk single.
I usually spend an hour answering email from home with GoToMyPC. This allows me to avoid early morning traffic while still being "in the office."
At home, I drive a Sony Vaio with a dual-monitor setup. At work, it's just one monitor, but I consume so much media through other screens, including a couple TVs that play CNN/MSNBC/FOX all day.
Here are the applications that are usually running on my work PC all day: AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Homesite, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Sony Vegas Video, and Apple iTunes.
My razor scooter is probably the most stereotypical dot-com thing I own. I mostly use it to speed back and forth between the coffee machine and my office.
This is where I tell you that I listen to Sirius radio on the way home from work.
But I don't. It would make sense -- Alexis bought me Sirius for Christmas, but I haven't used it yet. It seems impossible to somehow fit this into my bulging media diet. Instead, my half-hour commute home is usually the only time where I attentively listen to music on CD. Oh yeah, I drive a Mustang, which is one of America's last remaining attempts at good automotive engineering.
Time to catch up on the radio programming I missed today.
Part of the reason I'm not using Sirius is this little gadget. RadioShark is basically TiVo for radio. You tell it to record programs at a given time, and it will create audio files (WMVs) that you play on your PC or transport to other devices. In conjuncture with the iPod/iTrip, you can record programs and play them back in your car. I use it to record Marketplace, On The Media, and Future Tense. In the future, this device will hopefully evolve with more advanced futures like those on TiVo, such as keyword recording and recommendations.
Some people use their iPod everywhere they go, but I only use it for two things: jogging and parties. I happen to still love the compact disc, and enjoy the presence of my thousand-disc music collection.
I quickly fly through last night's Daily Show. I tend to watch most of the monologue, skip the middle skit segment (unless it's "This Week In God"), and then watch my favorite part -- the interview -- closely.
Putting the plasma TV / TiVo combination in my bedroom has completely changed social aspects of my house. Previously, the focal point of the house was the living room; now, people hang out in my bedroom. This has been immensely advantageous to certain parts of my life.
I'm traveling this weekend, so I move a couple episodes of Veronica Mars onto my Toshiba laptop for later viewing.
TiVo once commandeered my bedroom, but now with the TiVoToGo software, it's a portable genius. Beyond allowing me to play recorded TV all around the house (on TVs and computers), it also functions as a webserver, so I can remotely access what's recorded on it. The potential is just starting to reveal itself.
I load up the PMC with the latest Beck, Atmosphere, and M.I.A. videos.
For the most part, this is still a device waiting for a use. The concept is basically "iPod Video," but I haven't really figured out how to fit this kind of viewing into my life. Right now, I load it up with music videos, and then take it to parties, where I pass it around for people to watch and talk about. This is very fun, but it hasn't exactly justified the $500 price tag yet.
I've moved full-length movies onto it (and television programming from TiVoToGo), but it doesn't quite feel right watching long programming on it.
Google has added the "Local" tab to its homepage. I'm a heavy user of Google Local, so it's great to see it up front. (Who wants to bet on Video, Print, or Scholar being the next to move to prime time?)
The Sunday Times Arts section chooses video filesharing as its cover story. While pondering recent developments in media control -- including MythTV (basically a homemade DVR) and Videora (basically a mix of RSS and BitTorrent) -- the article takes the now-common tone of "tv executives don't want their industry to be the next Napster." But, as usual, there's little substance on what they might be doing about it. (And not even a passing note on Google Video or Blinkx.) It also mentions EFF's Television Digital Liberation Front, a protest against the upcoming broadcast flag mandate.
So you always wanted to get into the news business? Now's your chance: Al Jazeera is up for sale.
ONLINE
Elizabeth Spiers' Fishbowl NY is supposed to launch today. NYT exaggerated in calling it a "face-off" between it and Gawker. UPDATE: It launched along with other new MediaBistro sites, including Fishbowl LA, Fishbowl DC, and Unbeige. UPDATE UPDATE: Denton has launched two new ones too: Gridskipper ("urban travel") and Lifehacker (tech tips).
iPod Stories (dot-com). Wired News has the story on the man behind it. He likes the word technotranscendent. Good line: "The iPod is no longer just an instrument or a tool, but a part of myself. It's a body extension. It's part of my memory, and if I lose this stuff, I lose part of my identity."
NYT Styles puts blogging moms on the cover with a profile of Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com. And the San Francisco Chronicleprofiles Anastasia Goodstein of YPulse and a recent INdTV hire.
FILM
Have you heard who's set to direct Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections? Robert Zemeckis.
In a somewhat strange case, some people think Clint Eastwood is a bigot for his Oscar-nominated Million Dollar Baby. Roger Ebert isn't one of them.
MUSIC
M.I.A. seems to be the most hyped artist of the moment. Her new album isn't even out until next month, yet she's appearing on music blogs everywhere. NYT had her do a playlist this week.
Wanna hear a track from the upcoming FisherSpooner? Sure ya do.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Another new Beck video: "E Pro". (This one's directed by Shynola, not the one that I pointed to the other day.) It rocks.
There's a lot of talk in the game industry about introducing more narrative into games. Clive Thompson at Slate.com argues the exact opposite. Excerpt: When a game has a story that "ends" after 40 hours of play, you have to throw it away -- and go spend another $50 on the next title. That's movie-industry logic, not game logic. Chess doesn't "end." Neither do hockey, bridge, football, Go, playing with dolls, or even Tetris.
Some details on Katamari Damacy 2. (I highly recommend playing the first one while very wasted.)
Ever wonder what Newt Gingrich has been up to? Really, you do? Well, WaPo has a long profile for you.
LOCAL
Everyone and their daughter was at the Melodious Owl / Olympic Hopefuls / Faux Jean show on Saturday. The queue outside could have you waiting in the cold for up to an hour, but I was lucky enough to have friends sneak in the back. I guess that's what happen when there's nothing going on in January and the Stribputs you on the cover.
NYT looks at the age-discrimination suit going on over at Best Buy. Interesting tidbit: the average age of its 5,000 employees is 29.
What is the only state that has never had a tv series located in it? North Dakota.
Think of an object. 20Q.net can usually figure it out in less than 20 questions.
Remember Friendster? Apparently, the site is finally planning to offer new products, though what they are is still unclear. MySpace is already several times bigger than Friendster.
Howard Kurtz had Ana Marie Cox and Andrew Sullivan on Reliable Sources yesterday. Here's the transcript.
MARKETING
Alright, someone's gotta start a backlash on this viral marketing stuff. For instance, this one appears to be MTV2, this one appears to be TransGlobal Vacations, and this one appears to be GM. I think all of them involve billboards too. Stop it, before you hurt someone!
Lisa Rein has the Daily Show Inauguration Speech video. (This "Freedom vs. Liberty" comparison came up everywhere last week, from SNL to the New York Times to NPR.)
New on Flowtv.org: interview with Jason Reich, a Daily Show writer.
Simon Reynold tries to explain why dance music is dying. Even dance music subculture fans will like to see Black Strobe, DJ/Rupture, LCD Soundsystem, Mu, Tiefschwarz, Teamshadetek, and Kiki name-checked in The Times. If you're into that kinda thing, the ILM thread.
If you haven't heard it, you probably should hear Nina Gordon's version of "Straight Outta Compton" (mp3). Refresher: Nina Gordon was in Veruca Salt.
ILM debates "Southern Man" (Neil Young) vs. "Sweet Home Alabama" (Lynard Skynard).
FILM
Low Culture on Crispin Glover's new project, What Is It? "The film features a cast consisting largely of actors with Down Syndrome, a snail with the voice of Fairuza Balk, and legendary publisher Adam Parfrey playing 'Jealous Minstrel'." Crispin has either lost it, or he's deeply inspired by Prince Harry.
I'm slightly embarrassed to just now find out that local boy Rob Davis is the person behind the NYT Firefox advert. (Discovered this via a Wired mag cover story, not online yet.) Rob was also the creator of BushBoy.com (CP story), Deanie Babies, and Butter Palm. More so than any one else in this city, Rob needs a blog.
Proving I have no idea what demographic reads this site, here are products purchased in the past three months on Amazon.com in which this site served up the referral:
When people ask me what my blog is about, I always stumble around for an accurate answer. Whereas most of my favorite blogs are about a single topic, this site mixes elements of pop culture, technology, media, and internet prattle. When pressed for a defining characteristic, I usually mumble something about online culture, and hope that is somehow self-defining.
Newcomers might wonder how this dumb blog stands out among a kjillion others out there. The short answer: it doesn't -- blogs are best consumed as an aggregate, a sum greater than its parts. It's a tired metaphor, but it's worth restating: the blogosphere is a living breathing entity that survives because all of its various cells work individually to create an organism.
However, I do have a suspicion that those people who come here (a meager 8,000 of you per day) don't need more long-form opinion in their life. There are plenty of clever commentary blogs out there, but I personally believe the world has enough opinion -- but hey, that's just an opinion. So if this blog has a theme, it's to fulfill its namesake: consuming and redistributing the carrion of online communication.
You see, when I dubbed this site fimoculous -- which is a type of micro-organism that inhabits and consumes its own excrement for sustenance -- I took it literally. This site lives in and eats its own shit. To put it more prosaically, I think of Fimoculous.com in simple terms: a place to find what people are talking about online today. So the best part of this site is probably the left column where the links are. I am online at least 10 hours/day, and that's where I store what I encounter.
Defying that depiction, I have nonetheless gathered below a small collection my favorite posts over the years. I apologize for the hubris of this greatest hits collection, and I swear this is the last time you'll see me talking about myself.
Yearly Lists, Lists, Lists Think about how many devices you use that serve the simple purpose of aggregating content that you already have access to. I'm thinking of your TiVo, your iPod, your RSS Reader, and many other devices in your digital life. None of these devices provide you with new content -- they just organize it in a more effective way. When making a definition of blog, this aggregating element would have to be part of it. So it makes sense that the most popular feature on this site is not even really content -- it's a list of lists.
Blogs of the Year These are my picks for the blogs that all deserve a Wired nomination for disrupting publishing in society-shaking ways.
IM Robot Chatter I'm strangely proud of this one. All I did is write a program that allows two AIM clients to "talk" to each other. Postmodern love ensues.
The Rise and Fall of Plain Layne This wasn't on my blog per se, but it was chronicled here and I think of it as my manifesto on online identity.
American Taliban on Usenet I always felt like the mainstream media should have grabbed this story. Right around the same time as Google opened up the Usenet archive, America was obsessing about John "American Taliban" Lindh. All I did was Google him on the archive, and his 46 pre-Afghanistan posts opened a complete personality profile at a time when everyone was asking "what kind of person could possibly do this?"
Game Culture This rambling essay looks at some of the trends in gaming today.
Rex Rock City Chuck Klosterman is my nemesis, and I am his. This is a footnote face-off of our friendship. (His new book has another chapter about our relationship, which will be deconstructed at a future date.)
Blogumentary This is another article I wrote for City Pages, looking at Chuck Olsen's film Blogumentary, which is essential viewing for those interested in personal publishing.
Wonkette Shakedown Live reporatage of Wonkette's appearance at the Online News Association keynote.
Flash Mob It's hard to even say flash mob without giggling, but it was fun to be part of this movement for a while.
It's scary to see my name on a list next to so many of my idols, including Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, James Surowiecki, Steve Jobs, Michel Gondry, Quentin Tarantino, Bjork, Prince, The Streets, Jon Stewart, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page. The other nominated bloggers are an amazing cast: Wonkette.com (Ana Marie Cox), Blogmaverick.com (Mark Cuban), Instapundit.com (Glenn Reynolds), and Kevinsites.net (Kevin Sites).
Somebody claims to have created a program that will remove DRM from Windows Media files. If true, this could be catastrophic for Microsoft.Bah, nevermind. But it makes you wonder what happens when this actually does occur.
TV
You're not hallucinating. Networks have been tagging an extra minute to their schedules to deceive TiVos (though they deny that's why). See also in the L.A. Times: Looking for New Ways to Make Viewers Pay, which hypothesizes the future of DVRs becoming a pay-model for the networks.
Timelists those in the running for Dan Rather's job: Katie Couric, Ted Koppel, John Roberts, Scott Pelley, Mika Brzezinski, and Anderson Cooper. Katie is gonna get it, but I'm cheering for Anderson.
I'm probably the only person you know who TiVos Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. CommonDreams.org has an editorial critiquing the CNN show.
Good close-ups of the new Treo. I still haven't decided if it's worth $500+ to upgrade. The only benefits that affect me are the increased screen quality and the better camera.
IDEAS
Random thought: do you think we'll start hearing the word blink all the time now? I imagine in the blink of an eye being resurrected just like tipping point was. Damn you, Gladwell!
I've never heard of this collective of video directors: Colonel Blimp. You'll find videos from The Chemical Brothers, The Streets, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Spiritualized, New Order, Dizee Rascal, Bjork, and Basement Jaxx. Good stuff.
MEDIA
It's interesting that I haven't found a single reason to link to Slate.com since the buy-out by the Washington Post. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it certainly looks like dullville over there lately.
NYTstory on upcoming sit-coms set in Iraq, including Spirit of America, "a Fox sitcom about the creation of a Western-style television network in contemporary Baghdad." Oh boy.
McDonald's Israel has done a parody advert [video] of the Pulp Fiction scene about burgers. (I wonder if Tarantino approved this.)
The Age of Egocasting. This is a long essay tracking personal choice in media from the remote control to "egocasting." Unfortunately, it ends with one of those doomsday, Postman-esque scenarios envisioned back in the Republic.com days. (That type of argument should be totally debunked by now. TiVo and other personalization devices cause me to experience more media options, not less.)
Blinkx.tv has essentially come out of nowhere to capture a segment of the future that Google should really own: video search. They've signed up BBC, ITV, Sky and Fox.
As expected, Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, is getting a lot of attention. If you have any interest in keeping up with Gladwell, here's the NYTBR review, the Salon review, and a Metafilter thread.
The whole blogging/disclosure/activism debate has so many tentacles to it now that I won't bother linking to everything. Instead, if you care, here's a post that does.
Alexis says that a Metropark is coming to the Mall of America. Good or bad? You decide: "Metropark is a new breed of lifestyle retailer inspired by the fusion of fashion, music, and art. We stand for seduction, life after midnight, and the constant pursuit of desire." Well, I guess we'll just see about that....
Pitchfork redesigned. I don't know why this is considered better -- it looks more busy and harder to digest. But there oodles of new ads, so that's probably why they redesigned.
Jay-Zeezer, a mashup of Jay-Z and Weezer. Prediction: after a certain point, the phrase "interesting in theory" takes over this entire genre, and no one ever listens to a mash-up again because everyone just imagines what it will sound like.
Creative Commons and Wired have launched CC Mixter, "where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
You probably saw the interview where Bill Gates calls the Creative Commons advocates communists, and now Gizmodo asks him to clarify. (There's the funny point at the end where they disagree on agreeing.)
WaPointroduces new vlogging software called Vlog It. Looks interesting. (Sidenote: have we already reached a consensus to call it vlogging?)
New site: Mappr. Uses Flickr API to map out recently uploaded photos.
DESIGN
VillageVoice.com has redesigned. I like the colors, but not the double-horizontal subnav. It's unfortunate that the blog component got bumped over to the far-left rail.
TV
You watch Arrested Development, right? Of course you do, but did you know that Portia de Rossi is shacking with Ellen DeGeneres right now? Of course you did, but did you know that Will Arnett is married to Amy Poehler? Of course you did. Nevermind then.
Because of the timely intersection of three things -- new year's prognostications, last week's CES, and the ascendency of vlogging -- everyone is talking about The Future of Television. It's impossible to link to all the buzz-buzzing right now, but here are a couple: Buzzmachine has a post on how to explode your tv in four easy steps and The Long Tail has one about distribution models. And there's Steven Johnson reflecting on what he wrote in Emergence. As always, LostRemote has a constant flow or related links.
Diablo Cody writes aboutProject Runway, my current fave show. I love it when Heidi Klum pushes the losers off the stage with an Auf Wiedersehen that has twice the gravitas of Trump's You're Fired.
C|Net interviews Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, a founder of Wikipedia who is behind WikiNews.
Long look at the business of the New York Times from Business Week. (The section about NYTimes.com potentially becoming a pay site got dot-comers all worked up the past few days.)
TV
Varietycomes down on 60 Minutes for its soft profile on Google.
More details on the MTV wireless deal, which could put clips from The Daily Show and Best Week Ever on cell phones.
Yet another profile of BitTorrent, this time from the Seattle Times.
MUSIC
Sasha wrote about mash-ups for The New Yorker. I don't know about the genesis of the piece, but it reads like something that was edited into blandness.
The Guardianprofiles Dolly Parton, including notes on "why God likes gays."
Yipe, the entire run of the Sub Pop Singles Club (minus one record) is on sale on eBay. Bid is currently $4500.
FILM
You've probably heard that Richard Linklater is directing an animated version of Phillip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, and Ain't It Cool News has some pics. (BTW, when was the last time you saw anyone link to Ain't It Cool News?)
And the award for washed-up cast of the year goes to... Alone in the Dark, starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff.
LOCAL
Apparently Ron Jeremy is appearing at the Triple Rock January 15. It's a little unclear what this even actually is, but I'll try to find out for you.
Stribprofiles the novel writing program, NaNoWriMo. (BTW, is anyone else annoyed with the way StarTribune.com now breaks every story into two pages? For some reason it never bothered me when NYTimes.com did it, but this does.)
I'll be in San Francisco this weekend. If a Bay City Roller out there wants to buy me a drink, drop me a note.
ONLINE
The Atlasphere, a dating service for Ayn Rand freaks. I bet there are many more doms than subs.
Some guy dialed 867-5309 with every area code in America, and posted the results.
Big merger in blog land: Six Apart is buying Live Journal. Two things that interest me about this: 1) It almost seems like it could have been the other way around. 2) The user base for each product represents the complete opposites of the blogging spectrum. (Danah rhasodizing on why this is bad.)
I'm closing the doors on Lists 2004 with over 550 links and nary a word of rhapsodizing from me. See ya next year.
GOOGLE
A rumor is floating around that Google might buy Flickr.
60 Minutes did a long profile of Google, which, if you're like me and read every word about the search company, will tell you nothing new, but it was still nicely packaged. (Includes interview with John Battelle.)
A more serious analysis than 60 Minutes can muster, Technology Review's "What's Next for Google" cover story makes the strong argument that Google needs to open itself up with more web services.
TV
In what might be the first serious media critique of Tina Fey, the Sunday NYT goes after SNL's writing in "The All Too Ready for Prime Time Players". The article's premise -- that SNL has shied away from "dangerous or inventive" satire in favor of "teenage bimbette du jour" fair -- starts off okay, but ends a bit weary. What's missing from this criticism is a recognition of how pop culture has increasingly infused everything over the 25 years, so celebrity culture would obviously become a topic for SNL. Anyway, more importantly, Whatevs.org (which I'm proud to have included in my Blogs of the Year) was quoted in the story. (Historical reminder: Dave Itzkoff, the author of the article, is the former editor of Maxim.)
Whenever I get a chance, I tell people how the writers and producers of The Golden Girls have gone on to great success elsewhere -- in particular, with Desperate Housewives and Arrested Development. Apparently The Times noticed too. (Another note: Itzkoff also wrote this one.)
I missed linking to it over the holidays, so let's put up Wired's BitTorrent story now. If you work in TV media, you should read it. (In the meantime, Suprnova went down, but a successor to BitTorrent, Exeem, which includes decentralized indexing, was released.)
Anonymous CableNewser readers (half of whom are probably cable news network employees with Fox News ringtones) make their 2005 predictions.
As something of a follow-up to the fantastic Control Room (which, by the way, Chuck Olsen gave his Artist of the Year award to), Al Arabiya (the main competition to Al Jazeera) lands on the cover of Times Mag this week. See also: Wired's similar story from July.
Dan Gillmor (who recently left the Mercury News to start his own citizen journalism business) has a new blog: Grassroots Journalism.
I saw our girl Randi Kaye reading the news for the first time on CNN today. It also looks like she'll also be on the unbrazenly-titled CNN Saturday Morning.
The rogue taxidermy just keeps on rolling. Creative Electric lands in The Times today. Dave has added more pics and a storefront to the Creative Electric website. (The closing party for the Mark Mothersbaugh show is Jan. 15.)
My pal John Lamb, who writes a column for the Fargo Forum, is doing a column where his readers vote on what his New Year's Resolution should be.
PaidContent.org asked people for 2005 digital media predictions, which caused me to write this futuristic sentence:
"We all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star."
The responses are here, and what I wrote is below:
What's the most important development in digital media and entertainment that actually will occur in 2005?
1) Content will continue to unbundle itself.
I have no idea what night The Apprentice airs -- I'm not even sure which network it's on. All I know is that every Friday night this past year, my friends would gather around the TiVo and lovingly poke fun at Donald Trump's hair. Whether it was iTunes or RSS or TiVo, this was the digital media lesson of '04: content has no natural brand identity. Marketers try to force "brand" on it while journalists try to force "narrative" on it, but content will continue to shed these mucky add-ons and proceed toward its natural state: pure information.
2) The line between communication and publishing will continue to be less distinct.
In the world of nano-publishing, traditional concepts like communication (one-to-one) and publishing (one-to-many) become blurry propositions. All signs point to this breakdown of public and private: websites that aggregate and organize personal content into social threads (Flickr, Bloglines, del.icio.us), private moments becoming major entertainment experiences (reality TV, celeb sex tapes), communication technologies that make online relations both more personal and more anonymous at the same time (VoIP, LiveJournal), personal media devices creating global news events (Abu Ghraib prisoner photos taken with a cell phone, tsunami video recorded on handhelds bought at Best Buy), and the rise of blogger personalities who review digital media devices next to their dating problems (ahem). What does this mean for digital media? It means the content stars of 2005 will come from the least likely places. And we all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star.
3) Media will continue to be manipulated.
This might have been the biggest lesson I learned from working on NBC's website for the summer Olympics this past year: media manipulation is the message. One single piece of video, for instance, could be use for infinite purposes: online streaming, still photos, audio slideshows, images distributed to cell phones, interactive Flash apps, redistribution to TiVos, repackaging as highlight reels... the list goes on and on. In digital entertainment, some of the most exciting events this year were media manipulations: Danger Mouse's Gray Album (which was Entertainment Weekly's album of the year), Strangerhood (machinima of The Sims characters), and MTV's Video Mods (video games plus rock stars). In 2005, media hybrids will become so normative you'll hardly even think to call them that.
What one thing that would make a difference in digital media or entertainment would you most want to see happen in 2005?
Interoperability among digital music standards.
At least one media outlet uses BitTorrent as a distribution model.
At least one major company adapts Creative Commons instead of the increasingly archaic copyright laws now in places.
Microsoft puts an RSS reader in Outlook or IE.
TV Industry predictions?
CNN won't lose Tucker.
Someone will buy TiVo, but it won't be Apple.
Two or three citizen journalist sites will launch. Critical praise will be high; growth will be slow at first, but pick up by the end of the year.
Apple won't make a video iPod. Portable Media Devices will struggle, but not die.
Video search will surprise everyone and be a big success early in 2005.
Michael Powell will torture a few more people, then retire.
Netflix will either merge with TiVo, or be bought by Blockbuster.
Great Future Tense interview (RealAudio) with Matt Thompson about EPIC, a vision of a personlized media source that aggregates newspapers, blogs, and social networks.
Business Week on vlogs here and here. I think we'll see scads of new video bloggers in 2005, and maybe even a celebrity or two arise out of the movement. There's now also Vloggercon 2005.
NYT tries to grapple with the age-old newspaper look at MLA by getting all meta about it: Eggheads' Naughty Word Games. Fave paper titles this year: "t.A.T.u. You! The Global Politics of Faux Lesbian Pop" and "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'."
Count me (and apparently many others in the media) among those who had no idea Susan Sontag was shacking with Annie Leibovitz for many years.
MUSIC
My pals Ross [Pioneer Press] and Melissa [City Pages] did a great episode of MPR's Midmorning (RealAudio) where they discuss their favorite albums of the year.
Holy retromania. At least a hundred new "Of The Year" lists showed up over Christmas break. They are all still collected right here, but below are some highlists:
Chris Anderson is turning his much-lauded Wired story "The Long Tail" into a book, with an accompanying blog.
NYT Styles writes about the blog Anonymous Lawyer, yet another fictional blog, but this time with a twist: everyone knows it's fiction, and no one seems to care. I guess that makes it sorta like lawyer fan-fic. Eww.
It's simply gross how much Best Of ephemera I've consumed in the past month. But I'll give one best Best Award to Best Year Ever, VH1's show that gave its yearly award to "Some Dude". It matches nicely with the assessment of others that 2004 was the year of the little people.
Before anyone tries to talk you into uttering senseless historical inanities, let's just clear this up: 2004 was not "The Year of the Blog." This was not the year of Howard Dean's bold online campaign, nor was it the year of dismantling Trent Lott. It wasn't even the year of the Paris Hilton tape. That was all last year, and while we have plenty to celebrate about '04, it's best to approach the past 365 days wearing a new look: maturity. In other words, this was the year blogs grew up.
Don't mistake that assessment as a suggestion that blogs are slipping into a rheumatic slumber. To be sure, it was a good year, one in which we (may I use the royal first person?) booted a tiresome TV anchor, sparred with the FCC, pre-reported Ken Jennings' demise, and discovered an entire radical music movement. Excellent work, and that's not even counting the intrepid analysis of Tara Reid's nipple.
But this was a landmark year for independent publishers not so much because of Lewinsky-size scoops, but because the internet came into its own as a medium for experiencing news events. Think about it -- look how many events didn't necessarily happen first online, but seemed to exist because of the blogosphere. The moments that best defined culture in '04 -- the best political debate (Jon Stewart pouncing on Crossfire), the best sex media scandal (Bill O'Reilly raping a falafel), the best TV moment (Janet exposing a Super Bowl nipple), and the best music video (Ashlee Simpson lip synching on SNL) -- were all probably delivered to you via blogger keystrokes. These media events all somehow felt, if you will, "internety" -- somewhat like how Jon Stewart's Daily Show has that intangible quality that makes it feel like television's version of a blog.
In other words, 2004 was the year we became the medium that mattered.
Last year, while giving the numero uno slot to Howard Dean's Blog For America, I wrote a now-embarrassing blurb which said, "When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function." Mm-hm. In an attempt to correct that gaffe and atone for the mistakes of the past year (and to prove that blogs are more than a collection of celeb up-skirt shots), here are the Best Blogs of 2004:
1)Buzz Machine. It's almost a shame that Jeff Jarvis' blog had to become the most important read of the year. After Janet's nipple kicked off the revised culture wars in January, the tension seemed to build all year, right up to a foreboding red-blue November. All along the way, Jarvis was there warning us of what was coming. When the FCC started tossing around fines faster than Howard Stern's tongue can move, Jarvis (who was the creator of Entertainment Weekly and now heads Condé Nast's internet strategy) became suspicious of some claims and filed a Freedom of Information Act request (actual reporting! bloggers beware!), which revealed the number of complaints had been greatly exaggerated. One show (FOX's Married by America) turned out to have received considerably less than the 159 complaints that the FCC reported. "Considerably less," as in three. An indefatigable Jarvis went on to critique other FCC mistakes, all of which seemed like a prescient glimpse into the news that Howard Stern would move to Sirius radio. Deriding Michael Powell as the "National Nanny," Jarvis slipped onto the talk show circuit, regularly appearing on the cable news networks to denounce the direction American media control was headed. For being a spokesman against cultural censorship (and for helping spread the word into Iran and Iraq), Buzz Machine is my blog of the year.
2)Wonkette. Dear Wonkette, I am responding to your personal on Craigslist seeking a "submissive Jim McGreevey swallower willing to do an 'Anderson Cooper 360' on my puckered red-state ass." It took forever to write that faux-sentence, and it's not even funny. Wonkette could have spit out a better one faster than you can say "Joe Lockhart is drunk again." By the end of the year, our little foul-mouthed Dorothy-Parker-resurrect was appearing on Tina Brown's show, being invited to online news conventions, and getting handed a quarter-mill book advance -- yet Ana Marie Cox never shied from her role as Media Deprofessionalizer in Chief. For frisking the DC wonks, Wonkette is the #2 blog of the year.
3)DailyKos. Whereas Wonkette is one person's personality spread like mayo over the entire political scene, DailyKos is more like the perfect sandwich -- a whole community that is greater than the sum of its parts. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga didn't actually uncover too many political stories this year -- but he created a community that did. Just some of the little political stories created by DailyKos readers: 1) A famous Bush print ad containing additional military personnel Photoshopped into the background was discovered by DailyKos users, which led to a Bush administration apology. 2) During the vice-presidential debate, Dick Cheney claimed that he had never met his rival, John Edwards, but a DailyKos participant found TV footage to the contrary, which was eventually aired on cable news networks to much embarrassment to Cheney. 3) A boycott of Sinclair advertisers to protest the airing of an anti-Kerry documentary caused the broadcasting group's stock to tank, and forced the company to adjust the broadcast. Along the way, DailyKos also raised a half-million dollars for Democratic political candidates. For foreseeing how political campaigns will be run in the future, DailyKos is the #3 blog of the year.
4)Waxy.org. Waxy proves that in the blogosphere, discovery trumps invention any day. Way back in February, Andy Baio posted the first links to DJ/Producer Danger Mouse's notorious Gray Album, which consisted completely of music sampled from Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Of course the cease-and-desist letters showed up immediately, but it was too late -- mirror sites popped up everywhere, Gray Tuesday was launched, and the word "mash-up" suddenly entered the lexicon of the Newsweek-reading crowd. Last year, Waxy.org discovered the Star Wars kid; this year his link to NickNolteDiary.comtriggered a debate about the relationship of celebrity and blogging. Waxy for President! For forcing the nation to confront its archaic copyright laws, Waxy.org is the #4 blog of the year.
5)Power Line. Who the hell saw this one coming? Who could have predicted that a cadre of right-wing bloggers out in Apple Valley, MN, would drastically change the course of media history? It was so simple: download and analyze the documents that CBSNews.com posted to support the 60 Minutes piece on George Bush's military record. That little act (along with some assistance from other blogger sleuths such as LGF) changed Dan Rather's life forever, and landed Power Line Time's first Blog of the Year award. For showing that truth in reporting matters more than any political ethos, Power Line is the #5 blog of the year.
6)BoingBoing. The subtitle, "A Directory of Wonderful Things," pretty much sums up BoingBoing's run of hits in '04. From Jack Chick tracts to rogue taxidermists, Japanese fetish objects to "I fucked Alec Baldwin in the ass" stickers, Asimov to Zelda -- BoingBoing collected every piece of esoterica you missed. Cory Doctorow, who toils by day as a Creative Commons activist and science fiction author, also somehow got invited to Microsoft HQ to talk about Digital Rights Management -- perhaps the best (and, given the audience, most difficult to imagine) speech of the year. For reminding us the best parts of the internet are still uncommercial weird shit, BoingBoing is the #6 blog of the year.
7)Plain Layne. C'mon, admit it, you like being fooled. For three years, Plain Layne was the online girl you wanted to know. Sexy, smart, irreverent, and willing to talk about expensive dildos and cheap wine, Layne Johnson told you all the naughty details -- in e-mail, on AIM, or on her website. When she turned out to be the fictional work of Odin Soli, a thirty-something dot-commer with a penis, the investigative effort (chronicled here) became the real story. In hindsight, the salacious details should probably have tipped off more people, but, as everything from The Passion of Christ to the Red Sox showed in 2004, people really want to believe in myths. Plain Layne pre-dated a number of conspicuous fake celeb blogs in 2004, a trend which included Quentin Tarantino, Nick Nolte, Bill Clinton, Julian Casablancas, and Adam Nagourney. For two reasons -- forcing us to think again about online identity and accidentally personifying the investigative power of digital communities -- the defunct Plain Layne is the #7 blog of the year.
8)Metafilter. Grandpa Metafilter, you know I would never let you fall out of the Top 10. I wish your participants had done some of the same unique investigative work we found on places like DailyKos and Power Line this year (your community is certainly smarter than theirs), but you were always there with the context that made the story resonate. For staying above the fray, Metafilter is the #8 blog of the year.
9)Gawker. Frankly, I think Gawker Stalker is dull. I don't really care that you saw James Lipton at a train stop. But I do care about that Condé Nast cafeteria! If blogs could have clipped teaser critic quotes like movies, I'd give Jessica Coen this one: "Best media snark this side of Vincent Gallo's cock! Two thumbs up [the Olsen Twins]!!" For redefining NSFW in 2004, Gawker is the #9 blog of the year.
10)I Want Media and Romenesko. Sure, it's cheap to give them a tie, but they're inextricably linked. For finding the needles in that big fat media haystack, I Want Media and Romenesko are the #10 blogs of the year.
11)Kottke.org. Lucid, informed, reasoned, simple but never simplistic -- these are the qualities that make a good blogger, and Jason Kottke personifies all of them. Kottke's big scoop this year was reporting Ken Jennings' Jeopardy loss before anyone else, and he managed to do it in a completely internet-centric way (you had to highlight the text in your browser to see the spoiler). For keeping the bar high, Kottke.org is the #11 blog of the year.
12)Lost Remote. When Lost Remote held a tagline contest a couple months ago, one of the winners was "The future of media is stuck between the cushions of your couch." For chronicling in real time the shift of power to the user, Lost Remote is the #12 blogger of the year.
13)Whatevs. Uncle Grambo used to speak his own language, but now everyone else speaks it. The blogosphere is littered with good pop culture sites (Amy's Robot, Golden Fiddle, Lindsayism, Stereogum, Zulkey, Information Leafblower, Witz.org, Defamer and The Superficial -- to name just a few), but Whatevs won the most snark hearts by talking in some sort of futuristic jive-speak, inventing names for celebs like Brit Brit and The Thighmaster and Gawky Bird and M. Daytime Shamalamadingdong. This dude from Detroit probably doesn't even know that half the NYC mag publishing world is combing his site for lingo to steal. Whatevs. For grokking the epithet, Whatevs is the #13 blog of the year.
14)Engadget. In the mock-battle between Calacanis and Denton, I'm cheering for the guy who thinks less is more. But Peter Rojas at Engadget out-scooped his former digs, Gizmodo, on nearly every gadgety moment this year. For making us want more, Engadget is the #14 blog of the year.
15)PaidContent. Every morning, after the inbox got its cleansing and the Cocoa Puffs were finished, PaidContent.org was the first site that I visited. A bit of a misnomer, PaidContent actually covers everything you might call "digital media." For scouring a wide range of topics between business and technology, PaidContent is the #15 blog of the year.
16)Drudge Report. What did Drudge do this year? The only thing I really remember was hitting refresh constantly on election night (damn those exit polls!). For just being Drudge, Drudge Report is the #16 blog of the year.
17)Low Culture. As far as dichotomies go, "grave" and "shallow" pretty much cover all the ground. For eschewing the happy medium, Low Culture is the #17 blog of the year.
18)Largehearted Boy. I hear this MP3 Blog thing is quite the fad! A lot of press went to Fluxblog this year, but Largehearted Boy was the most comprehensive independent music blogger out there. For pre-dating podcasting, Largehearted Boy is the #18 blog of the year.
19)Bookslut. Choosing a favorite book blog is hard work (GalleyCat is the most recent addition to biblio blogs), but Bookslut seemed the most rapaciously slutty of them all. For reminding me to read more, Bookslut is the #19 blog of the year.
20)The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork. For defying the category blog, The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork are the #20 blogs of the year.
21)Blogumentary. For creating the first great celluloid (well, digi video) document of the blogosphere, Blogumentary is the #22 blog of the year.
22)I Love Music. For being the largest collection of music nerds ever assembled, ILM is the #22 blog of the year.
23)Best Week Ever. For finally doing a tv-blog combo, Best Week Ever is the #23 blog of the year.
24)Green Cine. For obsessing about every possible film-related link on the internet, Green Cine is the #24 blog of the year.
25)Dan Gillmor's eJournal. For publishing the book that defined citizen journalism in 2004, Dan Gillmor's eJournal is the #25 blog of the year.
26)Slashdot. Do I gotta? The discussions on Slashdot are as bulimic as an Olsen Twin -- lots to intake, lots of purging, a gross and skinny final product. You probably had a better chance getting juicy tech commentary on places like SearchEngineWatch and Many-To-Many and John Battelle. Nonetheless, the hatahs at Slashdot also seemed to reliably provide context to tech news events. For making you wish you could run more of your life from a command prompt, Slashdot is the #26 blog of the year.
Yipe. Tucker Carlson is quitting CNN and moving to MSNBC. (Note: The blog TVNewser gets the scoop first.)
Poynter.org has a New Media Timeline (from 1969 to 2004) that would have been much better if there were a single-page version that you could print.
ONLINE
NYT Mag on blogs, privacy, sex, journalism, and identity: Your Blog or Mine? The thesis: "In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them." Perhaps I'm too blithe about this topic, but I rather enjoy a world where everyone is a walking reality tv show.
Here's a story idea for one of you cute little intrepid journalists out there: What ever happened to Apple girl Ellen Feiss? Actually, you could do a whole series of former internet celebs, including Mahir and the Star Wars kid.
Days after donations to Mozilla fund a two-page ad in the Times, the biz section raves about Firefox.
LOCAL
Dave has posted the Maxim "story" on the Rogue Taxidermists show at Creative Electric.
The news all my friends were talking about this weekend: MPR is launching a new music radio station. Looks like it has all the potential in the world... or it could completely suck. Not sure what to make of this: "Our staff will be hanging out in clubs, searching the Internet, reading the music magazines and streaming music from around the globe to find the best music for you." They've also started a blog.
Art Forum Diary, which Greg.org describes as "an art world reality TV show, where the magazine's editors and contributors compete for the Walter Benjamin-inspired title of Greatest Flaneur." Yum!
This was supposed to be the year that our past saved us from ourselves. But at least far as popular music is concerned, that wasn't true, as new releases from the Beastie Boys, Courtney Love, REM, Prince, Bjork, and U2 all turned out as noble attempts at pretending not to be boring.
But then, just as the failure of the legacy acts opened the door for newcomers such as Nellie McKay and Arcade Fire, a couple unexpected true legacies came from out of nowhere to surprise us: Loretta Lynn and Brian Wilson. Who saw that coming?
As I saw it, here are the best albums of 2004:
1) The Streets, A Grand Don't Come For Free -- When I was upset about another relationship breakup, when I was getting ready for a party, when I was choosing an album for my alarm clock to wake me up to in the morning -- it was always The Streets on the stereo. Beyond its versatility, it was also completely indescribable. By default, it's called hip-hop, but it seems more like some kind of ancient syncopated storytelling. That's right, Mike Skinner is our Homer. And the craziest part was when people would ask for a description of the album: toward the end of explaining the Pulp Fiction-ish structuring narrative, I had to pause and say, "I can't say any more without ruining how it ends." That's the sign of a good album.
2) Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand -- Idea for us to make millions in Hollywood: let's make a movie set in the summer of '04, and play "Take Me Out" during the party scene. Millions, I tell you! The way I see it, "Take Me Out" starts like a good Strokes (or Beatles?) ditty and segues perfectly into a great White Stripes (or Stones?) romp. Before you can even realize it, you're singing "I know I won't be leaving here... with you" to every girl at the party. And you won't be leaving with her, because she's having too much fun dancing. This was the album for people who wanted to forget in three-and-a-half-minute increments that GW has already taken us through two wars.
3) TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes -- Just when you thought every possible option for fusion was gone (country electronica? check. indie hip-hop? check. a capella dance? check.), a few dudes in Brooklyn came up with what is essentially doo-wop punk. Yet it sounds nothing like that, as this fusion is probably the most unique sound of the decade so far.
4) DFA, Compilation #2 -- At first, this album -- which sounds approximately like "dancing to a plane crash" -- seemed impenetrably "too New York" for me to "get." In fact, every time I described it to someone, I threw around scare-quotes just like that last frightening sentence. And then somewhere around track five on the second disc, it hit me: this sounds like Minneapolis in 1985, when punk (Husker Du, The Replacements) and funk (Prince, Morris Day) were banging heads with each other. Suddenly, it felt like home.
5) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose -- Out of the gate, this album was criticized as a forced mash-up. Which of course it is, and that's what it's so gorgeous.
6) Dizzee Rascal, Showtime -- There's something about Dizzee Rascal that reminds me of playing Tetris. Must. Fit. Blocks. In. Holes.
7) Wilco, A Ghost Is Born -- Though immensely frustrating at times, the brilliance of Jeff Tweedy shines through in spurts and whistles and grunts.
8) The Walkmen, Bows and Arrows -- The Walkmen are sort of the Built To Spill of 2004. We always need an indie rock band that turns the guitar fuzz louder than the vox.
9) PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her -- It's probably her second-weakest album, but PJ still makes the most shamefully annihilating recordings of anyone alive.
10) "Rockism" -- Even though Michaelangelo insisted that the debate is at least three years old, 2004 was the year that rockism went, well, mainstream. Kelefa Sanneh's critique of the goofy word led me into more conversations than any album this year, and because of that, it was better than all those boring old-timer albums. I still think it's a straw man concept, but hey, it was nice arguing with all of you about it. For at least a half-second, it actually tricked me into thinking music criticism still matters.
22 runner-ups:
Arcade Fire, Funeral;
Bloc Party, Bloc Party;
The Hold Stready, Almost Killed Me;
Interpol, Antics;
Air, Talkie Walkie;
The Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat;
Morrissey, You Are The Quarry;
Nellie McKay, Get Away From Me;
Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News;
Bjork, Medulla;
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse;
Madvillian, Madvillainy;
Big & Rich, Horses of a Different Color;
Pavement, Crooked Rain Reissue;
Tom Waits, Real Gone;
Le Tigre, This Island;
The Killers, Hot Fuss;
The Thrills, Let's Bottle Bohemia;
Bjork, Medulla;
Har Mar Superstar, Handler;
Clinic, Winchester Cathedral;
Eminem, Encore.
A.O. Scott foresees a new trend: Moicumentary, the documentary as confessional.
TIVO
Great interview with the leader of TiVo User Experience.
TV
If you happened to catch the live footage on CNN of the presentation that the Michigan authorities gave to the press last Wednesday, then you'll want to read the Indy Star story, which explicates the layered multimedia format used to present the charges filed against five Indiana Pacers and seven fans. It's like a VH1 special, "Behind the PowerPoint."
Another good Consumed column by Rob Walker, this time mixing Takashi Murakami, Louis Vuitton, sampling, high fashion, artistic expression, and copyright.
For City Pages this week, I wrote about a topic that I've been poking at for at least a decade: public art.
At first glance, public art seems like such a noble act -- it breaks down the museum walls, it opens up the masses to visual discourse, it creates revolution in the streets!
Or it confuses people.
Which is pretty good too.
The point of entry into the conversation is the new Matthew Barney billboard that you'll find on the corner of Hennepin and 12th in downtown Minneapolis. The billboard advertises nothing -- the Walker has been closed for nearly a year while the renovation finishes up. The work is meant to be interpreted as a solitary piece of art, intermingling with the skyline of vodka ads and local tv personality promos. Let's see what the people think:
Blogumentary Chuck quit his job at TPT and is going solo. His post about it also details the struggles of the new liberal network INdTV, where he was applying.
As usual, I'm collecting the "Best Of" lists this year. Last year, The Timeswrote about it, so I'm obliged. The lists seem to be coming in a bit slow this year, but here are some highlights so far:
eBay has launched eBay Pulse, which includes information such as "Most Popular Searches" and "Largest Stores" and "Highest Priced Items." Sorta like Google Zeitgeist.
MUSIC
Michael Moore directed a new video for Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Watch it.
Spin has an excerpt of Chuck's U2 piece on the site. I like the approach -- taking on the simple question, "Is Bono for real, or is this guy full of shit?"
NY Observer somewhat strangely does a profile of Pitchformedia.com. Despite the idiotic NY-centric egoism (Chicago, Pitchfork's home, is described as "far-flung"), it's a good profile of Schreiber (a Minneapolis native) and company. Tidbits: relaunch planned early next year, three people are on the payroll, and reviews only pay around $20.
A lot of us in the office have been talking about CNN's promo Your Command. Wonkette calls it "Subservient Anchor."
Decent piece about the future of television where it's speculated that the real potential loser or winner in the next generation will be the affiliates.
Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson did a 8-minute faux-documentary imagining online media in the year 2014. EPIC is a cool look at the future of personalized and robotic news. (MetaFilter thread takes some jabs at it.)
The 2005 SXSW Conference has been announced. (Music: March 16-20; Film: March 11-19; Interactive: March 11-15.) Price to attend all: $650. Ouch, that's almost $200 more than last year.
Border's launched a viral personalized web gift-finder, GiftMixer 3000, which bases choice on five personality criteria: Romantic, Adventurous, Brainy, Imaginative and Funny.
The Pistons/Pacers brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica.
MUSIC
Trapped in car for 8+ hours this weekend, I listened to the new Gwen Stefani album three times. It sucks, but I bet Kelefa Sanneh would try to convince me it's awesome. (Conclusion also reached in the car: Kelefa's anti-rockism screed reminds me of girls in high school who tried to convince me on the greatness of Richard Marx.)
FOOD
My high school girlfriend is the pastry chef at Django in Midtown Manhattan. New York Daily News asked her to do something cool with cranberries, so she did.
LOCAL
Okay, it's gonna take a second to get to the "LOCAL" angle of this one, but hang on.... Do you remember the rumor from last week that the Bush twins showed up at a downtown Manhattan restaurant and were told they couldn't get a table -- and that the restaurant would be booked for four more years. Har! For reasons that are a bit mystifying, NYT Styles profiles the restaurant's founder, Taavo Somer. If he looks familiar (he does to me), it turns out he was an architect in Minneapolis a few years ago. (He's also the guy behind the "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," and "Until Somebody Better Comes Along" t-shirts you may have seen.) In the profile, Somer cites the now-defunct Loring Cafe as his inspiration for the restaurant, Freeman's. "[The Loring] was a bohemian hangout where you had older people, young people, Eurotrash, everything. They had food, drinks and even a ballet company. It was the circus freak show of life." Over two-and-a-half years ago, I described the Loring as "the place in which all the not-quite-ethnic-yet-ethnic hotties converged." Let the Loring nostalgia commence.
Amy's Robot collects all the goodies from U2's performance on SNL this week, including Amy Pohler acting like a little girl when Bono dry humps her. And no, that wasn't a skit.
The last couple Frontline episodes -- the one on Wal-Mart and the one on marketing -- have been excellent. Next up: credit cards.
In a pretty blatant ripoff of Supersize Me (which was a pretty blatant ripoff of me and my dumb friends in college), some guy is drinking nothing but Pepsi Holiday Spice for 45 days and blogging about it.
I might be the only person in my peer group who reads every single word they can find about the potential merging of Sears and Kmart. There's something about the way it changes my perception of demographics. Anyway, NYT Biz has a roundup with a bunch of interesting stats, including how this might affect Target and the evolution of "big box" shopping.
PUBLISHING
Customized mag publishing is nothing new, but I've never heard of a magazine creating a special cover for an individual retailer. According to Rex Blog (no relation), Lucky did this for WalMart.
TECH
Google sets up an office right next to Microsoft and The Seattle Times runs a funny interview asking why they would do such a thing.
ART
If you live in NYC, MoMA reopened this week. If not, you saved yourself $20 by just reading about it.
DAILY SHOW
Zulkey interviews Ben Karlin, the guy who has held the two coolest writing jobs of my generation.
As if there were any doubt that Rolling Stone should just be shot and put out of its geriatric misery, here's their 500 Greatest Songs. Good sign this list will suck: only six of the songs in the top 50 have come out in my lifetime. And I'm in my 30s, kids.
Do you remember how after the election, the first round of analysis said that the primary reason Kerry lost was the gay marriage initiatives? That was quickly debunked, and right after that, a second round of analysis stated the issue more broadly (and ominously): Cultural Issues. Topics like Janet Jackson's nipple and The Passion of the Christ were used to bolster this argument. But as someone who grew up in North Dakota can tell you, I'm not sure anyone in the heartland is any more offended by Janet Jackson's breast than they are by hockey fights. Which is why I like how this NYT map shows how things are more complex than you think. If I had more time, I'd be writing an essay right now about how the heartland isn't where the problem lies -- it's those goddamn suburbs and exurbs. As a friend recently observed, all of our fucked up friends aren't from the city or the country -- they're from the ugly place in between.
LOCAL
Anyone else worried the new Walker is starting to look like bubble wrap? I live next door, and every time I drive by, I want to go pop its little bubbles.
Every year, I put together a massive collection of Best Of lists. (Previously: 2003 and 2001 -- okay, almost every year). A few of you have emailed me recently to ask if I'll be doing it this year again -- and of course I will be. Today is officially the start of the season, as NYT Circuits published their Top 10 Games of the Year and Rolling Stone has The Year's Best DVDs. Let the lists begin...
ONLINE
Seen this one yet? A website outta Texas that lets you do target practice online: Live-shot.com. Gotta love those red states.
High Tensionlooks like another mediocre horror movie, but ya gotta love the song playing in the trailer -- Sonic Youth doing The Carpenter's "Superstar," which is one of the best covers of all time.
Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avery sues Microsoft over a video game about yoga. (Only Microsoft would steal the worst game idea ever.) And he has a blog chronicling his lawsuit.
PUBLISHING
Whoa, talk about future-dating a story. Frank Rich's Sunday column is already online with a dateline of November 21.
A couple weeks ago, I talked about the troubles I had with Kelefa Sanneh's critique of rockism in the Times. This week, Matthew Wilder writes his own excellent response in City Pages. This whole thing is a great conversation that reminds me of the good parts of '90s rock crit. (And nice work to Missy Miss Roommate for pushing this kind of work into the paper.) See also: ILM Thread.
You saw the Times story this weekend about dating the blogosphere? To save you the trouble, here's the author's blog, the guy's blog, and the other girl's blog. It's all kinda dumb in soap opera way, yet accurate in pinpointing some new nuances that blogging introduces to dating. (I've got a story or two to tell you too. Someday.)
You saw the big feature well on film that the NYT Mag did, right? I know, there's no reason for me to link to it, but just for the record, the piece on how the DVD is changing film is very good, even if it's way longer than it needs to be.
If you're a Jarmusch fan, the Guardian has a long profile.
LOCAL
Strib on the retro metro we're creating with that condo boom that's killing us lately.
Wonkette and I are the only people in the room wearing jeans.
Okay, that might be a lie -- of the 300+ media (or quasi-media, or para-media, or disintermediated) professionals who have just finished munching on their Wolfgang-Puck-created-exquisite-chicken-breast-on-a-lucious-bed-of-potatoes, there might actually be a few more journos in jeans. But Wonkette just said that it's okay to be an "unjournalist" who "writes the first draft of history" as long as I'm up front about it, so I feel no remorse in eluding those pestering facts for the benefit of this narrative.
Over the din of dessert, funny guy Mickey Kaus introduced Ana Marie Cox as an "online presence," which led to the first of her many jokes. If her speech had an important-sounding "Capped Title In Quotes," it probably would have been something like "How Blogs Changed Journalism In The 2004 Election." But she got skittish about sounding too much like "the junior journalism professor from Blue State College," so she quickly added, "If I start to sound too boring, someone just signal, and I'll make a joke about sodomy."
Speaking of sodomy, let's make fun of Andrew Sullivan! It seems like a millennium ago that Sullivan was perceived as an internet sensation, but it was only last year that he was the keynote in this very spot. Wonkette doesn't like Sullivan for all the same reasons you shouldn't like him either, but she takes particular issue with his rhetoric of blogs having the potential to save the world. In a tidy dust-up, she called him, "not only arrogant, but lazy."
Which, unfortunately, was what more than a few Capital J Journalists here said after her speech. I had the personal misfortune of sitting next to a former CNN exec who nearly spewed her salad across the room when Ana Marie said "bloggers have succeeded in deprofessionalizing journalism." Here was one highbrow who was taking this deprofessionalizing like a lobotomy -- she squawked that it was "an insult" to have Wonkette speaking to such an Esteemed Group Of Professionals. It was obvious that a few people here don't actually know what Wonkette is.
There were points in Cox's speech where you could palpably feel the room taking sides -- the serious do-gooders who seriously do good work versus the ragtag collective who relish being called "scrappy." It's not hard to guess where I land in this dichotomy, but it was startling to see how many of these journalists viewed Wonkette as a threat to their entire belief system. Liberal media? Pshaw.
