I have a book coming out at the end of this month! If you once enjoyed this blog, you will likely find The Encyclopedia of Misinformation a delight. It was influenced greatly by blog culture of early '00s.
There were 971 entries found with "fimocu":
Netflix and Ch-Ch-Chilly
How have decades of mass media and technology changed us? I return to my hometown to find answers.
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.
Part 5: The Artist, the Thief, the Forger, and Her Lover
How did the Mona Lisa become famous? The biggest art heist of all time connects the forger and the thief.
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 a couple, 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.
Calling out someone as a "sorority girl." Sensing we would deem this bullshit, Sorkin set out to prove it's not.
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?
I was surprised to find out last night that Dan Wilson co-wrote Adele's "Someone Like You." If you're from the Upper Midwest, you immediately thought of Trip Shakespeare. Outside of that, the name might not sound familiar, though you definitely know "Closing Time," the 1998 omnipresent hit from his band Semisonic. According to a profile in today's Star-Tribune, Rick Rubin brought him in to write with Adele.
Wilson said the session commenced with Adele playing some YouTube clips of rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson, her latest favorite. "Then I went to the piano and she played guitar and we launched into writing. It was very natural and low-key.
"She told me she had this terrible big breakup and it was all she could think about. She had the first four or five lines [of lyrics] and a melody, and she sang the verse."
Wilson then played the song on piano, embellishing it with big, classical chords. "She said, 'That's way more inspiring.' Things started to move quickly, and by mid-afternoon, we started recording."
Take THAT, science.
best whisky board on pinterest by greg clayman. Perhaps this is the answer to my rhetorical question on Twitter:
So which of you will be the first to publish their Pinterest as a book?
So, two questions:
1) Who exactly is MIA flipping off? It's you, right?
2) What exactly is she trying to say with this?
Five things that intrigue me right now:
1) Daughterly Nepotism. Oooooh, boy. Chelsea Clinton, Jenna Bush, and Meghan McCain now all work for work for NBC. This makes me miss the 30 Rock cafeteria!
2) The Bipolar Reactions that Lana Del Rey Elicits. Watch the video and then look at those comments!
3) Slaughterhouse 90210 Entries Like This One. She’s still got it.
4) After 17 years on the web, Kottke finds the craziest thing he’s ever seen.
5) Social Media Pillows. There ya go, the beginning and end of the Fimoculous Holiday Shopping Guide.
Five things that intrigue me right now:
1) This NYT Map of NYC Startups.
2) How I Ended Up Leaving Poynter. Jim’s highly-detailed account doesn’t make Poynter look worse, but they sure don’t look any better.
3) Betabeat’s Most Poachable Players in Tech. The best thing about this is not knowing most of these people.
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.)
Five things that intrigue me right now:
1) The Atlantic Cities. Urban affairs microsite, yeah!
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.)
2 hours agoby ADM
I thought it would be funny.
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:
- Joanne McNeil at Tomorrow Museum
- The brilliant Danah Boyd, whose research and insight into social media and youth culture is unmatched
- Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG, who is at once reportorial and speculative
- The visionary architect Lebbeus Woods
- 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
- The Big Picture photo blog, started by a developer at the Boston Globe who is now launching a similar project for the Atlantic
- 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.
Update: Rex offers his take, on Tumblr.
The Daily? Is that like eWorld? No? Ok, more like Launch?
Oh wait -- false alarm -- it's open access after all. And I didn't even have to buy an iPad! Or subscribe! [via]
Blogging is dead, say bloggers, some of whom REPORTEDLY recently gave up their personal blogs for a Tumblr. Which is not like a blog at all.
NYC has hired Rachel Sterne as its first Chief Digital Officer. She is 27 and will be making $115,000. NYC's tech entrepreneurs are said to be happy with the choice -- she's one! First assignment: find the real nerds in this town.
A rumor I heard about Murdoch's new tablet app, The Daily. (Wish I understood the logic of when I post something on my Tumblr, and when it goes here, and when I cross link from one to the other. There is no logic!)
Speaking of long sentences, how long would a sentence (or book) have to be to protect you from a bullet? Apparently longer than Freedom. (And even longer than The Instructions, believe it or not.) So, if you're in a bad neighborhood, leave the Kindle at home and maybe bring along Musil's two-volume The Man Without Qualities.