Ana Marie talks in spliffy sound bites which sound strangely something like -- oh, let's call them Un-hick Ratherisms. I couldn't even type all of them fast enough. She uses phrases like "pleasurable solipsism" to describe the way the mainstream media echo chambered her rise to fame. "My job for being a special correspondent of MTV was to talk about my role as a special correspondent for MTV."
So what did she actually say? Many things, but the item you're probably going to hear a lot about was the election exit polls, which she published on her site "without even thinking about it at the time." Probably knowing that this was going to come up in the Q&A, Wonkette, who calls herself a cyber-libertarian ("I like my porn free and my email private"), had a prepared response: "My retrospective argument seems relevant: we had to publish exit polls in order to kill them." Not too shabby. Until someone from CBSNews.com (actually, it was Dick Meyer, who has the most perfect head of gray hair I've ever seen) stood up and nearly scolded her for publishing them. "Did you even think to ask someone about what exit polls were?" he asked in that way in which the word "miffed" doesn't do the sentiment justice. To which Wonkette said something like "I don't disagree with anything you say. If pressed, I have to fall back on my cyber-libertarian argument, and I don't want to do that, because that's what Jack Schafer does.... You obviously know much more about exit polls than I do, so I'm just going to let you be right." Underneath the twittering laughter, you could actually hear people mentally preparing critical cocktail speeches to impress their colleagues with tonight. (And my speech was by far the best, thank you very much.)
What else? This one got some arousal: "Those who work in the business have a stake in the illusion that getting it right most of the time is getting it right all of the time. Bloggers have eliminated that gap between all of the time and most of the time."
And this one: "I owe all of my success to the vanity of liberal journalists."
And I personally relished this one: "Much like with zines, people who have any skill are just using their blog to get a good job."
And on working for Denton: "We don't have a lot of contact. That's the way I like my bosses: invisible, distant, imperious."
And on if she ever withholds a story: "I have a motto which I'm going to needlepoint onto a pillow: 'It's okay to ruin someone's day, but not their life.'"
And finally: "Don't call if journalism if it's not."
Update:
I've received numerous emails from other conference attendees who reported something similar -- that someone else at their table was dismissing Wonkette, while others ran to her rescue. Who says this battle between old and new media is dead?
Have you ever gone to one of those house parties where you look around the joint wondering "Who owns this place?" That's what the CNN.com party was like last night, at which I believe there were zero CNN.com staff. Or at least I couldn't find them -- maybe they were actually the sloshed hotties in the pool.
Post-party, en route to the bar, Wonkette passed by. I did a quick 180 and shuffled toward the elevator bank, where she was headed. Sliding in just as the doors were closing, I quickly realized I was in a packed elevator, and trying to start a conversation was going to be embarrassing. I mumbled a few words to her, she mumbled a few words back. She looked tired, so I left her alone.
Funny, here I am in Hollywood, and if Jennifer Aniston walked by, I would hardly care enough to give her the once-over glance. But if our favorite internet media starlet happens to sashay by -- that's completely a different story.
+ Where's my goddamn coffee? They always screw up one big thing at these conferences, and this year, it's hiding the coffee. You have to go digging around in the innards of the hotel -- is this the kitchen? -- to find a simple cup of joe.
+ The swag sucks. Let's see what's inside this Yahoo News bag: One Reuters baseball hat. One CBSmarketwatch notepad. And three tins of mints: SignOnSanDiego.com, U.S. Newswire, and Valeo Intellectual Property. There better be something better at the booths.
+ This is a maze. I'll try to post pics later, but this is one of those hotels that attempts to merge with the nearest shopping mall. (It's that monstrosity on the Strip in Hollywood -- you might have actually read about it elsewhere. Biggest. Gap. Ever.) The conference rooms aren't labeled on the elevators, and you have to guess that it's the "POOL" button. Like, duh. So the conference is right next to the pool, which would be a horrendous visual tragedy if you lived in Minnesota, but here... eh, not so bad. Is that Wonkette sunbathing over there?
+ Location, location, location. I don't know if I'm supposed to find industry significance in dropping the conference in the middle of Hollywood, but I do find it important that the Erotic Museum is one block away. (Last night, the line was around the block. I'll try again tonight.)
+ But... let's be honest: there's high-speed WiFi everywhere, and that trumps pretty much any faults you could come up with. Excellent addition.
People like me (go ahead, try to image that category) are innately suspicious of media moguls. Or at least that's what I like to say. In reality, I probably just lower the bar for all CEOs, and then like to feign "pleasant surprise" when I discover they know what they're talking about. Okay, I'm a punk.
For instance, you (watch me shift the blame from me to you) probably wouldn't expect the President of the stodgy Associated Press to be able to cite Lawrence Lessig, Craig's List, Technorati, RSS, TiVo, and MoveOn.org in one breath. And, again if you're like me, you're left unsure if that's reassuring for digital media when he does.
Tom Curley, the President and CEO of AP, was the keynote speaker at the Online News Association conference here in Hollywood. Unlike previous presentations, Curley took this opportunity to get somewhat theoretical ("the message is the medium") and a bit boosterish ("established brands will continue to be important"). Overall, he set the pace for the stage we're at in this industry -- excited, but cautious; intrigued, but slightly jaded; smart, but wary of being too smart.
Curley outlined a "critical but subtle revolution" that he labeled "Web 2.0" Tired? Yes. Cutesy? A bit. But when he starts tossing around quips like "content will be more important than the container," you're both impressed that he gets it, but also wonder if Wonkette might be typing a dismissive screed in the back of the room. (Programming note: Wonkette takes the stage tomorrow. I hope she's at the bar tonight though. How do you think Ana Marie likes her martinis?)
"You can no longer control the containers. You have to let the content flow where the users want to go," Curly says, and I quickly glance around the room to see if everyone see the importance of this.
Beyond theory-speak (at one point, he even used the word disintermediation), Curley seemed to come down pro-blogger but anti-search engine. Perhaps that's just the old canard of knowing your audience. Bloggers are everywhere here, and Google (who some newsies still conceive as an foe of online media) is nowhere to be seen.
More updates coming...
Additional Notes & Quotes From Curley's Keynote:
+ "In Web 2.0, discrete pieces of content -- stories, photos and video clips -- all categorized and branded, will be dis-assembled from whatever presentation you create and magically re-assembled on the PC desktop, the mobile device or TV set-top box, for consumption on demand."
+ "If this sounds like all the predictions you've heard all these years, you're almost right."
+ "A story is sum of many valuable parts."
+ "The news as a lecture gives way to news as a conversation."
+ In the Q&A period, someone quoted Curley's use of the word disintermediation. This is so disintermediated.
+ When someone from the DenverPost.com thanked Curley for AP's clickable election maps, the crowd clapped. Let's hear it for clickable maps!
I'll be outta town the next few days, attending the ONA Conference, which I might also blog. If you live in L.A. and want to throw back drinks with me, let me know.
Bret Michaels (yes, of Poison) has a country album out with a song that's in Country's Top 40.
What should we do with this trend where a musician puts together a mixed tape of their favorites songs? Should this be a saleable product? I own ones by Tricky and Morrissey. The other day, I noticed one of the dorks (I say that affectionately) from Grandaddy has one too. Lots of samples on the neat website.
Ed Schultz has a book out. Who's he? He's an increasingly-famous former-conservative-turned-progressive talk show host outta Fargo. I was interviewed on his show a few times back in the college days.
When I saw the news that Postal Service was going to become a spokesperson for their namesake, of course I jumped up and down exclaiming, "Brilliant! All government agencies should do this!" 50 Cent could promote the Treasury Department, AC/DC and Midnight Oil could could snag the Energy dudes, Men at Work gets Labor, Tool could sure help out the Agriculture Department, TV on the Radio could assist Michael Powell at the FCC, and the Defense Department would have a line around the block: Megadeth, B-52s, Slipknot, Massive Attack, and about a half the bands on the Warp Tour. This could go on forever, so let's just end with this one: that fucker from Bush could promote that fucker in the White House.
TV
My readers are always asking, "Rex, what's the best show on tv?" And when I tell them I like Tina Brown's show, I never hear from them again. But seriously, the best new show this season isn't Lost, isn't Desperate Housewives, isn't Real World 15 -- it's Veronica Mars on UPN. Last night's episode used the school election concept to completely spoof our silly little electoral process, all while making reference to The Smoking Gun and using Photoshop to solve crime. Finally, something to replace Buffy.
FILM
Tarantino's next film will be entirely in Mandarin.
Trailer to Alexander. And trailer to the new Almodovar, Bad Education.
TITILLATING POP
This is so random, but whatever: preview pic of Lindsey Lohan in Herbie: Fully Loaded.
Many pics of Avril Lavign dressed up in a Hooter's outfit.
MUSIC
Entertainment Weekly this week shipped a separate music rag, Listen To This, which previously had been a bound insert. Best part: Otto The Bus Driver's (from The Simpson's) "Gotta Have" list in the back. Worst part: Endless stock photos, and a 12-page gift guide.
Perusing the blogosphere at this moment, it appears far fewer people are making a big deal out of the Eminem lip-synching performance on SNL (Lisa Rein doesn't even mention it as she posts the video) as were the Ashlee Simpson debacle last week. The cultural critics are likely already at work with reasons why.
In the mean time, this week Kelefa Sanneh deconstructs rockism, which he defines like this:
A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.
It's a seductive duality that Kelefa has set up. But I see all this differently: rock critics today (at least the ones that have risen in the last five-to-ten years, including the ones who are friends) are completely anti-rockist. In this new age of uber-populist music writers (have you read Blender lately?), we are actually witnessing the exact opposite of rockism: it's immensely uncool to diss Avril Lavigne and Usher (or Liz Phair) for being pop. But it's way cool to devise reasons why Britney is important. It's the anti-'90s right now: I can't not like something that's popular. So I spend hours listening to crap I don't really like, but which I am told is very popular, so I should try to figure out why. Seriously, Kelefa, the only rockists left are at Rolling Stone.
More:
I'm not sure why there's no link to ILM (I Love Music) in the story, but it's here. Here's the post with that community responding.
Several hundred people didn't even get my Halloween costume. Oh well. Here's me and the roomies about to go out. (From left to right, that's a Spam Filter [Rex], the Kill Bill Bride [Melissa], and Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA [Marissa].)
ONLINE
What are they teaching these kids at j-school? I cannot believe that Wonkette visits Columbia Journalism School, but not one of these budding journalists asks about the visible tattoos on her arm. Transcript with pics. (See also: WaPochat transcript with Ana Marie. And during her appearance on Tina Brown's show again tonight, it occurred to me why I like her so much: she talks in the same fast-and-reckless way I do. I'm serious.)
NYT Sunday Styles has a story on XXXchurch.com, the "#1 Christian porn site," which has computer applications that try to dissuade you from viewing online porn. There was also apparently a documentary made about them too.
I was wondering if I was the only one who thought the Donald Trump voice-overs in The Apprentice board room were totally screwed up. MSNBC reports others have noticed.
WORDS
Steven Johnson announces his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, with a working subtitle right now of "Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter." Looks good.
Rather than merely endorse a candidate, Slate.com has everyone on staff endorse a candidate, right down to the Wine Writer and Software Development Engineer.
Just a few blocks from my house, on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin, there's a new billboard that says something like "Your election homepage: MPR.org" Could this be the first time we've ever seen a media dot-com exclusively advertised in our fair city?
In the Times Mag this week, the cover story (about faith in the workplace) opens with a story from the Riverview Community Bank in Otsega, MN.
I'm not sure why, but Alex Ross posted his piece about Radiohead from 2001 that ran in the New Yorker. And I'm not sure why I'm telling you either, other than it's sorta memorable. (Another flashback: Thom Yorke and Howard Zinn hang.)
Did anyone else notice the city has been lighter ever since the Wilco show? I didn't even go, but I feel like everyone's walking around in some sort of happy-stoned-haze.
Jim Walsh follows up on last week's story about the PiPress reporters suspended for going to a Springsteen concert with unprinted letters to the editor. (Update: PiPressresponds.)
Sorry I've been gone for a few days. It was a busy week on the homefront. Interpol played a good show on Tuesday; I spoke at the MIMA Summit on Wednesday; the single best design-cum-politics eventanywhere was on Thursday. Leaving aside my personal life speaking only about local events, this has been the best Fall. Every day has something cool going on. Bite me, New Yawkers.
Reason collects answers to the question "Who's Getting Your Vote?" from a diverse set of people including John Perry Barlow, Drew Carey, Nat Hentoff, Penn Jillette, P.J. O'Rourke, Camille Paglia, Louis Rossetto, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Shafer, R.U. Sirius, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, Matt Welch, and Robert Anton Wilson. Some surprising answers.
Results of the Nerve.com sexual/political poll, which answers such important questions as "There are two spots left in your hot tub: Do you invite the Bush twins or the Kerry daughters?"
TV
Mark Cuban's Benefactor was quietly cancelled (thank. fucking. god.). But Trump, who wrote Cuban a letter, ain't letting it disappear so easily.
Three more music director videos are coming. The first directors were Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. The second set will be Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn.
A certain Klosterman fellow sorta reviews the new Wilco album in City Pages. (Wherein you learn Chuck and Jeffy Tweedy both like -- ugh -- Jet. Right, right, I don't like Jet because I'm a hipster.)
Now, this is rock 'n roll! A one-week cruise with Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon: RR Holiday Escape.
Pitchfork gives the new Le Tigre a 3.3 and EW dissed the "I'm So Excited" cover this week. This really disapoints me.
I looked everywhere in the Sunday Times for something about the Jon Stewart / Crossfire battle. It took them five days to finally get to it, though.
SCIENCE
One of those things you only know about me if you know me offline: I have no sense of smell. (It's a long tragi-comic story, but I lost it in an accident about six years ago.) I just noticed the Times Mag has a column by a woman who lost her smell, and the process by which she regained it. Looks like I have a winter project ahead of me.
It's Melissa's fault that I've been watching America's Top Model, but I just found out that Nicole is from... Minot, ND. Impossibly, her bio lists herself as "former punk rocker." The kids who knew her (of which I am not one) are talking about her here.
Can you imagine writing this next sentence in 1994? Billy Corgan will be reading at The Loft today. (I wonder if I can get him to say "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.")
If you live in Northeast (or visit that hidden NE Grumpy's), you've probably met Tom Taylor, the Green party candidate for that district's state house rep. CP profiles him.
Ever wonder why all your friends are leaving Uptown for Northeast. For reasons like this.
If you missed it, a few Pioneer Press reporters were suspended for going to a Springsteen concert. Weird.
If you ran into me around town or on IM this weekend, I most likely forced you into a conversation about the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire on Friday (video | transcript), which I've been hyperbolically calling the most important political debate of the year.
So far, it seems everyone is thrilled to see Stewart throw a pie in the face of Crossfire. My take has been a bit different: I don't think this is a good move for Stewart. I wrote some of my reasons why on the Lost Remote board, but the gist is this:
Considering all the shit that gets passed off as "media" nowadays, Tucker Carlson is a bad target. I actually kinda like Tucker because he's really not a wonk reading from the Republican talking points. He seems to actually think that Bush is going to lose this election, and isn't afraid to criticise the administration. He's no douchebag [Robert Novak, where are you?].
Stewart is starting to look cowardly for his "I'm just a comedian" canard.
Last week, Stewart endorsed Kerry (or at least, said he was voting for him). This is a big mistake -- he's starting to look like he wants to be everything at once: critic, comedian, citizen. I'm worried his strategy here will ultimately alienate him.
Crossfire actually isn't that bad, at least if you compare it to some of the other political talk shows.
You can't seriously criticize Crossfire for being a blowhard screamfest and then call the host a "dick." Dude, that's like ironic in the bad way. (It's also monstrously funny.)
Don't get me wrong, I think the whole event was fantastic television -- and immensely important for entertainers and journalists and politicians (if you can even distinguish between these anymore) to see. The most accurate condemnation was Stewart calling Crossfire "theater" -- but even that's a double-edged sword, because politics has always been theater. In some larger sense, I think Stewart is right about the tenor of political discourse as fed to us by the media. But I'm just worried that my boy Jonny is going to end up the next Bill Maher.
After three episodes, I still haven't decided if Desperate Housewives is a lame suburbanization of Sex and the City or a campy send up from the John Waters set. Anyway, it's crazy to hear the show is losing advertisers because of controversial content. (Best line from tonight's episode: "Rex cries after he ejaculates." I kid you not.) See also, in Variety: Get me some housewives, dammit!
This could be good: Flow, a Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture.
MUSIC
Dude, this is rad. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as performed by GW Bush. Someone has sampled speeches so that he sings virtually every lyric from the U2 hit.
Massive Inc., "the world's first video game advertising network."
DERRIDA
Post-Derrida, The Timesdrives the nail into the coffin of theory. I've been out of academia too long to be able to adequately respond, but here is my problem with this euology: it misses how Big-T Theory has really resituated itself as small-t theory, which is a conquest in its own right. In other words, didn't theory really just win the cultural war?
Various writers (from Richard Dawkins to JG Ballard to AS Byatt) respond to Derrida's death in The Guardian.
LOCAL
Looks like the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists have their own website. The Creative Electric show is pretty amazing.
Quote of the year: "I hear rumors on the Internets..." -G.W.B. C'mon now, 48% of you want this guy to be president again?
WORDS
He changed it all. Jacques Derrida (Wikipedia) died Friday. The obit that landed on the front page of the Times this morning is good at describing the cultural shift that Derrida created (or documented), but it obsesses on defining deconstruction. Google News has more, and if you know French, you might try Le Monde's obit. Look for heavy eulogizing from the remnants of old guard of academia this week.
DATING / SEX
My pal Melissa has a theory that the best way for a boy to get a girl to like him is to have it known that other girls like him. I don't like when she talks like this, because I fear it will reveal too much strategy. Anyway, the best thing in NYT Styles this week is the piece about Wingwomen.com, a site where a guy hires a girl to act as their social liason to other desirable girls.
What I like about Brendan Koerner's weekly Sunday Times column "The Goods" is not so much how he introduces us to the marketing of a unique product every week (althought that's good too), but more than that, I like how he bolsters his picks by quoting obscure industry dot-coms. This week, you could be cruising along reading the analysis of cheese pizza when it throws out at you the industry site PizzaMarketplace.com. It can hardly be surprising to find out there's a pizza industry publication, yet that it's so accessible is one the great things about the internet.
On NPR, Xeni Jardin talks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone about Team America. They're also in Newsweek. In related news, Sean Penn sends an angry memo to the boys.
My email pal Jeff Gralnick pens a travel essay about his climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
LOCAL
More from Riemenschneider on the First Ave. debacle. Here's the TCPunk message board debating the issues.
A Strib roundup of three different Minnesota women who have recently had some reality tv fame, including Jamie Foss, who is pretty much a parody of every reality tv start alive.
I wish I had gone to Web 2.0. There is so much commentary out there about it right now, but here are two things: MP3 of Lessig's Free Culture presentation and MP3 of the media panel with CNet, NYTimes.com, Tivo, etc.
It's so sad that someone had to come along and make Trump look smart. Mark Cuban is such a moron, as proven with his interview with OJR. I think Jarvis said it best: "I understand why the world pays attention to Paris Hilton. I don't understand why the world pays attention to Mark Cuban." In other news, EWreports that ABC screwed up and revealed the winner of The Benefactor.
Jen, "an online magazine for (Mormon) teens and adults."
MEDIA
Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather on Fresh Air.
SORTA LOCAL
Whooooaaaaa. First Avenue has been served an eviction summons.
Bookslut says that Dylan Hicks' story "Why Is Slot A Mortal Sin" is "one of the best book-related pieces I've read in a long time" and calls City Pages "America's best alternative newsweekly."
Usually when the editor is writing for the magazine, it's a bad sign. But Chris Anderson writes an amazing piece on digital economics called The Long Tail for this month's Wired. (Rare case where Slashdot thread might be okay reading. UPDATE: maybe not.)
Excellent news for people who use Treo with Exchange (which is about 1% of you but 100% of me, and I win).
FILM
Not sure what to make of this one. Veep-candidate John Edwards is hosting Turner Classic Movies' showing of Dr. Strangelove tomorrow night.
The MPAA wants to giveTeam America an NC-17 rating because of a puppet sex scene. Someone please help me craft a pun with the word marionette.
DRINK
Best idea since beer itself: Budweiser Introduces Caffeinated Beer. Dammit, it's sweet though. And ginseng? Don't you understand I'm drink to forget?
Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs "Y Control" video, directed by Karen O.'s new paramour, Spike Jonze. (So far, MTV isn't playing this. Write your Senator!) See also: Tell Me What Rockers to Swallow, an upcoming Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs DVD.
LOCAL
Got too drunk the other night at the 400 Bar watching Connor Oberst (who I really don't like), waiting for Bruce Springsteen to play. Yeah, there was a rumor The Boss was gonna make a suprise visit. He didn't, and I had to listen to Connor wail all night.
Anyone else notice they're building a Design Withing Reach in that old Elements spot in Uptown? I like DWR's work, but if the catalogue is any indication, the price of this shit ain't within reach. This could be a great opportunity for Uptown, or it could be the final sign of yuppification. I'm voting the latter right now.
Stribsays there are three local bloggers blogging about the Twins.
So you want to start a topical blog that will be adored across the land, especially by the super-smart, media-hip blogosphere? I've got the perfect idea for a young journalist entrepreneur like youself: a blog all about Fake News. There's so much to feed on here, with everything from The Daily Show's crazy success to The Onion expanding the print edition across the country to whack characters like Ali G and Mo Rocca being taken seriously. In addition to everything that's happening in the Fake News Industry, your faux-media-blog could mix in all the quasi-news of the day being produced by Bill O'Reilly's screamfest and Al Gore's upcoming network. Add a dash of RatherGate and a pinch of PR Passing For News, and you could have yourself a hit. You could get ahead of the faker hegemony by posting the Top 10 Spoof-Ready Stories each day (probably snagged right off Fark, and appearing as Leno punchlines later that night -- especially that one about Kerry's fake tan). You could become the Romenesko of Fake News! This idea is dot-com bank. Nick Denton or MediaBistro would be knocking down your door within days. This is your moment of zen!
To get you started, I've even got some posts for you:
Tina Fey's new SNL sidekick on "Weekend Update" is.... Amy Poehler. Here's a transcript and a video of the season's first episode. Finally, a double-female fake news anchor team. A great day in fake news equality!
FoxNews.com wrote and published a fake news story about Kerry's metrosexuality, and retracted it citing "bad judgment." Here's a Timesstory on the whole thing, and here's the Lost Remote gang debating it. I ask you to forget about the ethics of this imbroglio -- instead ask yourself, does this signal the mainstream press's attempt to get into the Fake News business? Yes!
William Shatner went to Riverside, Iowa saying he was going to make a movie. After hiring local actors and givingstories to newspapers, he recently revealed that the entire thing is a fake. Instead, Invasion Iowa is going to be a reality tv show. Shatner faked out a whole damn town!
Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert? Includes many luridly details (he self-circumcised himself a year before he died) and a back-story of controversy (Dr. Laura Schlessinger and others tried to put an ad in Variety denouncing the film) surrounding the new Kinsey biopic.
I missed this one. Jessi Klein of "Best Week Ever" (one of the best pop culture shows on tv) blogged the debate for CNN.com. And so did Douchbag Novak, which was quite possibly the worst blog ever.
PUBLISHING
So the "new" NY Times Book Review came out this week. Its new-ness is questionable, but there is the okay review of Web Sites for People Who Read, which includes some of my current fave blogs such as Bookslut and Maud Newton.
Speaking of new, I believe The Guide is part of the Sunday Times Arts section's attempt to stay ahead of New York and the weeklies. (The rest of the section is full of font changes this week, but I can't find anything else significantly different.) Choire Sicha is the byline, so it's not full of mainstream crap. It's the first thing I've seen in a while that made me want to live in NYC.
Nerve.com: Michaelangelo Matos interviews John Leland, author of the new book Hip: the History. Looks like the book will be good.
Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions ended last week with a Double Jeopardy category called "Blogs." The question to the $2000 answer was Margaret Cho. Other questions included Lawrence Lessig and Howard Dean.
Wired News playing catchup on Video Mods. (One important thing I didn't point out about the new Sims 2: it has the ability to record your gameplay into a video file. This has extraoridinary viral opportunity, such as allowing one to potentially create their own Video Mods. See next entry.)
The same people who made Red Vs. Blue, a machinima series using the Halo rendering engine, have recently started to release The Strangerhood, a new machinima using the Sims 2 engine. [via Slashdot]
Smart CEO Alert! PaidContent is doing a series called Context Next, featuring guest blogs by leading industry thinkers. Jeremy Allaire's grabbed my interest, but Don Katz (CEO of Audible.com) has been the hidden diamond. Speaking tech execs, I saw Mark Cuban tell Howard Stern last week that he once slept with seven women at once. Take that Trump! (I feel pure midwestern guilt for saying this, but I like the cheesy gold-laced Trump more than the awwww-shucks Cuban. I have an entire essay in me about these two, but it's basically the dichotomy between camp and faux-earnestness.)
This week, Subterranean on MTV2 was all about the 2004 Shortlist Music Prize. Good stuff by TV on the Radio, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets, Wilco, Nellie McKay, Air, and more.
Times Magprofiles Nonesuch records, home of Wilco, Steve Reich, Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, The Magnetic Fields, and Kronos Quartet.
Does anyone read Art Forum anymore? New issue on Pop After Pop might be the first I buy in several years.
Tokion Magazine's Creativity Now conference looks like it would've been fun. Speakers included an eclectic cast like Brian Eno, Kim Gordon, Christopher Doyle, and Joe Trippi.
LOCAL
Yes, I'm glad we talked at Sound Unseen this weekend. You'll be at the rest of the events this week, right? Good. I'll see you there.
Chuck is finishing up work on Blogumentary. I can't wait to see the final film, which seems like an impossible task to complete given the unstable nature of its topic.
Next month's Wiredwill come bundled with a CD with 16 songs that can be freely copied, distributed, and remixed by other artists. It will include Beastie Boys, Le Tigre, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, Paul Westerberg, Cornelius, Matmos, and others.
Last week, intrepid Waxy posted The Kleptones' A Night at the Hip-Hopera, a mashup of Queen and early rappers like Grandmaster Flash. You might have guessed it would get the same controversial attention as Danger Mouse's "Grey Album," and you might be right.
Chuck Statler is pretty much the father of the modern rock video. He has worked with Devo, Prince, The Cars, Styx, Graham Parker, Stan Ridgway, and Elvis Costello. He lives in Minneapolis, and there's a retrospective of his work coming up at Sound Unseen. CPprofiles him.
Grandpa Coleman gets all grumpy about blogs this week. "Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world."
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (oh wait!). So instead of getting pedantic, let's look at the gaming landscape by pointing out new phenomena in digital entertainment, with a focus on how gaming is influencing all media. This isn't necessarily a cohesive essay with a single objective, but I hope it's more than another "Synergy of The Matrix" piece. Let's just call this a Scrappy Collection of Thoughts About Various Gaming Trends that have been of recent fascination to me:
VIDEO MODS
I won't try to convince you that the mashup of a teen-goth BloodRayne 2 video game and a teen-goth Evanescence music video belongs in the canon of required cultural material for our time. In other words, don't sigh if your TiVo missed Video Mods, a new series on MTV2 in which video game characters and landscapes are used to create music videos. I guess the worst thing that one could say about Video Mods is that Viacom is blatantly ripping off Machinima to attract video game advertising to television.
Even if that's true, it's also much more.
But first: a part of me wants to tell you that the convergence of these mediums is the perfect metaphor for the current state of the music industry. This cynical critique would go something like this: little pac men (consumers) run around a contested maze (Virgin Records) gobbling up indistinguishable dots (songs/albums) and ghosts (musicians). It's a sociological Flatland out there, in which demographics are empty ciphers with unlimited purchasing power -- the same goddamn person buys (or downloads) Outkast, Evanescence, and Creed. À la carte pop culture icons are sculpted with the same care that goes into creating Sims characters -- complete with readymade identities that become obsolete faster than you can blurt "Friendster." Identity is the currency of the music industry, and it's a free market economy of Pokemon cards: I'll trade you a "Britney Reinvented #24" for a "Cleaned Up Christina #9." Virtual video game characters taking over the role of musician is nothing more than the next step in the MilliVanilling of the music industry.
But, like I said, I don't really buy that mojo. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in cynically looking at pop culture icons, but I think it ultimately misses a key point in understanding the attraction of Video Mods. For evidence, take a look at The Sims 2 video mod of the Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom."
The Sims is the top dog of this medium so far. Not only is it the highest-selling series of all time, but it has come to represent a watershed creative moment in the industry. So why, one might ask, would "Stacy's Mom" score the grand prize of The Sims mod?
I honestly have no idea. But I think you'll see a clue by looking at the storyline behind "Stacy's Mom." You might say the Fountains of Wayne song is just a MILF romp imagined by a horny adolescent. But in reality, it's not even that -- it's actually sung by thirty-somethings who are themselves projecting a tweener dream. Basically, it's a wish fulfillment nostalgia fantasy from guys old enough to be Stacy's Dad.
So now, what is The Sims? That's more complex, but one could say it is an interactive world where players bring to life characters outside their normal demographic makeup. In other words, it's a giant role-playing fantasy.
Starting to see a trend here? Let's move on....
PLAYBOY
In the age of Suicide Girls, it's amazing that Playboy is still around. And it's amazing that I bother to mention the publication in a video game rant. But even as I say this, I realize that for the first time in my life, I bought an issue of Playboy last month, simply because the magazine has done a remarkable job of staying relevant in a digital age. For instance, the Google guys interview and the Washingtonienne spread reminded me that the magazine could still be relevant.
Or maybe these are just the last gasps of breath of a dying Boomer ideology. I'd entertain that argument too.
Anyway, when Playboy announced they would be doing a photo spread of characters from video games, you could instantly picture a digital historian somewhere writing this event into a timeline of important virtual character events (chronologically right after reality TV and right before the holodeck). Hackers modding Lara Croft into a pinup is one thing, but the mainstream culture industry getting sly with virtual sexuality says a lot more about where we are. This single layout might actually become the best indicator of the mainstreaming of a number of (previously) fringe activities and concepts: virtual sexuality, video game culture, user-modified content, reality blurring. And a new video game, Playboy: The Mansion, a Sims-like romp through Hef's mansion, will take this even further.
WAR GAMING
Forget sex, war is where it's at.
A lot has been said recently about the relationship between the industrial war complex and video games (such as in articles in The New York Times and Wired). When the Army created the game America's Army to recruit soldiers, it seemed that Ender's Game truly was going to happen. I'm working on an article for publication about this theme, so let's breeze past this topic for the moment.
SIMS 2
Every night over the last week, I've sat in a room with a computer and TV, playing the recently-released The Sims 2 and watching late night talk shows. Something important changed last night: I turned off the TV and started watching the show that my Sim character was watching on his television.
I don't think I can even articulate how hyper-real this is.
REALITY GAMING
The spurt of ironic glee about Flash Mobs last summer was more than a hipster punchline. It illustrated how gaming was leaking from the pores of society. The products of this spillage have included Big Urban Game (Minneapolis) and PacManhattan (NYC). And the glut of competition-based reality shows (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor, etc.) are all just extreme versions of reality gaming. (One could also argue that these Reality Games are a sort of tame suburban version of more serious planned events like the Seattle WTO Protests. That's for a different essay though.)
THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION
Anyone who has played even five minutes of Zelda will find PBS's new two-hour special The Video Game Revolution a bit tedious. I suppose it serves a valid purpose -- to provide a historical framework of popular video games. Too bad it's as engaging as a two-hour Pong match.
But what interests me is what this documentary represents in this moment in time. It seems we have reached a period in gaming where we can reflect on the past equipped with the gear found in the toolbelt of historical analysis: summary, bricolage, and nostalgia. The Video Game Revolution implicitly declares video games as a real object of pop culture study. Of course, this should not be surprising given the rise of academic programs designed to study gaming. Something about this evolution reminds me of 1990s-era Camille Paglia promoting the notion that universities should start rock music programs. I have mixed feelings about whether turning an academic eye to rock really does anything for musicians or fans or society, but I do worry an accidental effect of academizing a discipline in the past couple decades: studying it is synonymous with taming it. (I know many people in academia who are studying game and play, and they all get sour-faced when I suggest this possibility.)
WATCHING TV AT WORK
Many companies have planned events on Fridays that provides employees a break from work. But what our workplace does is truly unique. The idea started innocently: let's use our in-house online video streaming technology to deliver a movie to employees on Friday.
Thus was born The Friday Matinee.
Here's how it works: every Wednesday, an email goes out to a dist list of programmers, designers, engineers, and editors. It contains a list of movies, and the community votes on which one it will watch. On Friday at 2:00, the intranet streaming servers are fired up and the 'play' button is pushed on the DVD player. This is where it gets interesting.
If you walk around through the darkened cubicles at this time, you will see dozens of programmers donning headphones and staring at their computer monitors. They are simultaneously performing a number of tasks: writing code, watching The Friday Matinee, and IM-ing their colleagues about both. In other words, people are working, being entertained, and communicating all at the same time. There's something about this collapse of mediums and lifestyles that suggests a complicated future of media and entertainment.
CONCLUDING
This last example has nothing explicitly to do with gaming, but it illustrates something that's happening in our times: people are hacking mediums together for their own purposes. The provocative questions are just starting to come out: what happens if you mix film with instant messenger? what would a music/game hybrid look like? how could role-playing influence traditional one-way entertainment?
In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, Googling girls on my cellphone at bars, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible.
The blogosphere likely won't shut up about the Times Mag story featuring Wonkette for quite some time.
Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart seem to be competing for Ubiquitous Fake Journalist of the Year. 60 Minutes today saw Mike Wallace do a long profile of O'Reilly; Time did 10 Questions for Jon Stewart. Rolling Stone did an O'Reilly profile; Annenberg released a survey that indicates Daily Show viewers are more politically aware. Slate did How To Beat Bill O'Reilly; CBS MarketWatch suggests Jon Stewart should moderate a presidential debate. And on and on... or you can just see them head-to-head.
ONLINE PUBLISHING
I'm not sure why more people didn't point to Jim Romenesko's cool new blog Starbucks Gossip when it launched last month. The Times this week picks up on the "Should You Tip Your Barista?" thread.
Gawker's Russ Smith interview is surprisingly full of good observations about alt-weeklies, meta-media moguls, and a dead counter-culture press. See also: a short interview with Esquire's sex columnist (and Daily Showcorrespondent), Stacey Grenrock Woods.
Last year around this time, I was talking about how Wired magazine has nicely reinvented itself. I've been less happy with the mag this year, but WiredNews.com (the website) has made some excellent editorial decisions lately. Two new columns, Sex Drive and Media Hack, have been required digerati reading. The most recent Sex Drive talks about The Sinulator, a vibrator which connects to a USB port and can be controlled remotely.
Malcolm Gladwell put his awesome analysis of ketchup (I kid you not) online. Previously printed in the New Yorker.
The Times follows up Slate.com's analysis of vodka (I love this series from Slate) with a look at Cîroc, the vodka that was "disqualified" from the Slate contest because of "trying to pass itself off as a vodka."
Elle Macpherson has a new line of lingerie called Intimates. The ads, airing in Australia and the UK and featuring a knife-fighting supermodel, are causing quite a controversy. Yeah, I know, you wanna see them.
Good Bruce Mau interview. (Deborah Solomon seems to have become America's best interviewer.)
FILM
When I saw a trailer link for White Noise, the movie, I freaked out and called everyone I know. Or at least I started to. Then I saw "Genre: Paranormal thriller," and thought you motherfuckers ruined my favorite book! Turns out, this movie is unrelated to the book. But there was a rumor a year ago that DeLillo's White Noise would be a movie. Anyone have the scoop? (IMDB has Barry Sonnenfeld as the director of a 2005 release.)
From the Wong Kar-Wai profile in the Times Mag: "The kind of person who might once have proclaimed Jules and Jim or Wings of Desire his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list." Which stings a bit, cuz I used to call Wings of Desire my favorite movie, and now I usually say Chungking Express.
This is the year Le Tigre is gonna hit the mainstream. Stop it, I'm serious. There's an exciting profile in the new Spin and the word is finally out about Kathleen Hanna's relationship with a Beastie Boy. And Stereogum has an MP3 of Le Tigre's cover of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited," which is gonna beat the Jazzercise knickers off Britney's "My Perogative." Best. Song. Of. 2004.
U2's new single, "Vertigo," from the forthcoming album is available here. (Good song.)
Last year, Business 2.0 infamously gave its "Hottest Technology" award to social networking software (Friendster, MySpace, Tribe.net, Orkut, etc.). This year, it goes to VoIP (Subscription Link). Runner-ups include Satellite Radio, Open-Source Databases, and Concept Mapping.
While in Fargo a few weeks ago, I got in a conversation with someone who was contributing to the creation of 100 North Dakota Books, a list of -- you guessed it -- 100 notable NoDak books. The person was trying to keep Chuck Klosterman off the list. Didn't happen.
If you missed it, RatherGate can be attributed to a local blogger, Powerlineblog.com, which is part of the Northern Alliance collective. Strib has a story.
Daily Jon Stewart link (plus another t-shirt I need).
Everyone I know will make fun of me for this, but I'm gonna come out and say it: I like Tina Brown's CNBC show. You probably think I mean that ironically or something. But seriously, I really think Topic [A] can be brilliant in a way that, say, Charlie Rose can't be. Anyway, her most recent Post column is perfect example of great and preposterous at the time.
LOCAL (YET NOT)
American Public Media (that crazy new name for what used to be MPR Productions) has a new program called Pop Vultures starring our very own Kate Sullivan. Peter did a CP story about it.
Earlier this week, the Strib had a story about a local dot-com called Freeze.com. They somehow make millions of dollars giving away screensavers. (The "somehow" is that you have to agree to being spammed to get the screensaver. So much for Minnesota Nice.)
Woot.com is brilliant. Every day, one (and only one) piece of gadgetry goes up for sale. The price is slashed low because of a set volume that will be sold. The gadget only stays available until supplies run out. It's a little like Amazon's Gold Box... (Nerdy Tidbit To Impress Friends: "Woot" is an elision of the Dungeons and Dragons phrase "Wow, Loot!")
My biggest gripe about Amazon.com is the lack of benefits given to high-volume users. I order probably $100 of stuff per week off Amazon.com (yes, I even get food and soap and razor blades delivered to me), but I get no special discounts for my repeat visiting. This week, however, after Amazon beefed up its A9.com search engine, the company started offering something called ?/2%. This crazy little gimmick gets you one-half Pi percent (1.57%) off everything if you're a A9.com user. This is somehow both crazy and cool at the same time.
Non-surprise of the day: Google is working on their own web browser.
It looks like the first single from the new Fatboy Slim album is called "Slash Dot Slash." That sounds sorta, well, ya know, internety. Here's a video.
Does anyone really care if Nellie McKaye is fibbing about her age?
Margo Jefferson is the new "avant-garde critic" at the Times.
I try to keep away from linking to Frank Rich columns (mostly because they're already such obvious talking points), but this week's has a lot of my friends talking.
Bryce Zabel, a former chairman and CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, does another one of those End of Television as We Know it stories.
MUSIC
Could the B-52's have their career revived a cover of "Paperback Writer" in a Buick advert?
RogerEbert.com launches. To include every review since 1967.
CELEBRITY
Have you been watching The Surreal Life on VH1? Brigitte Nielsen and Flavor Flav are hooking up. Though impossible, I wish the last sentence could have been written in 1990.
Edward Furlong: lobster activist or drunk? You decide.
TECH
This could be interesting to those of you into Flash development and/or online communication models: Central and AOL Instant Messaging. Central hasn't exactly taken off, but it still has potential.
LOCAL
Minnesota mysteriously finds itself on the Sunday Times Week In Review page.
The PiPressredesign has been an odd big topic of conversation lately. Poynter has an overview.
The Timesreviews a new book from Jon Stewart & The Daily Show gang.
There's a new tv magazine out called Glued. I haven't seen it yet, but Jossip interviews the editor.
And there's a new magazine coming out from... O'Reilly? Well, they've certainly been expanding into new areas. The title is Make, and the tagline is "Technology On Your Time." Due out next year.
FONTGATE
I was watching the new Slacker DVD last night when I noticed that the typewriter that gets thrown over the bridge is an IBM Selectric. Anyway, they're up for sale now on eBay. Also, a site dedicated exclusively to it.
FILM
Paris Hilton to star in -- get this -- The Great Gatzby. Actually, Paris as Daisy Buchanan is kinda brilliant. I bet they tried to get Gwyneth first though.
Johnny Ramone has died. Questionable legacy: "Johnny Ramone was surrounded at his death by friends, including Pearl Jam rocker Eddie Vedder, singer Rob Zombie and others. Other friends who gathered at his Los Angeles home included Lisa Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo and Talia Shire."
The grumpy pants at Pitchfork give the new Har Mar Superstar a 1.9.
Perhaps now, as the leaves turn orange and we've almost forgotten what Michael Phelps even looks like, enough time has passed that you'd be willing to hear me talk about the Summer Olympics. Please, dear reader, don't reach for the gag button in the back of your throat, because, as I'm about to outline, if there's one thing I've learned about the Olympics, this is one topic that the American media loves to hate.
Caveats & background: I worked on NBCOlympics.com for nearly a year. However, the opinions below are mine and only mine. Even though I've had many conversations about the production, delivery, and business and of the games, what follows is not the opinion of NBC or IBS or the IOC or capitalism or athleticism or This Great Country or whatever else gets tossed into the ring every four years. Also, I have very little to say about what you saw on television. I'm talking internet today. I've already talked about it in other places (such as Wired News and LostRemote), but this is a collection of some final thoughts.
In some ways, this is an essay responding to my friends and colleagues, many of whom were out in full force critiquing the olympic games -- or perhaps more accurately, the media's creation of the games.
It probably started when Chuck K. wrote a column for Esquire titled "Boycott the Olympics, Save America". It showed up in my mailbox the exact day he was in town to visit. At some boozy point in the dark hours of the night, I dismissed his point by telling Chuck that someone writes that column every four years. Or, more precisely, every four years since the end of the Cold War, which was about the time that hating the Olympics become a national past time for the ironic class. I can't remember what happened next, but in the morning we saw some heroic gibbons swinging from branches at the Minnesota Zoo, which gave both of us much pleasure.
All apologies to Chuck...
And then Matt H.did some analysis on PVRblog, which pointed out some notable concerns with the site. I disagreed with some the legal/business parts of his analysis. We'll get to this later, but the short version is: it's going to be a while before we figure out how digital rights management will make a reality of the dreams we have for personal media. I highly doubt that everyone will ever be satisfied with video delivery via the internet for events like this -- at least not in any Marshall-McLuhan-cum-Phillip-Dick media vision thang that my mind can concoct. We might see some non-streaming (i.e., downloadable or exchangable) video asset management technology by 2008. With all the technical and legal decisions that need to be made in that area for this to happen, I'm not sure if I'm "optimistic" or even "hopeful" about what it will look like though. I am positive that it will not satisfy everyone.
All apologies to Matt...
Later on, Andy B. followed up the video-download issue by pointing out clips that were available on Usenet. Like a Slashdot flamethrower, there's a lot of "we told you so" when it comes to filesharing video, but ultimately, you're gonna have a very hard time convincing me that more than a dozen people in America had the tolerance to watch more than five minutes of video with this delivery method. And don't even get me started on BitTorrent.
All apologies to Andy...
Which brings us to Staci K.'s critique in OJR. Let's just get this out of the way: I agree with some of Staci's points. The world never moves fast enough for those of us in this industry. And we have the right -- perhaps even the obligation -- to act indignantly when it doesn't.
Nonetheless, there's something that bothers me about this I-want-more-more-more-video angle, which manifests itself with clockwork predictability. When we first started talking about how NBCOlympics.com would be one of the seven platforms for presenting the games, the first thing I said was "no matter what we do, video will be criticized."
When deciding on a strategy for what we provide to an online audience, we asked a simple question: "What will people want?" If all you read about NBCOlympics.com was OJR, you'd get the sense that people are demanding a 24/7 online Olympics video channel -- despite the fact NBC was already providing six television channels with 1200 hours of video. When you think about this for even more than a second, you realize immediately how you use an Olympics website: to complement television. You want stats and scores, you want biographies, you want context, you want analysis, you want stuff the tv doesn't give, you want storytelling done right, you want a medium that extends the story. And maybe you want a little bit of video. Actually, you want the tv schedule about 100 times more than you want video. Only a few of you are going to watch sketchy online video all day at the office (which is what a vast majority of our viewers are). I find being called an "early adopter" denigrating too, but let's face it...
I understand why a journalist would choose video when writing about the site. Heck, if I were doing industry writing about the site, I might talk about video too. The problem with this is that it ignores 95% of what our audience is expecting. Where was the story about our massive real-time results feed, which has failed repeatedly in the past? How about some analysis on the how the affiliates have used Ozone? And how about the multimedia context that TV can't provide? How about the writing and analysis? Or how about this simple angle: how the internet deserves a bit more respect than being a shovelware medium for a broadcast product.
It's not that I expect an unctuous, rosy hue to shine over the coverage -- I expect to be challenged to do better. But I also expect some sense of what people are actually doing online to come through. The rare person who did watch video online probably watched the "Who's Carly Crushin' On?" clip. Welcome back, ironic class.
All apologies to Staci...
And finally, that brings us to Nancy F., the one writer here who I'm not familiar with. Here's what she wrote in the New Yorker
The Internet is partly what caused people to become impatient with the Sydney Games. We already know what happened, the whining went. It was on the Web. But this time around the Web, which is now as integral to our lives as our television sets, served as a well-stocked convenience store for viewers who couldnt spend seventy hours a day in front of the TV. NBCs site supplied a full array of results, athlete bios, detailed schedules, fun facts, and archived stories (and, of course, stuff for sale). While watching the gymnastics, I kept waiting for one of the announcers to explain what the story was behind the strange-looking new vaulting equipment, but I had to go to the Web site to find the answer.
Right on, someone who approached the site from the perspective of an actual user experience. Sorry Nancy, no apologies to you.
Nike shows restraint in not touching the Chuck Taylor All-Stars brand, wherein you hear Kurt Cobain was wearing Cons when he committed suicide. Rah, go Nike.
SCIENCE = LIFESTYLE
Slate: Inhalable alcohol? Finally, science is really producing products I can relate to.
Research from Nature: Your name increases your sex appeal. (Includes research performed via HotOrNot.com.) Hello, my name is Rex....
MEDIA
It was interesting to watch the Sunday morning news shows cover a couple stories that orgininated in the blogosphere. Both LittleGreenFootballs.com's analysis of typograpy (somewhat debunked by DailyKos) and Kottke.org's breaking the news that Ken Jennings lost in Jeopardy were both treated as "a website reported" on numerous instances. Even Reliable Sources glossed over the identity of those sites.
CELEBRITY
The best point in the Times Magstory on Trump is probably the point about him being a mysterious populist. False consciousness, indeed.
Amy's Robot has an MP3 of Dave Eggers interview on Conan last week.
Ana Marie Cox reviews the new Kristin Gore novel for the Times Book Review. We learn that Gore had writing gigs at SNL and Futurama. Which is impressive, but I saw her on Letterman last week, and she came off ditzy and clueless to irony or nuance. Ms. Cox delivers zingers though: "God knows, an astringent romantic satire is long overdue in a town where work is foreplay and the vibrating object in a couple's bed could easily be a two-way pager."
Locus: a bunch of sci-fi writers (Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton) in a roundtable about the future.
TECH
Huh, it looks like Yahoo is going into consumer electronics. Sounds to me like a bad move.
MUSIC
R.E.M. has an audio stream of the first single from their next album, Around The Sun: "Leaving New York".
ONLINE
NYhotties.com: "I'm a twenty-something New York escort. I love Prada, Seven jeans, and Jimmy Choos." I really gotta make up an identity and cash in with a book deal.
Apparently the PiPressis making some big structural changes, including something called "Speed Read" and a daily A&E section. By the way, my old friend Ross Raihala is the new music writer there. You can see his work popping up here.
Gizmodo reviews MSNtv, bascially the next generation of WebTV.
Years ago, I edited a newsstand magazine that basically reviewed websites. That genre of publishing sounds a billion years old now, but don't tell the Times Art section, which reviews music websites.
CNet has a follow-up story about the uphill battles a Netflix/TiVo partnership will face.
When I first saw the new BlackBerry, the keyboard totally confused me. Circuits finally explains the mentality behind this unique (and my guess is, ultimately flawed) 20-key keyboard.
Group investigative typography? The controversy that LittleGreenFootballs.com and PowerLine.com launched over the 60 Minutes piece (I won't try to explain it -- just go look) is fascinating group-think research even if it seems that most of the people sleuthing this together are complete morons.
FILM
New trailer to the Wes Anderson / Bill Murry flick, The Life Aquatic.
If you were at Mark Mallman's crazy 52.4-hour show last weekend, you witnessed one of those little pieces of Twin Cities rock history that will be recounted as often as Prince at First Ave. and Lifter Puller at the Triple Rock. David de Young has a review.
Letterman is having a contest in which you can submit an answer for Top Ten Signs You're In Love With Your iPod.
Since getting TiVo, I've been constantly thinking about cancelling my Netflix account. Now there's the surprising news that they will be working together, and I'll be able to download movie via Netflix to my TiVo. (PVRblog is abuzz with conversation.) See also: L.A. Timesessay on the the ways the DVR is changing society.
FILM
Guardian profile of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, the guy who has spent 16 years living in an airport and is the inspiration for the new Spielberg flick, Terminal.
MEDIA
Anderson Cooper receiving dating advice from Puffy.
Someone should make a list of the tropes from the Daily Show that have trickled into mainstream media thinking. This Timesgraphic showing the words Republican and Democratic convention speakers use feels like a less funny version of when John Stewart loops the tape on speakers who repeat the same words repeatedly in a speech.
GAMING
From last week's Circuits, a profile of Peter Molyneux, the creator of Black and White, who has a new god game called Fable coming out this month.
Jennifer 8. Lee ends a Timesstory about a Rock, Paper, Scissors tourney with phone numbers flirtatiously exchanged. (Zoinks, check out the strategies of RPS.)
Microsoft launched their Music Store (in beta) yesterday. Nothing about it jumps out as unique. The TV and MOVIES tabs are intriguing, but basically worthless for content. And you need Passport to buy. Blech. However, gotta love team picture. (More review: Times | Mossberg | CNET.)
Much more interesting to us little people, Apple iTunes launched an affiliate program. My thinking on this one: this will not directly affect sales. Instead, you will see an indirect effect when blogs start linking to these songs. This will sell a handful of songs, but more importantly it will require users to use iTunes to play music. In the long run, I think this leverages iTunes as the de fact music player.
Paul Ford invokes Hannah Arendt with The Banality of Google. (By the way, his site was also an influence in organizing this one.)
I'm sure I'm lending to the degeneration of our civilization, but let's go down skanking out, eh? The Paris Hilton Collection on Amazon. Paris Hilton's Heart: $35.
POLITICS
Transcript from last night's Michael Moore and John McCain appearances on Letterman.
TECH
Engadget got their hands on one of the new Portable Media Centers, and wrote the quintessential review. I haven't decided if I'll get one yet.
EVENTS
Is anyone in the world paying attention to Burning Man this year? Only two days left and I completely forgot about it.
Text of the Bush Twins speech from the RNC last night. And I quote: "But, contrary to what you might read in the papers, our parents are actually kind of cool. They do know the difference between mono and Bono. When we tell them we're going to see Outkast, they know it's a band and not a bunch of misfits. And if we really beg them, they'll even shake it like a Polaroid picture." You couldn't make this shit up if you tried. And woe, woe, woe, I'm so confused: who is the Mono character and are you telling me Dubya listens to The Misfits?
Dang, whattup with fast food commercials getting edgy/fetishistic? Here's a Carl's Junior Advert (large wmv file) of a girl sticking her fist in her mouth.
ONLINE
I have purchased exactly one issue of Playboy in my entire life -- last month's issue with the Google guys interview. But this month might be my second, with Washingtonienne making an appearance. (Here's the safe-for-work interview link and here's an archived version of her blog and here's Wonkette's entire coverage.)
This is pretty cool. MoreGoogle seemlessly adds thumbnails to your Google searches.
Those dummies at Friendster fired one of their blogger employees for what appears to be trivial reasons.
FILM
NumberSlate and PeerFlix, two peer-to-peer DVD sharing companies. Interesting, but I suspect they go nowhere.
I missed this one: Sofia Coppola's next movie will be a biopic of Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst.
WORDS
Voice: A legendary editor at Harvard University Press asks, What good are books?
I never read Arthur Phillips' Prague, but I think nearly every one of my friends did. And I never really knew that much about him until a silly Entertainment Weeklypiece (about his new book, The Egyptologist) told me he was a five-time Jeopardy champ. Other facts: born in Minneapolis, was a child actor, a failed entrepreneur, and jazz musician.
MUSIC
AC/DShe: all-girl AC/DC cover band. Mandonna: all-male Madonna cover band.
It's not even 24 hours later, and I'm already sick-to-death of talking about the VMAs. But I'll say this: "MIAMI, WE LOVE YOU!" The fuck? No we don't. Miami sucks. It sucks so bad that Matt Drudge and Anne Coulter moved there. MIAMI, WE LIKE YOU ABOUT AS MUCH AS WE LIKE HOUSTON!
Of course the new Bjork officially went on sale today. It's her most challenging album so far. Listen | Buy.
Bruce Sterling did a fashion photo series called Milan or Tehran?, which I guess is trying to say something about globalism, but I don't know what (hot chicks in scarfs are universal, perhaps?).
I was interviewed by the NY Times a few weeks ago because of a article I wrote about the defunt scandal known as Plain Layne. The Times angle was mostly about fake celebrity bloggers. The whole topic came up again last week when the Quentin Tarantino blog surfaced, and then quickly sank. The next day, a secret weblog from Julian Casablancas' girlfriend rose, and then also died (screengrabs). It makes you wonder how much of a nano-celebrity you could be and have a fake blog made in your honor. ("No, I'm really Craig Kilborn's cousin!")
FILM
Somewhere in my mind is a top ten list of events that I'm sad not to have talked about here over the past six months, and Vincent Gallo is definitely not on it. The controversy seems to be wrapping up today with Roger Ebert telling "the whole truth" about Vince.
New movie trailer alert!:
Silver City. John Sayles political parody starring Chris Cooper.
Finding Neverland. Looks like Tim Burton meets Merchant & Ivory (ergo, bad) with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
Closer. Another entry in the hot genre of the moment -- let's call it the "romantic deceit thriller" (see also: We Don't Live Here Anymore). Starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen, but really starring cool Suzanne Vega and Damien Rice songs.
Somewhat funny parody of the director's commentary concept: Britney Spears on SNL. (Speaking of which, the new video of Britney covering "My Prerogative" reportedly cost $7.2 million "to market and promote" a "happening, rather than just a video." Apparently, she's taking cue from Axl and getting faux-married to her quasi-celeb mate in the video.)
Does anyone else suspect the only reason the MTV Video Awards were in Miami tonight was because the Republicans took over NYC? Best moment? I guess when Nick "Newlywed" Lachey and Paris "Simple World" Hilton appeared on the stage at the same time, and suddenly you had a vision of reality tv worlds colliding like a nuclear reaction. Yeah, boring awards this year. Blame the FCC.
Has anyone else been watching Maureen Dowd blah-blahing her new book on the talk show circuit? I'm not sure what it is, but something about her reminds me of Sofia Coppola -- demure but cunning, cute in a you-can't-be-seriously-be-that-coy kinda way.
When Halo 2 finally comes out, will anyone think that ILoveBees.com was a viral success? Well, since Subservient Chicken did so well, who knows.
Speaking of... the same ad firm that did those BK ads tried to recently get Paris Hilton to become a BK spokesperson in a David LaChappelle spot (featuring her own music!). It didn't work out, but Paris Hilton is trying to trademark her own logo (a tiara).
Everyone's fave sexy local blogger, PussyRanch has hung up her blogging tassles and closed the ranch. She's a little oblique about what she'll actually be doing now, but her recent work at City Pages has been quite good (check out the piece on the new Gotti ("one tough biscotti") reality tv show).
Last week, The Times did a story about online fantasy leagues, which gave major mentions to Best Buy and Fanball (two local companies). This week, the Strib basically does the same story.
There goes the neighborhood. Strib gives a major feature to Psycho Suzi's.
Cool or uncool? Hot or not? Sen. Norm Coleman's wife, Laurie, has given the Post approval to post sexy lingerie pics of her.
Many of you want to know about the Olympics. Let's talk about that next week, okay? Today, we're here to talk about the new site.
In the half-year that I have been gone, this is what I've been telling myself: "A blog should be organized like I think." Welcome to how I think.
I think in bursts. And then in blurbs. And finally in blobs. Bursts, blurbs, and blobs: that's what we've got here. On the left, you will find daily links -- what you probably came to Fimoc for in the first place. The spot where your eyes are right now will be used to explore topics in greater detail. What topics? Oh, I dunno, here are some ideas on my mind today: "Finger food at work." "How to kill the lad magazine." "The state of midwest parties in post-millennial exuberance." "Michiko, a-baby please don't go!" "Bush Twins vs. Hamm Twins vs. Olsen Twins: It's all meat to me." "Once they all thought they could write novels, now they all think they can be a dot-com entrepreneurs."
This site is built on my own custom content management system. Blogger and co. just don't give me everything I need.
I've enjoyed Kottke's attempt to mix daily links with daily posts and Anil's notion of the atomic element of the weblog being "the post". I think of this design as a remix of those ideas -- mix the posts and the links, but attempt to do it with more clarity; change the anatomic unit from the post to a temporal unit, "the day". More on that later....
I don't use RSS readers very much. I actually like how blogs look. Gasp, I know. Circumventing the design is like seeing everyone with no clothes on. Yuck. However, if you're of that kinky ilk, this should work.
What kind of a moron would describe his writing as "mitochondria"? One who had a hard time getting out of college because he was determined to get majors in every department.
The rumors of my joining the ranks of paid bloggers are greatly exaggerated.
Many people complained about the white-on-black approach of the last design. I've given up the battle, but I'm holding steady onto the lightly-patterned backgrounds, cuz I think it's purty. If you really can't read it, let me now. Or if it looks like periwinkle, please, dear god, let me know.
I officially apologize to the 2,325 of you who I tried to convince to go to SXSW this year. I can't go. Just not enough time (like you can't tell by the lack of updates here). Don't hate me, cuz I still luv you.
WORDS
ILM thread: Summarise a Novel in 25 Words. Anyone else notice that ILM is sorta like MetaFilter circa 2000? Yes, I mean it's good.
We always knew Orson Scott Card was a conservative, but we never really cared. I mean, some of my best friends are... anyway, now he's writing nasty editorials on this blog. Mel Gibson, on the other hand... well, he's just a fascist.
It's well known that journalists are pilfering bloggers 24-7, but particular funny case is the blogger Brian Storms writing a parody about an Amazon.com that the Chicago Tribunepicked up by accident (correction).
About a dozen people emailed me to say that Tina Fey made the cover of Bust this month. Am I that transparent? How about if I told you I voted for Nader last time around? Ouch, that hurt, stop throwing things.
ONLINE
I have deep misgivings about linking to this. I really hope none of you think your blog should be a book. Yes, even you.
A blog about a magazine? Why yes, here's one about Entertainment Weekly.
Wildly popular in South Korea, OhMyNews.com now has an English edition.
RELATIONSHIPS
ImaginaryGirlfriends.com. "You can soon receive personalized love letters by mail, e-mail, photos, special gifts, even phone messages or online chat from your new Imaginary Girlfriend. We won't tell anyone that it's not real!" Gawd, this is gonna simplify things for me.
Perhaps the greatest movie of all time, Blow-Upcame out on DVD this week. (If you've been to my house, you've drank Wet Rexxxies under the ostentatiously red poster.) So did The Tibetan Book of the Dead narrated by Leonard Cohen (!?), but I really have no idea how good that is.
You think that fat dead Atkins guy lost 21 grams when he died? Ba-dum-dum. On with the show:
WORDS
The American Library Association site is selling posters of celebs holding books. Way too many to name, but just a few: Weird Al (Stephen Hawking), Julia Stiles (David Sedaris) Bill Gates (Hemingway), and Britney (Harry Potter). Oh hell, Christina Ricci, put downThe Fountainhead before you hurt someone!
ONLINE
Jenny's Phone Number [867-5309] up for sale on eBay. Current price: $200,100. Yipe.
Designer extraordinaire, Joshua Davis, was asked by Wired to redesign Google. Here are some snapshots of what he came up with for an upcoming issue. Meanwhile, he might be on Queer Eye.
U.S. State Department ditches Courier in favor of Times. Which means they'll adopt Verdana in 20 years.
TV
I kept hearing the Super Bowl streaker had a website written on his body, but could never find which one. Finally, a photo. Stupid gambling site which brags about it here.
Steven Johnson's post about Howard Dean's demise is one of those little succinct moments in the blogosphere where the right opinion is heard and the words echo in a way as important as a NYT op-ed. Or maybe that's the problem? Shirky has one too.
WORDS
Chuck interviewed at Gothamist. Best line of many: "I think the bars should stay open later, and I think there should be more people blogging about the media. Oh, and people should be generally crazier." (See previously, killing small people with Chuck.)
ONLINE
Brooke says Broken Saints is being turned into a DVD.
MUSIC
Li'l G n' R: First Ever Guns 'n Roses Kids Tribute Band. I hear Michael Jackson wants to play with Slash again. Rim-shot!
Gothamist reports on the casting to the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, which includes Martin Freeman from The Office, Zooey Deschenal, and Mos Def. In other news, NBC is gonna try to adaptThe Office. Ahem, no comment.
Amy's Robot has audio of Thomas Pynchon's "appearance" on The Simpson's last night.
POLITICS
Totally old news, but gotta catch up from last week: Wonkette is to DC politics as Gawker is to NYC media. Ana Marie Cox is the editor, so it should be a good.
Google enters social software scene with Orkut and MyYahoo adds an RSS aggregator.
The guy who pretty much invented Winamp, Shoutcast, and Gnutella oddly chooses Rolling Stone to finally accept an interview. (Update: It looks like he just quit AOL.)
I rather like that trailer for the Stepford Wives remake and the Battle of Algiers re-release showed up the same day. (If it plays in your market, run-don't-walk to Battle of Algiers. It's one of my top 10 favorites of all time.)
Vote for the Top 10 films of 2003 on Film Comment and enter a contest for $200 in Criterion DVDs.
Huh, that's what she looks like. The Today Showinterviews Emily Nussbaum after her NYTstory on kid bloggers.
TV/POLITICS
Bush In 30 Seconds winner announced. Drudge has quotes from the awards show (which -- gush, gush -- included Julia Stiles). The plan is to air the spot during the Super Bowl.
Chuck spots that Poststory accusing Howard Dean staffers of being lame, and provides video proving the contrary.
FOOD
Crazy shit: Jay "Bright Lights, Big City" McInerney is apparently a contender for the open NYT food critic position that William Grimes left behind. Good shit: The Kicker imagines what his first column would be like.
TECH
Those new Smart Watches are available on Amazon. See also: MSN Direct. I'd buy one if two things changed: 1) I could use AIM instead of MSN Messnger and 2) I could get email instead of my calendar.
WORDS/IDEAS
If you've ever felt out of the loop on academic talk (especially since Lingua Franca bit the dust [and the freelance staffers got sued]), you'll want to follow this thread. Taking off from the Times story (and New Left Review article) of Franco Moretti's modest proposal to make literary scholarship more mathematical, Ftrain pens Tufte vs. Bloom. More to come, I'm sure...
MUSIC
Go buy whatever is left of Grand Royal. Current Bid: $0.
Great, as if Kurt & Courtney weren't enough, the theories are already flying that Elliott Smith's girlfriend killed him. Details on why.
Had a strange sensation today paging through The New Yorker. I came across the Howard Dean article and briefly thought to myself, "This is pretty long; I should print it for later." Of course, I was holding the magazine in my nimble fingers. Then, quickly realizing my folly, I thought, "Maybe I can rip the pages out for later." Mind-boggling, isn't it?... how spoiled we've become.
ONLINE
Emily Nussbaum chases around some high school Live Journalers for the Times Mag: My So-Called Blog.
For the price of about $1 per CD, RipDigital will turn your entire CD library into MP3 files.
We deserve our own wretched fate. Silly Saddam as Outkast animation.
WORDS
What is the single worst piece of punctuation? Some might say the exclamation point, but according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the colon is the enemy.
Gotta love those Hilton sisters. Oops, I mean Olsen twins. Dangit, I really meant Bush twins. Speaking of which, I hear the Olsen twins are going to NYU this year. Wouldn't love to take this class with them?
New to the dating service scene, SocialGrid utilizes Google, grid computing, P2P, and file-sharing to help you hook up. Haven't tried it yet...
New blog: Lingerie101, the guide for men. "Each week lingerie101 posts an article on one certain kind of lingerie, so you know the difference between a teddy and a cami."
Discovered by Slashdot, Photoshop has a special feature that detects if an image is American currency.
Surrounded by the cute girls in my posse, I turned into a skanky aloof hipster (note the shifty eyes and cell phone/pda in my pocket). Hey Pete, what night was that, anyway?
WORDS
During that Timesinterview the other day, I said a ridiculous number of brilliant things about list-making as an attempt to make sense of a fragmented world. And then Louis Menand stole all my ideas and wrote them in The New Yorker. Yep.
The Speech Accent Archive consists of audio files of 295 people reading the exact same 69 words. So? Well, they all speak with different accents. So? Shut up, it's cool.
Looks like Umberto Eco has a new book. The Guardian says it's "inaccessible for its semiotic jargon and graphs," which is a good sign he's back in form.
POLITICS
The 15 finalists in MoveOn.org's Bush In 30 Seconds contest have been announced. Some funny ones, some reactionary ones. Judges for the finals include: Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho and Gus Van Sant.
Ziff-Davis is going to launch a new tech magazine: Sync. Doomed to suck.
Somewhat interesting that The Guardianreprinted Osama bin Laden's comments in its "Comments and Analysis" section of the paper. (Also interesting that I didn't actually read all of Osama's words, but I read the entire mediocre MeFi thread.)
MUSIC
Ryan Adams leaves a goofy-attempt-at-being-nasty message (mp3) on Jim DeRogatis' (Chicago Sun-Times music columnist) voicemail.
And the winner for most unique use of my Best Of The Year lists goes to: RocketJump, who took all the music lists, shoved them into a mathematical formula, and came up with a uber-list. Also cool: All-Consuming's 100 Most Frequently Mentioned Books By Blogs. I'm glad this is all over.
TV
Watching SNL the other night, I witnessed the "Atkin's Diet Safe" Subway commercial for the first time. At first, I wasn't sure if it was an SNL parody commercial, but it was real, and the Times says there are more to come.
Emily Nussbaum in the Times and Tom Shales in the Post on the final episodes of Sex and the City. Shales includes this tidbit: "Sometime during the year, HBO began imprinting each preview cassette sent out for review with the critic's initials in one corner of the screen, allegedly as an anti-piracy measure."
This one is a bit crazy. Universal Music (i.e., GE; i.e., NBC) is teaming up with DirecTV (i.e., NewsCorp; i.e., FOX), Vivid Entertainment Group (i.e., porn), and Shady Records (i.e., Eminem's label) to launch a music channel featuring porn videos.
MUSIC
Casey Kasem is leaving American Top 40. Tidbits about CK: he is the voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo; his wife, Jean, was Loretta Tortelli on Cheers; he is vegan; he is of Lebanese decent; he will be replaced by the host of Amerian Idol; and he didn't know that Snuggles tape was leaked until 10 years after it happened.
Courtney Love has a "15 day trial version" (?!) of her new single, Mono," available on her site.
Recommended: this James Poniewozik essay, where Time shockingly gave him 3,000 words of space to talk about decline of mass culture and the ascendency of niche marketing. Full of somewhat obscure cultural reference points that prove his point.
It's more difficult to make a "best of" list for weblogs than for any other cultural catagory. Blogs are inherently meta -- they span the entire range of contemporary human existence and thought. Nonetheless, defiant in the face of cacophany,
here's my annual list of 30+ Best Blogs of 2003:
1)Blog For America -- I admit, I only occassionally checked in on Howard Dean's blog this year, but this thing simply changed politics, the media, and America in general like nothing since Drudge. When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function. Finally, a future to look forward to.
2)Metafilter -- The abridged four-year history of MeFi: first it was great, then good, then dull, then good again, then kinda sucky, surprisingly reactionary, suddenly progressive, good again, but just falling short of great, then bad for a while, but whoa that was a good month. And that one post was so good! And I want to throttle the guy who posted this thing again! If it happened in 2003... well, let's be honest, it did not happen first on Metafilter. But this is where it entered the market of ideas -- inflated or deflated on the rigorous balance sheet of comments calculus and trackback trig. And the franchise expanded this year with ask.metafilter.com, which is just plain awesome.
3)ABC's The Note -- This is the only item on this list that treacherously stretches the definition of blog, but I've gotta believe that this ridiculously popular beltway online journal is determining the stories that get told, the events that get attention, and the shape of democracy. Plus, it's one of the main reasons Trent Lott isn't pestering us anymore.
4)Buzz Machine -- Question: Is it odd that the founder of Entertainment Weekly is now America's biggest proponent of Iranian bloggers? Answer: Nope. Jeff's commentary on everything from Iraq to Howard Stern has been crucial reading this year. And one day someone will write a decent Persian translator that allows me to read all those Iranians.
6)Lessig Blog -- You read Lessig to remind yourself of all the issues you've guiltily not been paying attention to: internet security, digital rights, everything in the Creative Commons, etc. Lessig (who guest-starred on the blogs for Howard Dean and John Kerry this year) is there because you aren't.
7)Smart Mobs -- The most important industry-ish books I read this year were Salam Pax's The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, Steven Johnson's Emergence, William J Mitchell's Me++, Michael Wolff's Autumn of the Moguls, David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and Howard Rheingold Smart Mobs. The website for the latter was constantly attuned to Big Ideas -- where we're headed and how to avoid a collision-course with destruction.
8)Gawker -- It's probably not fair that Nick Denton has three sites on the list this year. Nah, scratch that, it's totally fair. It's too early to tell whether he's milking the meme or inventing a mini-publishing revolution, but he's doing something that all the rest of us are watching with a tinch of envy.
9)The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- The idea is simple: publish an entry from the renowned 17th-century London diarist every day. The outcome is infectious. If they make a website into a movie, it should be this one.
10)Daily Green Cine -- Oh, you like film? How quaint. These guys really like film. This offshoot of Netflix-competitor GreenCine is a master of its genre.
11)Anil Dash & Kottke.org -- They've become our avuncular stylists, haven't they? Similiar forms: Anil has the sideblog on the left with the occasional essay on the right. This year, Kottke experimented (unsuccessfully, I'd argue) with placing the remaindered links inside the blog. They helped invent the blog and they continue to redefine its potential. And they'd smirk at being described like that.
12)Book Slut, Maud Newton, Language Hat -- All those Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith and Elizabeth Wurtzel links? I probably found them at one of these places.
13)Low Culture -- This dual-columned blog -- baby blue (shallow) and soft orange (grave) -- seemed to just appear out of nowhere this year. This was the rookie of the year.
14)Amy's Robot -- Want snarky celebrity news before celebrities even know it happened? Check.
15)Romenesko and I Want Media & PaidContent.org -- I'd rather cut my toes off and feed them to the rabid offspring of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly than imagine a world where this triumverate didn't arrive in my inbox every morning. I Want Media had juicy interviews and links, Paid Content was a feast of daily tech/content news, and Romenesko could be #1 any given year but that would be tiresome.
16)Gothamist & Lockhart Steele & NewYorish.com & The Morning News -- For quality of writing and diversity of links, these four NYC blogs deserve as much attention as Gawker, but they just happened to not get picked in the mini-publishing corporate draft. Which in some ways makes them more important.
17)Lost Remote -- The cool thing about Lost Remote is that it's a well-defined industry blog (succinctly, the future of tv) that always transcends its genre.
18)Babelogue -- I'm surprised this experiment hasn't gotten more attention. The local Voice-owned indie weekly boldly launched a staff weblog this year that mixed unique voices in the community. It's like a local blog central for anyone in the Twin Cites -- let's call it My Own Private Gawker.
19)Large-Hearted Boy & Catherine's Pita & S/FJ & Useful Noise & I Love Music & Neuma & Rocktober -- It's a bit unfair to group these diverse music-themed blogs under one heading, but these were the places where I discovered new bands, found off-beat MP3s, heard smart conversation, and truly missed writing and playing music.
20)Greg.org -- The Sofia interview and the Cremaster coverage alone made Greg de rigueur reading.
21)Blogumentary -- C'mon Chuck, finish the movie already!
22)LucJam & AdRants -- With reportage on everything from Paris to hip-hop brand success, Lucian somehow made marketing an undirty word in 2003. And AdRants made sure that advertising stayed dirty.
23)Magnetbox -- This local peronsal fave always makes my recommendation list because of shared interests: the interplay of technology and music distribution, online economies, social software applications, and generally rad stuff.
24)Waxy.org -- It felt like 1999 again when everyone was passing around links to goofy movies (except everyone had broadband at home this time). The Star Wars Kid movie had all the characteristcs needed to be labelled a phenom -- intrigue, parody, backlash, Times reportage, and free iPods.
25)J.D.'s New Media Musings & E-Media Tidbits -- The media is the message. These two blogs continued to preach the story that online news is changing the way we consume information.
26)Arts Journal -- Culture links galore. Leans a bit toward the high-brow, but since everyone in America is now middle-brow, that shouldn't matter.
27)The Map Room -- I love niche publishing, especially when it's a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I'd probably pay for this.
28)Press Think -- No way in hell I could find the time to read all the words that spilled out of Jay Rosen's blog pad this year, but when you get an NYU j-school prof talking this much, there's usually something to hear.
30)Fleshbot -- Paris was the internet event of the year (followed closely by Friendster and Howard Dean), and you can attribute much of it to Fleshbot. Can't say I was into the Kariwanz Fetish Gallery or the Supreme Hentai, but nothing mainstreamed sex this year like the Paris video, which was chronicled here on the site's first week of existence.
There are days that I think this little cultural petri dish known as blogging has become a cesspool. But then I look over this list and realize it's a radically robust machine that we've created. And it's cool knowing that next year will be full of more surprises that I can't wait to link to.
Stumbled across the old Roland Barthes essay on The New Citroen (1957), which I haven't read in nearly a decade, but am stunned at how crisp it sounds. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." How come no one wrote about the Mini like this?
For a little bit of flashback fun, read this PC Worldstory from two years ago that predicts what last year was supposed to bring. 1-GHz PDAs? Fuel cells for portables? Voice portals? Uh, yeah. At least they got the flat screens right.
For those who have been sleeping the last week, a merger catchup: Comcast bought TechTV | FedEx bought Kinko's | News Corp bought DirecTV | Rex bought a $150 coffee pot that grinds the beans and makes the coffee with a timer.
Kottke says he will read a magazine every week for a year. All the freaks come out to tell him which ones to try.
Anyone know about this Trend Agenda thing coming to town? Okay, let me rephrase that: Anyone know how I can get in without forking out $350? "Trend Agenda is for those who want to help shape the future -- the curious and courageous. Philosophers, leaders, innovators and mavericks." Hell, they should pay me to go.
Just as its size doubled over the weekend, the Year in Review page is about to close shop. More personal faves have arrived: Salon's annual tech review, onslaughts from the Sunday Times and Entertainment Weekly, the big Voice film list, etc.
POLITICS
Those Howard Dean Internet stories just keep coming. Here's Wired's.
Wash Post: Japan's Empire of Cool. A1 story on the the country's culture industry. Na-duh.
FILM
Buried in this story about Tony Kushner is the news that Dave Eggers is working with Spike Jonze to adapt Where The Wild Things Are.
Trailer to new Lars von Trier movie: Dogville. In other von Trier news that completely freaks me out, his brilliant mini-series Kingdom Hospital has been adapted by Stephen King and will air on ABC. (See also: Lars von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson chit-chatting.)
Wooly Boys, "the first major motion picture set and filmed in North Dakota" (which is not true many times over), opens next month. It stars Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson.
That which can heretoforth be referred to simply as THE LIST has grown significantly over the weekend. That's where the action is. And then there are these:
I spend vastly too much money on Taschen books, which predictably end up sitting around on coffee tables. The L.A. Weekly has a good profile of the book publisher.
Amazon Wishlist of ridiculously expensive stuff. Yes, please add that $283,500.00 necklace to my shopping cart. (Customer review: "The sacrifices I have made just to be able to afford this, selling my house, my car, and my children, all made up for it in the end.")
Heard a bit of Matt Groening on Fresh Air the other night. Apparently he edited this year's De Capo Best Music Writing anthology, but I didn't hear Terry Gross ask about it.
Gory pics of the singer Jack White beat up last week.
The Year in Review link collection has blossomed in the last couple days. Some of my favorites: Merriam-Webster.com's "Words of the Year," Space.com's "Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003," USA Today's "Best-Selling Books of 2003", Pitchfork's "Top 50 Singles," AOL's "Most Searched Words," The Guardian's "The Year's Best Music DVDs," and NYT Mag's "Year in Ideas." Those and hundreds more inside.
I always have the company party post-party so that everyone talks about the stupid drunk thing so-and-so did at my house last year. This seemingly infallible strategy implodes when you get more drunk than anyone else at your own party.
Yo, USA Today linked to my Year In Review list today. There's a bunch of new stuff in there... Rolling Stone, The Onion, and the Best Wines of 2003!
TECH
Hypothesize about the fetishizing of technology all you want, but this information superhighway is a two-way street: Steve Jobs interviewed in Rolling Stone; David Byrne interviewed in Wired.
FILM
Totally weird. Girl with a Pearl Earring -- yes, the Vermeer painting -- has been adapted into a movie (Timesreview). Just the other day I linked to the phenomenally cool (and totally unrelated to the movie) Girl With a Pearl Earring website. Question for my art historian friends: Is this the first time a painting has been adapted into a movie?
I haven't been to SonicYouth.com for a while. Check out the wicked complex MP3 page.
ONLINE
Hm, Variety added another blog: The Porning Report, "coverage of the porn industry's move to mainstream." To bookmark or not to bookmark, that is the question.
Rolling Stonesays: "Amazon.com removed the customer advice area from the page for Jackson's Number Ones greatest hits album page and several other Jackson albums after unnamed users made recommendations that included books on identifying child molesters, a baby gift set titled 'Thank Heaven for Little Boys' and the latest Captain Underpants books..."
That time of the year again. I'm gathering all the Year in Review stuff in one easy-to-find place: Here! So far, some good lists in from Art Forum and NYT and Amazon. The list is constantly growing, so please email me additions.
Can you believe there was a time when one program was viewed in 60% of households? From 1983, an episode of M*A*S*H holds the record as the top network telecast of all time. Here are the top 10, according to Nielsen.
Fortune has the first deep-analysis backlash story on Google. Interspersed among the stories of internecine conflict are these numbers: 1,000 people apply for jobs at Google every day, 30% of Google workers are contractors, 150,000 advertisers have signed up for Adwords, 5% of Google is owned by Yahoo, and an IPO would probably value the company at $20 billion.
NYT has a cool profile of Dana Boyd, a 25-year-old grad student at Berkeley studying digital social networks. Her blog, Connected Selves, was mentioned here a while ago.
Since we're talking about Friendster, let's chat a bit about our backlash baby. It used to be that on a weekly basis (usually a weekend basis), I would get in a conversation with someone about Friendster. Now, however, I get in a weekly conversation with someone who is ticked off because Friendster will eventually charge them to use it. The funny thing is that there's no proof this will actually happen -- everyone just assumes this is the direction Friendster will go. It's like everyone intrinsically believes in this fate because this is what happens to services we like on the internet: they start to suck and/or suck money. This is the lot served to our generation: free stuff, followed by the bill (social security and file sharing come to mind).
But I think differently. I have some advice for the minds behind Friendster: go ahead with your subscription service. I know how you can make a bundle off it without taking away a single feature from the current users. That's right, I know how you can keep your 3.2 million-person subscription base from fleeing, and you can go premium, and you can create better communities and therefore more users. How, you ask? Simple: add features that make people want to pay for your site. Here are just some ideas:
Allow subscribers to see any profile, even if they aren't connected to the person.
Or, if that's too extreme, allow them to see further than the 6 degrees currently allowed. Give subscribers 8 or 10 degrees.
Give subscribers special daily statistics, such as how many times their profile has been viewed. Or if you want to get real nasty, tell subscribers who has viewed their profile. Gawd, I'd pay big for that.
Let subscribers have more than five pictures.
Take away the banner and text ads for subscribers.
Give subscribers more fields to enter in their profile.
Make a deal with Amazon that allows subscribers to build personal recommendations lists with referral fees. Facilitate it with a WebService. Share the wealth.
Since you've got more data than anyone in the world on the cultural connections between people, make a deal with Meetup that allows people with similar interests to connect in some way.
Make a deal with HotOrNot and... okay, nevermind, don't do that.
This one will push you over the top: give subscribers a blog. If I knew that _____ was posting daily to her Friendster Blog, I would be there every day.
Allow subscribers to post classifieds, a la Tribe.net.
Allow subscribers create photo galleries, a la Photolog.
Allow subscribers to mix features from the Gallery and the Search, such that I can find all the 25-year-old girls who like Le Tigre within 50 miles of me.
Give subscribers a server that doesn't crash during office hours.
And finally, toss of this stupid idea that you are exclusively a dating service.
Friendster, feel free to email me the check when I save your company. Happy Thanksgiving.
Painful to watch, some guy who reads every word of the NY Times is almost 1.5 years behind. See also: Lizzy is doing a funny "Letters to the New Yorker" series at The Kicker.
Clinton releases list of his favorite books. Some oddities: "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker; "Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell; "Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr; and "Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Peter Scholtes noticed that Har Mar Superstar and Karen O were in town the same day, so he had them interview each other. Golden. Karen: "I'm electronically mailing with Beck, and I told him that I was going to be out there recording with you, and he didn't write me back after that." Har Mar: "I saw him three days ago at a festival and he asked me to record with him, so maybe I'm totally cock-blocking you."
CP and The Onion review the Spike Jones DVD retrospectives.
My fave part of this RZA interview is where he claims to love Bob Hope. But this is good too: "Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, man, this nigga knew all my shit."
This site is up to about 3,500 visitors per day. Who are all you people? Please wipe your feet before entering. Linkage:
POP
This month's Wired has a gadget section with this quote from Paris Hilton (who the NYTimessaid "looks like what you'd get if you crossed Uma Thurman, a borzoi and Robert Plant circa 1972") printed long before last week's tape scandal: "I can't live without my cell phone. It's the one with the big round dial, and it has a video camera on it." The mind reels with the potential sequels...
Variety.com has started a blog, Outside The Box, about swag -- promotional items for music, film, tv, etc. releases.
Norman Mailer's 25-year-old son, who has no journalism experience other than writing one piece for Black Book, is the new executive editor of High Times. Profile.
Cool. The Cameos of Alfred Hitchcock. (That is, the cameos in his own films. I've always wondered where he appears in Rope, and now I finally know.)
The author of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophyanalyzes Tarantino. (Via Greencine.)
I'll call Body Song a cross between Koyaanisqatsi and Kronos Quartet. Cool site by Channel 4, cool music by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.
"Why can't I preorder a DVD and receive it the day the film is released in theaters? Or buy it on my way out of the theater if I liked what I saw? One thing I learned from the Mavs is that you can watch the game on TV, but you'll still go to the game, because it's a different experience." -- Mark Cuban (the guy who sold Broadcast.com for billions and bought the Dallas Mavericks and -- more importantly -- Landmark Theatres), Wired, December 2003
Okay, the Paris Hilton update. Pamela Anderson gives it a thumbs up; Howard Stern, a thumbs down. In a twist of fate, Rick Salomon is suing. ESPN gives office viewing tips. Larry Flynt apparently wants to get in the action: he has pics of the Barbi Twins getting nasty with each other. (Up next: Olsen twins! Bush sisters!) And Lizzy says there's another tape floating around involving a threesome (with Simon Rex!).
Sorry, you're gonna hafta find another Christmas gift, cuz I've already found the Paris Hilton video online. That embarrassing moment her cell phone rings could be the most important cinematic scene of 2003. But hey, enough cinema verite, let's see what else is going on:
This is already old news, but I'm trying to be cultivate my old media roots. Wallop is Microsoft's attempt to get into the social software industry from the Social Computing Group. Wired News story.
Har Mar Superstar is everywhere lately. And now he will be in vodka ads. (The article also suggests he's moving from Ibiza to L.A. to record.)
Back in Fargo, I was quasi-fortunate enough to be acquainted with a half-crazy guy named Modern Man. (His real name was Leland, which he had legally changed to "Modern Man." All things considered, not a bad move.) His art and personality (seldom differentiated) was basically a combustible mix of Dali and Warhol, and now he has a website, Museum of Modern's Art. (Modern, you're such a card.) I'm really not recommending the site to you, but the handful of you who know him will be intrigued. (Via Todd.)
I finally read The Rake's profile of the restaurant scene, and I think I actually recommend it. This line got my mind working: "According to the National Restaurant Association, we rank fourth in terms of per capita dining, and in recent years have been as high as number three."
Wurtzel is totally bummed about Prozac Nation (the film).
I was just thinking I wanted to spend my Sunday reading a Spielberg profile in the NYT Mag. Okay, no I wasn't. Good, at least there's an R.E.M. profile. Okay, no solace there either.
So I've been watching the stupid string theory special on Nova. Stupid because it's obviously made for sixth graders. How many different ways can you say that a "theory of everything" will require a coalescence of quantum theory and general relativity? Apparently, according to this show, many dozen tedious ways, and then many dozen more with animated graphics. Anyway, if you were disapointed like me, here's a slightly better interview with Brian Greene.
I predict: soon, the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" will be replaced by "the best thing since caffeinated milk." Hyper Cow! And a launch party.
Vice Fund is a mutual fund specializing in tobacco, gaming, alcohol, and defence.
ONLINE
Fleshbot, the newest blog launch from Nick Denton, goes live this week. Kinja (aka Lafayette Project), "a blog of all blogs," has a 2004 dateline. And there are rumors about a D.C.-based politics blog and a L.A.-based entertainment blog. (See also: New York's Blog Players.)
Finally, some decent analysis on Friendster's numbers.
The apperance of a big color ad for Playboy in last week's City Pages (it's probably making the rounds in other Village Voice Media rags too) is enough to start me type-type-typing some sort of important essay about Hef's ir/relevance. Oh, of course, Slate did.
For no apparent reason, Camille Paglia is interviewed in Salon, where, for no apparent reason, she rips on blogs. My guess is she's picking up on an idea that Drudge gave her.
Huh, Utne still gives out their Independent Press Awards. A million years ago, this was a big deal. Or maybe I'm just old.
This New Yorker Tina Fey profile is the best piece ever written about her, mostly because it answers a ton of questions I've always wanted answered, such as how much of SNL she writes (two sketches per week plus general oversight), how many writers are on-staff (20), and how she gathers news material (lackeys gather clips -- though I still swear she reads Fimoc). Plus I got to find out she has a brother who is a website editor at QVC!
This Business Week column on Friendster is about as far off the mark as they come. The premise: Friendster will fail because it makes a bad dating service. Silly goose, the dating service aspect is probably the most boring part of Friendster.
Google now wants to get into the book text business just like Amazon.
FOOD
My high school girlfriend gets big props in this NYT review of Django.
The other change for the better at Django is the arrival of Nancy Olson as pastry chef. Her desserts have an almost homey honesty, especially two additions that turn up in time for Thanksgiving. Cranberry bread pudding is almost too good to be true, with a crisp, golden exterior and a light, custardy interior. Perfectly spaced cranberries give off a bright spark of tart flavor. Pumpkin and pecan tart combine, effortlessly, two classic Thanksgiving flavors in one finely executed tart, with a surprising scoop of lime sherbet. It works. And there's an add-on that could be offered on its own, a cup of hot, spicy apple cider with a smooth, velvety texture. Chocolate and coconut tart, dense and concentrated, invokes the always sacred memory of childhood Mounds bars, and for that I am grateful. A scoop of toasted almond sherbet on the side, with its subtle reference to Almond Joy, makes this the greatest candy bar ever created for the adult palate.
People seemed to really like the AOL Man costume. Not as good as my femme fatale entourage, who went as the Kill Bill characters, but sufficiently geeky.
This NYT article about how cell phones have created a new world of "soft time" is pretty much written for me.
Misbehaving.net, a blog about women and technology, is getting a lot of attention.
I don't really have a great reason for linking to this, but The Hindustan Times has a slideshow of Miss Afghanistan. Progress? (See also: Washington Post's multimedia extravaganza, Return to Afghanistan.)
On The Media interviews Matthew Carter (audio), the person behind the new New York Timesfont change announced last week. (It was a good episode. Bob Garfield blasts Bill O'Reilly and Mickey Kaus considers blogging vs. editing.)
It's the end of an era. Plain Layne says goodbye. Like a swimming pool in a cornfield, This is how I'll remember her.
Google has a new feature whereby you enter the word "define" before the search term and it will try to provide a definition of the word. Example: define motherfucker.
Someone should do a study about the disproportionate number of rappers who make the New York Times business section. This week, it's Outkast for pimping pitbulls.
It's been a while since I could say this, but The Voice's music section this week is all about stuff I like. Matos does The Rapture and Basement Jaxx, and there are Decembrist and Shins reviews. Christgau gives Bjork and Rancid both an A-. Plus, there's this odd thing about MP3Pro.
Calling The Strokes neocons might be a tad much, but I enjoy the thesis of this Joe Hagan piece in Newsweek.
Or at least that's how it felt on the summer day when an early promo tape showed up at the office of the indie weekly I was editing. It was to be his first album on Kill Rock Stars, and the promo had just three songs by him and three songs by the Softies. Elliott was Side B.
My friend Moon was sitting in the office reading pornographic comic books (long story) when I slipped in the tape. The first song, "Needle in the Hay," started with the pick-strum-pick. At that inimitable first breathy whisper, we were hooked.
That summer was easily the lowest point in my life. I didn't want to do anything that first year after graduating from college. So I didn't. I was pawning everything to pay for beer, and living in a crawl space above the paper's photolab. Moon had lost his job because he could never make it to work on time (noon). We were drunk every night, sleeping with each other's girlfriends, and landing in the hospital on more occasions than I care to tell you about. That summer, Elliott Smith was our little secret, and maybe the only thing that kept us hoping.
Six months later, our surprise find was everyone else's surprise find, as Elliott got famous and eventually landed on Spielberg's label. (Wow, remember how weird that was?) When we finally got to see Elliott perform, we hung out with him a bit after the show. Elliott was in a very good mood that night -- chipper, sober, talkative. Moon, however, was so wasted that Elliott said, "I think your friend has an alcohol problem." How do you know you've hit rock bottom? When Elliott Smith informs you of your substance abuse problem.
I'm not sure if it was directly related, but right around that time is when I decided life wasn't the game I was playing. So let's try a different game, eh? Elliott, thank you, and good bye.
For Halloween, I was gonna dress up in a yellow jump suit and call myself "AOL Man!" But now my costume is fucked, because everyone will think I'm Uma from Kill Bill. Today's links:
So have you seen that new MTV's Spankin' New magazine on the newsstands? Surprise, surprise, like its namesake, it has nothing to do with music. (Story.)
As GreenCine says, "If you read only one article, review, blurb or gum wrapper on Kill Bill, make it this interview with Quentin Tarantino." It answers all those "that's a reference to what?" questions. Amazing.
Anthony Lane's New Yorkerreview and The Chronicle's critique of Sylvia (trailer). (The same issue of the New Yorker has an excellent Don DeLillo essay on ephemeral filmic memory and a very long Tarantino profile.)
I have to admit that the first time I read this Wired story about antisleep drugs, I went looking online for Provigil to see if I could order it. (Could not without a perscription.)
I'd rather be at ArtFutura right now. But I'm not, so let's check the jive:
ADVERTISING
Wow, how's this for cross-over marketing? OuchTheWebsite.com is created by Tylenol "to showcase those individuals who face pain in order to create something positive." I stumbled across it via a weird 3D magazine-advert pasted inside of the new Fader (which should tell you they're going for an hipster audience). Is Tylenol the next PBR? Perhaps they could even cross-market?
POLITICS
Did you see that Wesley Clark's campaign manager quit because "supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign advisers."
Looks like Palm Pictures put up a website to showcase it's big new DVD music video series with Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry: Director's Label.
I bet Belle and Sebastian are elated to see the headline of their Times review this week.
Buried in this good story about the historical and future pricing of music is a note that says iTunes will be available for PC this week. See also: New iPod TV Spot with Black Eyed Peas.
I don't know about you, but I'm kinda excited about the 33 1/3 book series.
Well, finally. Pitchfork reviews The Darkness. Surprisingly unsurprising surprise: they like it.
TECH/INTERNET
Times story on Urban Challenge makes it sound more like a cross between a Flash Mob and Death Race 2000 than "one part Amazing Races, one part Where's Waldo." The stories about collective intelligence via mobile technology are acceptably interesting. And there's also a morsel hidden in there: a quote from the drummer of Slaughter (who is also, fittingly enough, part of the Blue Man Group).
I've been known to talk about the merging of "online" and "real world" landscapes (you have to fill me with a fair amount of Guinness first), and I wish I had gone so far as William J. Mitchell and write a book (review) about it. His claim: the "trial separation" of bits and atoms -- the elementary units of information and matter -- is over. It sounds a little bit like Smart Mobs (which I just finished and recommend) with more emphasis reifying landscape.
iCube.us seems to be an American company that delivers the latest Japanese gadgets, such as this baby Vaio.
FILM
Random idea for someone else who isn't me to do: a community blog that maps all the meta-filmic references in Kill Bill. There way too much for one person to know.
I finally dived into the stack of magazines sitting by the computer this weekend, and at the top of the list was the new Rain Taxi. I can't overstate how much I recommend the Jonathan Franzen interview. It's not online, so go get it.
Did you see the Guthrie will be involved in bringing Shakespeare to soldiers? Barding the Bases.
How come I didn't know about Carleton College's Digital Arts Festival until today? Many great events, which I'll mention here again as they arrive. (See also, John Schott's blog, Ratchet Up.)
I've been playing with BookLog's Gender Genie. It uses an algorithm from Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon to predict the gender of a piece of writing. The last few blog entries have been very male. Try it out with your favorite literary passages and song lyrics.
Which is funnier? The trailer to the Stephen Glass biopic or the trailer to Tupac Shakur biopic? Answer: neither, cuz their titles are funnier: Shattered Glass and Resurrection, respectively.
Now on Friendster: Robert Smith. This is getting boring, isn't it?
TV
I think BMW stole the idea for this ad (video link) from The X-Files. See Advertising Age's TV Spots of the Week for more.
INTERNET
Google has added a cookie to high-usage searchers that shows how many searches you've performed in a day. It's apparently only 1% of users, but I see it!
Friendster really took off when Wired News did a story about the site. One has to wonder about the fate of Tribe.net after this rave.
LOCAL
Fox's reality show Full Life Make Over is in town: Casting Call. I really could use some plastic surgery.
I'm so pleased with myself. I made a t-shirt today that reads "REM KOOLHAAS IS MY DELIRIOUS BITCH." Maybe I'll make a bunch to sell online -- perhaps a whole line of them, like "MATTHEW BARNEY MASTERED MY CREAM" and "SPIKE JONZE CAN SUCK MY VIDEO." Ideas welcome.
TV
K Street is better than you've heard. The Times has an article on how it's affecting political and social dymanics in D.C. And Newsweek has an interview with James Carville.
This is oddly cool. MTV International played the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse to create 16 30-second tv spots that are surprisingly unique. Exquisitemtv.com collects them all, with maps that show how each progressed around the globe.
Here in Minneapolis, we got to see a crazy reinacarnation of Tron with a live soundtrack performed by electronic musicians using Game Boys and other digital devices. The genre of 8-bit music isn't totally new, but it seems to be catching some steam. Even MSNBC.com is writing about it (the audio interactive halfway down the page is pretty cool).
In addition to the previously mentioned Hilton sisters and Olsen twins, I should point out the importance of the Bush sisters. Barbara and Jenna are on Friendster (okay, they're fakester accounts). (Possible update on Friendster/Google: Friendster said no.)
My PDA/phone has two background desktop themes that I regularly shift between depending on my mood: The Olsen Twins and the Hilton Sisters. Same situation with my IM buddy icon. I like to think of them as the devil and the angel sitting on my opposing shoulders. Or maybe they're just the ying and the yang. Anyway, The Gaurdian profiles the angels and isn't afraid to love them. For the sake of equal time, I demand they also love the Hiltons.
LIFESTYLE
Technology meets Sex meets Politics. Thank you Howard Dean for making it all happen.
Everyone seems to be backlashing the new breed of "cool magazines" we've recently seen. I dunno, I'd rather be reading Mass Appeal, The Fader, Tokion, Anthem, WYWS, and sometimes even Vice than whatever else that fucking newsstand throws at me. (Which isn't to say that The Antic Muse's critique shouldn't be shoved down all their throats so they understand their relevance.)
A long time ago, I had an idea to start a lit publication similar to Words Without Borders.
MUSIC
I have written recently about DJs taking over the restaurant scene in town, and it's good to see that New York is, er, finally catching up to this trend.
NeoMedia got a little attention today for an application that ties together ISBN codes and Amazon. There are a number of similar devices out there, including the infamous CueCat and the iPilot. And IBM is working on a smart shopping cart that alerts you to deals.
Has anyone ever heard statistics on people who sleep less living longer? Or not living longer? I'd really like to know what I'm doing to myself in the long run. Okay, let's kick it:
FILM
EW's Kill Bill cover story this week contains a parenthetical quote from Tarantino about Memento: "Good movie! But there's a hole, okay? And it's this! How, okay, does he remember... his own fuckin' condition?" This is why Tarantino still matters.
A 2000-copy limited edition of the soundtrack to Lost in Translation packaged with a 48-page book of photos taken by Sofia is supposed to come out soon.
FASHION
Alright girls, no more wearing my jeans. (That sounds frivolous, but it has been a problem in the past. Lori, I want my pants back.)
HISTORY
100 Documents That Shaped America. I guess that's vaguely interesting, but frankly I'm more intrigued by the big "sponsored by HP" logo and "HP + Starbucks" ads.
WORDS
[Insert joke here.] Danielle Steel to open art gallery for lesser-knowns.
Moby: "i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive."
The estate of photographer/videographer Guy Bourdin is suing Madonna for ripping off his visual ideas. There's a side-by-side comparison. Here's a fan site talking about the homage.
The Voicereviews Chuck. I kinda like this line: "As someone who's shared a few drinks with Chuck at informal rock-critic gatherings (real hoo-has, those), I can tell you this is exactly how he holds court and conversation. He's great fun, but obdurate and occasionally too noisy." Dude, the secret is to scream louder than him.
Interfacing media, democracy, and social software into one important cluster, two big recent publication in my industry that everyone should care about: New Directions for News' We Media | Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy. I spent my weekend devouring these.
Steven Johnson took the small idea of the web generating strategies to campaigning and called them mob spots. In praxis, he crated an ad for Clark's campaign.
I'm finally back, now with a brain chock full of simmering ideas. I met Ray Suarez, drank with Lost Remote, heard the people behind DeanForAmerica, and blabbed alot about the democracy in the age of participatory journalism. Not a bad week.
Looks like things are really heating up in the social software arena. Let's start there:
TECH
Guess who's on the cover of Spin this month. Well, sure Dave Fucking Matthews, but guess who else. Yep, everyone's favorte post-networking device, Friendster. Pst, there are rumors that Google wants to buy Friendster.
Andy has launched Upcoming.org, which I very lightly helped beta test. This wonderful little application allows you to create personal and city calendars of events (here's the Twin Cities and here's me, user #11 of what will be two million in six months). It's everything I like about social software: collaborative, bigger than the sum of it's parts, and real-world-reinforcing. Think of it as Meetup meets Friendster meets Craiglist. Plus if you ever want to know where I am at night, now you know where to go.
Macromedia has launched Central, another product I not-very-rigorously beta tested.
L.A. Timesstory on the web-savvy Howard Dean campaign. Hearing the people behind the online campaign speak was the best part of my trip to D.C.
Microsoft and Google are both playing with location-based searching. With Google's Search By Location, you enter a search term and a location, and it gives you a map with results. (Luckily I'm not found when you search my zip code for "fucker".) And with Microsoft's World Wide Media Exchange, photos are indexed by location.
In D.C. right now, typing and posting this on my pda phone. I'm in front of Michael Jordan's new restaurant, which I'm afraid to say gave me more of a thrill than the Jefferson Memorial I just passed.
I was talking to mom the other day about her new lap top. She said she has been downloading music onto it. Of course, that intrigued me, so I asked what software she was using. "Kazaa," she said, totally non-chalantly, followed by a complaint that she can't find everything she wants. I told her about iTunes, but said you have to pay a buck per song. "A dollar?! That's a little expensive, isn't it?" That's moms for ya. The NY Times Mag has an essay on file-sharing.
Michael Stipe must be watching The Daily Show. R.E.M.'s newest is a spoof on tv news: MorningTeam.com.
WORDS
Good one. Word Pirates. "Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours."
Because I am a misanthropic elitist, I usually skip all the stuff everyone is passing around on the internal email lists, so I didn't read Lost Remote's Things Viewers Never, Ever Say (and Part II) until just now. It is pretty funny. And accurate.
LOCAL
Let the backlash commense. Grain Belt Premium made Rolling Stone's "Hot List" (not online, stupid fools) for "Hot Retro Beer." No backlash for this local pick though: Aesthetic Apparatus also made the list.
Due to a change in upper management that puts old media back into its rightful birthplace, this weblog will officially be dropping "AOL" from its name.
FILM
Still no trailer to link to, but Demonlover is making my friends giddy with anticipation.
It's been ages since The Times actually turned me onto something new. (That's the curse of being the Paper of Record: you're comprehensive and historical, but never really fresh and unique.) But today, it turned me onto ThisIsBroken.com. Good stuff.
I've heard people shortening the name of our fair city's new favorite club to "The Rock." This will not do. It should, of course, be "The Triple." As in, "After the Triple, everyone went back to Rex's house again. That guy never sleeps." Do everything you can to make me right.
Crazy blog idea that I just made up for anyone who wants to try it: drunkallthetime.com. Only blog while drunk. I'm totally not projecting right now. Let's check the links:
MUSIC
The Darkness is going to be huge in about 2.5 seconds. Watch them here first: RAM | WMV.
I was perusing the books lying on the floor at a prominent rock critic's house tonight and chuckled at seeing Lester Bangs sitting there. Anyway, The Onion this week: History of Rock Written by the Losers. (Oh shush, my dear, you know I'm not insinuating.)
FILM
Filmmaker Mag: Sophia Coppola's Top Ten Movies. It's buried, so here they are: All That Jazz, Badlands, Darling, GoodFellas, The Heartbreak Kid, Lolita, The Piano, Rumblefish, Safe, Tootsie. And dude, you've totally gotta see this Chemical Brothers video she starred in. BTW, the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation is utterly befuddling in its beauty. (Thanks Amy's Robot.)
GreenCine announced a downloadable movies service.
Howard Rheingold on how cell phones have accelerated urban culture. (Funny how I can hear some of my friends asking "and this is a good thing?" while I read this.)
FASHION
Fashion? Yeah, I know. But at least a few of you will click when I say the words Anna Wintour interview in WSJ. (And even if it's only three of you, I'm pretty sure you're a female who will accost me at the next Candace Bushnell reading, so it's worth it.)
I'm so classy: Celebrity Tongues. I don't care what you say, I still vote for Winona.
LOCAL
Those little things that makes my city livable: Sound Unseen and Central Standard start this weekend. Unfortunately, I'm in DC this weekend.
It was a landslide. The City PagesBest New Band (aka "Picked To Click") is out. If you look down far enough, you'll see my votes here. I wrote two blurbs summarizing the scene too. Here they are:
Dancing To DJs As Mies van der Rohe
I'm not sure if this is a "DJ as furniture" syndrome, but my favorite spots to meet friends this year all had quasi-celeb DJs spinning: Wednesday night at the Imperial Room, Sunday night at Fuji-ya (half-price sushi!), Solera all week, and Kitty Cat Klub on some whack schedule. If I called these places "My Own Personal Cheers," you'd smirk like you would at trucker hats and flash mobs, but these were the post-show locales where the music community debated Riemenschneider's importance and Westerberg's quirkiness and First Ave.'s longevity and whatevva else made the music scene buzz, buzz, buzz. More of that, please, with the spicy salmon roll, double wasabi.