A Visual History of Daft Punk's Helmets. Speaking of which, someone should recut Tron: Legacy with a different soundtrack and see if it's still possible to watch. [via pop loser]
There's a new trailer for the next season of Big Love (premiering Jan 16). For the first three seasons, the theme song was from The Beach Boys, but last season they switched to Interpol. This time, it's a shoe-gazing band called Engineers.
Oh yeah, the Lists Of Lists: 2010 is up. But this year I decided to crowd-source it -- submit your links here.
We launched VYou.com today (a little background). Some press: TechCrunch | Gizmodo | The Awl | Vanity Fair | WaPo.
This is a video of video being taken as Sleigh Bells performs at Vice's Creator's Project yesterday.
moot's TED talk. Previously: interview with moot.
A follow-up to the Nic Rad show: Gawker TV at the closing and Meghan Keane in The Awl.
For David Carr's media biz column, I wrote something about Gawker Media and the new iPhone.
This new book is full of spectacular writers, and me. A few of us will be reading from it tonight and Thursday. More details.
Regarding yesterday's discovery @WhatTimeIsItNow: it turns out there are more than a handful of Twitter clock bots out there to tell you what time is it. In the words of @big_ben_clock, Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! -JM
My friend Tamara makes these awesome wallets that you will covet.
I'm excited to see what this week's guest blogger, Danielle Strle, is going to come up with. She works at StumbleUpon, designs stuff, and will blow your socks off. (If for some twisted reason you are interested in what I've been doing, here's an interview with me about recent projects.)
Top secret Improv Everywhere thing today involving Stormtroopers, if that's your thing. My thing? Stormtrooper burlesque. -- DG
I thought Barbie's new job was going to be some sort of computer engineer? No? Now she's secretary Joan Holloway? Well, not much of an advancement in feminism, but you have to admit, waaaay more sexy. -- DG
Even though it looks terrible. --DG
Last night's House episode dealt with one of the show's key demographics: bloggers. Let's see what the show's writers thinks our profession looks like.
Nailed it. --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
It's been a fun week. I'll sign off now before I get tempted to overstay my welcome and live-blog the Oscars tomorrow night. ("WHAT?! Hurt Locker was SO contrived!!", etc.)
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Rex for the opportunity.
If you're interested in more of this kind of thing, you can follow my shared links and catch me on Twitter. In a couple months, I'll be launching Slow Machine (RSS), a site with occasional, longer pieces about -- what else? -- pop culture and politics. Hope to see you there. --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
Rex's oft-repeated prediction about the Hipster Grifter is one step closer to reality: Ex-con Kari Ferrell will be answering readers' questions at Gawker. She'll be responding by video. Get in there, Rex! --ADM Update: Her response is up.
My pal Thomas has a new book out today: The Decision Tree. I'm only through the first chapter so far, but it's fantastic. Mediaite has a 5QQ with him. -RX
Here's that new Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary ($364.68) that you many have seen lauded in the New York Times Magazine. Check out the video "How to Call Someone Stupid In Old English Using The Historical Thesaurus of the OED":
The giganto list of 2009 lists is finally winding down, but here are few highlights to appear recently: Ad Tunes' Top Ad Music, Onion A/V Club' Top 10 Electronica Albums and Mixes, Eat Me Daily's The Year in Food Blog-to-Book Deals, The Auteurs' Movies Posters of the Year, Techmeme's Top 10 Objectively Biggest Tech Stories, Art Fag City's Best of the Web, The Atlantic's Best Cocktails, Stereogum's 10 Most NSFW Music Videos, and The Yale Book of Quotations' Most Notable Quotations.
While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?
Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.
Sigh.
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.
So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:
[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]
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 it is not. 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.)
24) Best of Wikipedia
...Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe...
(See also: Double Tongued.)
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 internet comment thread, 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.)
15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power.
(See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)
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.)
13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it's another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT's most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists.
(See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)
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.)
10) Letters of Note
We've known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, "Correspondence deserving a wider audience," says it all. There's Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed "Okay you lazy bitch," there's Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there's the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there's J. D. Salinger's hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie.