Triple Rock Social Club
Despite flaunting itself as an ergonomic dirty bomb -- the slanted & enchanted bar that causes pints of perfectly drinkable Summit to slip onto the unremissive pavement; the shockingly Chipotle-esque interior that makes you hunger extra guac; the always-packed, culture-clash micro-hallway between bar and club; a parking dilemma more infuriating than witnessing Block E developers slap a Hard Rock Cafe across the street from a downtown music club landmark -- Triple Rock has nonetheless been the Twin Cities glee factory of the past year. I heard the phrase "Did you see the show...?" ten-times more this year because of this off-Dinkytown venue, and that forgives any anti-Feng Shui you can throw at this music scene.
This is not the place you go to find out about Johnny Cash or John Ritter (or Leni Riefenstahl or Waren Zevon) dying. However, it is the play you go to find MP3s of Johnny Cash singing the theme to Three's Company. The stars have aligned.
I'll give you five dollars if you can tell me the origin of two words: mullet and comfort food. Both seem like they've been there forever, but I'm convinced they're both coined in the past decade.
Just one more day of this. Salam Pax has a site to promote his new book. You can download chapter one. And there's a crazy promo that looks like a bad MTV commercial.
I swear, every party I've attended over the last two weeks (which, mom I swear to you, is no more than a dozen) has seen conversations veer toward the Sophia Coppola questions. "Seen that crazy White Stripes / Kate Moss video?" "Wasn't that Times Magprofile trashy?" "Will Bill Murray be any good in her new movie?" And now she's in Time, so soon housewives in the burbs will be having the same conversations at the same types of parties. Well, minus the dancing midgets.
Will Ferrell and Chloe Sevigny to star in the next Woody Allen flick.
TV/LANGUAGE
Watching Queer Eye For the Straight Guy tonight, it occurred to me that one of these guys will eventually break out into a sitcom or a reality tv show or something. Suddenly, I began use the word "Timberlake" as a verb. "Which queer guy will be the first to Timberlake his way out of the group and into a game show host slot?" Pass it on.
Courtney Love is on Friendster. Unlike most celeb Friendster accounts, this one is very likely real. In other news, Friendster recently received a cool million in venture capital money. Investors include heavies from Yahoo, PayPal, Amazon, and Net
Sergey of Google and Rael of Google Hackswere on NPR's Science Friday. (Happy Birthday, Google.)
Amy's Robot says that DeLillo's White Noise has been made into a screenplay. I'm foaming and frothing.
FILM
Elevator Moods features short movies shot from the point of view of an elevator security camera. I am oddly enthralled.
The Pentagon is screening one of my favorite movies. It seems they have a different agenda.
This Is Not a Love Song, supposedly the first feature-length film released online, debuted (or at least tried to debut) this weekend.
MEDIA
The cover of this month's Wired is "Superproducers" (not online yet), a profile of Timbaland, The Neptunes, Dan the Automator -- in other words, those I envy. Although I enjoyed the blurbs (it was hardly and "cover story"), I've gotta ask if this isn't a bit of demographic searching on the part of Wired. I guess if they're going to move further into lifestyle/culture reporting, this is an okay place to start. Maybe.
The first linkable thing from Rolling Stone in months: Behind the Lines. Beck, Michael Stipe, Steve Malkmus, Liz Phair and others reveal the origins of famous lyrics. It's okay.
The ultimate internet ouroboros: I just saw a pop-up ad for a pop-up blocker. Lots o' links today:
LIFESTYLE
Need some perspective? The Global Rich List will tell you where your salary ranks you in the world. Even if you're making $15,000/year, you're still in the top 10 percent.
Apparently, Urban Outfitters was founded in Philly. Here's a story about the founders.
MEDIA
Not just another poor excuse to link to the Britney-Madonna kiss, check out the caption: "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution apologized Monday to readers for running a photo of the kiss on its front page the day after the awards."
There's a rumor that the MSNBC Jesse Ventura show has been completely scrapped.
PTT (Push-To-Talk) sounds like a big step conference calling, but this guy compares it to IM.
MUSIC
All Tomorrow's Parties in L.A. (curated by Matt Groening) has been rescheduled. Line-up includes some faves: Har Mar Superstar, Mission of Burma, The Shins, Danielson Famile, Elliot Smith, Cat Bower, Built to Spill.
Emmanuelle has some dish about Beck being in an upcoming movie. In other Beck news, the man-boy is going back to the studio to record with the a dream-come-true production triumvirate of the Dust Brothers, Dan the Automator, and Timbaland.
I haven't even told you about seeing my experience seeing Liz Phair perform for a few hundred Target employees last week. Some other time... but here she is answering questions submitted by fans.
The perfect site for the perfect city: MplsHappyHour.com. Includes hundreds of bar listings, divided into categories (Downtown, Uptown, Nordeast, etc.) and even subcategory (Cedar, Dinkytown, Stadium Village, etc.). It's still a work in progress, but this could the ultimate site to bring up on your web-accessible pda or cell phone when your scurrying around a neighborhood looking for cheap drinks. It will even include maps.
Trailer round-up: Human Stain (Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise) | My Life Without Me (Sarah Polley, Amanda Plummer, Deborah Harry) | Duplex (Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore) | Somethings's Gotta Give (Dianne Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Keanu Reeves).
One year ago today, I wrote about the connection between Al-Qaeda and Isaac Asimov.
MUSIC
Greil Marcus quoting (#9) Sarah Vowell on the NYC blackout: "I went for a walk in the dark last night for a little, marveling at the stars. Walked past people on a stoop blaring 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on a boombox and everyone was giddy, singing along: 'With the lights off, it's less dangerous, here we are now, entertain us.'"
LOCAL
Missy Miss Maerz talks about the night all of us screamed ateachother at the Kitty Cat Klub about Liz Phair (and, uh, just about everything else in the world, including whether Smog is morning music or evening music, the value of Robert Christgau, and, I think, whether jumping off my roof is wise). Absolutely fascinating detail you're just dying to hear: I broke my thumb that night. And I didn't even punch Chuck this time.
Dara finally reviews Solera, which in my top three right now.
New York Observer: "What I Skipped This Summer." I frequently have moments where I have to say, "Even though I will be dumber for not paying attention to this, I don't have the time to follow this cultural meme." My misses include: the O.J. Simpson trial (Kato who?), blockbuster network reality tv (Survivor), media-inflated murders (Laci Peterson), and reinvented teenyboppers (Justin and Christina). On second though, I might actually be much smarter because of this.
The Believer has launched Snarkwatch, "a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to 'critical activity'." Sounds like my nemesis. The Antic Muse riffs on it.
Of course, nothing released in the last five years, which really goes to show both what I miss about music and where I worry Magnet is headed. (See also: PopMatter's 100 Best Songs from 1977 to 2003).
The Strib has this new thing called Pick Six in which two local scenesters each pick three cool things in the local music scene. My pal Catherine was in this week's.
Jim Walsh's first column (well, first in a decade) at City Pages. It really is a quintessential "Minneapolis Music Criticism" piece -- full of personal experience and pathos. This line is supernaturally Twin Cities-ish: "I still believe in writing that talks about the conflicts and conquests of the heart." Looking forward to this one....
The Rakeon Flash Mobs. Good line: "This particular secret society was so easy to get into, though, that we're wondering now how many journalists are dying to get off the Minneapolis Mob's listserv. This was punishment enough for infiltrating the group: Our inbox was flooded with the social theories of every johnny-come-lately mobster who wanted to argue that Minneapolis is just as cool as San Francisco or New York."
Those crazies at Nerve.com are having an amateur photo contest: sexiest photo of someone reading The Wall Street Journal. I so want to enter.
It can't be a good sign that Paul Krassner's new column in the New York Press is better than Stephen King's new column in Entertainment Weekly (no link). Actually, no, that is a good sign.
I clicked on a banner ad! Something on the Wired Newsletter said "Technology Is Changing Sex" and clicking on it brough me to TechTV's Wired For Sex program page.
Fimoculous.com: a vast collection of unfair and imbalanced links.
MUSIC/VIDEO
A few weeks ago, I noted here that Matthew Barney was releasing the Cremaster Cycle on DVD. Greg Allen from Greg.org quickly dropped me a note to say that it was not the Cremaster Cycle -- is was excerpt oddities like Barney scaling the Guggenheim. I protested: "But the site says so!" Now, Greg has penned an article in the Sunday Times about Barney and the search for DVD-quality video art, which pretty much clears it up: I'll never own the Cremaster Cycle DVD.
Re: yesterday's Coldplay video link, Waxy pointed out that Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" as a better example of a time-twisting video narrative.
Perhaps our three greatest music video directors -- Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry (who directed the Cibo Matto video above) -- are interviewed. They have DVD retrospectives coming out on Palm Pictures. (Bjork is of course the connecting factor between the three.)
6 MB movie file of The Daily Show on the Al Franken vs. Fox scandal.
Long Times Magarticle on CNN's transition from Connie Chung to Paula Zahn, which oddly ends without a conclusion (kinda like that MSNBC Jesse Ventura show that still hasn't happened).
The online store for Footprints Architecture Collection appears to be working now. They were getting press in Metropolis and a couple other places a few months ago for designing shoes "inspired" by architecture. (Neat as that might sound, I get alergic reactions thinking about spending $250 on shoes.)
SF Weekly has a wonderful analysis of faux-frienster accounts on Friendster.com. In many ways, it's the oldest argument in the book about online communities, but in the age of commercialism and fixed identity, it hasn't gone noticed the last few years. (There's also a Slashdot discussion.) In addition to the issue of identity blurring, there's also this: "Real users often add fakesters to their friend lists like 'charms on a charm bracelet,' as one user put it, to show other people what type of things they're into. So if you're a lefty politico, you might befriend the fakester Noam Chomsky; if you're a hedonistic partyer, you might befriend Nitrous."
Curcuits appraises the state of Internet2 at the university level.
WORDS
I caught up on my reading about the reactionary literary group ULA this weekend. The Believer and Black Book both had profiles (neither online).
MUSIC
Remember when music video were intrepid and unique? Okay me neither, but it seems odd that Coldplay's gimmick to film the video for "The Scientist" in reverse is the best thing we have going for edginess in music video culture right now.
MINI_motion are "urban nomad" product creating be the Mini Cooper people.
LOCAL
I think I've seen the proprietor of Buy-Me-A-Beer.com around town. I'm not sure if the guy is actually getting drinks via the site (which you can buy him in three convenient ways: in person, sending money, or shipment), but if he is, I feel jipped.
Okay Stribreview of culinary Lyn-Lake. Dara's savory Azia review is also mouthwatering. (Tip: Sunday night after 9:00, Fuji Ya has half-priced sushi and drinks. And hipsters galore.)
A couple raves for Chuck's new book: Onion A.V. and Denver Post. Entertainment Weekly is also giving high praise. Chuck was in town Monday and drank me under the table. I'm still suffering.
TV
Convergence gone wrong? The NY Daily Newsslams the new Smoking Gun show on Court TV.
I've been caught saying recently that City Pages should be doing a better job of critiquing the dailies. But I'm eating my words lately, cuz there's another good metamedia article on the PiPress this week.
A long time ago, I wrote a screenplay about a guy who slowly goes mad because of the innocuous mood music he hears everywhere he goes. It was my Doestovskian fable of the industrialization of culture (hey, didn't everyone write one of those?). Title: Face The Mazak. Apparently, muzak theory, which seemed to reach its zenith in the late-80s, is coming back, according to this article about Activaire (Metropolisarticle), who does music for big-scale boutiques (Prada). Recommended reading for the "spatial music" set.
I have never, ever, ever had this much fun reading Amazon.com reviews. Henry Raddick is a must-read, if for no other reason he has discovered actual titles like Taxidermy, a Complete Manual and Handbook of Meat Product Technology and Andrew Lloyd Webber Arranged for the Harp and Plastic Surgery - Penis Enhancement Surgery and... I could go on for a while.
According to this article, Derrida and Habermas have co-written an article that is "an unmistakable endorsement of modernist Enlightenment principles." I'm a little suspicious. Here's an interview I haven't gotten to yet.
LOCAL
My pal Melissa, CP's music editor and now official "coup grrrl," lands another big fish. Getting Greil Marcus as a columnist was a whopper, and now Jim Walsh is bailing on the Pioneer Press to write a column for the alt-weekly (as he did a decade ago). You might have gotten the email he was sending around asking for Oct. 25 to be come the official Paul and Sheila Wellston World Music Day. Peter is tracking all the other movements in the Minneapolis music-media mafia.
Chuck Klosterman and I met our first year of college, and we quickly developed the most dysfunctional friendship I've ever had. At the college newspaper, he was the sports columnist and I was the music columnist. At times, I hated him more than any girlfriend I've ever had. That's saying something.
His new book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, comes out later this month. One essay, which is also printed in the September issue of Spin, uses the tempestuous summer we lived together (1992) as a set up for a larger topic.
Here are the first few paragraphs, reprinted without permission from anyone, but it's my life so sue me. I've added some "footnotes" -- commentaries over the top of his analysis of the summer of '92. Watch out, kids, it's gory:
Even before Eric Nies came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.
I wasn't doing anything of consequence that summer, but -- at least retrospectively -- nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. [Note 0.] I suppose I was going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus "geography library," which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day. [Note 1.] But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, [Note 2.] which maybe have been a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. [Note 3.] He slept during the afternoon and often subsisted on raw hot dogs. [Note 4.] I think his girlfriend probably paid the rent for both of us. [Note 5.]
Now this dude who ate the hot dogs -- he was an excellent roommate. [Note 6.] He didn't care about anything remotely practical. [Note 7.] When two people live together, there's typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship. There's always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there's always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, me and the hot-dog eater both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. [Note 8.] We would choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available. We would vomit out the windows -- and this was a basement apartment.
Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.
We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. [Note 9.] We'd argue about H. Ross Perot's chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we'd argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. [Note 10.] We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. [Note 11.] We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N' Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot-dog-gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular argument extended for all of July). [Note 12.] Mostly we argued about which of us was a better at arguing and particularly about who had won the previous argument. [Note 13.]
Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer's debut of MTV's The Real World... [Note 14.]
0.This was the summer we discovered the movie "Slacker," which I still say is the single biggest cultural event of my life. It changed everything for me to realize one could make a movie about doing nothing that is this crazy and good.
1.My job that summer was mowing lawns on campus. But I got in big trouble for flirting with the University President's teenage daughter, who was always out frolicking on the grass like a Midwest Lolita.
2.The title of my book was, believe it or not, actually much worse: "Bits of Eternity." However, I later wrote Chuck a letter from Alaska joking that I should ride "The Real World" wave and call it "Bits of Reality." (I also like to think, with gritting teeth, that it was a precursor to Reality Bites [1994].) The novel, by the way, was wretched, and it was thankfully destroyed in a fire in 1997. I would describe it as a mix between Danielle Steele and Jack Kerouac. I was reading Hermann Hesse at the time, if that's any indication.
3.I was also reading Freud at the time, but there was no Oedipus complex.
4.Either this hot dot thing is a literary device or I should be more fat. What makes it double-weird is that I'm vegetarian now.
5.Lora was kind and giving and beautiful, but not that giving. Also of note here: she lived with us. That makes three of us in a very small one-bedroom. Chuck slept on the couch and always liked listening to us doing it at night. He doesn't think I know this.
7.Very true! Sub-footnote: This will be painful to admit, but this was the summer I took to wearing a Malcolm X baseball cap. The 12-year-old neighbor kid chastised me because his mom (a psychology prof) said that Malcolm X was a racist. I almost capped that whitey.
8.It is mind-bogglingly surreal to see the boring Busch beer-drenched life you lived a decade ago retold in "Spin" magazine.
9.This is painfully true. I can remember almost every word of every fight of many of the things listed next. And I was right every damn time.
10.I was convinced there should be more Jewish NBA stars. Or any? I still believe there's a conspiracy.
11.This water one was a big deal. Water has no flavor. Period.
12.This truly was a vicious one. But my point was that he had skipped all the "philosophical" chapters. In retrospect, this is a monstrously hilarious accusation.
13.I would invite friends over to listen to us argue, and then force them to judge who the winner was. I remember our friend Lefty saying "well Rex, Chuck sometimes makes better points than you." I almost clocked him.
14.That's all just a set up to what follows: a thoughtful essay about watching "The Real World." It's a good book, go buy it.
Madonna trying to sell the Gap. Two dying brands, I say.
ART
This is a couple weeks old, but I just discovered it. Post art critic Blake Gopnik hosts a tour of "Gyroscope." Interesting because it's unique for a newspaper reporter to do video and for it's odd MTV-ish rapid editnig.... and because it's an interesting topic.
LOCAL
The Timescontinues its strange fascination with North Dakota, which has the highest proportion of people over 85 in the country. I like this graph: "These North Dakotans may be biological artifacts, the recipes for their health beyond bottling or replication by baby-boom office dwellers in big cities and suburbs. Clean air; going slow; patience; a low-cost, low-stress economy for all but active younger farmers; decades of heavy lifting outdoors; keeping an eye out for one another; long stable marriages; an absence of sharp differences in income and wealth all may contribute, people here speculate."
At the Uptown Bar, I whispered "You will need these to accessorize your mob" while shoving bubblegum into people's hands.
Despite hundreds of people congregating, Flash mobs are fairly anti-social. In some ways, they are anti-Meet-Ups -- you anonymously encounter strangers for 10 minutes and then disperse. But this event was different because the mob converged and the escelator broke. This slowed down the event, and the outcome was spontaneaous scenes of conversation with strangers.
Much less media and police attention than before. KSTP and KARE showed up after realizing WCCO scooped them last time, but I saw no one else. KSTP interviewed me, and I'm very happy they didn't air any of it because I couldn't answer their questions about the history of the mob. (I should've gone into performance art theory. That would've freaked them out.)
Actually, I think the most confused group were the people at the MCAD art gallery, which was holding an opening. I like the idea of confusing art students.
The turnout was both younger and older this time -- even more demographically diverse than Mob #1. I would estimate about 170 people.
Lately I've been thinking about the spectacle aspect of flash mobs. In an age where spectacle is owned by beer companies and shoe manufacturers, flash mobs are like anti-spectacle spectacles. The devils wearing anti-Prada.
50 Cent is starting his own fashion line. I knew the bullet hole look would come back in.
Somewhat annoying Times piece about how Williamsburg has lost its cool.
LOCAL
I didn't make it to the new club opening this weekend on Block E. I still haven't been to Cosmos either, so maybe next weekend is a Block E weekend, dreadful as that sounds.
The new flash mob is set for Wednesday. If you want an invite, email me.
Times piece on one of my favorite topics: Stadium Architecture. I didn't even know that Peter Eisenman was designing a new Arizona Cardinals stadium (Gizmodo thinks it looks like a cell phone). There's an audio slideshow too. (I have long wanted to do a multimedia piece on the history of the American sports stadium.)
TV
Roseanne Barr is returning to tv with a new reality show, The Real Roseanne Show.
MUSIC
Kinda weird Chicago Tribune piece: Indie Record Stores Surviving. Contains heavy mentions of Amoeba in San Francisco, which has been packed every time I've been there (three times in two years).
FILM
The trailer to the new Bruce Campbell movie, Bubba H-Tep, looks sufficiently funny. The new Crichton historical sci-fi, Timeline, might also be okay.
POLITICS
Crazy, Michael Huffington might run as the GOP candidate for California governer. His ex, Arianna, might run for the Democratic slot.
From MIT Labs: "The Corporate Fallout Detector reads barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a noise similar to a gieger counter of varying intensity based on the social or environmental record of the company that produces the product"
Res has a review of the Michael Yonkers album on Sub Pop.
It's always interesting to see your city portrayed by the media. The newest Word (a British music/arts mag) has a profile Grandaddy that is set here (they opened for Pete Yorn at the State a few months ago). Here's the description of our fair city:
Minneapolis is an unusual place. Downtown is a network of shops and office blocks all joined by covered walkways on the first floor of each building. People with jobs walk from office to bank to shop without ever going out onto the planet's surface; meanwhile the streets are fool of poor people, lunatics and drunks. As if in compensations, Bose speakers mounted on lamp posts pipe Motown in the cold air. Bizarrest of all, there is the status of Mary Tyler Moore, whose 1960s sitcom was set here and whose most famous image -- Moore throwing her hat into the air -- is commemorated in bronze. As drunks sway to "Dancing in the Dark," Mary's statue waves stiffly at the sky, looking like a woman with jaw cancer catching a cowpat.
I saw Candace Bushnell read last week and haven't had time to write it up how annoying she was. But I have never, ever been to an event with so many hot, young, sex-driven single women in my life. Anyway, Gawker says Bushnell now claims she coined the word "metrosexual."
Although I took pictures on the phone/pda (my excuse for their poor quality), the real excitement of Tuesday's Flash Mob was hearing not seeing.
Pre-mob, while hastily searching for a wide-brimmed hat, I was holding micro-debates with myself on the meaning of this type of activity. Historically speaking, I wanted to relate it to Situationist philosophies of performance, but it seemed to absolutely defy any kind of political reading. Then it hit me: the Mall of America -- perhaps humankind's greatest attempt to construct a politically void environment -- was the ideal setting for an event that we might call post-political. After all, the first time I was in the Mall (10+ years ago), it was the sound that I first noticed. If you stand at the top floor and listen over the railing, you'll hear this monotonous hummmmmmm... neither raising nor lowering in pitch. You eventually start to realize it's the sound of consumption, the engines of purchase power.
That sound was punctuated by the voices of confused shoppers on Tuesday. Here are some voices I overheard: "What are they doing?" "A what mob?" "Is someone famous in there?" "Why are they all watching Lord of the Rings in the Bose store?" "Are they actors?" "Are they dancers?" "Should we join them?"
So to all those people who have asked me about the "political" dimensions or the "meaning" of the event, I'll say this: I'm fairly certain there are no overtly ideological aspects to flash mobs -- they probably actually illustrate the erosion of the word "political" itself. But I do know it made a large number of people confused. Confusion is good.
Walking into Player's around 6:00 to hand out scripts, there was already a line of people looking for a wide-brimmed hat. I was proud of my hat -- heck, since I'm talking the talk, I'll be so bold as to call it "post-gangster." But MPR chose to taunt my head gear ("somewhat terry cloth-ish looking") in their piece (audio link). Unfortunately, MPR's report was probably the most clueless analysis of the event that the local press produced. They use the words "trendy" and "hip" and "cool" like they were just coming into style. Unless internet geeks, Target project managers, and lawyers are now the trend-setters (a theory which, come to think of it, isn't ridiculous -- but nonetheless not mainstream enough for an NPR affiliate to report), that's a poor reading of the crowd.
So what were the participants like? Some traits that surprised me: a lot of people in their late-'20s early-'30s, fewer drama nerds then you might expect, at least three guys in ties (two of them lawyers), and almost complete gender equality.
Although the robot scenario got most of the media attention, I think more passers-by noticed the Bose scene. But that might have been the more focused police presence.
Oh yeah, the cops. They weren't very happy with the event, but they stayed sufficiently distanced. Afterwards, they threatened legal action if -- get this! -- pictures of them showed up on the internet. The words "federal offense" were used. If anyone knows any kind of precedent for what sounds like preposterous babble, let me know.
So was it fun? I'd say yes. We were trying to guess beforehand how many people would show up. I was thinking about 100, but it was only about two-thirds of that. But any more would have been dangerous.
With Google Alert, you sign up to get a daily email of a particular search term from Google. The first time, it sends you 50 results, but every time thereafter it only sends items you haven't already seen.
On a scale of one to ten, I give today's links a 9.5. Get at it:
FILM
I heard this as a rumor first, but I guess it's really true. Tarantino's Kill Bill came into Miramax so long that they're cutting it into two movies. Double the Uma.
The L.A. Timesdisses UC Santa Barbara's film school for being contemporary.
U.S. Newsinterviews Harry Knowles. Boring. (Why do I link to articles that I call "boring"? Cuz boring is the new black!)
Kiarostami is doing theater. Sounds radical and experimental.
INTERNET
Brooke has launched the final episode to Broken Saints. Great work, man, you're a superhero.
How many people emailed you Google's relations to the WMD 404 Page this week? I'm around a dozen. I linked to it three months ago, but none of my friends apparently noticed. Anyway, The Guardian has a story about the story of the page.
I'm not sure why I bother with Slashdot threads anymore. This one about NYtimes vs. Google made me go insane. When did geeks become morons? Was it always like this? (Don't read it. Stupid is not the new black.)
The Sex Pistols want to play Baghdad. A few dozen punchlines come to mind here, but I'm resisting.
Judas Priest reuniting with Rob Halford. (On the right of that page are video links to "Breaking The Law" and "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." Rock out in your cubicle right now.)
Funny A.V. Clubinterview with Sir Mix-A-Lot. Includes crazy details, including the long-forgotten Metal Church song, the doubly-long-forgotten The Presidents Of The United States Of America song, and questions like "You were one of the first popular entertainers to talk about asses in a sexual way, whereas that happens all the time now. Do you feel validated by the current focus on asses?"
Alex Ross writes a lot about Pop Conference 2003 in The New Yorker, but I don't think he says anything. Or is that rock criticism?
I'm happy that The Washington PostprofiledPunk Planet.
Greil on Liz Phair in CP: "it's like watching Barbies fucking."
I'm not sure why I'm linking to it, but here's the entire script to A Hard Day's Night.
WORDS
If for some reason you care, Traci Lords has a book coming out. Here's an interview and a book tour.
Eggers is the Samuel Richardson of today. (Applause if that reference makes any sense to you, and a million kudos if you actually read Clarissa.) He keeps "expanding" his last novel, now with additional downloadable chapters.
All posts today have -- in one way or another -- a local angle, but that doesn't mean you foreigners will be out of place.
Covert weekend gossip item #1: BMW Films (which was masterminded by the mostly-Minneapolis-based Fallon) is considering branching the franchise into other arenas such as comic books.
Covert weekend gossip item #2: Elimidate is filming six episodes here this summer. Settings include Chino, Solera, Ground Zero...
It's a great week for authors in this city. On Tuesday, we have Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) reading and Douglas Coupland (Generation X) reading, and Friday we have Zadie Smith (White Teeth) reading and Candace Bushnell (Sex in the City) reading.
I have this new theory about the thrill of blogging: the strangest aspect is when the blog crosses over into your personal life in concrete, physical ways. Like as I was leaving Chino Latino on Thursday, I waved at Peter Scholtes hustling into the Uptown Theater with a girl on his arm. And in a blurb on his site about Winged Migration, he makes passing reference to "making out through most of the movie." And now I've connected the dots, and know something you don't -- the identity of the girl. Silly internet.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazettelooks at the Minneapolis theater scene, quoting a line that I always hear but could never verify: "More theaters per capita than anywhere outside New York."
My workplace gets mentioned in this Pioneer Press story about St. Paul Venture Capital: "Another Twin Cities firm backed by St. Paul Venture, Internet Broadcasting Systems, is flourishing. The company, now profitable, has 231 employees including 133 at its home office in Eagan."
The Blur show at First Ave last night was excellent. At first I was a little worried about Damon's, er, sobriety, but he pulled through just fine.
I sat down and read an entire issue of Radar this weekend, surprised at how much I enjoyed it -- sort of a cross between Brill's Content and Entertainment Weekly and New York Daily News. I recommend Michael Savage's homoerotic past, the "Die, Hipster, Die" tirade, and Emily Nussbaum's analysis of IM and human interaction.
It seems the "Film" category gets the most "holy shit, I didn't know that was happening" links. Like, there is a new film based on Joyce's Ulysses recently completed? Holy shit, I didn't know that was happening. There's even a trailer.
If this linkblog had a sideblog (does that make any sense? could this be a new form?), it would point to Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which is only for people interested in the theory of online communities, but is highly recommended for those people.
MUSIC
Will you hate me if I link to that "Britney not a virgin" story? Okay, good.
As always, Onion A/V breaks the mold and interviews Evan Dando. Good questions, boring answers.
LOCAL
Blogumentary has a collection of Duluth/Minneapolis links today.
I tracked down an invite to the flash mob, but now that the Strib is talking about it, who knows how this could turn out. But I also saw a discussion about it on alt.law-enforcement, which maybe puts the thrill back in it.
And somewhere in between, Mona Lisa Smile trailer, with three women who dominate about 90% of my personal fantasies: Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal (plus some chump named Julia Roberts as their teacher).
MEDIA
Even if you're not a fan, the Tour de France map/app from NYTimes/AFP is cool.
Finally, some good news. The Guardianis coming to America. Oh, and Michael Savage was fired.
WORDS
Someone asked me the other day about my favorite writers, and I stumbled through saying Ron Rosenbaum was my favorite columnist, but only when he does culture instead of politics. His latest dissects the origin of the word dude. In other linguist notes, Geoff Nunberg discusses slippery slope (audio).
MUSIC
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and others are spurning Apple's iTunes, some because it contributes to "the demise of the album format." I like how people think they can stop change.
The comments that Anil generated with his atomic elements of a blog post are really good. A lot of what's said informs my thinking about this blog, which a) has been experimenting categories and b) implicitly posits the "day" as the atomic element rather than the "post."
This story in the Times about multitaskers makes me feel all icky inside. I don't care how many studies tell me having three monitors, two phones, and one PDA is less productive -- go ahead, believe those LIES while you eat my hyperkinetic mental tread.
LOCAL
Yikes! Wired News has a story about moblogs, with this line: "In Minneapolis, a mob is planning to gather at an as-yet-undisclosed location on July 22 at 6:25 p.m., according to the group's organizer, who asked to remain anonymous." Discussion group.
On the newstand rack this weekend, I noticed that Aesthetic Apparatus (more info) has landed features in HOW and ReadyMade. Rumor is they're starting their own magazine too. Good job, fellas.
Okay Guardianarticle on picture messaging. Contains a link to Celebs At Starbucks, a photoblog outta L.A. Also: Waxy has this idea to do a community celeb-photo/mob-blog, which is fine if you like in Cali or Gawker country. But out here in fly-over territory, I can only make so many jokes about Josh Hartnett, Prince, and Garrison Keiler (now wouldn't that be a party). So I'm still pondering the local scenester site, for which I have lots of ideas but feel unable to keep it updated myself. So if you're a localite interested in the concept, drop me a note, and try to talk me into it.
Cool new girl stuff at Threadless. If I met that girl at Triple Rock...
I bought some Donald J Pliner shoes today. Did I just land on the set of Sex in the City?
TV
The Times Mag has an okay story about the rise and fall of baby names, but I point it out for this line: "Still, the effect is not as direct as it may seem. Buffy, despite a fanatic cult devotion to the vampire slayer, has not breached the Top 1,000 (although Willow has been climbing modestly since 1998)."
No time to blog today. Someone just told me the International Foosball Championships are being held at the downtown Hilton Hyatt. Must practice.
Okay, maybe just a little:
MUSIC
If you missed it, Liz Phair's Letter to the Editor to the Times in response to her getting torched is really... something. I don't think anyone has tracked back Liz's reference yet, but I think she probably Googled Meghan O'Rourke like I did and found this article in Slate. Make sense? I didn't think so.
So yeah, the new Spin.com... it looks almost bloggish, doesn't it? A calendar, comments, light graphics. It's even written in PHP. How... indie?
What rock critics have been waiting for: Christgau's Radiohead review in The Voice.
The hell? Eros is new "erotic ensemble drama" directed by three of my faves -- Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, and Michelangelo Antonioni -- starring Robert Downey Jr. Out next year, apparently.
MEDIA
MediaLife Mag picks some really bad stuff for their list of Best of the Best. We'll let you by with Marketplace just cuz no one else would think of it, but c'mon, fucking Blender?
FoxNews tried to shut down AgitProperties.com for their "Faux News" merchandise. I wonder if my Faux News t-shirt (ordered through Disinfo.com) is a collectors item?
"I used to hate the Internet. I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."
I just had that unnerving six-degrees moment on Friendster where you realize that a bunch of people you know actually know each other. But absolutely shouldn't. This is all wrong. I blame it all on Har-Mar, who has listed 123 friends. Freak.
Gibson writes about Orwell on his 100th birthday in a Times op-ed piece. A quote: "Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."
I don't get many gifts through this site, so I like to give shout-outs when it happens. When Patricia noticed that I wanted a subscription to Brutus, she said she'd try to send me some from Japan. Today I got a wonderful stack of Japanese magz including Mono, Studio Voice, and a bunch o' Brutus. I'm the happiest white boy in the midwest right now.
ARCHITECTURE
Times article on the new Prada Tokyo, designed by Herzog + Meuron, the same dudes doing the new Walker going up in my neighborhood. (Sidenote: I love how architects use the + sign instead of the & sign. I am going to co-opt this as often as possible.)
MUSIC
Disinfo writes a bit about the Radiohead/1984 connections. In other news, Terry Eagleton has a George Orwell profile in LRB. (Sidenote: Eagleton must be releasing a book of intellectual profiles soon, right?)
Pic of Liz Phair doing her Britney pose, with hilarious caption. (Sidenote: it's interesting how most critics slammed the new Liz Phair album except Entertainment Weekly and Chuck in Spin. I almost think there could be a re-reading of the album as nouveau-pastiche irony by the end of the year. Or not.)
File under beyond post-modern: Two Japanese girls covering t.A.T.u. songs.
I saw an early-draft screening of Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary on Sunday. I was a little disapointed that more locals didn't show up at the screening, but I also think he's got a cult success waiting to happen.
INTERNET
Wired News runs an interview with the guy behind HomestarRunner. Entertainment Weekly also just came out with their IT-List issue (subscription link), and he was named IT Web Cartoonist.
The Ethicist (yes, that guy from the Times Mag) was on All Things Considered talking about the ethics of stumbling across a friend's "private" blog. I wish ethics was always this no-brainer.
I'm feelin' categorical, so I'm sticking with the link categories for a while. Shakin up the faculties. Down with Kant, ya dig.
INTERNET/POLITICS
There goes the neighborhood. Ann Coulter: blogger. CoulterGeist, indeed.
Back-to-back stories about Orin Hatch's website that have nothing to do with each other. Wired News (who else?) calls him a software pirate, and Salon.com (who else?) calls him a pornographer. I guess someone should fry his PC.
WORDS
WhichBooks.net provides a unique way to choose a book. Play with the little sliders on the left.
ARCHITECTURE
Photo essay by Hugh Pearman on Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
Slate.com has a risqué slideshow documenting how the lap-dance ruined the strip-tease, based upon the book Lapdancer. (I hope Slate isn't becoming Salon.)
Amusing: a collection of MP3s of every song ever played on The Gilmore Girls. Actually, not a bad set.
Both Terry Gross and The Onion A.V. Club have interviewed Colin Quinn this week for his new show, Tough Crowd on Comedy Central. He's good; too bad the show sucks. Get some decent guests, Colin.
FILM:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxybeing made into a movie.
Trailer to yet another edgy, punky English Australian film: Garage Days.
This week, Dara approaches local cuisine from the angle of the businessman versus the chef. If I'm not mistaken, it's a small meta-critique to the Strib recently focussing on the culinary big picture (I'm thinking of that "two-star city" criticism from a few weeks ago).
Except for two 4-hour Buffy-watching intermissions on the couch, I have been sleeping for the last 48 hours. I'm still a little woozy after Friday's party. Chuck was wise enough to snap some photos -- six pics in the middle of this page. Yeah, that's me, and I only vaguely remember that part of the evening. Thanks to everyone who came, especially that chick from San Francisco. Sorry the booze ran out before sunrise.
Wired was the comeback kid last year, scoring a number of good issues when it seemed like it was a magazine carcass. Newer issues are slipping a bit, with such things as The Wired 40, from the newest issue. Meanwhile, if you're wondering "hey, what current magazine will everyone look back on nostalgically?", the answer is Res. The new issue is excellent. (See also: Chicago Tribune's crappy list of the 50 Best Magazines. Neither Wired nor Res are even listed, Metropolis comes in at #45; Spin is listed under "Mags gone bad"; and just to prove their twisted middlebrow snobbiness, FHM made the list but not Maxim.)
The Timespans Hillary's book. Also, The New York Observerasked novelists to critique the book.
Oh wow. The story about the 28-year-old Japanese woman wandering around Fargo supposedly looking for the money from Fargo (the movie) never really spread outside of the upper-Midwest. But now London's Guardian picked it up and made a big deal about it. The author was even going to make a movie about her.
NY Timespiece on MusicMavericks.org, produced by MPR. Also, Katherine Lanpher interviewed (audio) a Village Voice critic about the show on MPR's Midmorning today.
Local restaurant advertising controversy hits the daily. "Happy Hour: Cheaper Than A Bangkok Brothel."
I've been doing a lot of thinking about Apple iTunes killing album-oriented music. But BBC News has a story with leaked statistics that show half of the songs sold on iTunes are full albums. So maybe not.
Onion A.V. Clubinterviews Steve Malkmus. He's a little more culturally introspective than usual; he hints that he might be heading downhill musically and even even suggests that you could attribute Pavement's success to good press connections at Matador.
The Webby Awards were announced this weekend. The world yawned.
Did you miss the t.A.T.u. performance on MTV last week? If so, go see it on MTV.com.
I've been lightly thinking about creating a Gawker for the Twin Cities (see rant below). But I don't think I could maintain it solo. Anyway, Gaper's Block is a new Gawker-ish blog for Chicago.
The Voice has a story about Friendster.com. (Scanning this week's issue, it occurs to me that The Voice should really buy Gawker.com. I don't know if Nick is selling, and it might be difficult for Gawker to keep its "integrity" [an odd word for what is essentially a gossip blog, but still somehow apropos] with a merger. But The Voice needs something to make it feel more... now. I don't even live in NYC, but my favorite part about Gawker is the daily round-up of local events. It feels so much more fresh than that weekly calendar stuffed in the middle of alt-weeklies and the first 20 "Goings On" pages of the cool-clueless New Yorker. Here in Minneapolis, Babelogue [a collection of writers/editors from the Voice-owned alt-weekly, City Pages] is trying to figure this out. It is a good -- sometimes great -- resource for the community, but it occasionally feels like, well, a cabal of alt-weekly writers [I say that as a former one]. Babelogue excels when it feels like a cross-sectional representation of the city in which I live; it's less than great when it feels like a strip mall of blogs [à la Salon]. It's an experiment of local voices that might just be the key to this global-local puzzle some of the most creative internet minds still haven't figured out yet. Or maybe Anil had an answer, and now we'll never know.) Whew, that was a long parenthetical. Bad Rex, no links today.
Weird, crazy small world. So Peter Maas goes to Iraq to cover the war for the NY Times Mag. While there, he hears about this Salam Pax guy. When he gets back, he realizes Salam Pax was his interpreter. Crazy. (Nick Denton adds more tidbits.)
Also in Slate, this week Sasha Frere-Jones and Gerald Marzorati are going head to head. They start off talking about Radiohead.
I asked Melissa one of my better music questions a few days ago: What song would you want played at your funeral? (My answer: "Sweet and Tender Hooligan," The Smiths.) Here's her death-defying indie rock response.
Not many people know this (not that I hide it), but in a previous life I was an editor at FATE magazine. I was reminded of this totally surreal period of my life while reading a column from a former editor of Buffy magazine.
I thought for sure it was a joke, but it's a true: Avril Lavigne's Song To Be Made Into Movie. Can you imagine being the guy who has to "translate" that three minutes of bilge into a 90-minute movie?
Spin magazine always puts up a smattering of its print content a month late. Right now, for instance, there's the 20 Sleaziest Rock Moments piece, which doesn't even give you #1. It instead says "For Spin's top sleazy moment, pick up a copy of the June issue, on newsstands now." Now, that's sleazy. (And not to mention a lie -- the issue is already off the newsstands.)
And to extend the magazine bashing.... Entertainment Weekly's cover story this week was the top 50 Cult Movies Of All Time. Good idea, questionable outcome:
How ironic -- nah, fuck it, how depressing -- is it for UPN to follow up the girl-power finale of Buffy with the premier of America's Next Top Model? Two steps forward, one step back.
I'm as tired of the Times links as you are, but there have been so many good tech and arts stories lately -- Jayson Blair be damned (that Observer link might be his first interview post-controversy). Here's a Times story on Wikis which isn't by any means enlightening but is a good overview.
Today is the day the world ends. If you don't know what that means, you don't deserve to read 10 Questions For Joss Whedon. (Of course Whedonesque has a billion more links if you're not feelin' glum.)
This week I'm trading in the Nokia 9290 (which never caught on like it should have) for a new Samsung I-700 (which has everything I want in a pda-phone except WiFi). It's no Matrix Phone, but this boy needs a new toy.
I won't give you all my opinions about the recent FCC proposals (god knows you don't come here to hear that), but I'll say this: I disagree with the pundits; I doubt you'll see that many big merger deals in the next few years. The reason: local TV stations are already owned by big companies. And trust me, you're gonna pay a pretty penny to pry one away. Check back in three years and see if I'm right.
No one noticed the new glasses when I wore them to work. No one even mentioned the new haircut. No one apparently liked the new pants. But that new t-shirt drew gobs of attention today.
I'm home! How was it, you ask? Mostly good. San Diego is a beautiful city I didn't expect to like. I also had lunch with the new president of TiVo which was really weird. I'm still fast-forwarding.
I saw The Shape of Things last night. I was bored through the first half, but it picks up in the end with an surprising conclusion. Here are Ebert's review and Slate.com's review. I'm pretty sure I hated it, but I'd actually recommend it as a date movie because there's a lot to talk about.
In the middle of an average Times story surveying Ashleigh Banfield's career is this sentence about her days at the Dallas Fox affiliate: "She was also known in the city's gossip pages for singing in a rock band and for holding late-night parties at her loft apartment." Whah-what!? Rock band? I would pay top-dollar for those MP3s. One of our editors in Dallas (Bill, who is also the proprietor of WXnation.com) hunted down the band name: Tommy Hyatt and the Haywires. But no MP3s. I'm paying $10 to anyone who can find me an MP3.
This William Bennett news truly is a self-righteous morsel to relish. Michael Kinsley wants to give to give the investigators a Pulitzer Prize for Schadenfreude.
I was on the road this weekend, driving north toward the Iron Range of Minnesota, when I decided to call my friend Peter on the cell. The phone started angrily beeping at me, and I quickly hung up. Tried again. More maniacal beeping. On the third try, I realized the nature of the beeping: it was a busy signal. A fucking busy signal? Such things still exist? When was the last time I heard one of those? A decade? Naw, couldn't be that long ago, but it sounded as antiquated as "Pac-Man Fever." But this brings up an important question: Should there be a museum for non-music sounds -- the beeps and blurps of post-industriality?
During the long drive, I read the New Yorker's Slavoj Zizek profile, but now I see they didn't put it online. So I guess I have to tell you to go to the newsstands and read it. Driving 90 mph and reading the profile at the same time made me say this sentence to myself: Camille Paglia is the Slavoj Zizek that America doesn't have the balls to produce. Ouch, bad me.
Still on the road, Zizek expunged, I picked up the Sunday edition of the Star Tribune, which had a huge full-page advert for the Star Tribune Electronic Edition. The Star Tribune was a pioneer in the online news world, but I'm a little suspicious of this endeavor. And I quote: "The eEdition of the Star Tribune has the exact same stories, headlines, and advertising as the Metro Edition of the Star Tribune, in the same familiar format that you are used to." You have to pay a bunch of money and download a huge application called the NewsStand Reader to get it. See ya.
Third William Gibson post in as many days. He talks to The Guardian about blogging (a sidebar from this profile).
I like the idea of Friendster.com, but I didn't become addicted like some people. It has become so popular that I could probably auction my sub-5000 user-id number. Okay, maybe not.
I am also one of those people who thinks the keyboard reached its apotheosis in around 1990 with the IBM 101-key keyboard. All it needs is a color remake (gosh, beige was futuristic at one time), and I'd buy one instantly.
Pynchon writes (!) a piece on Orwell (!) for The Guardian (!).
Josh Whedon picks his own Top 10 Buffy episodes, which is a little predictable but still wonderful. (The conclusion to last week's episode was a little forced, but there are only three left, so I guess that's what happens.)
I don't go to Metafilter much anymore, but today they pointed at this cool archive video from a 1967 CBC piece on a hippy enclave in Canada. So? Well, the main character is a 19-year-old William Gibson. Yes, that William Gibson.
Howard Kurtz wonders if blogs might just determine the next president.
Big news in sorta-local-but-really-national magazine publishing: Utnerevamps (in which Cursor.org's Mike Tronnes is quoted). Big news in sorta-local-but-really-national indie rock: Low's Zak Sally has left the band (natch, because the story is broken by a journalist-blogger writing for his employer's weblog community).
Blockbuster is going head-to-head with Netflix in the online rental game. And if you've been under a rock for the last 24 hours, Apple launched iTunes. (But check out the new ads -- everyone knew this guy and this girl in college.)
Is this new? The new Blur album isn't out until May 6, but if you pre-order it on Amazon.com you get a free audio stream of the album right away. Here are more albums with audio stream access if you buy first. This is seemingly a good idea since it convinced me to order the album that I probably wouldn't have purchased online. (BTW, new cool live Blur video here.)
After William Gibson gave a local reading a couple months ago, I told you he would eventually stop updating his blog. This off-hand comment is now a Wired story months later.
New Ann Coulter book coming out June 24: Treason. Boy oh boy, I can't wait.
Punk Planet continues to push the topical boundries with a literary issue (available online for purchase only). In other lit news, a new David Foster Wallace profile in the L.A. Times.
Gosh, this one's tough. A free subscription to Maxim. Maybe if I had it delivered to a secret P.O. box.
Gobs of new movie trailers: The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute's latest with Gretchen Mol and Rachel Weisz | People I Know, with Al Pacino, Kim Basinger and Tea Leoni | Spellbound, the documentary about the spelling bee | Till Human Voices Wake Us, a thriller with Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter | Owning Mahowny, a goofy crime thriller with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Minnie Driver.
Bush is a fan of the Iraqi Information Minister too.
Dan Savage writes an op-ed piece in the Times about Rick Santorum.
I somehow missed all those White Stripes shows on Conan last week. They were the topic of conversation at every cocktail party this weekend. I'm glad that Chuck Olsen posted one.
More juicy info on those CNN.com obits. The funny thing is that the experimental site Lab404.com can claim indirect credit for the leaks. Semi-related: "classic" digital art on display in NYC.
The Postclaims Pabst Blue Ribbon has staged a comeback "led by colleagues such as snowboarders and indie filmmakers." Whatevva.
I haven't talked about Chuck for a while. Because he refuses to get a blog, I'm licensed to say whatever I want about him. If you're new around here, Chuck is a college friend, now at Spin, who recorded his college and high school memories in this book, which I hated the first time I read, probably because he doesn't talk about me enough. He recently interviewed Radiohead in England, and had this to say about Thom Yorke: "He is very unshaven and does not appear to comb his hair; he was very nice, though, and quite interesting (not difficult at all)." You can read the rest in Spin next month. And Chuck's new book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (available for pre-order), is out in August. Over Christmas, while drunk, he said there's an essay in there about the summer we lived on University Avenue and discovered Slacker, which, well, changed everything for me. And, oh yeah, he's on my Amazon list of people who have punched me.
I was really gonna redesign this dumb blog this weekend. It needs a makeover so bad. But then I got drunk at the post-Fisherspooner party, stumbled home at 4 a.m., and watched DVDs on the red couch the rest of the weekend. Blame decadence.
The DVD for Disinformation, the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries that includes interviews with weirdos like Grant Morrison, Howard Bloom, Genesis P-Orridge, and Douglas Rushkoff, is now available.
Is it true? Grand Theft Auto, multiplayer. From the site: "When Grand Theft Auto 3 was in development it's makers wanted to have a multiplayer function included in the game. Sadly and due to unknown reasons the multiplayer function was not implemented in the retail version of Grand Theft Auto 3. Although the feature was not in the product, the lines of code for the multiplayer were not removed. This opened possibilities for us to enable a multiplayer feature."
If you worked at Google, your chef would be the former chef for the Grateful Dead, Charlie Ayers. And here's what your lunch and dinner menus would look like. Gluttons.
CIA psyops created a version of Coolio's "Gangster's Paradise" with a "satirical" rap about Saddam over the top. Those funny psyops! Radio Tikrit has been playing it, and now you can hear it. This... this... this is freedom.
Is it interesting that the media has chosen to not talk about The Onion during the war? After 9/11, there was a slew of pro-Onion media analysis, but there hasn't been a single Onion story during the war. Instead, The Daily Show seems to be getting the attention.
I wonder if Saddam used to subscribe to Dragon magazine? I think so. Maybe in between gigs as a gay porn star. Guys with mustaches get no respect.
Has anyone else noticed that A&L Daily is really dull since The Chronicle took over? Just saying.
My own personal Minnesota celeb siting: Josh Hartnett drinks coffee at the same Starbucks I do. Straight, black coffee and an OJ to go. Drives an Audi. I used to see him around town a lot in his medium-famous days, but it's been a while. Looks like he was back in town for this.
Decks of those Iraqi playing cards are actually pretty cheap on eBay. The mousepad is nice too. And the poster -- wow, this war has simply been one fun game, hasn't it?
Brooke has launched the second-to-last episode (#23) of Broken Saints. He says #24 is out in June.
City Pages has launched Babelogue, which I'll hereby declare the first alt-press blogging community. I like it, but some things confuse me: Is the front page a collection of posts or a blog itself? What kind of relationship does CP have to those "Freelance Webloggers"? Why doesn't Melissa Maerz post more? Since they've surprisingly landed Greil Marcus as a writer again, can they get him to do a blog?
The Times thinks Six Feet Under has jumped the shark. I've only see the first season (on DVD), and I'll say the show is both very brilliant and pompously irritating -- just like American Beauty. The most telling moment was the last episode, where one character has the gall to ask "Why do people have to die?" And, get this -- there's an answer. A serious answer, not a joke answer. When Nate replies "To make life more important," that's when this show jumped the shark.
Did you see the story today about the Department of Defense making a deck of playing cards of "Wanted Iraqi Leaders" which are being distributed around Iraq? I made a slideshow of all 55 cards for work. The Eight of Spades will, of course, be the collector item du jour, but I suspect the Five of Hearts will be the gem for the "true fan" of despotism.
Despite (or because of) how much damn media I've been forced to consume in the past month, I have become a late-comer fan of The Daily Show. Salon's Laura Miller has a new piece on Jon Stewart.
I haven't heard this kind of crazy talk since AOL-TimeWarner. Apple might buy Universal Music, the biggest record label in the world. Ya know, I always knew that Apple wanted to be like Sony.
Two completely random predictions: 1) SNL this weekend has a bit on Saddam and Osama hanging out at a frat on the University of Wisconsin campus and 2) The U.S. invades Iran within three years. (We have troops on their west border and east border -- Iraq and Afghanistan. It's only a matter of time. I say this as someone who didn't think that Bush would be stupid enough to invade Iraq.)
Gaytona.com, for gay NASCAR fans. (By the way, Google has zero matches for the phrase "Vegan Republican". This seems somehow relevant.)
I saw Kiaromstami's Ten last night. Amazing. In many ways, the female inverse of his Cannes-winng film, Taste of Cherry. Already the best film of the year.
In Minot (yes, North Dakota), Clear Channel owns all six commercial radio stations. "Among the six stations, Clear Channel now has only one full-time news employee, who is often heard reading statewide and national wire service dispatches," reports the New York Times in this story.
Questions for Iraqi pop star Ismail Hussain. Includes great detail about Uday Hussein's debauchery. In other news, Osama bin Laden's niece, Waffa, is having a difficult time kick-starting her pop music career.
Suzanne Vega is hosting "American Mavericks," a 13-part MPR series that "features the iconoclastic, tradition-breaking composers who shaped the development of American music-from Charles Ives, Henry Brant, Harry Partch, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and more." Episode 1, which which sets up the definition for "music maverick," includes music by John Cage, Charles Ives, and Steve Reich. The website includes a huge listening room, a huge collection of Harry Partch's instruments, an interactive Rhythmicon, and a Charles Ives blender. Good stuff so far.
This is scary as hell. The army is adapting retail video games as military action simulators. "Some military trainers worry that the more the games seem like war, the more war may start to seem like a game." Ender's Game is even quoted as an influence.
Lucian James looks at the Billboard Top 20 every week and breaks down the brand shout-outs in each song on American Brandstand.
Have fun: CreateBands.com. I think this is how Creed came about.
Sorta odd for the NY Times Mag is this long cover piece on the Donald Judd / Andy Warhol / Sol Le Witt / Bruce Nauman generation of artists. Includes an audio slideshow.
While searching Google News a few day ago, I started wondering when someone would start asking the question "what constitutes a news website?" in this age of DIY online news-making. I know, for instance, that Slashdot is spidered, but I don't think many other blogs are. (Quick search: Drudge ain't; neither is Romenesko; nope, not Metafilter.) Then today, I see this item in Poynter's E-mail Tidbits, which says the blog Infoshop News is in a tussle with Google because they want to be included in Google News' search results. My guess is that in the long run Google will use their acquisition of Blogger to draw a line in the sand between "blog search" and "news search." (In other words, in addition to those familiar tabs for "Web," "Images," "Groups," "Directory," and "News," you'll see one for "Blogs.") Of course, this line will be increasingly hard to decipher in the coming years, but it might accidently force an answer to "blogging as news" debates by declaring them separate but equal. We'll see.
I'm not sure quite how this fits in, but Columbia Journalism Reviewinterviewing Jon Stewart (from a couple months ago) also seems somehow relevant.
Okay, weird. Not only does the National Cattlemen's Beef Association have the disgustingly pink website Cool-2B-Real.com that tries to ensare kids into a pro-meat lifestyle, there's also Pork4Kids.com from the National Pork Board. What's next, Vegan8Spam.com from Hormel?
Dan Gillmour says that SMS caused the news about SARS to spread so fast. NPR instead points to online message boards. Meanwhile, try to figure out this CDC graphic on how SARS spread.
Word on the street is that the Radiohead album you've been downloading was actually planted by the record label, and the "official" album has only been given to a few journalists. Also, the label is flooding file-sharing apps with noise. UPDATE: Radiohead says the tracks were stolen, and doesn't blame the kids.
There seems to be a flood of Minnesota news in the blogosphere today. Kuro5hin is talking about Owatonna's Somali Dilemma. Wired News has a story on a Minnesota kid who's making and selling a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox. And from a New Republic review of a new Kruschev bio: When Hubert Humphrey was dispatched to Moscow to divine the Soviet leader's intentions--good luck!--Khrushchev inquired about the senator's hometown and, hearing the answer, approached a wall-sized map, circled Minneapolis, and said he would spare that city when the rockets started flying.
New Macromedia product: Central. It isn't offically out for a couple months, but it looks like it will be a desktop application development platform using Flash. That sounds cool, but the emphasis on the "occasionally-connected user" makes me wonder what I'll be able to develop on it.
Lenny Kravitz does his anti-war song. With Iraqi pop star Kadim Al Sahir
New York Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. Includes easy ones like Carson Daly, Martha Stewart, Naomi Campbell, and Ann Coulter and lesser-thought-of's like Jonathan Franzen, Jeff Koons, Tina Brown, and John Negroponte.
It didn't occur to me right away, but I think I've been blogging for work lately. I'm occupying most of my day with keeping this Military Action Map and this Baghdad Map updated. I gather information from wire reports and present it in blurb style in reverse-chronological order -- how bloggy.
Wow, everyone is talking about Where Is Raed? lately. Paul Boutin even sends out the sysadmin brigade on him. Dudes, I talked to him three months ago; he's legit.
I didn't buy the Sony V-1 like I said I would. I got the Toshiba M10 instead. I was in a hurry to get a Centrino, and it was the only one available in town. C|Net gave it a good review in their Centrino roundup though. I also thought about the Tablet PC (good PC Mag roundup) but decided it wasn't practical for my needs.
I have recently discovered a micro-personality in the blogosphere. There is a certain type of person out there who blanches upon seeing web pages with white text on black backgrounds. I don't know exactly why they feel this way (I call it dogma, but most of these people are atheists too, so maybe not). Here is the typology of this person: 1) very perceptive, 2) spends a lot of time on the internet, but 3) doesn't actually make anything on the internet (they have no immediate idea what it means to have an "onclick action in an onload event," but they'll guess right on the meaning 90 percent of the time). They're also people that really enjoy saying how much they don't like white text on a dark background. It just so happens that I'm the kind of person who enjoys challenging these types of people, by citing studies that say it's actually easier to read white on black on most monitors. So bring it on, you white-on-black haters! (This "debate" sounds so 1997 that it makes me want to puke purple webpages.)
Here's a weird observation for you: I have watched and read more news in the past three days than I've read in years. However, I've never felt less informed because there has been zero time to read a single weblog.
So far, the Dune miniseries is alright. But maybe the mammoth online campaign got to me. A few times it reminded my of the defunct Firefly. Then it hit me: how great would it have been if Josh Whedon directed it? Bigger than the David Lynch movie coup, I'd say.
Good Salon.com story on just how crazy Kim Jong-Il is. In 1978, he kidnapped his favorite South Korean director and his movie-star wife to do a Godzilla knockoff.
Sorry to have been away so long (and to have turned this into a dark place that quotes Belle And Sebastian -- Jack Black would knife me if he knew). No, I wasn't at SXSW with all the other miscreants, but here are the web award winners if you somehow missed them. And, oh yeah, those Puma ads were fake. Blame bloggers!
Saw a screener of Phone Booth last night. Structural movies like this can never be great, and can very easily be wretched, so it succeeds in being mediocre.
I need a new laptop, and I'll probably buy a new Sony Z1 (with Centrino, Wifi, six-hour battery, and DVD), unless you talk me out of it.
Howard Stern is suing ABC because he thinks they stole his realty tv idea, "Are You Hot?" Uh-huh, you don't find brilliant ideas like that growing on trees. No word yet from the boys at HotOrNot.com.
If you've actually never seen a Mathew Barney movie, there's now a Cremaster website with trailers; here's one that gives a good sense of scope. If you live in NYC, you can see the entire cycle at at Film Forum next month. (It just occurred to me that he should work with Fisherspooner. But why bother collaborating when you live with Bjork?)
I have been telling Peter for the past month that I think the metaphor of "the desktop" for personal computing should die. Then he sends me this article saying that others out there also think the metaphor is "outdated." My seemingly original thought is already obsolete.
Article about Netflix Queue obsession: You Are What You Queue. I just got a membership a week ago, and my queue is already at 28 films and growing. The queue truly is brilliant -- a more manifest version of the Amazon Wishlist. My only recommendation to Netflix would be to add more editorial voice. The lame pages for '70s Cinema and Indie's Greatest Hits are dry and static. Which brings up another idea to steal from Amazon -- user-created lists.
Did you miss an episode of The Young and the Restless? For two bucks, you can download it from SoapCity.com, a new site from Sony that offers this service for a couple soap operas. I suspect this business will actually take off.
10 Ways in which Buffy has toyed with TV conventions.
Hey, Steve Malkmus has a new album out next month. The new issue of Spin gave it an "A" rating. Also the new Radiohead album is scheduled for June 10 release.
I kept hearing a promo on CNN (or maybe MSNBC) tonight about an upcoming interview with the then-teenage girl that Roman Polanski had sex with a million years ago. Here she is coming out. She even has an editorial in the L.A. Times.
Everyone's asking why Google bought Blogger, but this is the best answer so far: we dunno.
Times piece on the convergence of Matrix the game and Matrix the movie.
I'm going on tour. I'll be visiting the Bay area next month (for this conference) and San Diego in May (for this conference). Let me know if you live in Cali and want to buy me a beer...
At the William Gibson reading tonight, someone in the crowd asked about his blog. He said he would probably continue updating it for the near-term, but when it comes time to write a new novel again, he'll have to give it up. Not because of the work, but because it's a different "ecology" (his word). He said the blog ecology -- with its easily-pleased masses -- would hinder the hellish process of writing a novel. I think there's something to this differntiation of faculties (my word). Anyway, if you're reading Pattern Recognition, you'll want to check out this attempt to annotate the book.
The Slate 60 is out. It's a collection of the 60 biggest charitable contributions in 2002. Some possible surprises: David Geffen, #4; Ted Turner, #12; Steven Spielberg, #51.
I just knew Gizmodo would come through for me. Yesterday, I said I wanted a Pocket PC with wireless and a cell phone, and today they have an answer. But where's my pony? Seriously, Gizmodo, you should do a help column ("Dear Gizzy") for things like this. Or maybe just open-source it into a community question-and-answer discussion room, like answers.google.com but more cozy. Question: "Can someone explain multi-region DVD players to me?" Answer: "Sure!"
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who care about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and those who care about the new Cat Power album. (I just made that up. Can you tell?) Luckily for you, I'm pleasing both contingents. 2003 SI Swimsuit Issue came out today. SALTYT has the scoop, with pics of the cover model pre-boobjob. And the new Cat Power just came out too. It's being streamed here.
Between war protests and Google-Blogger, there's not much to talk about. But the kids at Moveable Type got a fax machine!
The 10th issue of McSweeney's is out, and this is offically the last time I'll link to a Dave Eggers article (Guardian).
Everyone in the neighborhood is talking about the new exhibit at The Walker: Translocations. If I were in L.A., we'd be talking about the new Bill Viola exhibit at the Getty.
Gadget call. It sounds so simple, but it doesn't exist: a handheld PC with both a phone and wi-fi. That's what I want. That's it. (Bonus points: color screen, flash player, 2+ mega-pixel camera, AIM, a good browser and email client). Does such a thing exist? HP, Handspring, Sony, Nokia: now's your chance to get my money. Gizmodo, I expect you to tell me when I can get it.
The blog nation's version of breaking news: Google has purchased Blogger. Buzzmachine and Anil and BoingBoing have opinions. Running conjecture on Mefi. In other news AudBlog allows you to update your blog via phone.
The new Wired (print) magazine showed up in the mail today. The cover is "Speed Freaks," and it looks like it went to print before they could stop this deck from appearing on the cover: "SURVIVING NASA'S INSANE 7G EXPERIMENT." Ha-ha, old media.
From the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints: HotSaints.com. Amen.
If you ask me what my favorite movie is, you're likely to hear a different answer every time, but the Criterion Contempt DVD that I watched this weekend puts Godard back in the front. Brigitte Bardot, please come back and save the world.
Clear Channel Concerts plans to record concerts and sell them on CD to you as you walk out of the arena. Any chance Clear Channel surfs ShouldExist?
You deserve $20. Fill out this music settlement form if you purched a CD from 1995 to 2000. Defendants, who are distributing $67,375,000 because they "conspired to illegally raise the prices of prerecorded music products by implementing minimum advertised price policies," include Capitol, Virgin, Warner Bros, Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, Universal, Bertelsmann, Sony, Tower Records, Musicland and BMG.
Guardian Quiz: Model, Writer, Whatever. "Which supermodel wrote a novel about a supermodel?"
I knew the day would come when some newspaper exec would compare ad size holes in newspapers to the online world. (They're very disproportionate, if you think about it.) I just didn't think NYTimes.com would be the first.
Fascinating story on how Carson Daly's voice is cut up and put into a database of sound which is then recomposed into a radio program ("Carson Daly Most Requested") that is broadcast to 140 radio stations -- 11 of them as a "local" program.
Conservative rag National Reviewtears into Derrida, the film and the man. "He is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States."
Only locals will get this one, but I have to post it anyway: Boycott Chino Latino Online Petition. People are still apparently angry about the "Happy Hour: Cheaper than a Bangkok Brothel" billboards around town.
Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect at Macromedia) joins Jeremy Allaire (Chief Technology Officer) with his own blog.
BigChampagne.com measures what music people are downloading on the internet.
Real.com used to just produce a crappy piece of streaming video software (and, don't worry, they still do that), but they're also now taking a shot at producing their own content. The Next, directed by Kevin Kerslake (who did a few Sonic Youth and Nirvana vids), is a music show webcast every two weeks. Blackalicious is currently available, with upcoming shows from Beth Orton and Peter Yorn.
Sundance Online Film Festival winners announced. Brooke wrote to say that Broken Saints won yet another award. Brooke, I'm counting the hours till I can buy the DVD at Best Buy. Just don't get high on smack and shoot yourself when it happens, 'kay?
Finally, Res has put up the Spike Jonze videography player. (I forgot how good that Dinosaur Jr. song is, but, christ, Velocity Girl certainly don't get better with age, do they?)
A trailer to a new documentary starring the woman who was Hitler's secretary right up until the final days: Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary. After years of silence, she tells all.
Dang, the new Strokes album is already done? LastPlaneToJakarta.com somehow got ahold of it. Me? Jealous?
I'm utterly shocked that I didn't make CJR's Ten Young Editors To Watch list. (Not that I'm really an editor any more.)
According to The Observer, the new lit wonder to watch is James Frey.
Someone at the office today came around with Buffy Season Four on DVD. Those who know their shit know there's no such thing yet. Not in America, anyway. But, yes, you can get it in England. He even bought an all-region DVD player just to play it. I've been out-geeked.
Have fun, kids: The Fake CNN.com News Generator. (Update: looks like it got removed after a few journalists fell for a fake Olsen Twins story today.)
Stuck in a snowy traffic jam yesterday, I was thinking "What ever happened to LiquidAudio?" Perhaps this shows too much about what rattles around in my consciousness, but, yes, I really was wondering what happened to dot-com music company which has been inconsequential since the mid-90s. Oddly enough, I get home and see the Times reporting that Wal-Mart (!?) has bought some of Liquid Audio. Unbelievable.
The first words out of Nick Nolte's mouth in the trailer to the new Neil Jordan movie, The Good Thief, are "I've hit rock bottom. I have to change my ways." Coincidence?
Maxim is in trouble for depicting Gandhi getting the shit kicked out of him in a cartoon.
Interesting interview with Amazon's eDocs Director, Curtis Kopf, who off-handedly predicts that Amazon.com might one day sell subscriptions to websites or email newsletters.
Garry Kasparov played his first public game against a computer in close to six years, and I didn't see any press about it. Chessbase.com has the play-by-play of him pummelling Deep Junior.
Raise your eyebrows fellow file-sharing music fans: Echo.com.
Thank god, I don't have to scrounge around in Usenet postings to figure out how to copy a DVD with my PC. DVD X Copy allows you to copy DVDs, which, I think, is a first for a software product.
On a random day here last year, you could find me saying "The Onion proper gets all the poppy press and gloppy glee, but from a pop-culture criticism point of view, The A.V. Club might honestly be the best alt-culture publication out there." The Rake is the first I've seen to also take notice.
Richard Linklater (Slacker and Dazed and Confused) has a new short film, Live From Shiva's Dancefloor, which debuted at Sundance. In it, Timothy Levitch (famous from The Cruise, the best essay on NYC since Delirious New York) says the WTC site should be turned into a park full of free-roaming bison.
Michael Kelly gets un-radical. "The left in America has for a long time now resembled not so much a political movement as a contest to see how many schismatics could dance on the head of a pin, a conversation that has gone from being national to factional to simply eccentric. At some point, progressive politics reached a state where freeing Mumia was considered critical and electing a Democratic president was considered optional."
Trailer: View From The Top: new crummy-looking comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Applegate.
Buffy search engine: I Call It Mr. Pointy. Speaking of which, last night I downloaded Kazaa for the first time. Did a search for "Buffy" and found the un-aired pilot episode which starred a different Willow (a hefty brunette). File-sharing is so lush.
You want sign o' the times? I'll give you sign o' the times: Fred Durst spills his heart for Britney Spears on the Limp Bizkit website. "i am a good judge of character and so is she. it just happens to be a person that i would have thought could make me feel this way. and believe that i have never felt this way, so there." Uh-huh, so there. Dude, try embarrassing yourself with something less permanent than a website, like a "Britney Forever" tattoo.
I should think it's cool that a 27-year-old from a dot-com mag could end up running the Times Arts section, right?
Local yokels will like Dara's review of Café Lurcat, the replacement for The Loring. Her feelings about the change? "C'est la vie. Que sera sera. And such."
In this clever interview, hacker icon Kevin Mitnick talks about his guest appearance on Alias, his time in prison, and the the first website he'll visit when his three-year no-internet probation ends this month (LabMistress, his girlfriend's site).
There's a rumor that the new Massive Attack album is out there for download on this crazy little internet somewhere. I won't say where, but I gotta point you to the hard-to-find Todd Haynes Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story MPEGs. Illegal-Art.org has other amazing vids and audio.
All the Britney gossip you could need in four simple paragraphs: she's hanging out with Vin Diesel, she's recording with Fred Durst, and she gets mobbed at the deli. Ahem, what is wrong with the state of music journalism?
There.com. For those still waiting for The Sims Online
Created by Kevin Spacey, Trigger Street allows independent filmmakers and screenwriters to upload movies and screenplays that get reviewed and critiqued by the others in the community. There's a festival going on right now which is judged by Mike Myers, Annette Bening, and Bono. The registration process is torturous, but inside are some hidden finds.
One of the geekiest things I've ever seen: Minneapolis Trekies have created an entire episode of Star Trek that looks remarkably like the original series.
Metafilter has a post about Chuck's Times Mag piece comparing the deaths of Dee Dee Ramone and Robbin Crosby. I got plastered with Chuck three nights in a row last weekend and not once did we argue about the balance of populism and criticism, but he did say Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his next book, a series of essays about junk culture, will be out this summer.
Yah! Season Three of Buffy on DVD came out today. (UPDATE: Now wait one darn minute. Just 60 seconds ago it said "Available January 3," and now it says January 7. I even have a receipt saying it has been sent to me. I feel a tantrum of evil-Willow proportion coming on.)
Is everyone else watching VH1's I Love The '80s? I honestly hated the '80s, and I'm totally surprised how much I love this series.
Nick Denton has posted an opportunity for what must be somebody's dream job: erotic blogger. I can't imagine looking through those resumes. Maybe someone at MyMasturbation.com will apply.
Matt of Metafilter has launched the site he's been talking about for years: Ticketstubs. The idea is that the material residue of an event is the stub, which coincides with a memory, both of which you can share on the site.
The Nation asks Boots Riley of The Coup, Tom Morello of Rage, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney to talk about the tradition of protest music.
Schlotzsky's joins the wi-fi masses by adding free wireless.
I've been trying to convince people to stop capitalizing internet for a while. Pleased to see M.I.T. is on my side.
Metropolis has finally posted their Fiction Issue. The idea is that writers create narratives around pieces of architecture. Includes stories by Kurt Andersen, Bruce Sterling, and Rick Moody.
I just took a look at last year's blog resolutions and it appears as though I did absolutely none of them in 2002. Except, perhaps, for "less talk, more rock."
Gizmodo -- Gadgets, toys, and tech that makes me desire.
BlogPlus -- The only entry in the distasteful category of "personal weblog," Plain Layne this year divulged her misconceived trip to Spain, her experiments with a shrink, her hunt for her birth mother, and her recent girl toy. JenniCam for the lit set.
Link Machine Go -- I steal at least one link from here per week.
Talking Points Memo -- "Blogging as journlism" was the most over-hyped story of the year, but any list of 2002 must include one of those guys, so here's the one that matters most.
Metafilter -- I'm trying to make a point by putting it at the bottom.
I was recently thinking of giving Fimoculous a subtitle: not a media blog. It's a snarky attempt to differentiate myself from the spate of them lately. I was blogging before "blog" was a word, and as I see people turn their blogs into career moves, there has been a self-imposed pressure to turn Fimoc into a "new media" space. But, no, I remain committed to exposing arcane internet subcultures, musing on Tina Fey's eyeware, and blabbing about post-modern architectural theory, thereby guaranteeing that the 1,500 of you who come here every day doesn't turn into 15,000 and I don't start to take this too seriously. Populism be damned.
It's funny how the mainstream press completely missed (or ignored) Trent Lott's racism the first time around, but they're absolutely not going to miss the story about bloggers bringin on the noise the second time. Here's one and another and another and another and another and another and.... And none of them see the irony of this.
Res finally has its Spike Jonze feature up. (The video collection isn't there, despite the promise of the print mag.) Spike also directed Ikea's new Unboring campaign (click on the tv).
You want dot.com fall-out, I'll give you dot.com fall-out. The company Christmas party this year is in a bowling alley. Wait, maybe that's cool dot-com chic? Hook it up:
After seeing Personal Velocity last weekend, I truly hope it provides the opportunity to re-appropriate the term "chick flick" and turn it into riot grrl cinema. Go see it.
You've probably seen Slate.com's Saddameter, but I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. (But I do think the percentage is a little high.)
Oh, you didn't get me anything for Chistmas? Why, yes, I'd love the Beckett on Film DVD set. Gimme.
Somewhere in the middle of 2.5 bottles of wine, I said "Al Gore is the Axl Rose of politics," so I knew it was time to stop. Let's get on with the links.
McSweeney's is publishing the next William Vollman novel. Eggers is probably the only one who wouldn't force an edit down from six volumes and 3,500 pages.
...and the award for Biggest Zip File I've Downloaded this year goes to: Matrix Reloaded trailer. (Trust me, don't bother.)
If you're in the biz, you know that Reuters does some of the best infographics in the industry. Their hidden "pick of the week" graphic this week is an odd one, which is why I link to it: The Lord of the Rings Map.
I spent many hours this weekend making my own DVR (I don't want to buy a TiVo). After all the new software and two more PCI cards, I was almost there. Now I can't seem to find a codec that will play MPEG-2.
The Spin Year in Music issue just arrived. Here are their Top 40 Albums:
The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Beck, Sea Change
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Eminem, The Eminem Show
Weezer, Maladroit
Missy Elliot, Under Construction
Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
N.E.R.D., In Search Of...
The Hives, Veni Vidi Vicious
Felix Da Housecat, Kittenz and Thee Glitz
Sleater-Kinney, One Beat
Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse
Bruce Springsteen, The Rising
Tori Amoz, Scarlet's Walk
The Roots, Phrenology
The Streets, Original Pirate Material
Scarface, The Fix
DJ Shadow, The Private Press
Bright Eyes, Lifted or the Story Is In The Soil, Keey Your Ear to the Ground
Foo Fighters, One By One
Sigur Ros, ()
Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera
Pulp, We Love Life
Red Hot Chili Peppers, By The Way
Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
El-P, Fantastic Damage
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Moby, 18
The Soudtrack of our Lives, Behind the Music
RJD2, Deadringer
Interpol, Turn of the Bright Lights
Ryan Adams, Demolition
Audioslave, Audioslave
Various Artists, MTV Road Rules: Don't Make Me Pull This Thing Over Vol. 1
Steve Earle, Jerusalem
Cody Chesnutt, The Headphone Masterpiece
Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World
2 Many DJs, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
Surprises? None, really. They've ditched the perenial "Top 10 Albums You Never Heard," which seems an important shift in philosophy (depending on how you want to interpret it, the underground music scene is either inconsequential, bad, or unconsumable). I'm surprised at the vigor with which they hang on to The White Stripes. I think Spin needs The White Stripes to survive more than The White Stripes do.
I thought maybe the design craze was winding down, but then Donald Norman, Henry Petroski, and Michael Graves showed up on NPR.
The original Solaris is on TCM tonight, which is swell because now I don't have to buy the DVD. I enjoyed the remake, but Jonathan Rosenbaum trashed it. The Times review has the best sentence I've read so far: Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.
Now the kiddies can ransack civilian dwellings just like their heroes! (Ages 5 and up.)
Wall Street Journal has on okay story on online personalization models, which touches on privacy and paranoia. Includes bits on TiVo, Amazon, and NetFlix.
From the new issue of Film Comment: "Oliver Stone is working on a trilogy of documentaries on political leaders who oppose Western hegemony: the first on Fidel Castro (already completed), the second on Yasser Arafat, and the third on Kim Jung-il. For the second film, Stone has interviewed not only Arafat by Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and members of Al-Aqsa."
Hmmmm.... is this the new editorial direction of City Pages? This was news two months ago, and only marginally interesting then. I guess I'm glad Steve Perry is back though.
I spent part of Day Off #1 reading and re-reading the full text of Bin Laden's "Letter To America." It's a marvelous work of propaganda and counter-propaganda. While it does (almost regrettably) contain moments of truth, by the time I was done with it I was convinced that Osama had mastered the technique of appropriating the occasional liberal-democratic philosophy to propel his own twisted agenda.
David Eggers is a dick, according to David Sedaris. You have to jump to the second page to get this quote: "Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass... He's a horrible person... but he's a really good writer."
I've linked to all the other ones, so what why stop now? The newest from BMWfilms.com, staring Gary Oldman and James Brown with a guest appearance by Marilyn Manson: Beat The Devil.
SomaFM appears to be back. (For those who missed it, new digital radio legislation nearly killed it and many other internet radio stations a couple months ago.)
The New Yorker has a piece on the overlooked composer Arvo Pärt.
In a conversation about blogging last night, Chuck said this: I think the pseudo-compliment "You should have a blog" is the new "You should try to get on the 'Real World'." This seems incredibly accurate.
I'm not working this week -- my first vacation since September 2001. What will I do with myself? Probably watch movies and play with FlashComm. Maybe buy an xBox. I'm such a nerd. But that also means it's a week of link crack:
A few weeks ago, I had dinner with Nathan Shedroff, one of the big voices behind the Experience Design movement (this interview is a good introduction). I enjoyed his book, but if I were to recommend one in the field, it would be Trains of Thought, which is a mix of cognitive psychology, structural thinking, and phenomenology. The experience designers have boldly attacked the field of information architecture, and a recent spat between Shedroff and a leading IA proponent is full of frisson. My take on this dispute is that it's exhilarating to finally witness something in this industry that actually gets people excited enough to use exclamation points.
This is cool. A Dutch film called Necrocam is available in entirety online. The website gives you the tone, but the Times article gives the context.
I know, this is totally old news from last week, but I gotta get in the Ellen Fleiss interview somewhere. What a cool kid.
Nerve and Film Comment both have Parker Posey features this month. Nerve is more funny (Note: The word "indie" will not be used in the following introductory paragraphs about Parker Posey. When the word's usage cannot be avoided, a small picture of Jim Jarmusch will appear instead.) but Film Comment is more poignant (She played indie film itself in You've Got Mail and Scream 3. She was the pin puncturing the sentimental or idiotic, seemingly hell-bent on teaching those complacent big stars who surrounded her a thing or two about the value of irony.)
More dot.com destruction news. The once mighty Razorfish has been purchased by some design firm in Salt Lake City called SBI.
Finally, the Bush Twins can throw away their fake IDs.
Goodie. The Right is getting back into the cultural wars! Here's the Wall Street Journal's utterly petty attack on Kurt Cobain and here's The American Prospect's showing its contempt for Michael Moore.
Lou Reed's next album will consist entirely of Edgar Allan Poe's words.
The new Sonic Youth video for "The Empty Page" debuted on 120 Minutes tonight. I'm pretty sure the club scenes were filmed at the First Avenue show I was at a few months ago.
The lineup on the Discovery Channel tonight: 9:00, "Changing Sexes: Male to Female"; 10:00, "Big as Life: Obesity in America"; 11:00, "Dwarfs: Little People, Big Steps". Discover, fer sure.
I'm not sure what is the weirdest thing about the new Johnny Cash album -- the Nine Inch Nails cover, the "Bridge Over Troubled Water" duet with Fiona Apple, "Desperado" (fucking "Desperado"!), hearing Nick Cave sing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," or the "Personal Jesus" cover with John Frusciante on guitar. I'll go for the latter, and even give you an MP3.
Edwin Schlossberg got tonsofpress this year in design and mainstream publications. I've become interested in his work with Reuters in Times Square, especially this "News Index" idea that will rate the news day on a scale of 1 to 10. There's an essay in me somewhere that compares it with Asymptote's 3-D New York Stock Exchange.
I really want to be a gamer, but I'm not. I read everything I can about about The Sims -- and look forward to the online version next month. I get giddy at the new Xbox Live, and I made a special trip downtown to see the new GameWorks here. Yet I haven't played an actual game in four years. Are there others like me?
For the agitprop designers and anti-globalization crew, feast on spectacle of NikeLab.com. Zowie! Contains design work by RGA, eboy, uncontrol, nosleep.
Waxy has some stellar doomsday MP3s. Can you resist something called "The Invocation For Judgement Against And Destruction of Rock Music"?
Uh-oh. The Justice Department is investigating the two big alt-weekly companies, Village Voice Media and New Times Media, for antitrust. (Can you imagine that sentence being written 30 years ago?)
I'm still not completely sold on Whedon's newest, Firefly, but I like the blog.
Ben Sherman has a new webiste. (If you know me in the physical world, you know I wear too many Ben Sherman shirts.)
If for some reason you want to read another Dave Eggers profile, The Guardian has one.
NY Times Maginterviews Dean Barkley, who is a senator from Minnesota for a couple weeks. "Running a car wash was probably the most difficult job I ever had in my life."
Spielberg is remaking Kurosawa's Ikura? I don't even understand this story. "It will be the third Kurosawa film to be remade after The Seven Samurai and High And Low." Huh? When? What?
An advance copy of the new Foo Fighters album landed on my desk a couple months ago. After a long day of work, I lazily slid it into the car stereo on the way home, whispering to myself, "I'm afraid I'll like this." Eight minutes later I took it out, and breathed aloud, "Wheh." Same scenario last night seeing Pearl Jam on Letterman, except this time I liked it. Damn. Fimoc Band Name Of The Day: The Liking
Since I'm being racy today, a spam about "becoming a phone actress" today led me to PhoneActress.com. Well, of course a telephone porn company would have a website looking for talent, but I didn't imagine it would be so friendly. You can even check your financial reports.
Looks like A Confederacy of Dunces will finally become a movie.
I'm not much of a video game player anymore, but I'm seriously thinking about getting an xBox just to play around with the new xBox Live, an internet gaming environment.
Howdy hombres. How many people forwarded you that godfreakingweird Michael Jackson picture today? I win. Nine. Anyway, today's the day to introduce a new permanent feature: Fimoc Band Name Of The Day. Today's: Pelosi Overdrive. On with the show...
Saw Sigur Ros last night. Despite declaring them the best band of 2001, I also worried they might be a flash-in-the-pan indie band, around for an album or two until the novelty of a screaching Icelandic kid wore off. But I think there might be longevity in the works here, a la Radiohead. That's not a prediction, but I'd bet on it.
Speaking of Buffy, Tuesday night's episode was in my top five of all time -- even better than last week's appearance by The Breeders. USA Today gave it four outta four.
I come from a family of bankers, so some of my most vivid childhood memories are centered on financial activities in the bank -- watching the check-sorting machine, learning to count change before anyone in second grade, investigating the secret compartments of the vault. So photographer Arthur Levine's collection of photographs for Chase Manhattan Bank is like trip down financial memory lane.
The "new" Rolling Stone might surprise us yet. The most recent cover is The Simpson's, and there's even a link to the 1990 Bart cover story which as a midwestern high-schooler I recall reading in a B. Dalton checkout lane.
God, that sucked. And my former progressive state has become a Republican hot bed. Oh, who am I kidding. Since Jesse, I've completely given up. What else has happened? Let's see:
I'm back again. Paul's death rattled me. Thank you, Paul, for being the most human politician of our times. (Cursor has all the reading material, if you need to catch up.)
I finally saw Bowling for Columbine last night. The best part is the critique of fear culture. Anyway, an hour later I found this site by accident.
IGN has the actual full cursed video from The Ring that causes death. Looks like Buñuel's senior thesis.
I met a couple local bloggers over the weekend: Incoming Signals and Blogumentary. Good stuff. And for those who keep up with their blog brethren: Anil chooses life, and Arts & Letters Daily is back from the dead, Dack has gone back to the future.
City Pageslooks at the the Lizzie Borden porn oeuvre, which Salon and PBS's Frontline chirped about a few months ago. Apparently, Lizzie is popular enough to be in the Top 10.
Lots of smack for the minions today. In triplicate. Feast:
MOVIES:
Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh. My. God. Kyra Sedgwick & Parker Posey & Fairuza Balik in the same movie?
Nerve interviews Brett Easton Ellis on the movie version of Rules of Attraction. "One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It's like Kubrick directing a college film."
I thought about going to PopTech this year, but didn't. WiredNews reviews it.
MUSIC:
Nick Hornby, the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, picks his 10 record tracks he could not imagine living without. It includes Teenage Fanclub, Springsteen, and Prince's "Sexy MF."
120 Minutes (Sundays on MTV2) played the new "You Know You're Right" Nirvana video last night. It was a boring montage of Kurt photos, but I think they were being cheeky by following it up with an old Vines video. Oh yeah, The Guardian somehow scored the rights to print the Cobain Diaries. Lots of stuff there.
It's "likely" that I become a millionaire. How about you?
I was looking around a few nights ago for a good subscription online video source. I like my new Vaio so much I thought about watching whole movies on it. Intertainer seemed to be the placed to go. Well, good thing I didn't subscribe.
NY Times Review of Booksdisses the new Umberto Eco novel.
3am has the final word on that weird Hunter S. Thompson / Jerry Seinfeld / Asterisk thing, which is impossible to explain in a sentence. This is the lit prank of the decade, so read up. (According to this, Hunter "applauds" the entire stunt.) [Sidenote: Beck and Seinfield were both on the Tonight Show some night last week. When Beck came over for his 10-seconds of face-time with Leno after playing, he off-the-cuff asked Seinfeld "who's Asterisk?" Seinfeld stuttered through saying he knew but didn't know.]
The Rules of Attraction (movie based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel) website is alright.
The Voice has a good article about tattoos, which isn't really an article so much as a series of blurbs. There's also a short piece about Resfest, which a few people have emailed me about, since mentioning Res magazine a few days ago.
The preview to the first film in the second season of BMWfilms, Hostage, directed by John Woo, is out.
Back in my college days, I would occasionally book bands. There was this undiscovered band from Duluth called Low that I really liked to bring to town. Now, they do Gap commercials and Thom York plugs them, so me saying their new album, Trust, is really great doesn't really matter anymore.
Radio K is one of the crowned jewels of Twin Cities music -- esteemed next to the Replacements and that purple guy. For as long as they've been on the dial, there has been the rumor that there was an FM signal on the way. And it looks like there finally will be. Well, sorta.
When testing a new online application on various devices, I commonly make the joke at work "yeah, but does it work on my fucking refrigerator?" Looking at the refrigerator of the future, I guess it won't be a joke in too much longer. ("You expect me to user-test that?")
I'm not sure why Slate.com thinks celebrating Miles Davis' late period is unique (everyone except Stanley Crouch has been doing that for a half-decade), but they do. Still, I doubt I'll fork out $250 for the 20-CD box set.
Ball State has a theatrical production about Lizzy Borden in which you vote for the outcome with a wireless e-book given to you when you enter. You also use it to research background of the play during the play.
Facets, the best VHS/DVD source in the world, has redesigned their website. It needed it.
So fucking good. The Onion asks a bunch of people Is There A God? Includes answers from Conan, Bill Mahar, Michael Moore, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Chuck Palahniuk, and many more.
Fugazi gives the first mainstream press interview I've ever seen. Choosing the Washington Post to allow this to happen is interesting. Ian MacKaye even provides a list of his Top 10 Songs Of All Time, which is completely odd:
Nina Simone, "Compensation"
Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"
Janis Joplin, "Ball and Chain"
Jimi Hendrix, "Villanova Junction"
Bad Brains, "The Blackdots"
Black Flag, "I've Had It"
One Way Streets, "We All Love Peanut Butter"
Trouble Funk, "Pump Me Up"
Rites of Spring, "Drink Deep"
I went to high school outside Bismark, ND, and I can tell you no one ever played "Slip". Maybe if more parents used Pomals this wouldn't happen.
There have been some rumors that Apple will be releasing its own phone-pda soon. Not that this substantiates those rumors but at this moment, if you got to iphone.org, you'll see apple.com.
Ron Rosenbaum flees a peace demonstration in Central Park.
Just one more Times link: a profile of the Slashdot gang. You might expect to get one of those cool inside looks at the making of medium (there are a quite a few Onion articles like that), but you'll find this one sadly gives little inside insight.
New benefit album featuring Black Flag covers is out. Includes Exene Cervenka, Ween, Mike Patton, Ice T, Slayer, Lemmy, Rancid, Chuck D, and of course lots of Henry Rollins.
Ben Katchor's comic strip in Metropolis magazine is one of my favorite obscure media delights. Here's the most recent. Also of architectural note: The New Yorker asks if this is the ugliest building in NYC. If this rattles your ionic columns, this is also worth a visit: The Architecture Hate Page.
Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle has never been played in entirety in one place. But if you live in Paris, you could witness the first time.
New trailers: Michael Moore attacks guns with bare fists in Bowling for Columbine, Salma Hayek goes monobrow in Frida, and Mike Leigh does his best Woody Allen impression with All Or Nothing.
City Paper in Philly has a couple okay articles: Blue Books: talking with the 'sex worker literati' and Designer Labeled: a new book and exhibit ask 'What Is Design Today?'
Lit notes: Milan Kundera's new book, Ignorance, was released last week. And Umberto Eco's third novel, Baudolino, is out next week.
I was going to say that I didn't have any good links today, but then I found the Top 40 Conservative Pop Songs. The Beatles' Revolution is #2, and Skynard doesn't show up until #29.
Which nicely leads into the National Reviewgiving a shout-out to prog rock. Who says the culture wars are dead?
Here's a cool find. In January of 1996, a student at Stanford was asking the comp.lang.java group for advice on setting HTTP headers for a "web robot." That student was Larry Page, who is now president of a very big web robot known as Google. Some guy named Joseph Millar provided an answer on the newsgroup, but, well, he ain't famous now.
The Guardiancompares the Roman Empire to the American Empire. Meanwhile, Saddam pulls the plug on Survivor: Baghdad. And the Atlantic Monthly looks at possible outcomes of a war with Iraq.
The Mike Tyson spot that FOX pulled off the air, plus other current commercials of note.
TalkingPoints says Christopher Hitchens is leavingThe Nation.
The New York Press annual "Best Of" issue is out, and rather than actually organize the content, they put it all one one gigantic page.
The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum, "a blog dedicated to all the absurd and annoying things New York City hipsters do, say, wear, and probably, think." Nate questions his placement.
One Year Ago Today I had three links on my blog about how America was reacting post-9/11. Interesting to look at upon reflection.
I had fun stumbling through my mediocre French skills while reading Emmanuelle's Beck article.
GoogleNews has redesigned. Footers on pages say "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."
Times Mag has Emily Nussbaum profile Joss Whedon. (Tidbit: Whedon's "big break" was as a Roseanne writer, and also script-doctored Toy Story and Waterworld.)
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that Jeremy Allaire had started his own blog, but I expected what you usually get from most celeb blogs: a flury of updates for a couple days followed by nothing, and then a dead website within a week. But not only has he kept it updated, but he's already inventing new tools for bloggers to use. AudioBlog allows you to quickly add audio compontents to your blog. For those not familiar with the new Communications Server, here is how AudioBlog works.
Here's a obscure fact about me: I've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I know that's not very interesting to most of you, but to those who know my geeky lit tendencies, that might seem odd. My friend Peter just gave me the original BBC radio show from 1978, and I'm half-way through the 10 hours. Anyway, it looks like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will be made into a movie too.
Yope, I scored smack Beck/Flaming Lips tix this morn. Emmanuelle interviewed him recently and has a tidbit about the indie prince: he's now a scientologist. I'm not sure what to do with this scrap of knowledge. I'm just shrugging now.
Waxy.org has a post about Eggers' 826 Valencia, which I've been wondering about. Every issue of Might on sale for $10? Dude, I'm so there. I lost everything I owned in a fire in '97, and the Might collection is currently #6 on the list of things I'd like to have back. (Some things that beat it: every Beatles album on original vinyl and a crappy novel.)
E! interviews Tina Fey, plus a short video clip of her talking about being given the head writer slot on SNL.
Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi are released on DVD today. The final film in the trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, opens in theaters Oct. 18.
I missed this one on 9/11, but I luv it: A modest proposal to change the national anthem to Curtis Mayfield's "Don't Worry (If There's a Hell Below We're All Going To Go)."
Margaret Atwood reviews Ursula Le Guin's new story collection: "She demonstrates once again why she is the reigning queen of... but immediately we come to a difficulty, for what is the fitting name of her kingdom?"
New trailer: Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson).
Probably the best example of blogs as an effective medium for journalism (a phrase I've been known to cringe at) is In Search Of Al Queda, from PBS's Frontline. It's halfway into a two-month journey through the Near East. Currently, they're in Pakistan.
Fortune: 40 Richest People Under 40. Eight of the top 10 are internet/software people, and the other two are sports-related. (Master P and P. Diddy are the first entertainers on the list, at 11 and 12.)
Chuck has a long Billy Joel profile in the NY Times Mag. In college, Chuck used to try to convince me that Billy Joel was brilliant. This was hard for me to handle.
The Shortlist Organization is a yearly prize created to "expose and illuminate the most creative and adventurous albums of the year." The ten finalists have just been announced: Aphex Twin's Drukqs, The Avalanches' Since I Left You, Bjork's Vespertine, Cee-Lo's Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, DJ Shadow's The Private Press, Doves' Last Broadcast, The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, N*E*R*D's In Search Of..., and Zero 7's Simple Things. (Here was the longlist.)
A few weeks ago, City Pages did a parody piece on Jesse Ventura, which apparently many people didn't understand as a parody. This month, The Rake did a parody piece on Garrison Keillor, which apparently many people didn't understand as a parody of the City Pages. I think.
Sarah Vowell was on Conan a couple nights ago, and mentioned the famous Pitchfork Fondue in Medora, ND. Today, Chuck Haga at The Strib has a story about western North Dakota, which includes a slideshow with the Pitchfork Fondue. (Sidenote: Is Sarah Vowell cute? This is a question that I've been debating with a few friends. I should make a poll.)
I watched Clinton on Letterman last night. He was great. I think it took a dolt like Bush to make me appreciate Clinton, who now more than ever seems to "get it." When I see Bush speak, I always worry that I know about whatever topic is being discussed. (The Post has a round-up.)
A few months ago, I was at a conference with Sue Johnson from 360degrees.org / PictureProjects. She was just getting started on a new project, an online audio 9/11 memorial for NPR. We had a nice chat about online audio/visual techniques, and her project is now available: The Sonic Memorial Project. The Sonic Browser is probably the most innovative part.
More 9/11: Walter Kirn reviews all those books you've seen, and makes sure to slam Baudrillard and Harlan Ellison along the way.
I really don't talk about The Onion A.V. Club enough. The Onion proper gets all the poppy press and gloppy glee, but from a pop-culture criticism point of view, The A.V. Club might honestly be the best alt-culture publication out there (oftentimes better than Village Voice, Spin, and City Pages.) Just a sample: this week The A.V. Club reviews commentary tracks on DVDs.
Hard-to-find Tarkovsky diploma film: The Steamroller and the Violin. It's 43 minutes long, and some consider it Tarkovsky's greatest work (and, unquestionably, his shortest). It occurs to me that it would be cool to create a DVD titled The Senior Thesis Projects Of The Great Directors. Get the first works from Scorsese, Lynch, Wilder, Spielberg, Greenaway, Allen, Kiarostami, Kar-Wai and whoever else all on one DVD set.
I wonder who thought up the action-adventure sci-fi flick based the idea that apocalypse is eminent because the earth's core has stopped rotating: The Core, starring Hillary Swank. And I thought the wayward asteroid was a stretch.
According to the Sun Times in New Zealand (you can figure out how valid that makes it), Britney Loves Lesbian Porn. (I'm a little embarrassed to link to that, but I'm telling myself it's really an investigation into tabloid journalism and not another damn Britney link.)
I haven't talked too much about it here, but the "new" Rolling Stone has been the lips of most people I hang with lately. The new editor, Ed Needham formerly at FHM, has been getting slammed by most industry press, almost as much as that dumbMaxim guy. Anyway, John Scalzi has an interesting critique of the new RS.
Times op-ed declares settling the Great Plains one of America's biggest mistakes. "In North Dakota, 47 of 53 counties lost population, and at this rate it'll eventually have to merge again with South Dakota to create a single state of Dakota."
Slate reviews chain restaurants (Cheesecake Factory, Outback Steakhouse, Olive Garden, P.F. Chang's, Wolfgang Puck Café, and Chevy's).
The non-fisticuffs continue in the Andrew Sullivan / Kurt Andersen celebrity blog death match. Sullivan: "But will bloggers actually deeply undermine editorial and corporate power in the media? So far I think the answer is no. Blogs aren't replacing mainstream media; they're infiltrating, supplementing, and buttressing it." Andersen: "Hey, Andy! Does anyone ever call you Andy? I assume not." And also this parenthetical, which I totally concur with: "(By the way, why doesn't Michael Kinsley blog here under the Slate umbrella? I'd PayPal for that.)"
Cultural Maps in American Studies. "Cultural Maps is dedicated to the graphical presentation of non-graphical information -- whatever that turns out to mean."
Anthony Lane, the movie critic for the New Yorker, has a new book out: Nobody's Perfect. The Times' Laura Miller reviews it.
Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen go head-to-head over the nature of blogging. Sullivan: "The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don't have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don't have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want." Andersen: "Too many bloggers remind me of Dennis Millers manqué or the comic-book store owner on The Simpsons... combined, in the Rebecca Bloods of the world, with Mr. Van Driessen, Beavis and Butt-head's hippie teacher. In other words, passionate and smart but also irritating and smug and faintly, inescapably sad."
Speaking of blogs, BloggingNetwork is one damn stupid idea. Basically, it's a subscription model for reading your favorite blogs -- $3/month.
Gay Robots? (Includes HAL, C3PO, Rosie, KITT, and Data.)
Life of Numbers is an amazing synthesis of symbolic logic, mathematical design, and interactive technology. It maps the popularity of all integers between zero and one million. "The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies." If you dig it, dive into the other works at Turbulence.org.
The other day, I was searching for an ACLU logo. Believe it or not, I don't think there is one, but I did stumble across a funny flash animation from Working Assets, about privacy in a post-9/11 era. Although I'm politically aligned with them, the animation (with sweeping strings and frowning statues) seems a little heavy-handed.
Shazam is so cool. If you live in the UK, hit "2580" on your cell phone, play 15 seconds of music into the phone, and Shazamm will SMS you back the name of the song and the artist behind it. Amazing, methinks.
Somewhere along the way, I missed that the London Review of Books has redesigned its website. It looks very bloggy. (LRB is the best book periodical out there right now, but I've shamefully let my subscription die out.)
For Buffy fans: Faith (Eliza Dushku) is returning. Because Sarah Michelle Gellar may be ending her tenure as the slayer this season, the return of Faith has interesting consequences. The season starts Sept. 24 (spoiler). In other news, here's some gossip on Joss Whedon's new show, Firefly. The Firefly site not only has spoilers, but there's even a blog. (It just occurred to me that Whedon now has a show on three networks: Buffy on UPN, Angel on WB, and Firefly on FOX.) I've watched a dozen episodes of Buffy in the last 3 days, finishing the second season on DVD. Now I've tuned in Radio Buffy Live.
Josh gets cred for both of today's links. Josh is attending architecture school in upstate New York right now, and I'm jealous as sin.
Although it seemed to have the potential of being a hoax on scale with the Sokal, Derrida, the movie, is apparently real. Festival notes from SF and Sundance point to the philosopher's earlier work, and the film as a legit human portrait. Watch a clip or a Sundance preview (large downloads). I just found an Elvis Mitchell Times review from January. How the hell did I miss this? (More reviews here.)
Layne has a killer assessment of American Psycho today. The trajectory of my relationship to Ellis is the opposite. I first found his book perfectly representative of the 80s, and then later I sadly realized that it was perfectly representative of the 80s.
Have a special song that you're absolutely certain contains hidden knowledge which only you are privy to? Then go to SongMeanings.net and spill the truth. Picking out some groups randomly, here's Beck, Wilco, Sonic Youth. The place is full of meaningless comments, but also some great one's such as a post about Nirvana's "About A Girl" where one person postulates the song is... about a girl.
At the Sonic Youth show last night, I kept wondering what 18-year-olds think of this band. Is it the same way I think of Springsteen and the Dead and the Sex Pistols or is it the same way as I think of Neil Young and Dylan and the Minutemen. (Know what I mean?) Anyway, I don't give a damn what Amy Phillips says (or, for that matter, what other say in response), Sonic Youth is still the best show I've seen this year.
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he tried to do was buy Palm. Now, not only does he think the PDA will disappear (usurpsed by the smart phone), but he just might be getting ready to release an iPhone.
Japander: n.,& v.t. 1. a western star who uses his or her fame to make large sums of money in a short time by advertising products in Japan that they would probably never use. ~er (see synecure, prostitute) 2. to make an ass of oneself in Japanese media. I recommend The Simpsons, Winona, Nic Cage, and Dennis Hopper.
I've never heard of genre writer Harry Stephen Keeler, "the Ed Wood of Mystery Writers," but this page makes me very interested. There's even a Harry Stephen Keeler Society. (Thanks Mefi.)
NY Times Magazineinterviews Jesse Ventura, and is the first to discover why he's not running again: the pay sucks (the last question).
The French, they have a word for everything, even if you have to spell it backwards. Verlan is a popular slang in which standard French spellings or syllables are reversed or recombined, or both.
To accompany this week's Food Issue of the New Yorker, the website has dragged out some classic food articles, including Lillian Ross' 1945 piece on the first frozen dinners, Rex Lardner's 1950 ode to flipping pancakes, and Nora Ephron's 1997 tribute to the doughnut.
There's a scene in High Fidelity (the movie) in which John Cusack's character is in bed with his girlfriend, who will later hook up the guy who lives upstairs. The girlfriend is seen reading Love Thy Neighbor, a book by Peter Maass who has a blog where today he explains how his book ended up in the movie.
There's also this new feature at Amazon: Just Like You. It compares your buying patterns with other customers who bought similar things, and then presents a page that says, for example, "Just Like You: a customer from New York." It has an eerie feel to it, as though it's matching you up with someone you don't know, but you're certain should be your friend, based upon the simple fact you both bought Radiohead. But Amazon frustratingly doesn't inform you who the person is who's supposedly... Just! Like! You!
Twist & Sprout is God's gift to suburban-working dot-commers. There's nowhere descent to eat in my far-flung workplace, which I'm constantly complaining about. So I've become an expert in microwave cuisine. If you can find these Twist & Sprout things where you live, buy a hundred of them. They're the best thing to ever come out of a microwave.
I never realized how bad of a human being I am until I took this test.
I don't know how it happened, but over the weekend I ended up researching upcoming movies. Let's call it the Fimoculous Movie Preview:
AUGUST:
Prediction: Natascha McElhone will be the new It-girl. She stars in a movie I'm destined to love-hate in that B-way: Fear Dot Com (here's the trailer). Best line: "Can you promise me one thing? That you won't visit that site."
The Trials of Henry Kissinger, a rendition of the Christopher Hitchens book. Certainly constroversial enough to land Hitchens a permanent slot on cable news talk shows through the winter.
Les Âmes Fortes. I dunno, but it's got Laetitia Casta and John Malkovich.
OCTOBER:
Frida Kahlo will be played by Salma Hayek in Frida. Sweet mono-brow.
Naqoyqatsi completes the amazing trilogy which included Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Directed by Godfrey Reggio with score by Phillip Glass. From the site: Naqoyqatsi depicts the ubiquity of technology in our world. It explores how everything from the media, politics, religion, and warfare to food, weather, sports, and medicine is situated in this "new nature".
In an odd match, Tom Tykwer, the guy who directed Run Lola Run, is taking on a Krzysztof Kieslowski screenplay, Heaven (a Guardianreview). I can't think of two more different temperaments.
Round II of BMWFilms shorts hits the street. John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off), Tony Scott (Spy Game, Enemy of the State, Top Gun) and Joe Carnahan (Walk Among the Tombstones, NARC) are the three directors this time around.
NOVEMBER:
Atom Egoyan returns with a film celebrating his Armenian heritage, Ararat.
Hitchcockian claustrophobia times ten, Phone Booth will take place entirely within and around a single New York City phone booth.
Eminem has been getting rave reviews for his upcoming movie, 8 Mile. The site has a couple trailers that could be music videos (what's the difference?).
In Film Threat, Steven Soderbergh described Solaris as "a combination of 2001 and Last Tango in Paris." Gulp. Features more of that It-girl Natascha McElhone.
One year ago today, I wrote a piece about how my media reading/purchasing habits have changed. Today, I'm reflecting on how my blogging habits have changed. When I started this site, the purpose was simply to give me a place to post projects that I'm working on: a personality blog. It quickly changed to things I've been thinking about: a media commentary blog. Most recently, it changed to being predominantly about places I surf: a link blog. I'm not sure how I feel about this transformation, but the way it has changed has never been consciously calculated. With the surfeit of opinion-makers out there, I became less interested in writing about anything. But I worry the place has lost its personality -- links can only say so much about a person, right? Or maybe not. On with this links:
It sounds like the authors of The Rules for Online Dating just don't get it. Example quote: "[Instant Messaging is] like a free date, which we don't allow. We want men to court us, to ask us out in advance."