(See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)
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.)
7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here.
(See also: Music Machinery.)
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.)
4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.
3) TV Tropes
If you don't know TV Tropes, it's too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you've ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought "I wonder if anyone else has thought of this," the answer is: yes, a lot. I don't even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov's Gunman or Bitch In Sheep's Clothing -- or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks.
(See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)
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.)
Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.
Some new things added to the 2009 List of Lists: Buzzmarketing Daily's 10 Most Important Tweets, The Week's 10 Most Compulsive Twitterers, The Frisky's 10 Worst Boyfriends And Husbands, Onion A/V's Year in Swag, Idolator's Worst Album Covers, Yale Book of Quotations' Most Notable Quotations, Business Insider's 10 Most Infamous Lawyers, Top Recording's Top 20 Albums, Ad Freak's 30 Freakiest Commercials, Wall Street Journal Top Art Sales, and Reality Blur's Top Reality TV Whores.
The monstrous list of 2009 lists leaped up to nearly 700 entires over the weekend. Some new things include WSJ's Year in Photos, Billboard's Artists of the Year, YouTube's Most Watched and Searched For, AOL's Hot Searches, Jezebel's 10 Best Cover Lies, Glamour's 10 Best Dressed, Videogum's Best Viral Videos, and Babble's Best Mommy Bloggers.
Some new things recently added to the LIST OF 2009 LISTS: Roger Ebert's Best Films, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums, Mediaite's 50 Innovators and Influencers, Cryptomundo's Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories, HuffPo's Funniest Protest Signs, The Big Pictures' Year In Photos, and Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks.
Actually, all of my Tweets are lessons in Keynesian economics.
I was on CBC's Spark (a really great show, btw!) talking about the lists of lists. (I'm on at about 35:00, but Caterina Fake's interview much earlier is way better, so listen to that instead.)
It's my responsibility to explain why list-making matters, probably by making up some ridiculous counterintuitive argument and using words like "paradigm," self-reflexive," and "counterintuitive." I suppose I could suggest that the acceleration of technology has changed the way humans organize their internal thoughts, or that the proliferation of media has made list-making a necessary extension of cultural engagement, or that the ability to place pre-existing items into an arbitrary sequence has replaced the desire to generate an authentic personality. But that would be predictable.
--Chuck Klosterman, intro to Inventory. (The 2009 List of Lists is up to 250 entries and should double by the end of the year.)
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.
--Umberto Eco, Spiegel. (Well, okay! Check out the update to the 2009 List of Lists.)
Kottke launched a list of all the decade lists. In the meantime, the 2009 list here has passed 100 entries, but should quintuple by the end of the month.
The 2009 List of Lists is progressing nicely. Some new things that have been added: Google's Zeitgeist, Yahoo's Year in Review, Pitchforks' Top Videos, and The Millions' Year in Reading. Please email me additions.
So yeah, the End of the Year List of Lists is happening again. [Except this year, I have no time to manage it, so please email me if you'd like to either a) manage it for a small stipend, or b) sponsor it.] It's just starting out, but a few things already added: NYT's 100 Notable Books, Amazon's Best Books, Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction, S/FJ's Best Songs and Albums, Metacritic's Best Music, and Wired's Pop Culture Moments. Be sure to email me if you have more lists.
Will Foursquare be the one who turns your lifestream into a heat map?
Have you seen this crazy ass thing? It's a building going up in Bangkok called MahaNakhon that uses pixelation as its inspiration.
Finally announced: Anil's new digital democracy project. It will be called Expert Labs.
Expert Labs will borrow developers from the hallways of Google in Silicon Valley or start-ups like Foursquare and Kickstarter in New York to build government applications and social media tools in exchange for grants -- and the chance to connect with some of the most powerful people in the country.
Mr. Dash plans to lure participants with a periodic, competitive model, similar to the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge. He'll ask government agencies about their policy initiatives (say, fighting childhood obesity) as well as operating issues (like expensive, licensed billing software) and then host competitions, asking developers to code social media platforms so specialists can provide innovative solutions.
Is this the change-dot-gov we're waiting for?
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.)