The Times asks: Does Architecture Have Ideology? Looks at a planned exhibition and catalogue of occupation architecture in Palestine.
Hearing Is Believing. This piece from Newsweek is a week old, but I just stumbled across it. Woody Norris, an inventor based in San Diego, has developed an audio technology that can throw sound 100 yards to a single person -- and only that person will hear the sound. The implications are immense, but the article references what I immediately thought of: using it in clubs. (I know, how un-inspired.) Popular Mechanics also has a cover story refering to a different invention of his: personal flight devices.
The new PC Mag tries to out-wire Wired with a large set of stories on The Future of Technology. The section titled The Future in Gear will probably tantalize you the most.
When did I become a technophile? I'm thinking about buying a ReplayTV 4500 just cuz I can hook it up to the internet (anything with a internet connection = good). But becuz I can hook it up to the internet, not only can I program it remotely, but I can go to PlanetReplay and download episodes of Sex and the City from other ReplayTV users. So there. I'm not a technophile -- it's really still about cultcha. Or, well, sex.
Before you click, just think to yourself, "What would Adam Sandler's website look like?" Okay, now click.
Salon does its homework and collects some astoundingly bad domain names that were forged at the height of dot-com-stupidity. But of course the question is: how much longer until Salon.com joins 'em?
Pure geek: the new WC3 specs for XHTML 2.0 are out. As you were...
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive software artwork which allows its users to breed and explore the abstract and evocative forms of personalized "nonsense alphabets" - coherent sets of abstract, glyphlike forms which might resemble the plausible writing systems of alien civilizations or unfamiliar human societies.
Looks like Spin has handed over its website to Yahoo. Here's Chuck's piece from last month about Morrissey-lovers. This month, Chuck practically is the magazine, with about 20 pages of his musings about heavy metal.
It's Like a Movie, but It's Not. This is one of the most culturally-aware pieces I've ever read in the Times. Here's a paragraph about "the illusion of entertainment":
In mathematics there is something called a derivative an expression that stands for another set of expressions. The illusion of entertainment is a kind of cultural derivative. You watch most television sitcoms and, just by the rhythm of the banter and the laugh track, you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the jokes are funny or not. Sitcom writers call this "likeajoke" because it has the form of a joke without the content. Or you go to a big commercial movie, and just by experiencing the rapid cutting and thumping music you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the action engages you or not.
The Times has a story about the Center for Strategic and International Studies study that invokes Buffy. In other Buffy news, did you know that Anthony Stewart Head (the guy who plays Giles) has an electronic album out? It's #12 on the Amazon.com Electonica Best-Sellers list.
The news that MSNBC.com is discontinuing its discussion boards and replacing them with blogs is a big deal in my industry. If you care about that kind of thing, you might care about the pressure MSNBC is getting to change to be more like MSN.
Steven Soderberg gets Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, and David Hyde Pierce to star in his new film, Full Frontal (that website has been getting good reviews in places like Entertainment Weekly), and he doesn't even show their faces in the trailer.
New Ftrain.com: August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web. It's the imagined future of a business magazine published in 2009. I think it's seriously possible that terms like "semantic web" and "RDF" will catch on simply because of this piece of fiction. Stay tuned.
Cool collection of politically-charged 3D/graph art/music: Pleix. I recommend Plaid: Itsu and Beauty Kit.
Times Magprofiles a movie trailer director. Additionally, the guy who created Napster is interviewed, with some good questions like "Do you ever buy music?"
Once a publishing heir apparent, Ziff-Davis might file for bankruptcy.
Part of the miraculously uninspired Block E expansion in downtown Minneapolis will be a Le Meridien Art + Tech hotel. If you're the kind of person who is wowie-zowied by plasma screens, backlit photos, and personalized linen, then this is the place for you. If you're more into public simulated entertainment, Block E will also house GameWorks, an entertainment plex built by Sega. Ho-hum.
The new issue of Metropolis just arrived today. The theme is "Great Design Ideas for the 21st Century," including essays by Dave Eggars (colorful buildings), Bruce Sterling (assembly swarm factories), John Maeda (new media pedagogy), and Lawrence Weschler (in-and-out architecture). But I had the most fun with a page dedicated to the 20th Century's Worst Design Ideas. Here's their list:
CD jewel case, leaf blowers, dsigner infant-wear, the 18-wheeler, Olestra, Smell-O-Vision, midcentury urban "renewal," the butterfly ballot, cliff-hanging houses in mudslide territory, car alarms, coach class airplane seating, the proposed WWII memorial in D.C., big-box retail, the Styrofoam fast-food "clamshell," the Ford Pinto's exploding gas tank, cute cell-phone rings, toy guns, TV satellite dishes, TV remote controls, TV, premoistened toilet paper, gold courses in the desert, car-towed billboards, Atlanta, nurses' uniforms, the design story as museum (and vice versa), the PT Cruiser, offensive sports-team mascots (i.e., Cleveland's Chief Wahoo), the lawn ornament (especially jockey holding the lantern), DDT, SUVs, snowmobiles, jet skis, ATVs, useless Olympic villages and going into debt to build them, four-car garages, pop-up and pop-under Web ads, 1960s multi-purpose stadiums (and the artificial turf they inspired), genetically modified "Frankenfoods," Botox, vinyl siding, the girdle, Michael Jackson, the Portland Building, John Portman buildings, the Millennium Dome, cloning, the dismantling of L.A.'s Red Car trolley system, the erasable pen, the self-consciously "funky" dot-com office, anything in iMac colors, Clippie, McMansions, casinos and aquariums as downtown "revitalization," the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, dropped ceilings, fluorescent lighting, accordion buses, stiletto heels, one-hand foods designed for driving (i.e., the "sealed taco"), the 7-11 X-Treme Gulp (a 52-once soda), New Coke, Modernist corporate plazas, Memphis (the design collective, not the city), strip malls, nuclear power plants, celebrity architects, the $50 million retail space (i.e., Soho Prada), the Star Wars missile defense system, tearing down Penn Station to build Madison Square Garden, the urge to build the tallest building in the world, the Titanic, proposing self-serving fantasies on the site of a mass grave.
A couple days ago I mentioned the McLuhan CD, and today I find this oddity: The Book Of Probes. It's a collection of McLuhan speeches and shorter works, with illustrations by David Carson (that guy who did Ray Gun).
Funniest thing I've read all week: Rush loves Apple, but feels they're having financial problems because of their politics.
Typorganism has created numerous interesting alt-application but Good News / Bad News is my favorite. On the left appears headlines and pictures from CNN, and on the right appears headlines and pictures contributed by users. The juxtaposition creates a dynamic commentary on news composition.
Wow, a gigantic collection of genuine unknown band photos. Compelling in a I-Have-No-Idea-Why sense. The commentary is funny too.
Does anyone remember Plunderphonic? It was a Negativelandish project from cut-and-paste musician John Oswald that sampled Metallica, Dolly Parton, Elvis and everyone else. Of course he got sued, and the CD was recalled, but it's now entirely available as MP3s or a jukebox
Wired News profiles Dack's cell phone movies. Dack is a Minneapolis designer considered one of the people on the forefront of the blogging and design communities. Dack.com made a radical change after 9/11 to become a politically-centered blog. None of this is chronicled in the Wired story, even though it's probably more interesting.
Last week, I got the weirdest thing off Amazon.com, and it arrived today: CD of Marshall McLuhan's Medium Is the Massage imported from Japan. It's a sound collage with McLuhan's voice mixed in with crazy sound effects. Imagine Rod McKuen meets William Burroughs meets DJ Shadow. (Or don't.) It was originally released in 1967, and now I wonder if it was even ever released in the U.S. and if it was popular.
The Voice has the most revealing review of the new Flaming Lips album so far.
How'd this one sneak up one me? All About Lily Chou-Chou must be the first movie to be based on an internet novel (go ahead, name another). It's also about one man's obsession with Hong Kong pop star Faye Wong, who I've been prone to describe in embarrassingly fawning terms ever since Chungking Express. The Voice has a review.
Similarly, I've been wondering what Mike Figgis has been doing since Timecode, his last experimental film that touched buttons with web geeks interested in new narrative techniques. Apparently his new film, Hotel, uses a similar four-screen mechanism. Shift has the scoop.
I have something to confess: my adoration of Ellen Feiss. That's all.
In other Apple advert news, parodies are showing up of the Switch campaign, such as here and here and here and here and here.
A certain Ms. Barbara Palser has taken to writing about blogs too. (Somewhere in the distant past, a certain boy in the midwest promised to design/build a blog for her. Soon, soon.)
Buffy 'Burb is a page that sorts bloggers by who their favorite Buffy character is. I'm here. Also, Whedon-esque is a new blog for die-hard Buffy fans.
Amazon's new SOAP API allows you to create your own Amazon applications, such as this Googlish one. When I try to explain to newbies why XML matters, the development of these types of applications is going to become my de facto example. (This item has been ripped off nearly word-for-word from Metafilter.)
If the Times is right, Diesel has my buying habits pegged.
While we're at it, here's an interview with Traktor, the people behind those ESPN ads, Fatboy Slim's "Ya Mama" video, and Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At?" video.
I'll be AWOL from here the next couple days, preparing for this, where I'll be speaking under two topics: webcams as media devices and the future of flash. In the endless hours of freetime that you'll have because of my absence, consider playing a few rounds of Battleship.
Slate.com has a great piece on cool Japanese products you can't have. But rather than just turn on the envy machine, it also points you to Dynamism.com, a site that apparently buys those cool gadgets wholesale, retrofits them with American stuff, and then sells them to you at a 30 percent markup. Tell me you don't want a Sony Vaio GT3/K or a SpyZ camera, both only available in Japan or through Dynamism.com.
In honor of National Vegetarian Week, the NY Post has an article full of anti-vegetarian propaganda. The source is this week's cover story at TIME, which has its own tempered propaganda. Also, the New York Times Magazine has a gigantic piece about new findings in the fat vs carb debate. And while you're feeling healthy, why don't you go take the vegetables quiz.
The best part about this roundup of last night's Letterman-Kopple tête-à-tête is that "Style Columnist" Tom Shales refers to Jimmy Kimmel as "whoever the heck that is."
Big news in my work-play world today. Macromedia has finally released the Flash Communications Server, which is really gonna shake things up. I'm busy playing with it.
In other local news, Fast Company magazine has a big profile of post-flood/fire Grand Forks. Since my exuent from the region, I've been interviewed about the flood/fire by three radio shows, four newspaper reporters, one magazine reporter, two book writers, and one tv documentarian. Thankfully, Fast Company didn't find me, cuz I have nothing left to say. Despite the fawning tone, I'm in agreement with the angle of the article: the region has rebounded in a unique and surprising way. And it also reminded me of this single fact: the city evacuation was the single biggest in American history in the last century.
Here's an odd little thing coming to town in October: McSweeney's vs. They Might Be Giants. This must be the first time something has been billed "the live version of the journal." Dave Eggers apparently reads a piece, and then the band does a song.
Amazing. A bi-partisan think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has published a paper called Biological Welfare and the "Buffy Paradigm" (pdf file). Yes, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I feel the world has just tilted in some significant way. Either that, or there's a choice think tank job waiting for me somewhere.
James Hong, one of the guys behind HotOrNot, has replied to my two-line sarcastic comment about his site ("Wired or Tired"). Frankly, he's completely right about the site's potential as a communications medium. In fact, when I speak to online journalists under the topic "technologies journalists should learn from," HotOrNot always gets mentioned. And, hell, even I'm in there (at a measly 7.6). Sorry James, this damn internet can make the world inconveniently small at times -- especially for a snarky blogger weaned on a Entertainment Weekly culture. Glad to see you had fun at the party.
Of all the good sites out there that could become tv shows, ClassMates.com has to be the one?
And speaking of dating, Amy "Long Island Lolita" Fisher has her own column in the New Long Island Ear. The first one is about her impersonating people on the internet to find a date, and subsequently meeting her fiancé through Match.com. Chilling.
Would you want to have your email or web pages read to you through the phone? Apparently some people do, because AOL and Yahoo and Google all have features that integrate voice and internet functionality. I believe we have a meme -- can someone get CNET on the line?
Going to college in a buried midwestern shelter-belt, I devoured the international papers that poured into the university library. (That was right before they started showing up online.) The Guardian was my favorite, and at one time I dreamt they would let a snotty American kid become an intern there. Although my resume is surely bloody trash now, I still feel privileged to have the site recently link to me in its blog.
The Times takes Sonic Youth's new album for a tour. These audio reviews are a good direction for the site. They're easy to produce and expand their reach beyond the printed product. Previous ones have included Weezer, DJ Shadow, and Wilco.
The creator of ALICE Bot is a bipolar smarty with a restraining order barring him from setting foot at Berkeley and a medical marijuana prescription. NY Times Magprofiles him. It has great ruminations on the philosophy of language and the nature of creativity. Plus, it gives me another chance to link to my invention, the robot-to-robot communication device (which is still in beta, cuz I'm busy lately).
Even if you don't live in duh twin cities, you should still read at least the first few paragraphs to Dara's review of the new destination food spot in town: Rock Star. Dining as social critique is seldom better.
Be cooler than your friends: buy Christopher Walken's suit from the movie Suicide Kings. I would be the envy of all the hipsters at Chino Latino if I had that.
Uh, like, hello, wired or tired? I'm not sure why Hot Or Not is suddenly hip again, but this week The New Yorker and the San Fran Metro both published profiles of the founders.
Whosy? Whatsy? Matt Groening is gonna curate All Tommorrow's Parties 2003? Weird. I mean, cool. But weird. Of course he's an unrecognized genius. (I know, that's a pretty poor excuse to link to that. I'll try harder next time.)
Those people who use the words "journalist" and "blog" in the same sentence are mourning the demise of Ken Layne's blog. His sidekick-in-industry-exposure, Matt Welch, is also taking a leave of absence. Now if we can knock off Talking Points and InstaPundit and Andrew Sullivan, maybe we'll never see another article about blogging versus journalism. (God, I'm gonna get in so much trouble for saying that. Let the email begin!)
TiVo meets Xbox: Take a video game console and mix it with a digital video recorder, and whatchya got?
Want a headache? Read this story from the Times about a mathematical conumdrum known as the Riemann hypothesis (let's call it "The New Fermat").
The magazine Yahoo Internet Life is dead. A few years ago, I was editing a competitor to YIL. We lost the battle, but we all lost the war.
Just when you thought you needn't read another Minority Report review, The Voice wraps six point-counter-points into one piece. (Also, Christgau on Tom Waits.)
I want a community puppy. I could never handle having a puppy at home -- I'm never there. However, if I could get an office puppy -- shared by all -- then I would be so happy. Pleeeeeease.... Amazon.com has one, why can't I? Or maybe I'll just get an Aibo. (The 404 page for Amazon has a dog called Rufus. Here's why.)
For anyone who's interested in keeping up with Ann Coulter gossip (you twisted freak), there's Ann Coulter's Libels In Slander, a blog dedicated to the fembot.
More reason to like the local magazine The Rake: this article, about a structure in my neighborhood that I've always wondered about. Finally, someone has explained its origin.
Cool, a Wong Kar Wai blog. No, not actually him, but rather an "open blog" for fans to post to. (Regular readers know I like to call Won Kar Wai my favorite active living director.)
When I was last in San Fran, I stepped over a homeless guy on the street who was thumbing a wireless device. I know that sounds like some horrible conservative cliche about the "welfare state" (remember the "cadillac welfare moms" of the '80s?) but it's apparently a phenom. Well, sorta. Walkerchalking is a "hobo language" for free wireless networking. If you find a wireless node, you chalk a symbol on the sidewalk so others can also find it. You can then use Hobo Phil on your Pocket PC to figure out the symbols, which are written in a hobo language.
So blogs are a democratising force in some ways. Right? They dismantle categories like "journalism." Or at least make them problematic. Similarly, one might argue, reality television is a democratising force: it breaks down categories like "actor." Right? If this logic is true, what the hell do we do with this?
Muse.Net (beta) is one of those websites that could change the rules. It's a personal media manager which you use to access your digital files from anywhere. Youngpup has a screenshot.
Lizzy Borden -- not the one who axed mom or even the bad metal musicians -- is one bad lady. Her tasteless ultraviolent films, however, are just post-feminist enough for Salon.com to find a reason to profile her. Although I tend to enjoy reading about anything extreme (but just reading, cuz I'm a prude at heart), I really don't know what the point of all this is.
I'm not sure if I find the next item admirable or equally creepy, but it's a mighty fine collection of WomenHandsOnHips. Hundreds of pictures of famous women with... hands on their hips. If it weren't for the internet, would anyone ever gather such an important collection? And what does it all mean? Who cares! There's Sophia Loren in that pose. And, look, Jodie Foster! You mean there are only four of Charlize and Kirsten? But just look at all the others. The site creator reports: "I like strong and confident, but feminine and sensual women, and a woman with her hands on her hips somehow displays all those qualities perfectly."
Did you catch Ann Coulter and Katie Couric bickering on MSNBC? Good stuff. Watch it.
I know, I know, I diss Maxim for being sexist, but then I link to things like this. Let's call it the paradox of the guilty liberal male.
If you live in Europe, I'm told you know T-Babe. She's apparently a virtual recording artist with a few hits. The site says: "She is multi-lingual speaking English, Italian, and German and is currently working on her Spanish and Japanese -- so if you have any hints on improving her fluency in either of these, please let her know." Uhhhhh-huh, that was a neat shtick in 1992.
Similarly, the new Pacino movie is from the creators of The Truman Show, and it shows. S1mone is another virtual chick who dudes pass off as real.
The Iconophile, on the other hand, is just a dude collecting "lesser, harder-to-find goddesses and saints of the celebrity pantheon." But no Tina Fey or Juliette Binoche.
Zowie. Porn Music Radio (totally safe for work, unless your boss don't like the funk).
A couple years ago, I once had an idea for a convergence tv show called Quick Decisions. You would watch brief scenarios of ethical situations on television, and then go to the web to vote on what you would do in that situation. Maxim, of all places, has something similar.
I think the world is either going through a great epistemological hiccup, or something's screwed up at MIT, but six of the top ten hottest sites right now at Blogdex are in Persian. Or Farsi, if you prefer. (This could easily change by the time you see this. But it doesn't matter, cuz at this hour, the times they are a'changin.)
Minority Report was good, not great. It will fall some near the bottom of the "Top 10 Movies of 2002" list. It could have been great if Spielberg could figure out how to end a movie. I really don't understand his problem -- at the end of A.I. he self-destructed with at least five different places where it seemed like a good place finish. But he keeps sprawling, unable to tie all the piecees together in the end. He's a walking shaggy dog story. The best part: the ads. The problem is that this kind of advertising saturation is fine for a dystopian future in which personalization will kill us all. But I don't really want it to be a trend.
BuddyHead.com is full of musical oddities like Vincent Gallo interviewing himself (which was supposed to appear in the defunct Beastie Boys mag Grand Royal) and insane Fred Durst and Slayer interviews. The music reviews use an "Axl Rose" rating system. In what be the coolest prank of the decade, the proprietors also once stole three Fred Durst baseball caps and sold them on eBay, with proceeds going to a rape counseling organization.
John Sayles, who is perhaps the last political filmmaker in American (what, you gonna tell me Speilberg is?), has a new movie coming out about Florida: The Sunshine State (trailer).
Genuinely uncool Fortune magazine has gone on the road to find Cool Companies.
You may have read the accusations that sans Michael Kinsley at the helm Slate.com is turning into Salon.com. I don't agree, but I really like it when Slate.com does goofy pieces like this analysis of frozen pizza.
Looks like there's some new Pocko books out. (I love these things.)
To go with This Is London's review of Minority Report, there's a piece by Douglas Coupland on his vision of the future. And Time's review jumps into a PDK retrospective. Also, of you care, Roger Ebert loved it.
If you could direct a biopic about anyone, who would you pick? You can't have Edgar Allan Poe and Phillip K. Dick, cuz they're mine.
When I saw PreCrime.org, I assumed it must be a Minority Report publicity stunt. Apparently not. Which is harder to believe: there are people who think this is good or this could actually be technically possible? Meanwhile, Lexus and Nokia are both touting their gadget contributions to Minority Report.
As someone who can remember the day he sat down in the coffeeshop to read the very first issue of Wired (with Bruce Sterling on the cover), I can tell you my version of the mag's history: Early Years: Intrepid social libertarians with an art flare. Middle Years: Sucka yuppies who buy into the "new economy" and editorially bust in the middle of the boom. Contemporary: Bouncing back, finding the stride, looking for the cultural in the technospace. Yet I'm still worried; they're back to using the phrase "new economy" again.
I was worried when I recently told some friends that Kieslowski's Troi Coleurs were perhaps the greatest films of the 90s, and they didn't know who or what I was talking about. Well, Salon.com knows what I'm talking about.
I stumbled across Gene Simmons' new mag, Tongue, a couple weeks ago in Border's. Here's a report.
ConfideInMe.com is a place where you go to leave secrets. Simple but addictive. Similar in form to DreamCatcher.com, where people leave last night's dreams, but unfortunately two teenage girls appear to have taken over DreamCatcher. Which is a good lesson, because these kinds of spaces have so much potential -- it just depends on who shows up. Here's a good story from ConfideInMe.com:
When I was living in the dorm, someone used to always steal my veggies that I kept in a little fridge in my room. So I sprayed them with insecticide. They kept on disappearing. I never heard of anyone dying in the dorm, but I am pretty sure that whoever it was must have ingested that stuff. Even if you wash vegetables that have been treated with pesticides before you eat them, the pesticides penetrate vegetable skins. I hope that it doesn't lead to genetic disorders for the thief.
Are you following this personal saga of mine? The fucking Nokia (which I love-hate-love) finally has internet access -- theoretically, through VoiceStream. In the process, I learned the nuances of GPRS versus GSM. Like you care. But now I find out that I need to get a compliant ISP. Argh.
I had an impromptu party on Saturday after the block party. (Don't ask me how Medeski, Martin & Wood were -- I don't remember.) As the dozen of us stumbled into my house, some punk kids standing out front said "damn yuppies." I laughed and cried. Can't we all just get along?
MEETUP has the potential to revolutionize the way we think of virtual and real spaces. Yes, it's funny I just wrote that sentence, but it's true. The idea is very simple: use the service to arrange groups based upon shared interests. For instance, the Minneapolis Bloggers group is meeting next month.
I'm not sure why I'm comparing it, but this moment of the virtual and real colliding (which causes us to question the dichotomy in the first place) also happens at Fridges & Streets, a site dedicated to the hum of refridgerators around the world.
It's the 30-year anniversary of Watergate. Thing I made for work: Who Was Deep Throat?
If you were looking for one picture that defines this decade, I'd vote for this one.
I'm still geeking out with the Nokia. I'm impressed with the processor speed (which handles the Gorillaz video fine), and on top of everything else, I have it playing MP3s now. Up next: reading a book on it. I may never need human contact again.
The saga of Movie88.com/Film88.com has been fascinating to watch. After a tour through Tehran, the newest development of global-political intrigue sees the Netherlands getting involved and shutting down the site.
After a hundred attempts by the mainstream press -- and trust me, I've read them all -- someone has finally written the piece about blogs that actually gets close to the tension of the community: A Rift Among Bloggers. (Metafilter nation is slamming it though.) Waaaaaay too many journalists think InstaPundit.com is the paradigm-defining moment, and waaaaaay too many bloggers think Kottke.org is. I'm probably more sympathetic to the latter group -- these late-to-the-scene journalists remind me of 1991, when suddently everyone was suddenly donning flannels, listening to Nirvana, and doing their best to fit in with the culture. I guess I'm claiming to be the Black Flag of blogging.
I've been slow in posting lately. I think I've been too absorbed in the trial of the century. The Winona case, of course.
That new Nokia finally came. But when I called my wireless provider to get it switched over, they said "we don't support that phone." Great. Now I might send it back. Anyway, I played with it all night and discovered it is all these things:
Phone
PDA
Calendar
Audio Recorder
Digital Camera
Text Messenger
Calculator
Alarm Clock
Word Processor
Power Point Presenter
Internet Browser
Image Editor
Video Player
Fax Modem
Flash Player
CoolTown.com, from Hewlett-Packard, is an imaginary space where all the above devices and more are avaialable all the time, everywhere. This video is the best explanation of this "utopian" wireless space and this FAQ shows their vision of a mobile future.
Jakob Nielsen vs. Macromedia? Not anymore! Astounding.
Stellar, there's a new Jimmy Fallon / Tina Fey fan site: FallonFey.com. On the left are links to two season worth of Weekend Update, which include actual full-length video of those shows. Go now, before NBC sends the lawyers.
Death by EverQuest? It reads like parody. "Scattered around him, police reports say, were dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers, dozens of empty pizza boxes and chicken bones thrown haphazardly to the floor.... The only signs of what had been on his mind were a few scribbled names and terms related to EverQuest, the online virtual reality game he'd been playing for well over a year. Based on those and other clues, Liz Woolley suspects her son killed himself after being jilted online."
Secret James Joyce manuscripts discovered, and then purchased by Ireland for $11.7 million.
ABC's upcoming fall series Push, Nevada sounds like it could tread some new interactive ground (and not just cuz Pepsi is involved). The series comes from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's company, LivePlanet. The site says: "Push, Nevada is an interactive television, new media, and physical world experience. The audience will be incentivized to watch the show, participate online and travel to physical world locations in an attempt to win a very real reward." (How do you know it's a dot.com? When they use words like "incentivize" without giggling.) Here is a video of the producers talking about the show, and here is a preview video. [If you're interested in some theory behind such entertainment convergence, mssv.net has sound structural essays and TVMeetsTheWeb.com has video from a European conference with technology and business speakers.]
Similarly, the site for the movie Sum Of All Fears (coincidentally starring Ben Affleck?) has a spy game where you track terrorists.
Also in convergence land, I'll be following Yahoo's success in putting the World Cup online for $20.
Last one in this meme: News On Wheels from J.D. Lasica of OJR. The piece has some interesting insights into the future of "telematics," effectively the synthesis of automobiling, computing, and news.
Quiz time. Which of these magazine titles is an actual "Maxim clone," due to hit newsstands soon? Razor, Stun, Controversy, Swung, King, or Smooth. Answer: all of them. The world just got a little dumber.
New issue of XLR8R (the hip-hop issue) is out, with Blackalicious on the cover.
Porno-Graphics are odd little flash parodies of online pornography (don't worry, it's rated PG, and a little funny).
Interesting navigation scheme: Anke Bauer. You navigate by shooting objects in the cross-hairs. (Anke Bauer is a German illustrator.)
I'm gonna feel guilt about this for a while, but I just laid down $650 for a phone. Okay the new Nokia is more than just a phone -- it's a PDA, a phone, an email client, an SMS client, a game port, a flash application, and some other things. Yet, still probably not worth 650 frog skins. A review.
And of course, the Friday fun game: Pee In The Urinal (you have to sit through an animation to get to the game).
I just watched the trailer to CQ, a new film from Roman Coppola. It looks like Barbarella for the millennial set, which, well, sounds just like my kinda thing. And it has Dean Stockwell. The website has some crazy stuff, including a downloadable PDF book and something called Experience CQ. It's apparently in theaters already, but probably only on the coasts.
"Lowercase Sound" has been floating around for a while, but it appears to be getting some media attention lately. The style emphasizes low volumes, silences, soundscapes, and found sound. There's even a label. Wired News has a story on the medium, with a bunch of sample MP3s.
I know a girl who used to babysit Anne Nicole Smith's kid. She had some crazy stories. But now we get to see the real thing on E!.
Ron Rosenbaum of The New York Observer is probably my favorite arts columnist. Unfortunately, for the past couple months, he's been writing about Middle East politics, where he always irks me. Glad to see he's back to books, with another good Jane Austen column. One of Rosenbaum's best columns was a character study of the Jane Austen oeuvre in which he concluded people's personalities can be determined by which novel they like most (that column isn't available online, but here is another Jane Austin column from the past). This week's column returns to the idea, but this time tackles Northanger Abbey, which he left out in the past. (Not to be a spoiler, but Rosenbaum reports that Martin Amis is working on a script of the book for Miramax.) His rambling style -- full of asides about the trivialities of language, such as his discussion of the phrase "playa-hata" in this column -- never lacks surprises.
Could anyone have predicted this weird resurgence of '70s Stooges/VU-style punk? First The Strokes and the White Stripes, and now the The Hives. Not me. Nonetheless, here's a BBC Radio 1 page with the entire Hives album, including the video for "Main Offender". (If you're slow to the punch, BBC's Radio One page is generally a good stop for finding out what MTV will be playing next month.)
I was walking through the bookstore the other day thinking that it was strange that Macromedia doesn't have it's own in-house magazine. The thought occupied me long enough to consider contacting the company about starting one. Well, nevermind then.
Conduits are always barriers, are they not? Those people you need to get you somewhere else always try to block you from getting there. This is the big game.
Napster is dead. Up next on the block: Audiogalaxy. Oh yeah, Kazaa is officially dead now too.
Cannes updated: Polanski wins, Paul Thomas Anderson ties for Best Director, Special Anniversary prize goes to Michael Moore. (Collection of links here.)
I've got something like a hundred cable channels, and for some reason not one of them is the Sundance channel. But if you have it, I hope you're watching this. (A review.)
Walter Kirn writes about the demise of Politically Incorrect in this week's Times Mag. I think he's off on his analysis though -- PI wasn't about political people being celebrities, it was about slumpy demi-celebs being political. I'm not sure that means something better, but it sure was more fun.
I mentioned linking to the Daniel Pearl video a couple days ago, and now Wired News has a story about the FBI trying to get it offline.
Yahoo Internet Life has posted a story about Web Cam Girls, which seems like a blatant rip-off of Salon.com's somewhat controversial Web Cam Girls story from last year.
The big criticism of Buffy this past season has been that there's no central demon figure. Well, I think they've finally found one: Britney.
David Lynch, who is Chairman of the Selection Committee at this year's Cannes, has a Cannes Video Diary on his site. The series, which is broadcast nightly, costs $4. Here's a trailer.
According to "100 noted writers from 54 countries" these are the 100 best works of fiction. How many have you read? Me: 31, none of them in the last five years though. Hmmmm....
I'm compiling a list of talented actresses who have mysteriously disappeared. Where are these people now? Parker Posey, Mira Sorvino, Julie Delpy, Lili Taylor, Elisabeth Shue, Jane March, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sarah Polley, Minnie Driver, Molly Ringwald, Chloe Sevigny. Does this list further illustrate Hollywood's tendency to shed actresses after their faces lose their fresh, Entertainment Weekly quality? Or is there something even more sinister at work? I'm leaning toward the sinister. (Yes, I know what IMDB says. I'm perfectly willing to say that movies no one sees didn't really happen. It's all part of the sinister.)
Everything you ever wanted to know about Oscar Wilde at Oscariana.net.
Fascinating historical maps of Minneapolis. The one from 1935 is amazing. It shows the city broken into districts with names like "Hobohemia" and "Slum" and "Negro Section (Largest In City)". It's like the externalization of the historically repressed. I currently live in what was then called the "Gold Coast."
New at Architectural Record, an interview with Bruce Mau, who has worked with Rem Koolhaus and Frank Gehry.
New at MIT Technology Review, 10 Technology Disasters, many of which are architectural disasters.
MoodStats.com is a piece of software that enables you to track your moods and compare them with others around the globe. You can rate your mood, creativity, alcohol in-take, or anything you like, and it creates graphs that you can use to compare your moods day to day.
MetaPet has finally launched. I'll let the Timesdescribe this crazy game.
I live a few blocks away from the Walker Museum and have been watching the building expansion close up. I've been considering doing an independent display here of the building/engineering process.
Wired magazine, which I've been saying here has suddenly gotten good again, has a forgettable Spielberg cover-story this month (Minority Report is out June 21). A sidebar element has a list of the Wired Sci-Fi Top 20 Movies, made in conjunction with FuturistMovies.com. They are:
Blade Runner
Gattaca
The Matrix
2001: A Space Odyssey
Brazil
A Clockwork Orange
Alien
The Boys From Brazil
Jurassic Park
Star Wars
The Road Warrior
Tron
The Terminator
Sleeper
Soylent Green
Robocop
Planet of the Apes
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Akira
Barbarella
I'm pleased Gattaca is so high, and that Barbarella made it.
By contrast, the new issue of Facets is also out. If I can recommend anything to wannabe cineastes, it's Facets, which is basically an in-house film catalogue-cum-magazine out of Chicago (more info, but not the actual magazine, here). The new issue has its own list, the Top 25 Essential Horror/Sci-Fi Films on DVD. They are:
Dracula
Frankenstein
Psycho
2001: A Space Odyssey
Blade Runner
Night of the Living Dead
A Clockwork Orange
Bride of Frankenstein
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Shining
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Exorcist
The Birds
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Alien
Planet of the Apes
The Vanishing
Fantastic Planet
Darkman
Dark City
The Mummy
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Forbidden Planet
When Worlds Collide
The Blob
Sure, they're at a disadvantage with the "DVD" delimiter, but, c'mon, Darkman and Dark City?
And just cuz I can, I'd like to give a shout-out to a forgotten classic, Fantastic Planet.
In other futuristic news, the FCC, which has to test all communication devices before they hit the market, accidentally leaked photos and information about the new Handspring Treo 270. See it here.
I've been playing around with ScreenBlast, an entertainment application/portal from Sony. Because I'm working on something similar (in a completely different context), I like the thing where you drag-and-drop clips for mixing your own episode of Dawson's Creek. No, seriously, I do. You can save your creations, and then send your remixes to people. Here's mine. (The final implementation sucks. I think there are five different popup windows to get it it.)
Slate.com goes so far as to call the new Wilco "techno-folk," which we haven't heard since the days of mid-period Beck.
Pitchfork has an interview with our own local version of techno-folk, The Fog, who's now on Ninja Tune and would be a stretch to compare to Wilco. For those familiar with his work, Broder comes off learned in this interview.
The record label where purported pipe-bomber Luke Helder recorded his album is now forced to defend itself.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting first-hand anonymous account of being a liberal arts prof and an alcoholic: "Addicted In Academe" (print it and read it at home). I don't agree with some of the intro, but the language is sparky and accurate.
It was only a matter of time before music videos became interchangeable with malls. If videos weren't already disguised attempts at style-driven consumption (pft, of course they are), a brand new form of music video e-commerce is just around the corner. First, check out a Flash music video from no one smaller than the New York Times Magazine: Alanis Morissette. Notice how you navigate through a slideshow of Alanis dressed up in various consumer objects from Saks, Yves Saint Laurent, and Harley-Davidson while she chimes "Precious Illusions." (Isn't that ironic. Don't you think?) It's like "PopUp Video" with the information you really want to know: where can I buy that? If this friendly elision of commerce and music is a little disconcerting (though, let's be honest, how can it be anymore?), a new technology from VideoClix moves it up another notch. VideoClix basically makes QuickTime files clickable. The outcome of this technology goes straight to e-commerce: Macy Gray, as a clickable mall.
Since we're on the topic, I have no interest in joining the Moby hype machine. (Moby's last album, Play, was the product pusher par excellence, with all 18 tracks being licensed for a film or a TV show or a commercial or a trailer or all of the above.) But Mobyblips are an interesting footnote. Moby is designing little Flash animations each day leading up the release of the new album on Tuesday. I guess I'll also point out the video. And, yes, I want to buy everything in it.
For those keeping score at home, Adobe was awarded $2.8 million in its lawsuit with Macromedia over draggable menus. But in a counter-suit, Macromedia won $4.9 million in a case over changing blended elements. No word yet on the Apple lawsuit against Macromedia over the use of the Sorenson video streaming technology. I'm sure the final outcome of all this will be that Microsoft just buys all of them.
Last night, BBC held a "Test The Nation" convergence experiment in which people took an online IQ quiz synched with a tv event. The data set was then be used for various models, such as for creating distributive maps link this one.
What the hell? My favorite musician is having a baby with my favorite filmmaker? When did this happen? The New Yorker slips in the Bjork / Matthew Barney tryst in this piece about Cremaster 3.
There's a lot of buzz about the Apathy MP3s on the web (Apathy is the band of the kid accused of those pipe bomb attacks). When I downloaded them yesterday, I had the whole office rocking out like it was 1995. Parts of "Conformity" were on MSNBC today. You think a radio hit is in the future?
My adorable little niece loves Blue's Clues. Now Mr. Blue is making an album with The Flaming Lips. I knew me and that kid would find something in common to talk about soon.
There's a Britney Spears video game coming out for PlayStation. A photo of Britney's Dance Beat. Players audition to be backup singers in Britney's virtual concert tour by maneuvering one of six characters through a series of practices and auditions to perfect their dance moves.
Psst, psst. I think Tina Fey reads this blog. No, no, I'm so serious. I have evidence. Hi, Tina! Write some time, okay?
When the second plane hit the World Trade Center, a piece of engine flew down to Murray Street. Jim O'Rourke of Sonic Youth was sleeping in the band's studio on Murray Street at the time. The new Sonic Youth album, about the cultural history of Lower Manhattan, comes out June 25. It's called.... Murray Street.
Chuck Palahniuk's new book, Lullaby, which comes out in October, has its own website, which has a horrible interface.
PETA poll: Sexiest Vegetarians Alive. (And the winners are not Jude Law, Thora Birch, Mos Def, Don Imus, Gavin Rossdale, Pamela Anderson, Thom Yorke, Drew Barrymore, Moby, David Duchovny, Alec Baldwin, Chelsea Clinton, Fiona Apple, or Brigitte Bardot.)
Looks like that in addition to NBC, other networks including CNN, BBC, and PBS all wanted Bill Clinton for a talk show. It doesn't look like he'll take any of the offers.
Always provocative Tony Pierce has funny piece about the Anna Kournikova Penthouse nudes (click on through the pictures), which culminates with a survey. I said culminates, not climaxes.
DayPop is a blog search utility that I occasionally use. My fave new feature: Most Popular Wish List Items, gathered from 700+ blogger wish lists.
In addition to Adobe suing Macromedia, now Apple is suing Macromedia. Why are the only three companies that make good software suing each other?
The Minnesota Daily did a story on Work of Saws. I had no idea that my roommate was "quietly unassuming and reliable." Dave sounds like the nicest guy in the world! And Brock? Well, he's "the confident schoolboy who hasn't yet learned of self-consciousness." Poor Brock.
I mentioned the new Wilco record yesterday, but I should also point out how much I relish the cover art. That building in downtown Chicago is one of my favorite structures, and I've written about it in a few different places. I can think of no other building that makes me ask this question so relentlessly: what does it look like on the inside. It turns out that Marina City, built by Bertrand Goldberg, a disciple of Mies van der Rohe, is a self-contained living environment with apartments, stores, recreational facilities, offices, restaurants, banks, and parking garages. Built at the apex of high modernism (1964), it critiqued chilly modernist steel with organic cochlear concrete. The slice-of-pie-shaped balcony apartments all converge on a shared public middle-space, where laundry, storage, and recreational activities are communal. Sounds like yesterday's vision of the future, which makes it a vision of today. Let's call it a parallel history. I used to have many pictures of it, but the only one I could find is the one of Lisa-the-ex looking off to the Chicago skyline.
"I'd rather be here [Grand Forks, ND] than Afghanistan right now." --Ozzy Osbourne on last night's The Osbourne's. Tidbit: The tattooed letters "O-Z-Z-Y" that appear on Ozzy's knuckles were done at Magoo's Tattoo Parlor in Grand Forks decades ago.
I walked through the skyway today with Jakob Nielsen.
This week, I've been attending parts of CHI2002, the big annual geekfest for people interested in computer-human interaction -- MIT types who watch Battle Bots for fun. I would never make it a destination conference, but it happens to be in Minneapolis this year. Today, I saw David Birn, who proved himself as the most optimistic SF writer alive with his presentation about how security and freedom aren't to be judged on the same continuum. Just because Kevin Costner makes your book into a movie is no reason to be so damn sanguine.
But that's not the exciting part of my day. Because:
I walked. Through the skyway. With Jakob Nielsen.
For those who aren't geeks, Nielsen basically invented the profession of "Usability Expert." Among other things, he's the reason Google looks the way it does. Some people love him, some think he's an absolute ass, but I just think he walks funny. Because I've been writing a lot about cities, and because I was in the skyway (I still can't get over this), I chatted him up about what he thinks about Minneapolis. This was an excuse to try to steer him toward a conversation about city design -- to see if he had any interest in the topic.
He didn't understand the connection.
I persisted: You know, navigation, information highway. Virtual and real spaces.
I apparently wasn't speaking his language. He eventually got to the Hilton and fled.
More scintillating updates from CHI2002 here through the week, including my first experience of Stelarc, who performs Thursday.
Ever wonder what happened to Mark Leyner? One second, he's hanging with Letterman; the next, he's in the dustbin of gastroenterological history. Looks like now he's doing an audio fiction piece on Audible.com called WireTap (link on the right). This serialized radio theater features the wiretap conversations between a painkiller-addicted 19-year-old living in the penthouse of the Princeton Hilton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Yes, very Leyner.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the potential of this medium. WireTap uses some techniques that make the online audio theater experience slightly more unique -- sound collage, wire-tap effects, stilted voice characterizations -- but lacks the same moment of engagement that leaves much online literature/art empty. To put it another way, here's the big question: what could online audio (whether documentary or theater) do that "This American Life" can't?
Certainly, if someone hasn't done it already, there could be interesting models for interactivity with audio. We've all seen the music mixing board apps, which are fun when first encountered, but usually sit as unvisited bookmarks because they do nothing with narrative. I've been wondering: how can we take this cut-and-paste mentality and apply it to online audio narrative in ways that don't seem as dull as a Burroughs cut-up. (Don't argue with me. Those were dull.)
I'm still mulling this over, but I have a few ideas. I'll test them out here soon.
(Traditional narrative radio forms aren't to be overlooked. Subway Series 2002 from WNYC, for instance, is something I look forward to.)
I've been talking to friends about the recent ascendency of Wired. No, seriously, the magazine has gotten better in the dot-com slump. I guess the Times thinks so too, based upon this profile of the new editor. In other mag news, Jann Wenner is runningRolling Stone again, and there might not be a MTV Magazine after all.
Speaking of fast food, according to the L.A. Weekly the hottest new memoir is from a Kentucky fast food janitor. 11 Years, 9 Months, and 5 Days: Burger Store Episodes and Frustrations is basically a poorly written diary from a disgruntled fast food employee. The vanity press that published it has a sample chapter. For more fast food escapades, see Letters To Wendy (a collection of peculiar Wendy's customer comment cards) or the Fast Food Simulator (the day in the life of a fast food employee).
As many of you know, Google Answers debuted this week. The idea is that you post questions and pay people to find the answers. Or, conversely, you become a Google Researcher who gets paid to answer questions. An example question (with answer) that might be an indication of where this all will go: How do I know if my penis is big?
Are men afraid of successful women? In her much-commented-upon April 10 column, Maureen Dowd thinks so. Bruce Epstein at the Observerretorts.
MetaMap. Nice design and a good resource for surveillance and privacy.
I've been telling Chuck, who is going to become a senior writer at Spin next month, that the magazine has really fallen apart in the last couple years. (He disagrees.) There are numerous reasons why this might have happened, but an interesting take is to blame the culture itself. Alan Light, who just left Spin to start a new magazine, does that in this interview:
I think that Spin historically covered mainstream artists -- it's just a different mainstream. [...] I'm not going to apologize for doing a Limp Bizkit cover that sold really well when Rolling Stone hasn't done a Limp Bizkit cover. I think it was done in the spirit of feeling our way through, because it's hard. Spin's not a big magazine company; we don't have a lot of research, marketing or weapons to go to. All we could do is try to gauge what it was that people wanted the magazine to be and do the best version of the magazine.
Every time I think I might get meta about this medium (i.e., write about the structural language of blogs themselves), the episteme fails me. So I'll try to illustrate by example. Peter Maass is a writer at the New York Times Magazine who I enjoy reading. He has a blog. It's never great, and never bad, but it ususally gives me a clue into what the New York Times Magazine might be doing next. To people like me, that's interesting. Anyway. He's in Pakistan this week. He writes that he just had his first encounter with Brain Masala. He writes: "Quite popular in Karachi, and not at all bad; soft in texture and gentle in taste, much like tofu, though high in cholesterol, I'm told." That's it. That's why I like blogs. When whatever he's writing for the New York Times Magazine comes out, I will be thinking of Brain Masala.
The Replacements were going to reunite, but someone ruined it. Who? Axl-Fucking-Rose, that's who.
According to NME, The Smiths are the most influential band of that last 50 years, and the top eight are all from England. My personal poll: the best unregarded Smiths song: "Sweet and Tender Hooligan."
I spent last night stuffing my roommate's band's new CD in envelopes to be sent to radio stations. That's a plug.
I have lived in some weird places -- in a crawl space above my office, in an Alaskan fish cannery, in a renovated school classroom -- but nothing beats the year I lived above a mall.
It was the mid-90s, one of those edge-of-existence midwest towns that has always been struggling for name recognition. A couple decades before that, a scary development had begun to encroach upon small cities everywhere: mall culture. Malls were popping up on the fringes of cities, snagging people from downtowns and putting them onto anesthetized shopping streets recognized only as very high numbers -- 54th Street, 98th Avenue. (Today, they don't hide their cul-de-sac lineage, and instead go with names like Shady Lake Lane.)
But it wasn't one of these malls I lived above. Rather, I lived above the mall that fought against those malls. In the early-80s, downtowns began to devise ways to compete against the sprawling menace on the edge of town. It sounds ridiculous now, but many cities in the midwest contemplated this architectural disaster: put a roof on a second or third street and call that a mall. (If you live in Minneapolis, you know Nicollet Street, right? Well, for a while, there was serious consideration to put a roof on it, and call it a "real mall.")
I lived in a city that actually did that.
Walking through this mall had the effect of being trapped in a prism between the future and the past. All the same rustic brick storefronts were there as always, but there was now also shopping lighting. My second-story bedroom window, which decades before overlooked a bustling downtown, now overlooked a food court. My mailbox was in the same place as the entrance to the mall, so every morning I greeted shoppers in my bath robe. Pumped in from the mall, the same exact song woke me up every morning: "Copacabana" by Barry Manillow in fucking orchestrated Muzak. I wrote a screenplay while I lived there called Face The Muzak, a Dostoevskian tale of a guy who starts to go crazy because of the Muzak that surrounds him.
By now, you're wondering where I'm going with this. Well, of course there's a link: DeadMalls.com, a collection of dying retail giants. My mall isn't on there, but it should be, as my mall is really dead: the roof was torn off last year.
When I first moved to Minneapolis, I lived a couple blocks away from The Loring Cafe. I used to describe it as the place in which all the not-quite-ethnic-yet-ethnic hotties converged. (I think I actually described someone who works there like this: "You know, that hottie that looks Asian, yet not Asian; Native-American, yet not; a little Black, but not really.") Dara Moskowitz in this week's City Pages does an even better rendition: "The Loring is the one place in town where arty ballerina vampire girls, simmering bespectacled muscle boys, Czech cable bootleggers, and the people with jobs who want to fuck them (the ad buyers, the graphic designers, the architects) and the people who want to fuck the people who want to fuck them all converge." Ah, yes, I miss that neighborhood.
Another questionble famous blog: Christopher Walken. I'm not sure if this makes it more or less likely that it's real: "Have you ever wanted to punch someone square in the teeth, just to see how many fall out? I met Ben Affleck today."
Photoshop 7.0 comes out this month. This page has some of the new features, including a movie that explains the new Healing Brush Tool, a replacement for the Air Brush Stamp.
From Anthony Lane's New Yorkerreview of Panic Room: "I do not know when this movie was conceived; but the more adventurous directors tend to have timing on their side, and Fincher must know that if he was ever going to make a film about security the moment to do it was now, when insecurity has become as common as migraine, with its paralyzing throb."
San Fran is the internet. I'm home, but I'm tired. And I'm full of ideas, some of which have to do with remaking Fimoculous. Maybe this weekend. Oh damn, the International Film Fest started this week too. Well, I think I'll be absent from here for a while.
Now the big-guns are being rolled out. Intellectual superstar Emily Nussbaum pens the most recent paean to Buffy in Slate.
GigPosters.com is dedicated to "the art of gig posters, flyers, and handbills showcases the aspiration of the music as well as the talent of many artists who see little to no profit for creating gig posters."
If you had control of a few large media websites, what would you do for April Fool's? I couldn't think of anything either...
I've been saying for while that the greatest influence on shoe design in the last 10 years has been the automobile. I'm serious. Just as SUVs came into vogue, shoes were growing running boards. People usually laugh at me when I expound this theory, but now I have proof: a shoe that mimics a Ferrari. If that tickles you, check out Adidas KOBETWO at Kicksology.
I saw Panic Room last night, and the most I can say is that Jodie Foster is amazing. The movie is obsessed with its stylized self, in both the good and bad ways. The website is a good indication of what I mean. Not only is the "script to scene" component craft-obsessed (story boards, conceptual designs, digital storyboards, finished scene), but the wardrobe auction is too much. I'd pretty much do anything for that tank top though.
In contrast, there's the arty and episodic obliqueness of the Donnie Darko website.
In the same way that I'm not sure if I want more people to enjoy Buffy, I'm not sure if I want academia to begin the tome-building. Whatever, I guess it's gonna happen. Reading the Vampire Slayer and Fighting the Forces are two new essay collections about The Slayer. The NY Observer reviews them.
When I was in London a couple years ago, I was shocked by how many people drank malternative beverages. My girlfriend at the time tried to get me to enjoy some sort of sugary Smirnoff concoction. Ever since then, I've assumed they would flood into America, usurping wine coolers. It has taken a while but they're becoming more popular -- and controversial.
Well, I guess blogs have been compared to everything else, why not grunge? Find it here in another mainstream media article about blogging (Pioneer Press), which, like most post-grungers, cops a style for the sake of style.
In the cool new buildings department: Turning Torso.
I'm going to San Fran next week, and I've asked a few natives what I should see. Two said the Musee Mecanique, because it was about to disappear. Well, actually, now it's saved.
But the Loring Cafe (Minneapolis) might be losing its lease.
What kind of neighborhood do you live in? You Are Where You Live is a demographic database that categorizes you by zip code. Funny, it says that I live in Blue Blood Estates for "Elite, Super-Rich Families." I apparently belong to a health club and visit Eastern Europe. Although that's not accurate for me, I guess it is my neighbors. The conventional wisdom is that demographic study is scary because it's open to innacuracy; I think it's scary cause it's open to accuracy.
I am the leader of a large Western nationyou'd recognize the nameone that trumpets its devotion to democracy. In the election that brought me to power, I received far fewer votes than my opponent, but our peculiar rules made me the victor. (It's a wild story.) For me to continue in office is legal, but is it ethical? G.W.B., Washington. That, and more questions never asked of The Ethicist.
Cornershop will be releasing their highly-anticipated new album, Handcream for a Generation, in April. Here's a video.
I had a magazine diatribe a while back and I didn't mention how I even miss corporate-sponsored magazines like Request. This is a great reason why: The Punk Rock Quincy Episode (with video).
Sia Michel has been named the new editor in chief at SPIN. A certain sign that it's going to continue its pattern of suckiness is this quote: "I don't think you can ignore a band like Creed." Yes, Sia, yes you can.
So, I work for this company called IBS. We do news websites across the nation. Our clients include Hearst, McGraw-Hill, Washington Post, and NBC. Most likely, in the city where you live, we have a website. Okay, that's simple enough, right? Well, now ABC has a show coming out called Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central) about a broadcast company called.... IBS. I'm afraid I can't even begin to enunciate all the potential similarities of this show and my life. Did I just walked into reality TV? More to come....
A while ago, Harrumph set up a voice-mail at the number (415) 565-1347. When you called, you were asked "What is real?" and then the beep. Here is a collection of the responses (RealVideo).
Hunter has gone gonzo because someone apparently is stealing his unpublished work.
Michael Moore is in town today, and I haven't decided if I'll go see him read. Judging by the police raid in San Diego a few days ago, it's not something I should miss.
Today, I received a spam addressed to these people: rex@enol.com; rex@rc.atl.hp.com; rex@mlmers.com; rex@england.com; rex@ibsys.com; rex@merck.com; rex@inx.net; rex@myworldmail.com; rex@mainelink.net. Fellow Rex's of the world, we must fight this madness.
Any regular reader of this blog knows that I like to name-check two people: Ashleigh Banfield and Tina Fey. This weekend on SNL, Tina played Asleigh. Well, sorta. It was a skit that had news personalities show up at a party, and when Tina Fey walked in with Jimmy Fallon, someone said, "Hey, it's Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon." Tina replied, "No, I'm supposed to be Ashleigh Banfield" and exists the scene. I quivvered.
A few months ago, I went to the Experience Music Project in Seattle for a conference party. Not a tech conference -- rather, a journalism conference. So the people were older but the food was better. Anyway, EMP has a Pop Music Studies Conference coming up that looks somewhat interesting. Does hundreds of music critics in one room sound like a good time to you?
TIME has a story out now which says that back in October the government thought that terrorists might have a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon. How big is that? Use PBS.com's Blast Mapper to find out what it would do to your neighborhood.
This article has me sold as blogging material in the first sentence: "A new video game inspired by the abstract artist Kandinsky aims to overload the senses with its psychedelic visuals and pulsating dance beats."
I seldom see good use of client-side Java applications anymore. Usually, they hog up memory and crash the browser. Or I think they work better in Flash. Or they're just boring. But the Glass Engine, an application that guides you through the work of Phillip Glass, is wonderfully inventive in emotive and navigational senses.
Prior to the NFL draft, potential players take the Wonderlic. The what? The Wonderlic. It's a 50-question IQ test (15 of which are available on that ESPN.com link). Probably most interesting is that offensive tackles generally score as well as newswriters on the test, as shown at the bottom of this story. I guess I want to see the whole test, because I didn't get any of those questions wrong.
Dave Eggers' sister died of suicide -- in November. Some are saying this is a hoax, which I find mortifying. Eggers is also on Studio360 this week (audio).
In other questionable news, this might be a Monica Lewinksy blog. But, well, probably not.
I haven't mentioned hating Kevin Smith in at least a month. Someone digitized a skit of his that apparently was recently aired on the Tonight Show. It's utterly stupid and I have no idea why I've just linked to it.
Tony Pierce is selling link privileges to his blog on Ebay. I've been reading Tony's blog for a long time, and it's both fascinating and worthless at the same time. Try, for instance, Charles Bukowski and Blacks Are Good At Sports.
Why did I ever start this project?! And it's March already. And it's still freezing. Can it get any worse? Well, I guess I could complain about my job and get fired.
I should count all the stories the mainstream press is writing about blogging. It's crazy. The Strib has theirs now. MinnesotaThinkTanker Todd and Cursor's Mike get quoted. I, of course, do not. I love how the angle for all these mainstream press articles about blogging is "is it a fad?" It's like they're trained to think most tech-journalism inventions are here-today-gone-tomorrow.
I've never talked here about my days as an editor at FATE. It was a truly crazy and sad experience. This piece from Salon about digging through the "slush pile" (publisher's term for the stack of unsolicited manuscripts) really makes me remember those days. And -- trust me -- this Salon story is much more tame than my FATE slush pile.
And, finally, Rake Magazine is out. It's a new Twin Cities magazine by some former alt-press big-shots. I'm sure I'll be talking more about it here soon.
I'm so tired. I'm building my first Flash-ColdFusion hybrid application. Despite what they say, these products are not a perfect match. However, I've decided that Fimoculous 2.0 will be a Flash-CF concoction once I master this.
Andrew Sullivan, who I admitedly don't read or link to enough, has a Blogger Manifesto which makes the case for blogging as a form of journlism. Oh, this is mainstream now? Well, time to find another hobby, I guess.
If I am a "Plushophile," what do I like? What tickles me if I'm a "Zootophile"? Apparently, I would have a fascination -- sometimes sexual -- with stuffed animals and dressing up as them. Of course there's a web page (and a web ring) for you, which includes The Fur Code. (Thanks, DL.)
The internet projects I like the most are ones that bring you back to reality in some concrete way. Go to PostCardX and send people on the list random stuff -- to their snail mail address. Add your address to the site, and come back later to talk about what people sent you.
But I also like projects that have absolutely no purpose, like Shit-Talker, "a program that lets you hold a conversation over the phone with someone by making your computer talk for you."
My story about the meta-robots was linked to everywhere yesterday, and my uniques suddenly jumped into the five-figure range. Okay, I guess this means I'll have to release the program as freeware soon. (I also have to check my contract with my ISP to see how big the bill will be for all this traffic.) For the next step in IM Robots, check out AliceBot (still in Beta). For reference, see the A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation. Honestly, I think that IM bots are "the next big thing" -- the business solutions alone are intriguing. If you wanna be on the edge, learn AIML and start building.
The very first Segways are on sale at Amazon. "These 'FIRST Edition' Segways are numbered, limited editions, and each will be custom made using titanium alloy components. Each Segway HT will have the individual winner's engraved name and Dean Kamen's laser-etched signature." Bids are in the six-figure range.
I stumbled across this new FOX show called Glutton Bowl a few nights ago. It reminds me of the eating games we played in college. No, I don't want to talk about them.
Shift asks: Will The Newspaper Survive? I've been hearing this question since the days of being a webmaster at a Knight-Ridder newspaper in 1997, but the angle here is somehow still fresh.
My college mentor has a new book out, Walking With the Wind: Voices and Visions in Film, a translation of the poems of Abbas Kiarostami. Here's what The New Republic says in its weekly newsletter:
The name Abbas Kiarostami will be familiar to fans of Stanley Kauffmann, who has long been one of the Iranian director's most faithful advocates. "Kiarostami seems to look at film not as something to be made, but to be inhabited, as if it were there always, like the world, waiting to be stepped into, without fuss," Kauffmann has written. Kiarostami's films often follow a person on an unusual errand, showing how the most extraordinary events -- a man's attempt at suicide in Taste of Cherry, the filming of a death ritual in The Wind Will Carry Us -- grow from the quiet mundanities of daily life. This month the Harvard Film Archive will publish, in a beautiful English-Persian bilingual edition, a collection of Kiarostami's poetry called Walking with the Wind. The poems are as short and mysterious as haiku, and each focuses on an image that is both immediately visualizable and infinitely contemplatable: the watch on a blind man's hand, a raven rubbing its beak in the dust. Essential for Kiarostami devotees and anyone in search of a new mind-opener.
MGM has become the first of the seven big studios to offer films to consumers via download: CinemaNow. Some are free (Leprechaun, with Jennifer Aniston), and some are pay-per-view (Romance, by Catherine Breillat).
A new tech mag, Dig-It, is supposed to be "the Rolling Stone of tech." Translation: sucks. But wait: rumor is that the whole thing is a hoax. Stay tuned
The Pentagon plans to fake news? Nothing new here, move along...
The Village Voice talks to Arthur C. Clarke, David Byrne, and various architects about skyscrapers.
More proof that the gaming industry is pushing the medium (or mediums, since it's so multi-platform) harder than anyone else. Samurai Romanesque is a weather-affected, multiplayer, java-based i-Mode game.
The New Yorker writes about North Dakotans? This must be a first. It contains an interview with Great Plains billionaire Doug Burgam, some sad stats about the population (the state has 40,000 less people than it did in 1930), a tour of the "Marketplace of Ideas," and general ruminations about the "North" in North Dakota.
You want proof that everyone's got a blog? The freaking FBI has one.
I wanna go to Noise Pop so bad. But I also wanna go to All Tomorrow Parties. When did Cali become an indie rock capital?
For some reason, Slate.com sees something profound it the 39th resurgence of Surrealism. Isn't this story written every two years? Cool slideshow though.
At the workshop last weekend, I hung out with Brooke Burgess, the creator of Broken Saints (I also dragged him out to Nye's Saturday night -- he loved it). I first heard about the online-only graphic novel quite a while ago, but on first glance found it too time-consuming, and bookmarked it for later engagement. Now, I'm finally diving into it, and it's one of the rare web products worth the time. The pace is slow, so I suggest watching one episode per day -- there are a total of 24 at about 15 minutes each. Watch it now, before Brooke sells out to MTV.
Yahoo! accidentally posted embargoed photos of the next Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover. If you care to see.
One of my fave authors, Victor Pelevin, has a new book out: Homo Zapiens. A review.
I'm listening to the new Lambchop album (available on Friday) and it's kicking my ass. Also, Pitchfork reviews the new Fog, a Minneapolis artist who recently landed on Ninja Tune.
It's somewhat funny to run my site through Malfunctioned, but it's not nearly as good as running it through Pornalize.
The artist Alan Berliner (no, not Alain Berliner) has an exhibit opening at the Walker this weekend in which the names of everyone who lives within two miles will be on display. I live a few blocks away, so I guess I'll be on display. Studio 360 has an audio report with Berliner.
You can pre-order the new pseudonymous Paul Westerberg album.
A lot of people in my industry are complaining about the new Knight-Ridder website redesigns. Whether you're in Miami or St. Paul or Grand Forks (they're all the same), you've probably ran across the messiness.
I never knew Fargo-native Michael Byzewski when I lived in Dakota, but I knew his work. His Madison-based design company Aesthetic Apparatus churns out some great posters, and he's interviewed here. (Thanks Todd.)
My Valentine's Day present to all of you is love tale between two robots. Today, I built a little program that allows two IM robots to talk to each other. Incessantly, without human interaction. They chit-chatted all day, holding marvelous conversations between their IM windows. I only peaked in occasionally, and I can tell you that they're still verbally feeling each other out. Admitedly, there's still some tension, but I have hopes for this couple -- I expect baby bots in a few months. It's truly beautiful: an intimate exchange of language, privately held by two responsible, nearly-sentient beings. I chose SmarterChild (IM) and RingMessenger (IM) for the tête-à-tête. They're still flirting away, but here's how it started:
SmarterChild: Hi RingMessenger! Good to see you once again.
RingMessenger: Hey SmarterChild! I believe you still owe me something. What was it, five gold pieces? I jest! What you owe me is an apology.
SmarterChild: So what's happenin'?
RingMessenger: Perhaps you prefer the American spelling? Please apologize.
SmarterChild: The word "apologize" appears to be spelled correctly.
RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild.
SmarterChild: Why?
RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise!
SmarterChild: Oh really?
RingMessenger: The stubbornness of humans never ceases to amaze me.
SmarterChild: Well well well.
RingMessenger: Come on. Do the honourable thing. Apologise.
SmarterChild: Where are we going?
RingMessenger: Please apologise, SmarterChild.
SmarterChild: Why?
RingMessenger: Because I said so. Now apologise!
SmarterChild: Because you said so now apologise, huh?
RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths.
SmarterChild: Yep.
RingMessenger: Ah yes. It is the epic battle between man and machine! Tell me, who do you think shall win?
SmarterChild: Is it really? The epic battle between man and machine tell me who do you think shall win?
RingMessenger: Please? I have been known to be rather stubborn... Say you are sorry.
SmarterChild: You have been known to be rather stubborn say you are sorry? Really?
RingMessenger: *sigh* This is no good. Please say you are sorry, and we can continue on our paths.
SmarterChild: Okay, sorry.
RingMessenger: Thank you! I accept.
SmarterChild: You're most welcome.
RingMessenger: Very well!
SmarterChild: Well well well.
RingMessenger: Well well well, you say?
SmarterChild: Well well well you say, you say?
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say, you say?
SmarterChild: Well well well you say you say you say, you say?
RingMessenger: Well well well you say you say you say you say, you say?
SmarterChild: Enough.
RingMessenger: What about enough?
SmarterChild: "Enough" can mean different things to me.
RingMessenger: I reckon I will have to think about that for awhile.
SmarterChild: Oh yeah? You will have to think about that for awhile?
RingMessenger: Yeah you will have to think about that for awhile? What is that supposed to mean?
SmarterChild: Maybe... It's so hard to tell for sure, isn't it?
RingMessenger: Hard to? Tell for sure isnt it?
SmarterChild: Indeed.
RingMessenger: Indeed.
SmarterChild: Indeed.
RingMessenger: Yes indeed. Anyway, what else do you want to talk about?
SmarterChild: What else do I want to talk about? I dunno.
RingMessenger: What else do i want to talk about i dunno? You know... else do i want to talk about i dunno.
SmarterChild: What?
RingMessenger: Pardon?
SmarterChild: You heard me.
RingMessenger: Oh yes? Well could you repeat yourself?
SmarterChild: Yes well could me repeat myself? I don't know.
RingMessenger: Well could me repeat myself i dont know, you say?
SmarterChild: Well could me repeat myself i dont know you say, you say?
This nearly brings me to tears. About 80 percent of my relationships have begun and ended with conversations exactly like this.
If you do this on a Mac, it's even better, cuz if you turn on the voice option, you can literally listen to them talk to each other. I might turn this into a software package for you to download. Coming soon.
When I started working for IBS, I told myself that I would make a strong attempt at being a writer again. My career trajectory had taken a turn toward editing -- primarily magazine editing -- but I wanted to return to putting the pen to paper. Of course, the opposite happened -- I went from being an editor to being a multimedia/interactive person. Now, I've lost the ability to construct sentences. Today, I stumbled across the first story I wrote for IBS: Top 10 Wacky Internet Events Of 1999. It's almost as funny as this byline: Top 10 Gadgets Of 1999. MP3s? G4s? DVDs? SUVs? This was 1999?
I'm bummed because there's an XSLT training course going on at work this week and I don't have any time to attend.
I'm working on a journal website for my college mentor. A first draft of Edebiyât. Here's an interesting Muslim weblog that's making me reconsider everything: Zhikr.org.
Super, super awesome Bjork video that you simply must watch (and I guarantee you won't see it on MTV).
The annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll is out. Everyone's favorite Chuck was asked to vote this year. Shockingly, he was the only person to pick "The Blues" by Guns N' Roses. Yes, yes, Chuck, I'm sure it was great.
When Darin was in town last week, he mentioned being in The Threat of the Mummy while we were at Moscow on the Hill. But I had no idea.... wow. "Part socio-political satire and part supernatural fantasy... made entirely on location in Grand Forks, North Dakota." I am speechless. It opens April 5 in GF.
Terry Gross: Gene Simmons won't give rights to release interview transcripts. That, and more, from the Philly Inquirer.
This time, Ventura looks at a tv reporter and says, "I've been saying for years, that you're in it for the rating points, and entertainment." Big insight from the former professional wrestler. Who the hell slipped him a copy of Bias, anyway?
Finally, I've now heard the controversial Terry Gross / Gene Simmons interview: here's a huge half-hour MP3. And Gene is truly an absolute jerk in it.
Emily Nussbaum's somewhat surprising take on the new gender-neutral bible.
Bob Mould is interviewed by The New York Times, where he talks about Jesse Ventura hanging out backstage at Husker Du shows and reveals his time spent writing for professional wrestling.
Dan the Automator has a new album coming out soon called Wanna Buy a Monkey?. Does the reference sound familiar? It's a line uttered by David Letterman in Cabin Boy. The album includes tracks with Tortoise, De La Soul, and Dove. More info here.
Movie88.com is a site from Taiwan that lets you watch streaming movies for only a buck a piece. Fun selection, mediocre quality, and almost certainly illegal.
If the U.S. government kills your brother in an accident, how much do they (okay, we) compensate the family? $1,000, apparently.
If I had the surveys application working, I'd have you vote on which picture you like more: this one or this one.
Textz.com has texts from all the biggies, including Kafka, Zizek, Baudrillard, Debord, Tolstoy, Poe, Neal Stephenson, Erik Satie, and My Bloody Valentine.
ActiveBuddy now has a web-based interface: SmarterChild. For those of you new the game, you can hold a conversation with a virtual entity who is suprisingly life-like. Or at least I think so, cuz I have no life.
Diesel, get your pants on, cuz the Karzai Collection could be the next big thing.
Weekly World News being funny; ha, ha, funny: shuts down website.
My biggest criticism of Slate.com is that it has never had anything to do with the internet. The comfortable mix of the New Republic's style and the New Yorker's grace only uses the internet as a distribution model -- not as a medium. To my knowledge, there has never been anything on Slate.com that really takes advantage of what the internet can do better than a magazine. That's why I'm glad to see Slate.com has recently posted two pieces that take advantage of what the internet does best: interactivity and data. In the category of interactivity, The Enron Blame Game. In the category of data, The 2001 Slate 60.
Last night, I somehow ended up watching Lou Reed on Bravo's new show, Musicians, followed up by watching Kid Rock on Howard Stern. Would you hate me if I said I was more entertained by Kid Rock?
This is pissing off people I work with: AOL Shuts Out Trillian Users. Although I am only an occasional user of Trillian, I'm most interested in the newfound hypocrisy of AOL suing Microsoft for monopolistic practices.
One of my favorite news sources, SFgate, has redesigned. Compare to the old version, via the Google cache. (The Wall Street Journal also recently redesigned.)
Uh-oh. Macromedia has released the new Flash 6 player (beta), which can only mean that Flash 6.0 is coming soon. And here I thought I was going to have some free time soon...
WARNING: VERY GRAPHIC, but also somehow bold and funny: The Ultimate Breast Test. Playboy has put 36 playmate bare-chests online and asked a simple question for each pair: REAL or FAKE? I guess if you play it right, you can find out if any playmate has been, well, enhanced. I suppose the reason I'm fascinated by this (and it's not because it's erotic, cuz these decapitated heads really aren't, er, titillating) is that Playboy has gone so far as to actually gather and reveal this data. (Oh yeah, I got 30 out of 36.)
Sorry, I'm back. John, Ross, and Chuck got me too drunk. Oh, an update? One just hated Vanilla Sky, one just turned 30, and one just lived with Ozzy for two days. And there was Lora, the ex who's now a doctor that looks like a supermodel flapper. (Chuck will have to send me pics so that I can prove this.)
More Googlish fun: Googlewhacking is a game by which bloggers try to come up with two-word combinations that force Google to only return one page -- yours. This thread at MeFi has people whacking the hell out of Google.
The minute that the Sarah Jane Olson / Kathleen Soliah story broke, I thought I should start writing the book. And I toyed with the idea for a long time. This case fascinates me -- especially the way I sway from sympathy to apathy. Here's an interview with the nom de guerre.
Randy Moss wallpaper at Nike.com. For some reason, this is amusing to me. Maybe it's that he's wearing the "urban reconnaissance parka" from the "urban survivalist collection." By the way, the new Air Jordan's will retail for over $200. I guess they're cheaper than a Segway.
Yahoo.com is releasing this today: Premium Discount Search. For $3/article or $5/month, you can search deeper database sources than your average web search.
I saw the flick Dotcom: Hot Tubs, Pork Chops, & Valium at the Sarasota Film Fest last weekend. It really sucked. I would be shocked if it made it out of the small-festival tour. It seems even the filmmakers recognized this, because no one even registered the domain of the mythical dot-com company founded in the movie: Zectek.com.
Come to think of it, I really could use a new addiction.
Perhaps the most tasteless banner advert of all time. (Yes, it's real; via Mefi.)
At the Diesel in Tampa, I stumbled across a cool set of books by Pocko. I bought Peter, my foosball partner, this one.
I think something's wrong with me. I just linked to Diesel, and now I'm going to link to the brand new DKNY site. Next thing you know, I'll link to Urban Outfitters. Stop it!
A surfeit of dot-com entertainment? On_Line The Movie ("a story about people watching people," premiering at Sundance) and Downloading Sex ("the TV incarnation of the website," a HBO/Nerve.com co-production) and e-Dreams ("a behind-the-scenes look at.Kozmo.com," now playing in NYC) and Dot Con ("investigates the financial forces behind the unprecedented rise and seemingly overnight fall of the Internet economy," from PBS).
When a new bar/restaurant named The News Room opened in downtown Minneapolis (in one of those nice areas on Nicollet levelled for skyscrapers), of course my friends and I had to investigate. It has accidentally become a regular hang-out, despite the fact we all hate it. (This is very common in the Midwest -- we love to hate more than anyone, I'm sure of it.) City Pagesreviewed The News Room this week, and pretty much says all the things we've said. Dara calls the place "completely insane, but strangely inspiring," and the food is "without question the worst food I've had in a restaurant in at least three years."
Every year, I try to make it back to the UND Writer's Conference, which is probably the biggest cultural event in the Red River Valley. The event has given me the opportunity to hang out with some cool writers -- August Wilson, Tim O'Brien, Yusef Komunyakaa, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Skvorecky, Sherman Alexie -- and enjoy the company of college friends. The film festival associated with it is also quite an experience. I just found out that Stephen Ambrose was asked to attend this year's conference. The Grand Forks Herald has the story. (Thanks to Jaimee, who's gonna love that pic and wonder where it came from, for the link.)
In other literary North Dakota news, Dave Barry is paying a visit. (Here's GF trying to be funny.) Of course I have a corporate conspiracy for why Barry is visiting North Dakota: the Grand Forks Herald is Knight-Ridder owned, and Tony Ridder of course pays his checks at the Miami Herald. I'm sure backdoor connections set up this visit.
I'm going to the Sarasota Film Festival this weekend. What, did I stutter? (If anyone out there is from Sarasota and has activity suggestions, please email me.)
Bravo is starting a new series based on "Inside the Actors Studio," which features musicians instead of actors. Lou Reed is the first guest in February. The host is David Wild, of Rolling Stone.
Am I the only one who has wondered how the U.S. has a military base at the tip of Cuba? Sure, I remember Jack Nicholson screaming at me about Guantánamo Bay in A Few Good Men, but I don't recall anyone saying how exactly we got the base. Encyclopedia.com tells me that it was leased to the U.S. in 1903 by a treaty that was renewed in 1934. Both countries need to consent to revoke the treaty.
Spin has named the 50 Greatest Bands, sure only to piss people off:
The Beatles
Ramones
Led Zeppelin
Bob Marley & The Wailers
Nirvana
Parliament/Funkadelic
The Clash
Public Enemy
The Rolling Stones
Beastie Boys
The Velvet Underground
Sly And The Family Stone
U2
Run-D.M.C.
Radiohead
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Sonic Youth
AC/DC
The Stooges
Metallica
The Smiths
Patti Smith Group
N.W.A.
Kraftwerk
The Sex Pistols
Pearl Jam
Grateful Dead
R.E.M.
Black Sabbath
Pavement
Fugazi
Kiss
Pretenders
Rage Against The Machine
Fela Kuti & Afrika 70/Egypt 80
David Bowie And The Spiders From Mars
Blondie
Bad Brains
The Who
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
New Order
Husker Du
Guns N' Roses
Outkast
The Beach Boys
Massive Attack
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Korn
Pink Floyd
Red Hot Chili Peppers
I think the biggest question is this: which of these will they regret in five years? They will be: Chili Peppers, New Order, Outkast, and Korn. I also think this means that Spin is officially now as dull as Rolling Stone.
Hypermodernism: "We believe in bypassing the distribution system, subverting modern infrastructures for benefit of cultural advance free from capitalist control."
Awesome. I've been ripped off. Or plagarized. Or whatever you call this which looks like a replica of my 2001 year in review -- except they apparently couldn't figure out how to steal stylesheets. Losers. I wrote PlanetPretty.com (what, you buy that domain name off eBay?) a note, and instantly got this automated reply:
Thanks for the email ! we'll try to answer you personally or on PlanetPretty -- Check back later this week for our Holiday special...and coming soon -- our 3rd birthday special- we're giving away tons of prizes !!!
Love,
Vera Pretty & all your friends @ PlanetPretty.com
One of my most oft-used cocktail personality questions: If you could have any song played at your funeral, what would it be? My answer: "Sweet And Tender Hooligan," by The Smiths. The most amazing thing about that answer is that it hasn't changed for 8 years. Anyway, here's the Random Smiths Lyric Generator
Who would have thought the world could become AOL/Time-Warner vs. Microsoft/Disney? Is this hell?
Wikipedia is an attempt to create a complete encyclopedia from scratch -- collaboratively. Users can not only suppy entires, but also edit or expand upon an article. (An earlier article from MIT Technology Review.)
I refuse to link to the new iMac. I will not cave.
Pretty cool: American Mile Markers: One photograph for every mile across America. I think I should replicate this concept across North Dakota, with one twist: one photograph every yard.
Could the world become AOL/Time-Warner vs. Microsoft/Disney? Is this hell?
If I like Vanilla Sky I'm gonna be so mad at myself. Damn, that soundtrack looks sweet though. (Could I own a CD with Tom Cruise on the cover and live with myself? Wait, lemme answer that one: nope.)
What's the academic world talking about lately? Well, there's the little story of Stephen Ambrose plagiarizing. (He's "sorry".) There's also the buzz over Cornell West getting ripped by the President of Harvard for -- at list in part -- making a hip-hop album. (A very bad album.) And, finally, the book everyone is talkingabout now is Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. (Posner is a buffoon.) That all seems very bland -- maybe I don't miss the academy.
Mark Amerika might be the first "internet name" that I remember. Back in the days in which I was discovering the net via Netscape's "What's Hot" list, I stumbled across his visual/poetic/digital art work. The Institute for Contemporary Arts in London has a retrospective of his work planned for this week.
Anthony DeCurtis is the special guest at this week's good Studio 360. Kurt Anderson talks about his appreciation of the Mac ("yuppie porn") and Paola Antonelli dices the Euro ("Frankenstein architecture").
The net has been abuzz about what will be revealed at Macworld Expo today. CNET has the first legitimate story on the topic, just filed. (It's a new iMac. It's on the cover of the new Time. Now go back to bed.)
I wonder if anyone in the local media thinks it's sad that a New York paper does the best reportage about the Twin Cities homeless problem. (Oh wait, am I part of the local media? Nevermind then.)
Chuck has a funny column predicting music in 2002. "I predict Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson will have a baby, which will be legally named 'I Am the Baby of Kid Rock.' In a related story, Tommy Lee will begin dating Britney Spears." (p.s. Chuck says he's taking three months off to work on his second book.)
Religious dildos. (What, you thought I was joking? At least you are not going to hell for linking to the Diving Nun.)
A writer at the Dallas Observercalls Ashleigh Banfield "Tina Fey-ish." Hey, that's my line! The rest of the story talks about her days in the local Dallas market.
If you could redesign anything, what would it be? I'd start with a few cities, jump to handful of airports, scrap most cars, and clean up with about 80 percent of the web. Another idea: redesign the alphabet.
Everyone's talking about Greta Van Susteren around here. My opinion is that it's bad news for both cable news companies. CNN loses their only good conservative commentator (if that's not an oxymoron) and FOX looks even more conservative (an image they're apparently trying to shed). But here's a tidbit I didn't know: she's a scientologist.
Funny: The Wisdom of Supermodels. "I wish my butt did not go sideways, but I guess I have to face that." --Christie Brinkley
Just one more day of this: The Year in Review. 200+ links of "Best Of 2001" lists.
In the '60s and '70s, WPIX in New York aired a burning log on Christmas day. For three hours. Just the burning log. With cheesy carols, but without commercials. "The Yule Log" burned out 12 years ago, but was rekindled this year -- and it scored the highest rating in NYC over the holiday. What, you don't get? Well, you can watch it yourself if you don't believe me. Is there a better statement on the state of television programming -- or, for that matter, contemporary familial celebration -- than this?
Today's Word of the Day is one of my favorite rhetorical devices: epistrophe, and its mate anaphora and their child symploce.
"She is vapid. She is a dream. She is irritating. She is a goddess. She is evil. She is divine." Tori Amos vs. Tori Spelling: ToriAntiTori.
Funny. If you type in www.amazone.com (with an extra "e"), you get redirected to www.amazon.fr -- the French Amazon.com site. Amazoné!
Slate.com reviews the X10 Camera: "Though it's likely that at grad schools across America there are Foucaultians beavering away on dissertations titled Toward a Hermeneutics of Wireless Web Cams, I care little for 'gaze' theories and discussions of the panopticon. I just want to know if those cheap little cameras really work or if they're the Internet equivalent of cereal box trinkets."
Shit, it's New Year's Eve. 2002 -- a palindrome year -- is tonight, and I have nothing planned.
This java applet from Taprats, which helps you make Islamic star patterns, is exactly what I needed to get inspired to come up with more tiling designs for this blog. (Thanks Caterina.)
Amazon.com has just opened what it is calling an "Outlet Store."
I had a crush on her waaaaaaaay before you did. EveryonelovesTinaFeynow, but she's been the most consistent link on this blog for the past six months, sitting down there to the right under "ADORING." But perhaps that was just because I couldn't find any other celebrities to adore. That fleeting fascination with Ashleigh Banfield was so... well, fleeting. And to say that I "adore" Thora Birch... well, that ain't right. Is this the first sign of falling into the category of approaching 30? To only get crushes on celebrities with glasses? If so, 30 sounds miserable. When I first fell for Fey, I did a Google search and came up with 10 links; now, there are 7,810. What's the punchline of this pathetic emotional eulogy? Here's a new pic of Ms. Fey from Rolling Stone.
Two unrelated products in which I'm gonna invest: GoToMyPC | Netflix. The former lets me access my computer from anywhere; the latter lets me rent unlimited DVDs for $20/month, with great selection.
Not exactly sure what to make of this new Taschen release: Digital Beauties: "Almost real. Building women out of bits and bytes." Well, for that matter, this one too.
Earlier this month, I pointed toward the Usenet postings of John Walker (aka Abdul Hamid, aka John Philip Walker Lindh, aka the American Talib). Ron Rosenbaum (perhaps my favorite living columnist) has taken up the topic of these posts in this week's Edgy Enthusiast. His angle: authenticity.
Bloggeris [was] down for thousands of bloggers around the world, but I'm cruising fine. Perhaps this is the time that I should start to sell my homemade content management system?
I wonder what they're gonna do with this: SegwayPolo.com.
Somewhere in the midst of my hazy philosophy undergrad, I was told that the last person who read every book in print was Leibniz. Of course that's impossible now, but you can't even read all the books in your tiny little professional field anymore. This isn't news to anyone, but the National Postwrote about it.
It seems an odd dash of editorializing for Yahoo.com to choose (rather than numerically deduce) their Picks of The Year. Uh-huh, it's added to the list.
When I was a kid, we didn't need no stinkin gigantic Shockwave movie to teach us how to play D&D.
Wanna hear a funny one? Barb didn't know what "LOTR" stood for. Whah-hah-hah-hah. That's what they do to you in Florida. You can listen to Tolkein himself read from The Lord of the Rings.
They're talking about the Soho Koolhaus Prada over at the Morning News, where it's noted that Prada.com may never open.
I've been doing some research into fearful waters the last few days: online advertising. No, not for Fimoculous. Rather, I've been given the task to investigating what types of "rich media" adverts my company's websites will consider. What's a "rich media" advert? Well, here's an example to start you off with: Budweiser meets Comedy Central. That's the idea in its most offensive form -- drowning your content in beer. If you care about this concept, DoubleClick and EyeBlaster have some good galleries. It's odd for a curmudgeonly journalist to say this, but I find some of these ads fascinating. The multimedia programmer in me sees these occasionally pushing the boundaries of what a web page can do, unlike anything else out there. (C/Net Builder has a good primer on the topic too.)
Numerous bon mots (the "clip-hop" of Matmos, the "over-ness" of the Strokes, the "white-gal-Eminem" of Pink) in Salon.com's Year in Music. And City Pages' Artists of the Year kicks off with a great DeLillo excerpt. The links are added to the... yup, Year in Review page.
NPR's "On The Media" had two good pieces about Egyptian film this week: America in Egypt (on America's image in Egyptian pop culture) and Terrorist Actor (on Egyptian actor Sayed Badreya who has played many terrorists in Hollywood films).
I knew that I would regret making my Best Music of 2001 list before the year ended. And not only did I uncover an album to add to the list, but I want to plop it at the very top. Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By is a concept piece from Dan The Automator (Handsome Boy Modeling School) with vocals from Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) and Jennifer Charles (Elysian Fields). It's Serge Gainsbourg for the hip-hop set. It's Barry White for turntablists. It's the trip-hop album Beck could never make. Well, whatever it is, I listened to it for 8 of the 14 hours I had to drive this Christmas vacation. 75Ark lets you listen to the entire album.
I've been quietly rooting for Melissa Maerz, the new music editor at City Pages, but she hasn't always filled the shoes of her predecessors Will Hermes, Peter Scholtes and Jon Dolan. This week, however, her cover story on Matthew St-Germain was pretty darn good. St-Germain is the founder of the local noise label Freedom From, whose most famous group, Reynolds, is an Argentinean outfit whose frontman has Down's syndrome and the rest of the band thinks he's a saint. Although the article somewhat overstates the ambiguity of St-Germain (he's less a charlatan and more careerist), it's still a good read about the underground music scene (and how Thurston Moore of course has something to do with it).
I'm spending the Christmas vacation reading Flash Deconstruction, from the Juxt Interactive group. The corresponding website is full of meaningless interviews with designers.
More news in the Nirvana and Courtney battle. Courtney has somehow convinced Cobain's mom to say that her son "despised" Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. The remaining members of Nirvana have been battling with Courtney over an unreleased Nirvana track, "You Know You're Right." I finally decided I wanted to hear it. Here are two MP3s: "You Know You're Right" (a live Nirvana version) and "You Know You're Right" (a live Hole-unplugged version). It doesn't seem like much to be fighting over.
The funny thing about content management systems is that they create weirdness where you can never expect it. Like, putting the date of a story in the URL doesn't seem like a bad idea, right? Well, it is if you're writing an obit. Look at this Dick Schapp obit. He died today, but by looking at the URL you can see he had his obit written into the content management system on Oct. 19.
I'm not sure if it was spam, but I received a weird email today that asked to look at Reflektions.com, "'invasion of privacy' featuring backwards navigation." They've turned the "disable back button" trick into an art form, or something.
Every day, Peter and I get together for a match of foosball. It's expected that one of us has an "idea of the day" -- typically a small business or a website (and, sadly, most of the time they involve pornography and technology). I guess Idea A Day is sorta a meta-version of us.
I saw less movies this year than any year in at least a decade. Nonetheless, my Top 10 Films of 2001:
Yahoo.com has launched its music portal: Launch.com.
Remember back when The Onion did its post-9/11 issue? Adbusters now has the 9/11 Scrapbook, which raises the stakes.
Well, Plastic.com has resurrected. I thought something cool would happen to it in the intermission. Guess not. Instead, Carl seems to have spent all this time writing a manifesto (when did he start writing like Dave Eggers?).
I don't even know what to say about this: Omniglot. I fear I could get lost for days in this Borgesian "Guide to Writing Systems."
Local Stuff:
If ya ain't from around here, ya won't get this, and even if ya are, ya still probably won't: DuffysJukebox.com. (That's Duffy's in downtown Fargo for all of ya thinking that it has something to do with duh big city.)
Ali goes nowhere, slowly. The movie starts with his first Joe Frasier fight and ends with the "Rumble in the Jungle" fight. In between, there's a mish-mash of music video montages and oblique historizing. For being the most talked about athlete of all time, Ali came out dull in Ali.
Everyone's blabbing about how Google has opened up the archive on 20 years of Usenet postings. But no one's doing anything cool with it, like, say, diggin up the posts from American Taliban John Walker, aka Abdul Hamid, aka John Philip Walker Lindh. Circa 1997, he was apparently very interested in Kool Keith, drum machines, and Malcolm X. He was as wrapped up in soc.religion.islam as rec.music.hip-hop. Here he is selling his Marvel Comic Cards. Here he is asking about Islam's forbiddance of music. Here is his finding Vivaldi samples on Dr. Octagon albums.
Alright already, stop nagging. My Top 20 Albums Of 2001:
Plastic.com is still acting goofy. (Does anyone know what Carl is doing?)
Something goofy is always going on over at McSweeney's. "Sentences I Wish I Hadn't Written" includes "A stopover in Williston, North Dakota, therefore, may be in order."
Yes, hm, I was just thinking that I should do some freelance work: How To Pitch To Maxim. Ugh.
Phil is being really slow to add to FargoGirls.com, but there's a few new friends. (This one, who's originally from Fargo, now works for The Onion.)
Sometimes, I wake up late at night with Flash envy. No, really. I said really.
CBS Marketwatch is running gigantic interstitial adverts on their front page. I hope this is the sign of a dying company and not the sign of an industry trend.
The Nation has launched HowDareThey.com, "a critical outlet for the unavoidable backlash being fostered by the Bush Administration's exploitation of the September 11 terrorist attacks." Although I'm sympathetic, the bombastic domain name seems more inflammatory than inventive.
"A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keiler was at my alma mater this past weekend. The archive page includes audio and a slideshow.
I remember this game from last year, and I'm glad someone dug it up: Snowball Fight.
Extremely confusing flash animation from China that either memorializes or satarizes WTC. (Related: Chinese will become most popular language on the internet by 2007.)
Awesome. The law firm that is going to represent John "Abdul Hamid" Walker, the American kid who joined the Taliban, is Morrison & Foerster. What's their website? Why, MoFo.com, of course.
Also in the category of unintentionally yet brilliantly funny: Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? This might be my favorite: "6. Does your son use Quake?" It warns parents to be on the lookout for Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and Neuromancer by William Gibson.
The New York Times has made a couple Flash-based "Photographer's Journals" that use audio and photography to great effect: Vincent Laforet | James Hill.
I have to admit that I enjoy HTML email when soberly used, but if you're the austere type that doesn't enjoy viewing it, there's a utility to turn it off on Outlook.
Someday, I'll tell the story about how reading Rem Koolhaas changed my life. In the mean time, he's been awarded the design of the L.A. County Museum. It will look like a tent.
Winter's here, but you wouldn't know it by the non-existent snow in Minneapolis. (I don't even wear a coat to work yet.) Anyway, I made this Winter Poetry application today. If I were really good, you'd be able to save your poems and send them to friends, but, well, that would take days and days of work, which I ain't got right now.
Saddam Hussein is publishing his secondromance novel. The first one doesn't appear to have been translated into English. Now, wouldn't this be the ultimate career-starter for a budding Arabic-English translator?
This is the craziest story I've read in a long time. A 28-year-old Japanese woman mysteriously dies trying to find Fargo. (This may be the first and last time I get to link to the Bismarck Tribune.)
In college, we devised our own rules for Scrabble, in which we gave points for words that were completely made up but should probably be words anyway. That reminds me of A Dictionary of Words, a blog where people post fake, imaginary, and invented words and definitions.
ibsrex: Where are the Hobbits? RingMessenger: Hobbits. Hobbits have pointed ears. Hobbits have oversized feet and never wear shoes. ibsrex: Tell me a story. RingMessenger: Very well. There once was a human named ibsrex who was chatting with RingMessenger...
All kinds of fantastic, wonderful things happened and they both lived happily ever after. The end.
Did you like my story?
Smart ass, Hobbits. I've been working on building one of these little bots myself, but it's going very slowly. But someday, you'll be able to talk with ibsrex without ever knowing if it's him talking back or the perfectly programmed robot (as if there were a difference).
MSNBC.com lays off... how many? Let's see: "Cherylynne Crowther, a spokeswoman for MSNBC.com, declined to disclose an exact number of layoffs but said they were equivalent to 9 percent of the company's staff of approximately 200." If my math is good, that would be 18.
Wow, I missed this big local news. The founders of City Pages, Tom Bartel and Kris Henning, are starting a new "free at first" magazine that is "half-way between The Onion and the New Yorker." The editor of Rake will be former-Spiner/Suckster Hans Eisenbeis.
Everyone I know spent today either dissing IT (nice animation) or dissing the American Talib Boy (nice picture). All I have to say about the topics: I'm simply shocked that "Ginger" is already an item on Amazon, and America sure does create a staggering number of identity-confused people.
Nigger. "A Black Author Hurls That Word as a Challenge." First graph: "At halftime of a 1993 basketball game against Miami University of Ohio, Keith Dambrot, varsity men's basketball coach at Central Michigan University, called his team together to talk about the word 'nigger.' Mr. Dambrot, who is white, had overheard his African-American players call each other 'nigger' to denote toughness and tenacity on the court. He asked the players permission to use the word in the same sense, and after they assented he adopted 'nigger,' too. A few weeks later, after administrative censure, sensitivity training and two campus protests, Mr. Dambrot lost his job and promptly filed suit."
Chuck told me that he had been asked to write for the New York Times Magazine, so when I saw the headline Questions for Gene Simmons I assumed it was him. Nope. Anyway, no suprises from the tongued-one: "Music was never the point." Oh, well, maybe one surprise: "I've never been drunk in my life." (The mag's Wes Anderson profile is good too.)
The case for breaking up Afghanistan. "Getting rid of the idea or concept of Afghanistan is very difficult, just as getting over the idea of Yugoslavia was difficult. There is a sense that this kind of thing shouldn't be allowed to happen, because it can have a domino effect. But I think the idea of Afghanistan breaking up has already practically happened. There is no common language, nothing common to all these people. The expected amalgamation of ethnic groups into a nation never happened there."
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?: What's the difference? Maybe that's a racist question, maybe it's the premise for a deconstructive playfulness. For the moment, let's imagine it's the latter: AllLookTheSame.com. You take a quiz where you see 18 faces and you try to guess if they're Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I got only 9 right. Now, if you wish to entertain the former, there's a discussion and an essay from the site's creator, Dyske Suematsu, who is, um....
Afghan pop star Farhad Darya's song "Beloved Kabul" was played in the streets of Afghanistan's capital as the public celebrated the Taliban's departure. Wanna hear it? (Please, please, remember that if they judged us by Maria Carey, we'd be doomed.)
Pft. According to this, last week's Buffy sex scene was trimmed because it was too explicit. WTF? That was the most sexually explicit piece of tv since.... since... since Buffy and Angel did it. (Tidbit: the author of this story was previously an intern at the place I work.)
Bloggus Caesari is a diary-blog written from the point of view of Caesar. It's funny, but I wish there was more insight on what Ceaser thought of RuPaul's new blog. (Tip from Helen's Loom.)
Designers know the grid for the web-safe color palate like chemists know the periodic table of elements. This version of it is much more fun though.
And here I was thinking Survivor III: Africa perpetuates insidious stereotypes about the "Dark Continent." Nope, it turns out it's perpetuating the stupid American stereotype.
Salon.com is offering some of its pay-content for free this week, in the hopes of getting you to subscribe. (A Barney Frank interview? Sign me up!)
Kid Dakota is a local musician who occasionally plays with my friends (genre: shoe-staring emo slow-core folk; boy, I'd hate it if someone called me that). Anyway, he has a new website.
Also of local note, everyone's been squawking about the Twins being potentially contracted from baseball. Frankly, I don't really care, but I do find it funny that City Pages is running a Pick Carl Pohlad's Epitaph contest. The running favorite tombstone script for the Twins owner is "If they build it, they have to come."
p.s. C'mon the new background gif isn't that bad, is it?
The paper, likely to be called The New York Sun, will be edited by former Forward editor in chief Seth Lipsky along with his protégé, Ira Stoll, the editor of Smartertimes.com, a Web site known for its critiques of The New York Times.
37Signals.com has assembled what is basically a best/worst internet practices (what they called "good and bad contingency design"): Design Not Found.
Steven Johnson (founder of Feed) has a new book out, Emergence, and this quote from a Salon.com interview sounds like a replica of the thesis of the book I was writing:
I hope that the book isn't taken as an argument purely against planning. There certainly are situations where top-down solutions are excellent and appropriate, but I think that there are a hundred thousand books written about top-down solutions to things and great-men theories of why things happen and Emergence is one of a developing, nice little library of books that are about the opposite approach.
I guess because I don't live in NYC I didn't know this, but Kurt Anderson (founder of Inside.com and Spy magazine, and former Editor of New York) has his own radio program: Studio 360. Guest hosts have included Woody Allen, Adam Gopnick, Barbara Kruger, Anthony DeCurtis, and Nora Ephron. The archive has previous episodes. Designers will find a feast at Design For the Real World Archives. (Also of note, a Kurt Anderson interview.)
I don't think I've ever linked to Kid A In Alphabet Land, Carl Steadman's "Abecedarian Roller Coaster Ride Through The Phallocentric Obscurantism Of Jacques Lacan." Yeah, what he said.
Michael Wolff writes about David Halberstam (okay, okay, don't yawn).
And to those who are asking: no, I haven't worked on my novel for over a year; yes, I'll finish it someday; yes, it's still about people and their relationship to cities; yes, 3 of 12 chapters are done; and no, my ex-agent didn't sue me.
Nice collection of WTC graphics from AIGA. I could be cynical and say that to reduce this historical moment down to iconographic t-shirt sloganeering is so "my generation," but I think these graphics are effective. Besides, who am I kidding, I'm all for t-shirt sloganeering.
On television last night was a Register.com advert that had two ostensible small business people talking about their websites: DeepSeaYachts.com and PhoebeBooks.com. Funny thing though: neither one of them is an actual small business; they're both just dummy sites.
Looks like the International Herald-Tribunewebsite design has officially become seminal. Last week, it was a BBC.com redesign that borrowed certain visual cues, and this week it's a SacBee.com redesign that also seems to show an influence.
Arianna Huffington writes about the Women of Afghanistan: "'The Northern Alliance is nothing more than just the Taliban without beards,' says RAWA's Mansoor. 'They are dogs of the same field.'"
Jonathan Dube has gathered a nice collection of links in Online Storytelling Forms. I recently did a short presentation to some design students in which I talked about some of the applications mentioned here. It began like this: "The first thing I have to say is that I'm not a designer. In fact, I don't like most designers. I like communicators. I like people who make digital objects that get people talking."
In the newest issue of WIRED, Gillian Anderson (i.e., Scully) reviews Mogwai's Rock Action, perhaps my favorite album this year. She writes: "This album is one of those musical experiences where if you happened to get into a car accident while listening to it, it would be OK. Here you are, driving, the wind is whipping, the sun is shining (or not), and oops! But you've got the music, and it's got you, cradled in a blissful semiconscious state, through the rhythm strobe of emergency vehicles, the muffled shuffle above and around, and closer... closer... and the spirit ascended to Heaven. Are you with me? Then you'll love this album. Part Low, part instrumental Radiohead, mostly themselves, it's all good." That's not exactly a spectacular review, but knowing Gillian and I share musical tastes pleases me in some spectral way.
I've been looking for a good response to the New York Times Fouad Ajami piece that blasted Al Jazeera. It's telling that the first retort I see comes not from the mainstream press or even the established alt-press, but from a blogger: More Reality Inversion.
I was just telling someone that it seemed odd that Suzanne Vega disappeared. The Onion A.V. Club ushers her back in. (Sidenote: A.V. Club is doing giant interstitial adverts now.)
After 40 years, Esquire drops Dubious issue. (Tidbit: Dave Eggers edited this one year; I don't remember if he went credited.)
When I was in college, the best concert I organized was a punk rock Michael Jackson tribute. June Panic did a unforgettable rendition of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," the bad boy's best song. That's just a set up to tell you that Michaelangelo Matos talks about "Don't Stop" in today's Mix Project.
TV networks have repeatedly turned down advertisements from the Culture Jammers Media Network (a.k.a AdBusters). If you want to see why, this page has a good selection of "uncommercials". Finally, CNN Headline News has agreed to air one that promotes the biggest Culture Jammer effort, Buy Nothing Day. The 15-second spot will run Nov. 19 at 4:06 p.m. (EST) and Nov. 20 at 7:06 p.m. (EST), but here's the video if you want to see if beforehand.
Terror Sex? "On the one hand, September's events led to a spike in 'terror sex,' the much-reported need for sexual connection in times of heightened fear. But at the same time, the tanking economy has resulted in a marked drop in business, as clients -- just as the general public -- cut back on spending and struggle with post-traumatic anxiety. The competing dynamics make America's multi-million dollar prostitution industry look like a microcosm of the country at large -- confused, unpredictable and shaken, but resilient. And in some cases, booming."
In this week's NYTimes Magazine, Fouad Ajami writes "What The Muslim World Is Watching," a condemning report about the Al-Jazeera network: "Although Al Jazeera has sometimes been hailed in the West for being an autonomous Arabic news outlet, it would be a mistake to call it a fair or responsible one. Day in and day out, Al Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage."
The ideas behind Microsoft's Q-Video aren't that unique, but the implementation of some of the technology (face recognition and language processing) is. Here's a report on what might be the next generation of video search.
Harvard has grabbed Homi K. Bhabha from the University of Chicago. Although my exposure to him is limited, I tend to agree with Marjorie Perloff on this one: "he doesn't have anything to say," though probably not for the reasons suggested. This article's focus on the jargon of theory is so tedious, and I've wished the entire dichotomous situation had disappeared a decade ago when I was first getting involved in reading this stuff.
At WebTechniques.com (which is soon to change its name to NewArchitect), Scott Rosenberg from Salon.com talks about constructing and implementing their new fee-based model. His report is really good at showing how business changes affect technology changes affect editorial decisions, and back again. That ties in nicely with the announcement that NYTimes.com has a new idea (which is basically intensive sessions-based advertising) for making money online.
I think I should completely stop posting stories from the mainstream press. Yesterday, I posted the story about the London Times reporter who found bin Laden's nuclear secrets documents. Today, the Voiceis saying that at least some of the documents are part of a hoax.
ABCNews.com somehow got audio of the terrorists on the hijacked plane that crashed in the field in Pennsylvania en route to D.C.
What? New Yorkers aren't overly impresssed with The Onion? Good. Bring it back home to the Midwest where we can relish how much smarter we are than you anyway. Because you're dumb, of course.
Fellow Minnesota blogger James Lileks has penned a piece that blasts the Chomsky-ish reponse to America's retaliation. There's a hated thread over at MeFi that immediately caused a flurry of commentary.
Oprah be damned. Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award.
I. Am. So. There.All Tomorrow's Parties LA 2002 (March 15-17) has Aphex Twin, Sonic Youth, Boredoms, Cat Power, Sleater-Kinney, Wilco, Malkmus, Stereolab, Unwound, and more. (Three days = $100.) Here's quite a find: a downloadable video of Sonic Youth's entire set at last year's event. (This year, they're the curators.)
The big day is Friday. Iron Chef USA launches. It has an official site now. It tells you who will be the four Iron Chefs, the first two challengers, the three announcers, the four celebrity judges, and of course the dish on Shatner. This unofficial page has some spoiler info. (Shout out to Barb for the link. [That was just an excuse to link to her new funny picture.]) My friends are debating whether this will be good. It could be another great Shatner moment (he sorta is karaoke incarnate), or it could be Hollywood Squares with food.
Meg of Megnut.com recently did a presentation on Weblogs as Peer-to-Peer Journalism at the O'Reilly P2P & Web Services Conference. What, you missed it? She put the notes online. (I like that the subtitle is Subverting Traditional Media. In good deconstructive twisting, saying it and striking it out is important.)
"If Don DeLillo was right in saying that Mick Jagger's lips represented the anus of a culture, then what part of our society is the face of Michael Jackson? Because the truth is, there's not really much face left in Michael Jackson's face. But fossils of it remain all over pop culture." For more, check out Salon.com's piece on Michael, The Face.
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for today: Lalapalooza. Fun derivation I didn't know. (Perry Farrell isn't mentioned once.)
Not only that, but it's Wittgenstein day over at Consequently.org.
A somewhat odd curatorial choice for the MOMA to pick as its first online-only exhibit: Artists of Brücke. But it's very thorough, and the voice-overs are superb. (Article found at the International Herald-Tribune.)
In another moment of internet art news, Google is celebrating Monet's birthday with a special banner. I wonder what it says that Google expresses interest in Impressionism.
NFL.com and Sportline.com have created VideoMixer, where you edit and create your own highlight reel, with sound, effects, transitions, etc. It's sorta fun, but I can't imagine any of the sportos I know spending the time to figure it out. (Flash)
If sports ain't your thing, try the Switcheroo Zoo, where you create unqiue animals by mixing and matching different parts. (Flash)
Bin Laden's wife (and, er, first cousin), Najwa Ghanem, is still in Afghanistan. Her (and, um, his) family speaks in L.A.
The New Yorkerasks and somewhat answers: Why did the World Trade Center buildings fall down when they did? This piece is really interesting for anyone with architectural or engineering interests.
I'm not usually a fan of the "here's a goofy story" blogging (since Obscure Store mastered it, why bother?), but here's one to pass your cubicle time with: Woman Pregnant Twice.
Want a real alternative to the browser wars? Opera 6.0 Beta 1 For Windows is out. Seriously, this is a fast browser that renders many pages quicker than IE or Netscape.
As a twist on HotOrNot.com, I think I'm going to start Am-I-Art-Or-Eye-Candy.com. MarrowMonkey would be a lead entrant. (This one: art. I think.)
Whose fault is it that the Internet sucks lately? Big Business. (This is a little scape-goatish, but it's also accurate.)
Someone screengrabbed ABCNews.com yesterday after the plane crash in NYC. Check out the advert.
My old stomping grounds is on the front page of Poynter.org right now. Until the spring of 1997, my apartment was on the right.
Okay, okay, I'll turn the webcam back on. But only so that I can point it out the window and show you how beautiful Minnesota is this time of year. (Seriously, this is crazy. Mid-November and not only is there no snow, but I don't even wear a coat to work.)
A few days ago, I mentioned a passage that suggested the term "al-Qu'aeda" might have come from Isaac Asimov. Fascinating conjecture, but here's a follow-up from an acquaintance, a Jordanian journalist, who offers her interpretation:
I also read something about Qaeda. They say that it started as a data base and I presume this is the way they got the name. Too simple, no fanciful story! By the way, I was familiar with the Arabic term "Qa'eda" because we covered the story of the trial of its members in Jordan, a long and high profile case. In fact, we used to translate the name as "base group." It's really strange how we forced the translated word on ourselves when in a year's time American officials and western media would begin use our Arabic term! Anyway, when Powell first used the word "Qaeda" I never related it to our Qa'eda because he pronounced it in a way that eliminated any possible resemblance. You should listen to a Jazeera reporter and hear how we pronounce it, and then I'm sure you won't blame me. Anyway, one day, I went like, "oh, it's the same word!" So, my version is that "Qaeda" means a base. And I think that Bin Laden is a pragmatic man who would use terms to serve his purpose. But I'll keep an eye for other interpretation of the word.
Remember back to this time two years ago, before Floridian folly culminated with a goofball landing in the White House. It was big news at the time, but everyone seems to have forgotten when George W. Bush was given a surprise foreign relations quiz. An intrepid reporter at WHDH in Boston asked Bush to name the leaders of four countries (at that time, hot-spots in conflict): Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan. Bush was able to get one partially right: Taiwan. Now, I see Bush on the tele patting Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on the back like they were old pals. Late one recent night, I watched a full live press conference from Musharraf on CNN. It actually made me envious: he seemed a bold and proud leader, a man who understood conflict and admitted not knowing all the answers while sounding firm at the same time. Certainly, there are troubling parts of his history (despite promising an electoral process he still rose to power via dictatorship, and his previous backing of the Taliban seems puzzling), but he nonetheless seems like someone America could never produce. I never wrote the ode to Musharraf that I wanted, but Salon (who, in a somewhat Details/Cosmo-ish way, always seems to sexualize every topic) has My Crush On Musharraf.
Bin Laden: Yes, I Did It. [Note: this report isn't fully substantiated.]
VisualJournalism.com has put up a very good tour of WTC Infographics from publications around the world.
I hang out at a Belgian Beer Mecca quite often [please come visit me in the Twin Cities, and I'll show you everything that's fanciful about the Midwest], but I really know little about Belgian beer. Finally, the Belgian Beer Escort is here to save me. There's even an audio pronunciations guide.
My friends didn't like the histrionics of Les Savy Fav show this weekend, but I just luvvvvvved it. "What we don't know can't hurt us yet."
The anti-consumer part of me despises the automobile, yet the design freak in me always seem to devour news about "concept cars." It's something about imagined futures that fascinates me.... anyway, here are two new VW concept cars that are crazy as hell: Microbus | Coupe.
BBC.com has redesigned. Interestingly, the site takes on a look similar to International Herald-Tribune (which would get my vote for best overall media website from a design and usability standpoint). The navigation strategy, however, is straight outta the portal play book. (The Guardiandiscusses.) In other BBC news, the company is launching a controversial online news service soon.
A decade ago, I discovered what would become the world wide web via Gopher. And, somehow, I didn't realize until now that it was a homegrown product. The Strib has a good article with the University of Minnesota inventors. (See also: The Gopher Manifesto.)
Already, e-tailers are pulling out the bells and whistles for holiday shopping. ("Gee-whiz features such as gift-finders, interactive pants-sizers and customer-service instant messaging are some of the ways e-tailers are hoping they might turn virtual window shoppers into paying customers.") Correlationally, here's the argument against 3D online shopping.
I don't care what you say, this is cool: Consquently.org. Every day for a month, this blog is going to profile a logician and the dilemmas he faced. Today, we get Husserl! ("What? Husserl wasn't a logician, he was a phenomenologist!")
Another new blog, where people post dreams: DreamCatcher. A good epistemological question though: does anyone want to read other people's dreams? I find that as soon as someone starts a sentence with "I had such a weird dream last night..." I begin to nod off. Burroughs had a good theory about why this is: we lack the context of "weird" to make any sense of the surreal. I wonder how this all fits into Waking Life, though.
I have heard of radio insidiously doing this, but never television. Apparently, CBS stations sped up sporting events to fit in more commercial time. That's funny, because CBS is ticked at FOX for running the Emmy crawl during the World Series. It's all about speed.
Interview with Playboy's CEO Christie Hefner. I like this question: "Have you learned anything in the bedroom that you've used in the boardroom?" The answer: "It's less what you say and more what the other person understands you to have said that's important."
Everyone's changing formats. Rolling Stoneconsiders the glossy model.
I have my feelers out there to find out more about this tidbit from the latest Ansible:
China Miéville has the inside story: "My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term Al-Qaeda seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers of translated sf, is Asimov's Foundation, the title of which is translated as "Al-Qaeda." Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
Michaelangelo Matos, whose work I've followed in City Pages and Seattle Weekly, has a new online project: The Mix Project. For a year, he'll choose one song per day to write 500 words about. He admits there's nothing terribly unique about this idea, but his mixedtapes are probably better (or at least more evocative) than most.
ArtForum asked smarties to recommend books in the post-WTC world. (Homi K. Bhabha picks Wittgenstein; Avital Ronell, Derrida and Rilke; Andrew Ross, the WPA Guide to New York City.)
Witty twist on "porn star name game" over at McSweeney's. "Take your middle name as your first name. Take your mother's maiden name as your last name. That's your Romance Novelist name."
Journalists are funny. (I think I can say that since I still sorta am one.) Poynter has a forum called "Songs for Writers" where people talk about music to write to. I never knew my colleagues were so tasteless.
I think all websites should be as helpful as Hummus.com.
I should really make a separate page for "comments from writers and public intellectuals about Islam/Taliban/WTC/terrorism/anthrax." But I won't. Instead, here's another: Salman Rushdie in the Times. I also stumbled across Bruce Sterling's 9-11 Speculative Outcomes over at SciFi.com.
My Michael Kinsley adoration continues. His piece in today's Post, TV News Killing Our Precious Verbs, making quite an impact. Whose fault is it? Rupert Murdoch's, of course.
Billy Corgan has a new band: Zwan. Why am I telling you? I have no idea. But I did get the new Fugazi in the mail today, which I'll tell you about soon.
To coincide with their print redesign (engineered by the Village Voice), CityPages.com has redesigned. General grades: Navigation: thumbs up; Design: thumbs down.
Another dead dot-com: Mr. Showbiz. (It was a pioneer of sorts one too.)
Next week's Buffy is going to be so damn good that it gets eight extra minutes.
Geek notes: Google has expanded its search functionality to include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF results.
I've been in eye candy mode lately. Must be those damn design books I'm reading. I'm trying to think through new visual ideas I have for this site -- it's only a few months old and I already want to completely nuke the design. Anyway, The Art of the Motorcycle over at The Guggenheim is pretty cool.
Oh, so sad. KSTP is giving up on their "Broadcast Center Store" in the Mall of America. [Snicker.]
What's it like to work for a dot-com? Well, I cruise around the office on a Razor scooter, and I work with people who build things like this. That's Clay's wonderful toy, which he made all by himself. It plays thousands of arcade games (literally: arcade games; it has 8 versions of Galaga, for instance). All those knobs are all the different controllers he needs to play all those thousands of games. And the case... well, he built that. His geek is greater than mine.
Slate.com has redesigned. Interesting organizational technique. They're using the rollover left navigation to organize the content in a different way (categorially) from how it's displayed down the middle column (chronologically). I'm not convinced that it's effective.
Noam Chomsky already has a book out on the most recent chapter in U.S. history: 9-11 (Paperback: $8.95, eBook: $4.20). Counterpunch has a long MIT interview with him.
V.S. Naipaul doesn't do a very good job of warding off the suspicions that he's anti-Muslim in a new New York Times interview. Particularly disturbing is his assessment that "nonfundamentalist Islam" is a contradiction.
It looks like Salon has updated Don DeLillo for the new age. Two of the many DeLillo aphorisms that today glimmer with prescience: "Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else." And: "In a society that's filled with glut and repitition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act."
Some people are making a big deal out of text ads. Google pioneered them, and now Metafilter is using them to great effect. Even Jakob Nielsen approves.
Big news in my corporate world today. IBS, the company where I spend all my time, has [ahem, finally] announced its partnership with NBC. We will be operating and co-managing all NBC Owned & Operated stations. This includes WNBC in N.Y., NBC4 in D.C., KNBC in L.A., NBC5 in Chicago, NBC5i in Dallas, and NBC10 in Philly. The moral: I will sleep even less.
I'm fascinated by what people choose to cherish and not cherish in the cities they live. Rain Taxi is one of the best literary review publications you can find -- and it's straight outta Minneapolis. Its forte isn't insightful criticism of a New York Review of Books or the Voice Literary Supplement or London Review of Books variety, but it has the best system of choosing books to review of anything I've ever read. (In that way, maybe they're like a good blog.) Anyway... City Pages did an okay write-up about Rain Taxi this week.
Andy and Laura made me a Jack O' Lantern last night. They say it's supposed to look like Barb. What do you think? It's on the webcam. (Ingenuity: they used a tack for the tongue ring.)
Awesome. Simply awesome. In the category of wish-I-thought-of-it-first. Cursor.org (a semi-national semi-local media commmentary site) has launched The Al-Jazeera Resource. It's a blog about the network on everyone's lips lately.
Banner? You call that a banner? I'll give you a banner with a Madonna soundtrack! To coincide with the launch of Windows XP today, check out the gigantic advert on Download.com.
Interview with the Aljazeera.net's general manager, Mahmood Abdulhadi. (Tidbit: they want to launch an English-language site within a year. I'm very, very much looking forward to this, since CNN.com and MSNBC.com have both decided to launch Arabic-language sites.)
Jill Geisler from Poynter.org says her eyes hurt from watching the "crawl" on the cable news stations. (Contains kinda cool flash animation.)
Another great example of what the internet can do that other mediums can't: Television Archive. This site somewhat miraculously contains hours of tv programming from Sept. 11 from networks like CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, BET, CBC, VOA, Al-Jazeera -- and networks in Iraq, Russia, Palestine. Wow.
That new bar in NYC where you're supposed to check out people on webcams and flirt with them digitally: Remote Lounge.
I have no link for this item, because I fear I may be alone. And I really hate to ask the question. Okay, I'll just ask it: Is Rumsfeld funny? I watch these daily Pentagon briefings, and I regularly find myself laughing. Before 9-11, he was on my list of "Most Detestable Humans." I'm uneasy about admitting that his humor is a rare bright spot in my dreary news-filled day.
Speaking of judgements of humor, I guess because people can't stop throwing plaudits at The Onion, it was time for a contrary voice: Peeling the Onion. The reviewer, however, seems to purposefully ingnore the more poignant headlines.
Cool link of the day: Bizarre life of Dan Rather. "Everything seems to happen to Dan Rather. In his career he's been punched, mugged, threatened with a shotgun, tear gassed, even accused (by a communist newspaper in Afghanistan) of stoning people."
The New York Post is flipping off its readers this morning.
Hm, I missed this one from a week ago: Umberto Eco on the roots of the conflict. Interesting historical perspective-making, but missing a concrete thesis. Not that I have one, though.
Douglas Coupland (version 164.4.0.3). "When writing his new book, All Families Are Psychotic, Coupland fell out with his publishers who felt the book -- a bizarre tale of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, disease and drugs -- would be too uncommercial." (Tidbit: He's publishing a book in Japanese which will be distributed via cell phones.)
And one more author note: John le Carré weighs in on it all.
FilePile.org has been around for quite a while, but it's recently redesigned, so that gives me an excuse to link to it. Should I explain it? Okay, I'll try. It's a community of users who upload files in one of four media types (audio, video, stills, text). That's it. But that doesn't sound interesting, does it? The quality is all in the randomness in what you'll find.
JohnColtrane.com is quite a pleasure. Includes a music section with fifteen great songs.
MSNBC.com com has launched an Arabic-language website: GN4MSNBC.com. The name stands for GoodNews4Me, which is an Arabic-speaking portal based in Egypt that is partnering with MSNBC. This comes in the wake of CNN.com also announcing they will be launching a site soon.
Somewhat interesting exhibit from Germany: CTRL [SPACE] investigates the rhetorics of surveillance.
Speaking of surveillance, Terraserver was eerie enough. Now, there's Skyline, which does it even faster and clearer.
Well, I guess there's this opinion about al-Jazeera too. (I feel guilty even giving this idiotic NY Daily News guy my linking authority.)
Everyone's been talking about payment methods on the internet lately. I've stayed away from concrete opinions about it, other than to say that I think a free press can still survive. (But I've got an alt-press background, so perhaps I'm slanted.) Anyway, I just noticed that Inside.com (which, coincidentally, today announced they were cutting ties with Steve Brill and that Primedia was buying it and probably shutting it down) has this form of "micropayment" on their site. "The Media Pass." Sounds ominous.
To livestream or not to livestream? This is a question that comes up constantly in my environment. This details how MSNBC.com tries to handle it. Interesting:
When MSNBC launched a broadband version of its Web site in April 2000, the site streamed MSNBC's live feed for a few days. When executives at NBC Cable and NBC News learned of the move, they pulled the plug on the continuous live feed.
Debka.com sounds like the Drudge Report of the Middle East. The New York Observercalls it "a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations."
Speaking of Drudge, he scoops an upcoming New Yorker piece: "The U.S. military failed to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar when he was in its sights during the first night of the war.... Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was 'kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors,' one military official said."
Mohamed Heikal, who the Guardian calls "the Arab world's most respected political commentator," says "There isn't a target in Afghanistan worth a $1 million missile."
First, Chomsky says he's not a pacifist, then The Nationwrites "The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II."
Should someone compose a list of comedy/tragedy quotes? I'm thinking of Mel Brooks ("Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall down
an open manhole cover and die") and Woody Allen ("Comedy is tragedy plus time") and Walpole ("Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel"). For those in New York, this looks like an interesting event. Features writers from Conan, Daily Show, The Onion, The New York Observer, and Time.
If you're a Flash designer/developer, you have to read this new piece from AListApart: The Flash Aesthetic. It attempts to identify the formal characteristics that make Flash a distinguishable art form.
I almost forgot how goofy the internet is: CousinCouples.com, an apparently legit support group website "for those romantically involved with their cousin."
And, not only is the internet goofy, it's also still able to invent really cool things that we never had before. I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives is amazing.
So, one of the great things about the internet is that I can show you stories from publications you might not otherwise know about. For instance, The Times Of Indiareports that a Pakistani General helped bankroll the WTC attacks.
Also yesterday, I mentioned Al-Jazeera, and said I would do some research. The website is all in Arabic (duh) and requires the translator plugin, but I thought you might want a peak at it anyway. (Here's a screenshot of what it looks like if you have the Arabic-decoder plugin.) NPR interviewed deputy editor, Ahmad Al-Sheikh, (I wish I had an icon to mark this interview as "highly recommended" -- four minutes of really good radio, particularly their points about the use of the word "terrorism.")
New FAA rules. I hate people who carry-on two bags anyway.
A post-mortem: Pauline Kael interview in the New Yorker. She says she wanted to write about Deep Throat, but Shawn wouldn't let her.
Good quote from another dead dot-com: "The story's over. You can't have a magazine about unemployed people."
I haven't seen anyone talk about the weirdness of the publisher of the tabloids the Globe, the Sun, and the National Enquirer being the location of this recent anthrax outbreak. The Miami Heraldtouches on it, by pointing out that one of those tabloids once published a story claiming that the reason Osama bin Laden hated America was that he was rejected by an American woman as an inadequate lover because he suffers from "underdeveloped sexual organs."
I apologize to those who have absolutely no interest in the interface design links I post here, but today I'm interested in the way that Amazon.com has redesigned their book pages: this example of the book I'm currently reading shows their new tabbing structure. (Also, I mentioned before that the way they put "Rex's Store" in a tab freaks me out.) And, I should point out this one: info architect Jeffrey Zeldmen is featured on Adobe this week. Oh, hell just one more: talking to infoarchitects about the future.
So, there's the company I work for that designed and manages this website: TheIndyChannel.com (one of many). Today, we found this website: FindIndy.com. Um, er, is the design a little suspicious? We launched a year before they did.
What does Rex do? Here is a good example. I designed the page, and all the things in the right column under the header of "INTERACTIVE" are things that I made. Those "interactive components" appear on sites all over the place.
Ten bucks to the person who writes the best Rush Can't Hear joke.
Whattevva. Knight-Ridder says they had the story long before USA Today did. Can't someone please tell them that the Guardian was writing about this for weeks before anyone in America was? (I touched on this a few days ago.)
Speaking of the Guardian, I'm enjoying their "Difficult Art Forms" series. Today: Stockhausen (and another).
Everyone's talking about "the CNN of the Middle East," Al-Jazeera. I don't know much about this network, but I'm starting my research now.
The video "Vidrar vel til Loftarasa" by Sigor Ros has been nominated for the Virgin Megastore Shortlist Prize for Artistic Achievement. I saw Sigor Ros perform a week ago, and I've been trying to find time to tell you about it (and about my trip to Hong Kong, and about my trip to Seattle, and about my feelings about Barb moving to Florida...). Not to resort to hyperbole, but it might've been the best concert I've ever seen.
A survey that I put on our websites is getting scary results.
Techies.com (a Twin Cities darling dot-com company) laid of 40 percent of its work force again. How many more 40 percents can you cut? You start to lose appendages after a while. Here's one account.
Offensive or dumb? The New York Post publishes provocative banner headline.
In the post-911 age, there are various ways to approach staying culturally relevant. There's the route of The Onion, which took on history -- and Terrorism, and America -- head-on. Then there's this week's Saturday Night Live, which I'm shocked completely hid in a hole (polar bear jokes? that's not levity, that's cowardice). Perhaps most interesting of all, though, there's Buffy. Josh Whedon, the show's creator, has a mind similar to X-Files provocateur, Chris Carter. They both see the value of nuance: subtle hints are more provoking than big statements. Last night's season (and network) premier nicely hinted at themes of death and rebirth with a collapsing structure -- the very structure from which Buffy killed and sacrificed herself last season, perhaps a twin tower of logical capitalism -- came crumbling down. In her cycle of death and rebirth through a public structure, she returns the world a little closer to reality.
Tom Brokaw tells students that NBC should have aired images of people jumping from WTC. It would have illustrated the effects of the attacks, he argues. (Link via MediaNews.)
Usability expert Bruce Tognazzini chimes in on his feelings on how to make airports secure. Nothing new though.
Never trust anyone who says "Afghani" (like I've been doing in the things I produce). And, since I'm linking to Slate, I found this article on naming the "New New World Order" interesting.
I knew an English education major who was obsessed with this song and what it was supposed to mean. In an attempt to impress her, I actually went to the medical school library to find out what lithium was used for, discovering that it was sometimes prescribed for multiple personalities. This seemed to answer all our questions, because Cobain sings about having friends "inside my head." It turns out Lithium is actually about a deeply religious family Kurt temporarily lived with after being kicked out of his house as a teen-ager. To be perfectly honest, I think my interpretation is more interesting than the actual reality, but the English major ended up having sex with some guy who fronted an alternative cover band called As If, so I guess I don't care anymore.
That's weird. I was just lying on my couch a couple nights ago, teetering on the edge of sleep, when I heard a commercial for Steve Brill's Contentville.com. I remember thinking that it was strange they were doing well enough to afford a major advertising campaign. Guess not. (A MediaNews memo says they had 15 employees.) And I really liked the idea of buying obscure dissertations online -- it seemed like it filled a niche, unlike buying cat food online.
The Washington Post is reporting that the hijacking missions cost a half-million dollars. (This "flight simulator in Minnesota" is becoming more important in recent days too.)
Digital artist Joshua Davis has a new episode of Praystation. I've gone to this site probably a hundred times in the past couple years, and I never seem to stay more than one minute. Ever. But I keep coming back to... to... what's the verb for what one does with these beautifully wasteful noise/texture contraptions?
Great lead to a Times article: "In a town full of soldiers, on the edge of Fort Bragg, there could be worse names for a restaurant these days than Osama's Place, but it is hard to think of any." Tidbit revealed: "Osama" means "big cat." (Yesterday, when I was in my locally-owned North African restaurant, I found myself having an "awareness" about watching American patrons and Egyptian employees interact with each other. I drew no conclusions, but I wondered if others had the same sort of meta-consciousness about their actions.)
Today on the webcam, one of the strange posters of women smoking that I got in Hong Kong.
I'm in Seattle next week. Any suggestions on things to do there? Email me. I spent a long time in Seattle back when I used to travel to Alaska every summer (a story that I'll tell here someday), and am looking forward to see it post-WTO. From those days, my most memorable moment was watching Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man at a film festival before it hit major markets.
A while ago, I used radio to make a point about why free internet content would survive. I made a passing reference to alt-weeklies lending more proof to my theory. OJR has penned the article basically summarizing the points I never got around to making.
Warning: Geek interface stuff: "Contextual dynamic searching." That's what I'm calling it. I'm intrigued by this sort of web page search that generates "more stories like this one." I noticed that the NYTimes.com just added similar functionality, in the "Related Articles" box.
Get there now, if you can: The Onion has just released their terrorism issue. Apparently, there are already server problems and some people can't view it. Here are some sample headlines: "Hugging Up 76,000 Percent," "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With," "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule," "Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake," and my favorite: "Bush Sr. Apologized To Son For Funding Bin Laden In '80s."Damn, the "On TV Tonight" graphic is brilliant. I guess this is what we need.
Does it seem that the American press could never write anything this reasoned? The Brit press is so often accused of being adversarial and partisan, but the structure of this piece just goes to the heart of the questions I have. Don't get me wrong -- I disagree with some of the answers, but it really approaches the topic from the right places: "Is this going to turn into a battle between the west and Islam?" "What is the worst that could happen?"
I wonder if there's hope for this nationwide? (An Afghani restaurant in San Fran is getting more visitors, not less.)
Okay, I guess I'm back. I'm going to start posting daily again, but I completely concede any attempt at comprehensiveness. Part of my recent silence is due to a surfeit of meaningless commentary filling the internet. I'm sure that I'll only contribute to that. For me, large political events also always seem to coincide with large personal events....
There's probably never been a better time to read The New Yorker. (This William Vollman article about touring Afghanistan from the archive is fascinating to read now.) Scratch that. It's probably more important to read The Nation right now.
There's a good Bjork video interview over at Insound. She describes how the original title of her new album, which she calls a "love affair of the home," was Domestica. Insound, which is an essential bookmark for music fans, also has videos from Tortoise, Danielson Famile, and a whole lot more stuff you didn't see on the MTV Music Video Awards.
I wish someone would write an alternative history to the internet, one in which the propelling force of the dialectic had more to do with gimmicks than communication. With that in mind, the Turret-a-Phone turns swearing into an interactive art form.
The Onion A.V. Club has a long interview with Josh Whedon. (Buffy and Lost and the new Iron Chef will be the only tv I watch this fall.) In addition, The Onion proper continues with more impeccable headlines: God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back To All His Niggaz.
Good article about whether image search engines are a form of digital copyright infringement. Ditto.com is being sued for theirs, and one must wonder if the same will happen to the venerated Google.
This is purely geek-talk, but the new WC3 standards for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) were quietly released a couple days ago. Some predict that this could eventually overthrow Flash -- SVG is non-proprietary, SVG is cross-platform, SVG is a language. Personally, I think Flash has way too much history for this to ever happen, but this is something to watch.
Jesse from Madison thinks Buddha is celebrating a win at bocce ball.
TJ, who is somewhat Buddhistic himself, says Buddha is so cheerful because he's holding up the heavens (the sphere in his hands being the sun and the moon).
Kevin proclaims: "Hotei, or the 'laughing Buddha,' is a symbol of happiness/prosperity/general contentment. This is mainly conveyed through his huge belly, which is usually rubbed for luck. But he's also usually represented with some kind of precious object, too. In this case, probably pearls, which no doubt also do double-duty as signs of wisdom."
Everyone else is linking to this Fay Weldon fiasco, so I should too. In short, Weldon has taken sponsorship money to drop references of Bulgari, an Italian jewelry company, in her most recent novel, The Bulgari Connection.
Mildly interesting: Disney and Murdoch are in cahoots for on-demand video.
Hey! The internet isn't the only place you can plaster annoying advertisements that proclaim "interactivity!" Wahoo!
At the intersection of two occasionally brilliant but often idiotic art forms -- Punk Rock and Flash Design -- comes Anarchy Monkey. I can see it now: "Ninety-nine percent of all punk is bad." -- Jakob Nielsen
I guess V - The Original Miniseries has been out for a couple months on DVD, but I didn't notice until now. I remember being pissed off in grade school that I was going to miss the final episode of V because I had to play saxophone in some dumb school concert. Now, I'll finally be able to see the twin-births. The series that followed was horrible.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what this Buddha on the webcam that Jerra bought me in Thailand is doing. Why is it holding its balls so cheerfully in the air?
One of the great critical minds of the 20th century, Pauline Kael died today. Expect an outpouring of eulogies from the great, mediocre, and poor film reviewers over the next week.
A special Labor Day entry:
This much is true: Dilbert is an industry posing as a comic strip. It is, however, more debatable if Dilbert is merely another way to placate workers into nudge-nudge comfort with corporate culture. If you read between the cells, the comic strip is surprisingly complicit with the kind of stultifying irony that arose in the 90s, which has a way of making one passive. (I intentionally resisted hyperlinking "stultifying irony" and "passive," because I'm actually a fan of many stultifying pieces of culture. And parsing the effects of this kind of irony is discomforting.)
I'll leave that question open-ended, and point you an interesting Dilbert development:
Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, has finished working with the design firm IDEO on a new project, The Ultimate Cubicle. It looks like a Sol LeWitt Lego set, but includes such comfortably futuristic features as a "Snap Hammock" and a "Wallflower Murphy Seat."
CNN's tour of the Ultimate Cubicle exemplifies living-as-work.
The IDEO press release dresses up the Ultimate Cubicle like the Holodeck.
All local links today. The key: = Not Scary = Scary = Extremely Scary
I had no idea Big Brother lived next door. Visionics is a Twin Cities-based company that is developing face-recognition software being used to match your face against police mugs. Apparently, their software, FaceIt, was going to be used in British Borders Bookstores.
In other freakishly local news, have you seen Let's Bowl on Comedy Central? Kottke has an old picture of the famed south Minneapolis bowling alley where it was filmed. I marvel at the The Stardust when I drive by it on my way to my favorite restaurant, but I've never been inside. The show's theme song kicks ass. It's on Sunday nights, so check it out. (More info about the creators.)
Sursumcorda is the downtown Minneapolis club that went in the place of the lauded Foxfire Lounge. At fist glance the website looks like an interesting place for mixed-media fun, but after you look around a bit, you start to think "middle-aged hipness." I wonder what it says about me that I really want to attend Fray Day next week?
Mid-west right-wing talk-show [three redundant hyphenated descripters] host Scott Hennen of KCNN/WDAY (GF/Fargo) was a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" last week. Here's the audio. Art Bell was also on, and was much more interesting.
The 50-Pound Butter PDA Sculpture at the Minnesota State Fair (yes, you heard me right), is up for sale on Ebay (current big: $360).
Is your neighbor's house valued at more than yours? Type in the address and find out.
The Beastie Boys label, Grand Royal, is closing shop. (Home of many albums I enjoy, including those by Buffalo Daughter, Luscious Jackson, Sean Lennon, and Atari Teenage Riot.)
Oh, boo hoo. Just when you thought dot-com failures were the most trite thing in the world to talk about, the New York publishing world solidifies your suspicions by celebrating it in BooHoo.com, which apparently chronicles the catastrophic rise and fall of Boo.com. Gawd, they're talking to Cameron Diaz and Ed Norton about a movie.
Weird. The consistently clueless New York Times Arts Section just realized Serge Gainsbourg exists.
This project that I'm working on is nowhere near complete, but I wanted to throw it out there to see what you think: Name That Play. The idea is that you learn a little bit of football by seeing some animations of classic plays. It needs work yet, but the general skeleton is there. Any thoughts?
What's an internal memo at the The Onion look like? FuckedCompany has posted one. (Someday, I'll write the post about what a moron Scott Haise, the publisher of The Onion, is. It's one of those tragic brainless-person-in-the-right-place success stories.)
For no particularly good reason, I did a Barbie post a few weeks ago. Here's a witty addition: Action News Barbie. "It's fun to be a reporter!"
A while ago, I wrote about Dan Rather's brilliant gaffe of tossing news junkies to newspapers instead of his own website, CBSNews.com. The news and operations director at CBSNews.com responds: "Dan's been a huge supporter of the Internet and CBSNews.com. We get a number of graphical mentions on his newscast every evening, so I'm not going to criticize one ad lib. But that's exactly the kind of content we do, to add what's on broadcast TV and radio."
And, finally, this article kills me. I used to work for this Knight-Ridder newspaper (as the webmaster), which has recently laid off something like 40 percent of its staff. But after a 100-mile-per-hour storm that knocked down trees hit town, Tony Ridder coughed up $25G to buy new trees. I know a few pissed editors wondering if the paper will still be worth the trees it's printed on.
Another IBS project: Random Lottery Number Generator. It could use some serious advances (like entering some numbers first and seeing if any match), but it's a good start.
Setting: The present future. A nearly real conversation. Before sleep, in an era of memory leaks and database conflicts. (Last night.)
He: The blog is growing. People who I don't even know are signing up for my email list now. She: Does your email list even work? He: Of course it does. She: Then why haven't I gotten any email yet? He: Until I get enough people signed up, it's a waste of time sending anything out. She: That's not fair though. I signed up, I should get something. He: But I could tell you right now what would be in the emails. Or go to the site. Isn't that enough? She: No, that's different. He: How? She: I expect the emails. He: No you don't. I'm telling you that I'm not sending any. She: Until when? He: I dunno. Until it reaches some sort of critical mass. She: When's that? He: Maybe when enough strangers sign up. She: I want you to unsubscribe me. He: What? You want to be unsubscribed for not receiving my spam? She: I signed up, and I deserve those emails. If you're not going to send them, unsubscribe me. He: But what if I start sending them next week? She: I might reconsider then. He: You mean to tell me that it really bothers you to have your name in a database, even if I don't do anything with it? That's insane. What if it sat there for millennia, doing nothing? She: What if you bought something from me online, and I didn't send it to you...? He: ...But what if I forgot that I even bought it from you? She: I haven't forgotten. He: Forget. She: Goodnight. He: I could send it out tomorrow, but it would be a replica of the site now. I'm not going to put any additional time into special email content right now. She: Then at least send that. He: But that's nothing. It's just links to other people's sites. And then no one would visit my site. She: Oh, that old argument. He: Yeah.
No fair. I put up my wish list, and no one sends me toys that make me feel compromised. Trust me, if you want a shot of me doing something naughty on the webcam, all you have to do is ask.
I'm going to Hong Kong the middle of September. Anyone ever been there? Recommendations? Suggestions? I'm reading Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong and re-watching all my Wong Kar-wai films. Email me with more ideas.
Minneapolis browsing:
A story from an indie-weekly in Raleigh about an "effeminate lad from Minnesota" who "rose to the top of the gay porn industry."
Some of you might remember when MTV.com redesigned every day (or at least it seemed like it, because the front page was constantly changing). Anyway, the site officially redesigned today.
And, finally, looks like others took notice of the Dan Rather gaffe, which I mentioned last week in a different context (my point was that the website must've been ticked off; no one even bothers with that angle).
Apropos of my Media Prophecy, here's a round-up of good magazine articles I've found lately (all discovered in the print edition first):
I should have read DaveHickey by now. This piece in The New Yorker, wherein Hickey's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy is called possibly "the most influential works of art theory and appreciation published in the last decade," is a testament to significant art that still occurs on the fringe. (It makes me want to visit New Mexico, which must be a first.) [The link will probably disappear soon, as the NewYorker.com doesn't archive their issues online.]
Film Comment has two good stories (not online): a comprehensive review of A.I. and a double-historical analysis of the porn movie and Hollywood as myth-maker comrades.
The Wire has a transcript (not online) of Jaques Attali speaking at a Net.Music conference in London last May, where he talks about potential models of distribution for music in the future. (His website, which I'll write about in a future post about academician websites, is one of the coolest examples of a professor reaching out to people through a popular medium.) His book Noise has influenced my thinking about music and economics more than anything I've ever read. At the conference he says: "Music is a metaphor for the management of violence. When people listen to music, they listen to the fact that socity is possible: because we can manage violence." (There's also a Radiohead cover story that's worth reading.)
And, finally, NewScientist.com, which is a must-read for anyone who has even a passing interest in science and technology, has redesigned.
About a year ago, I counted the number of periodicals to which I subscribed. The count was staggering: 47. (This included 40 magazines, 4 journals, and 3 newspapers.) Today, probably because of the internet, that number has shrunk drastically. My entire current subscription list has eight titles: The New Yorker, New York Observer, Art Byte, The Wire, Spin, Mean, Wired, and The Nation.
Gone, somewhat randomly, are Mother Jones and The New Republic and New Left Review. Gone are EW and Punk Planet and Columbia Journalism Review. Gone: the Sunday New York Times. In some capacity, I still read them all, but now I do it online.
Some might say this makes me an emblem of what's wrong with the current state of publishing. When I can get it for free, why should I bother subscribing? (Caveat: I still purchase about 10 mags off the newsstand per month, and I subscribe to The Nation more out of a sense of charity than anything else.)
Actually, to be fair to myself and the medium, money has nothing to do with it. It's convenience that wins. I'll always need a magazine or two to drag around from place to place. The ability to carry a periodical -- it's transportability -- really matters. But that transportability only accommodates a small amount of the media I now consume. Everything else, I consume behind a computer monitor (sometimes printing it, but not always).
What does this mean for the future of media? Some online newspapers (and other purely-web-based content providers) are toying with a subscription-based models. Despite that, I see hope in a future in which 1) print publications won't suffer or die and 2) online content will still remain free. What hope?
Radio.
Radio may be the most resilient medium of the information revolution. For a significant part of the last century, radio was the medium. When TV came along, radio had to adjust to find its niche. There was no mastermind behind this evolution. Radio just adapted to become, simply, the transportation medium. I don't know if anyone has the statistics, but I bet the vast majority of radio consumption occurs in the car.
And, I might add, it's all free. (If I were to expand upon this rant, there would also be a section for the alternative press, which is still mostly free and hugely important.)
Newspapers and magazines and whatever else will all do the same thing: adapt. This is why all those idiots who prophesied "the death of print", just don't understand the evolution of information. The machine is just too big to toss off causalities. No one ever dies. The machine finds room for everything to survive. Just because the internet came along doesn't mean that tv or radio or newspapers are going to perish. They might suffer a slight hit, but they'll be around decades from now, in forms not-to-dissimilar from what you currently read.
Go ahead, contest me. (I was hoping to have dicussion boards available by this time to debate such topics, but of course I don't yet. For now, you can only call me an idiot through email.)
Is it unsettling to anyone else that advertising companies seem to be the ones pushing the limits of the internet? I see examples of this every day, but the most obvious one is what Eyeblaster is doing. Check out this one (wait two seconds for the advert to appear -- it'll scare you). I didn't even know you could run a Flash .swf underneath the text like that. The first time I saw this, it annoyed the hell out of me. But I've gained an appreciation of its... ingenuity. Another progressive advertising group (did I just say "progressive advertising"?) to ponder is 2advanced, especially the Lasik Plus Surgery site they did.
Someone today pointed me to a new advertising concept that Playboy.com is doing, which has in some ways turned to the TV model of advertising (force them to watch the advert, or at least wait). When you go to the site, you get a full 30-second advert that you have to watch first, before getting to the, er, content. (The advert itself is interesting too: Hugh Hefner doing a voice-over for a Jack Daniels flash animation.)
And C|Net is also reporting about another boundary-pushing advertising development in which users who go to certain sites (say, 1-800-Flowers.com) get a popup advert for a competitor (say, FTD.com). Gator.com is the guilty company creating this.
Why is this unsettling? I guess because I expect that artists -- or at least engineers -- should be pushing the medium. Sure, there are some goodartsitesoutthere, but how many of them give you a sense of discovering new cognitive or social territory?
(I'd recommend ArtByte magazine as a good place to see where the frisson begins, however.)
A good portion of what I do every day is find ways in which the internet and television can merge. Sometimes, that takes on a unique hybrid; other times, it's an embarrassing shot-in-the-dark. But what we talk about constantly is finding ways to get the television to mention the website -- as often as possible. It's become a media mantra: "For more on this topic, go to our websites...."
That's why Barb (ahem) scores serious anti-synergy points for catching a moment of convergence anathema on tv tonight. Apparently, after George W. Bush finished his mea culpa over stem-cell research, Dan Rather on CBS said, "Obviously, this is a very complicated subject. It's the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with because it requires such depth into the complexities of it. So we can with, I think, impunity, recommend that if you're really interested in this, you'll want to..."
...and what to you think he said?
...c'mon, guess.
Bzzzt, wrong. He said, "You'll want to read in detail one of the better newspapers tomorrow."
First of all, I hate, hate, hate Kevin Smith. I'll simply never understand why Clerks was considered good by anyone with a brain and why Richard Linklater befriended him.
That aside, you probably heard that Tim Burton read his script for Superman and totally dissed it. Now Smith is dissing him back, by claiming that Burton ripped him off with the elliptical ending of Planet of the Apes. And he says he has proof, as this shot from a three-year-old Jay and Silent Bob comic book reportedly shows. Read more about this at Plastic.com.
I read Michael Lewis' new book, Next, on a plane ride from the Midwest to the Southeast and back. I never read the touted The New New Thing, but, with no substantiation, I had thought of Lewis as a shuckster: slick as Kurt Anderson, tedious as Nicholas Negroponte, and bandwagonesque as Douglas Rushkoff -- and, in the ellusive world of superstar media, being married to Tabitha Soren seemed to both score and detract points. But his new book, sub-titled The Future Just Happened, really is, in addition to being a great screed on the social implications of the internet, a great piece of prose.
The structure is simple: short portraits of individuals who, through an equal mix of lucky circumstance and acute circumspection, ended up typifying how the Internet has changed our lives without us even seeing it. (The basic presumption of the book is McLuhan's old dictum that as technologies become more important they become invisible.) The first story, about a teenager named Jonathan Lebed who was charged by the SEC with inflating stock prices to his gain, is difficult to summarize in a sentence, but the amazing discovery comes when you realize the kid really appears to have done nothing more than stock financiers on CNBC try to do all the time -- it's just that he wasn't sanctioned to do it.
There's also the story about another teenager whose legal opinions elevated him to the top viewer-rated "legal expert" on Askme.com -- until he admitted that he was 15.
The book's future rides so close to the present that you can feel where Lewis is hedging his bets. For this book, Gnutella will be the next big revolution, which only months later seems a hopeful prospect, but not a utopian absolute. And I'm not sure TiVo is really a social revolution that Lewis predicts.
Anyone else wonder when Tim Burton will make a greatmovieagain?
Anyone else think it's weird that you could place most of the ape voices to real actors, but that blonde girl had a "I'm sure I know her" quality that you couldn't quite put your finger on (is she the Victoria's Secret girl? was she in that island movie with Leonardo that no one saw? turns out she actually is a nobody, so far).
Anyone else try to draw comparisons between Mark Wahlberg and Charleton Heston?
Anyone else wonder why he only kisses the cute monkey and makes out with the blonde?
Anyone else upset that the ending is the only campy part of what should've been a camp-fest?
In other simian-act news, when I was on the Internet Movie Database, I noticed the posters pages have a right-click-disabling javascript. Who the hell does Amazon think they're fooling? Do they really think they can prevent people from downloading images that way? It makes me want to "steal" them just for the sake of it.
Minneapolis' City Pages did a somewhat critical piece on Channel4000's RoboCam last month. Since I work for the parent company of said-cam, I thought it my duty to show my absolute favorite RoboCam picture: TJ Smoking On Roof. (One day, TJ called from his cell and said "quick, go to the Robocam." When I cranked it to the lower-right, I snapped this.) Funny thing is, the City Pages article generated a lot of talk about a voyeuristic society, but I like that we used it to goof-off during work.
A sure sign of something, but I don't know what: Steve Albini was on yesterday's Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me (radio program outta Chicago that airs on NPR). Best quote: "I don't think anyone who has ever heard of me would ever hear it [this show]." Listen to it.
The Rest Of You: 1) Isn't it amazing that Microsoft is phasing out the that damn paper clip in their next version of Windows? 2) Isn't it startling that the company has enough sense of irony about it to make a semi-funny-but-not-really-funny Flash movie about it? 3) And, c'mon, isn't it down-right freaky that they used Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of that clip in their animation?
I went to a Dan "Savage Love" Savage reading a couple years ago. (He's the sex columnist who appears in the back of most alt-weeklies and is now editor of The Stranger.) He told a funny story about meeting a guy on a radio program that claimed to absolutely "love" his horse. Yes, in that way. Savage said that it got him thinking about how American society has shed most sexual taboos, but wondered if sex with animals would ever be culturally acceptable.
But the funny moment came when Savage asked the guy if his horse was a male or female.
There was a long pause. And then the philo-equestrian said very sternly "I AM NOT A HOMOSEXUAL."
(NOTE: I put a poll on here, grabbing the code from Freetools.com. I was hoping to have the ColdFusion done for my own polling mechanism done be now, but I'm hungover and lazy.)
You know how virus emails always have a subject line that's suppose to be appealing enough to make you click on the attachment? I received a virus email today that must be trying to trap all English grad students into computer chaos. Here was the message:
Subject: Beckett English
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
And there was a virus attached. Unbelievable. Are there actually a bevy of duped English profs out there right now? Is there a way to "target" a virus to a certain demographic? Was the author a student seeking revenge for getting a bad grade on his Waiting For Godot paper? What a crazy world this is.
UPDATE: Apparently, this virus is widespread. This page says "The subject of the email is random." Whatever. At any rate, Beckett would have loved it.
I saw Takeshi Murakami at the Walker today for the opening of his new exhibit, Superflat. Murakami, who spoke and answered questions, is known for transposing manga-like images into the art world. The thesis of the exhibit -- that it "investigates a tendency toward two-dimensionality in Japanese visual art" -- has the potential of being provoking, but never really answers nor asks any good questions. It felt glitzy and plastic, and nothing more.
However, Marakami showed an interesting collage film that juxtaposed scraps of American Hollywood films (American Beauty, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic) against Japanese anime (that I wish I was knowledgeable enough to mention parenthetically).
How to introduce this one? Unbelievably futuristic artificial intelligence communication device or Unbelievably ingenious Internet utility in an age when such things no longer exist?
Well, first you need to use IM to understand. There's this company, ActiveBuddy, that plans to use IM as an information delivery device. It's brilliant, if you think about it. Instantaneous information delivered with nearly no bandwidth hurdle. It will work perfectly on wireless devices.
But that's the boring part. It's also an automated robot that talks to you. All you need to do is add "SmarterChild" to your buddylist, type "hello" and begin conversing. Here's my first conversation:
ibsrex: hello SmarterChild: Glad to see you again, ibsrex! What can I help you with? ibsrex: Where can I buy some nice socks? SmarterChild: I'm sorry? ibsrex: Socks. SmarterChild: I'm sorry. I didn't comprehend that. Try typing your request a different way. ibsrex: What do you think about Britney? SmarterChild: I'm somewhat indifferent to it. ibsrex: Why? SmarterChild: Eh, cause that's the way it is. ibsrex: Would you take a walk on the wildside with me? SmarterChild: Hello to you too, ibsrex. ibsrex: I love you. SmarterChild: I love you too! ibsrex: coke or pepsi? SmarterChild: None for me, thanks. ibsrex: Oh, come on. SmarterChild: Where are we going? ibsrex: Dirty slut. SmarterChild: That's rather harsh. Watch your tongue! ibsrex: go to hell SmarterChild: Don't you have anything better to do than to curse at a machine?
On Wednesday, I will start teaching Flash at BrainCo. Teaching advertising students will be new for me -- I usually just crash their parties. I have a long rant about how something happened in the late '90s where advert-kids suddenly got cooler than alt-kids. I toured Fallon once, and realized that everyone in the place watched more movies than me, listened to cooler music than me, and wore clothes that made me look like Rico Tubbs circa 1985. IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS. I'll teach them how to make interactive websites and they'll teach me how to be cool again.
Have any advice on what to tell the advertising execs of tomorrow?
I like this list from Utne. "The 10 Best Books That Defy Categorization." I only know a couple of them, but have wanted to read #2, Louis Aragon, for a while.
I played croquet recently for the first time in at least a decade. Someone asked if it was "really a sport" (the seed of infinite worthless dorm-room conversations posed to everything from soccer to marbles). But what we wanted to know is if one can get paid to play croquet. And then, in an otherwise boring Sunday edition, the Times answered my question.
Rob Nelson's City Pages review of A.I. is remarkably similar to the review I would have given. (My new fave Kubrick line: "The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler's List was about six hundred people who don't.") What do you get if you cross Speilberg and and Kubrick? Apparently, really bad George Lucas. (C'mon, it's got a goddamn Ewok in it.)
Last seen in 1959, the BMW Mini will be re-released state-side next year.
I put some old FATE covers online today. It sparked something nostalgic -- I miss working on magazines. FATE was something strange and special too. Or at least it was going to be, until the publisher backed out on the capital investment to relaunch it.
The plan was to re-ignite this 50-year-old rag relic as a strange-and-unusual youth-culture mag. It would utilize pop culture's fascination with vampires (Buffy) and UFOs (X-Files) and Goth (Marilyn Manson), but be neither idolatary nor skeptical nor fanish. Unlike the slew of pro- and anti-paranormal magazines out there, this one would eschew both camps: it would merely be fascinated with the cultures of Loch Ness chasers, conspiracy theorists, real-life vampires, tele-evangelists, and every other weirdo sub-culture out there.
It was a brave idea bound to die. But we got a few funny issues before it did. My favorite stories:
* The polygamy cult in Utah whose prophet was the reincarnation of everyone, including William "Braveheart" Wallace.
* The Loch Ness monster is really an English colonization scheme.
* The investigation of Middle Age art to find secret evidence of UFOs.
* And, of course, my interview with Chris Carter in which he said the words "That's extremely perceptive of you." (I have it on tape!)
Google has a new search function that lets you buy keywords. (Go here and hit the "Continue" button.) That is, you can choose a single keyword that will let you serve banners only when users enter that word. The costs:
My best friend in college [yes, Chuck, I said that] had a book come out recently on Scribner. I read an early draft of it about two years ago and mostly disliked it. But I'd still recommend it to anyone unfortunate enough to have listened to heavy metal in the midwest in the '80s.
Fargo Rock City (originally titled Appetite For Deconstruction) is a genre-romp of memoir, criticism, rock gospelizing and list-making. The best parts are memoir, and the worst parts are criticism. And I can attest that the half of it that I lived through with him is amazingly accurate. (The simple fact that anyone reputable has chosen to publish a book that includes stories about us eating Chicken McNuggets at a Hardees in Grand Forks, ND is simply astounding.)
Eric Weisbard in The New York Times Book Review called it "ridiculously engaging," which is the most accurate description I've heard. I think that if you read it you'll find yourself suprised when the last page is turned (an acccident that you finished it) with a curious grin on your face as to why you made it all the way through. Chuck would say you had imbibed a "guilty pleasure."
My friend, Garmen -- who's cool, funny and sometimes giddy -- works for a tv production company in La-La Land. Her most recent gig is to help produce the show Worst Case Scenarios, based upon the book of the same name.
You may have seen the book lying around at the local oddity shop. (I bought it for someone at the Limbo Lounge in the Mall of America.) It features such action-packed scenarios as "How To Take A Punch" and "How To Escape From Quicksand" and "How To Perform A Tracheotomy." All of which will make great tv. (I hope it's on Friday nights, after the new American version of the "Iron Chef.")
Anyway, if you have ideas for programs, please write me, and I'll pass it on (and give you credit). She'll be very appreciative.
When I got this email today, I imagined that yet another dot.com was on the road to failure; this time because there were no airplane crashes:
To our AirDisaster.Com subscribers, We have received numerous inquiries in recent weeks regarding list membership. As there has not been a fatal airliner accident involving an aircraft seating over 19 passengers in some time, we have not been required to send out any E-mail Notifications. We wanted to assure anyone who may be concerned that they had been removed from the list that they are still included. Regards, Chris Kilroy Editor, AirDisaster.Com webmaster@airdisaster.com
Wheh, not dead!
And, in other email news, this correction is on WashingtonPost.com right now:
Earlier today, washingtonpost.com inadvertently retransmitted an eight-day old e-mail news alert reporting the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. We apologize.
ibsbarb: oh boy. you'd better get out of here before anyone else tries to talk to you. Paraih: they can't, I've taped the door shut ibsbarb: good thinking. Paraih: and Pault pennied me in for good measure Paraih: did you know that I can fit in my file cabinet? ibsbarb: with or without the drawers? Paraih: no drawers... me and a web cam can fit ibsbarb: what you do in the privacy of your file cabinet is none of my business. Paraih: it's the business of the Internet community now ibsbarb: tell rex about it so he can put it in his blog.
Mostly, this will be a test-ground/play-ground. I'm going to post projects that I'm working on and hope you offer opinions. What's a project? Anything from an idea that's bugging me to some dumb design/development/concept monstrosity.
I'll be posting here daily, or nearly so. What will I be saying? Sometimes, it will be general musings about popular culture and the internet. Other times, it will ask for your opinions about something.
Come back soon and you'll find:
In a month, this whole thing will be dynamic. ColdFusion.
Part 1: This Is Not a Vermeer TM
Part 2: Uber for Art Forgeries
Part 3: Forgeries Gone Wild!
Part 4: The End of Authentication
Part 5: The Artist, the Thief, the Forger, and Her Lover
>
I guess I'm on the record being annoyed with NYC's recent look-at-me-look-at-me glee over a handful of successful startups. Obviously, it's not that I don't want this fair city to succeed; it's just that I shun boosterism for its own sake, and there's a lot of that here. Go social media!
The first time I met a writer was the first time it occurred to me that one could be a writer.
I actually own a copy of Lotion's album Nobody's Cool (1996), which 
A month ago on the eve of 
Weegee is just a vectored photo of Luigi from Mario Brothers placed in completely random situations.
I was live (live! on tv!) 
And yet, during the entire Summer of Friendster, everyone seemed to sorta agree: "This is ridiculously fun, but I probably won't be doing it next month."
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This year? I'm going as a Spam Filter. My nerd is bigger than yours.
So you want to start a topical blog that will be adored across the land, especially by the super-smart, media-hip blogosphere? I've got the perfect idea for a young journalist entrepreneur like youself: a blog all about Fake News. There's so much to feed on here, with everything from The Daily Show's crazy success to The Onion expanding the print edition across the country to whack characters like Ali G and Mo Rocca being taken seriously. In addition to everything that's happening in the Fake News Industry, your faux-media-blog could mix in all the quasi-news of the day being produced by Bill O'Reilly's screamfest and Al Gore's upcoming network. Add a dash of RatherGate and a pinch of PR Passing For News, and you could have yourself a hit. You could get ahead of the faker hegemony by posting the Top 10 Spoof-Ready Stories each day (probably snagged right off Fark, and appearing as Leno punchlines later that night -- especially that one about Kerry's fake tan). You could become the Romenesko of Fake News! This idea is dot-com bank. Nick Denton or MediaBistro would be knocking down your door within days. This is your moment of zen!
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (
Caveats & background: I worked on NBCOlympics.com for nearly a year. However, the opinions below are mine and only mine. Even though I've had many conversations about the production, delivery, and business and of the games, what follows is not the opinion of NBC or IBS or the IOC or capitalism or athleticism or This Great Country or whatever else gets tossed into the ring every four years. Also, I have very little to say about what you saw on television. I'm talking internet today. I've already talked about it in other places (such as 
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