I need help again! Last month I posted for an assistant, and it went well: I've hired that person full time. But now I need to find someone new. Same requirements as before. If you're interested, let me know.
New theory: Lady Gaga is the new Matthew Barney.
Klosterman talks to WSJ about laugh tracks. His new book, Eating the Dinosaur, which contains an essay about laugh tracks, is out
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.
"Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned." Previously: Bad Strategies.
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.
[via]
Nice: new Eater redesign. Also, Curbed bought Down By The Hipster. Update: Despite NYT's story, we already knew about the Curbed/VVM ad sales deal, but Fred Wilson put his usual twist on it by pointing out that local media's hidden asset may be its sales force.
Anyone else noticed the chartjunk on Google Maps lately?
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?
Anil makes the case that the most interesting startup of the year has been the federal government. While all the new dot-gov sites he lists look cool, I have to wonder: are there any practical examples yet? (It was a HuffPo puff piece, so I hope he expands it.)
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.
I asked for a DON DRAPER IS NOT BORED t-shirt, and of course someone made one.
So now that that happened, we can finish off that Time cover...
...And The Future Isn't Bright!
Some new stuff this week:
- Music: Man on the Moon: The End of Day, Kid Cudi.
- Books: Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin.
- TV Premieres: Leno (NBC), The Beautiful Life: TBL (The CW), Community (NBC).
- TV Returns: Gossip Girl (The CW), Fringe (FOX), The Office (NBC).
- Film: Jennifer's Body.
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.
Update: NYT obit.
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.
Some new stuff this week:
- Blueprint 3, Jay-Z's comeback, exec produced by Kanye.
- The Beatles: Rock Band, which got more press than Teddy Kennedy's funeral.
- The F-Word, by Jesse Sheidlower, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
- Level 26, a multi-media book/internet experiment from the creator of CSI (Fast Company profile).
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.
If you're interested, let me know!
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:
From the author of Book of Ages, a list of interesting ages in cultural history. Includes such items as "AGE 3: Sigmund Freud sees his mother naked, 1859" and "AGE 15: Susan Sontag buys her first copy of Partisan Review at a newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard, 1948."
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.
Some things that come out tomorrow: Californication, Season Two; The Last Days of Disco, Criterion Collection; Humbug, Arctic Monkeys.
What's Frances Bean Cobain looking like lately? I knew you were asking. Here ya go.
Mad Men ratings? Up 34% over last years ratings. I'm sure it was all because of Banana Republic. See also: iTunes Error? Unaired Mad Men Episode Now Playing.
MSNBC.com bought Everyblock. Excellent move. See previously: A Data Point on Every Block.
There are two clashing worldviews. There is my view, that a human being is in charge of his or her own life and, with sustained focus, can reach higher and higher achievement every week, gradually approaching (and maybe one day reaching!) a virtuous, peaceful, and happy life.
The other view is more of a victim mentality: that life happens to you, that infinite frustration and suffering are unavoidable, that the only reasonable way of coping with such an awful world is to attack whoever seems to actually enjoy life -- because surely they are dishonest or crazy and must be brought back down to Earth.
-Jakob Lodwick, Being Gawked At, and not that different from my interpretation.
On the occasion of the release of Squeaky Fromme: the spastic conspiratorial "Let's Put Squeaky Fromme on the One-Dollar Bill" section of Slacker. (Btw, people always remember Squeaky's relationship to Manson, but forget her actual reason for attempting to assassinate Ford: to save the redwoods. If you're in the mood for a flashback, read the 1975 Time cover story.)
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.
Know Your Meme t-shirts. This is how 4chan could have become cash-positive years ago. [via]
I hope the economy recovers soon enough for everyone to have guilt-free lust for the hypothetical new iTablet. Lam: "To me, this is where Star Trek starts, and War Games ends." Update: reports came in throughout the day that it will be is a 2010 launch, so maybe you should consider a Kindle after all.
Daniel Radosh Is Having A Good Week. Indeed his is! He just got hired at the Daily Show, and he has the NYT Mag cover story on The Beatles: Rock Band (out next month), which I predict you will enjoy.
For those who watched Dollhouse, the un-aired 13th episode is on Amazon. It takes place 10 years in the future.
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!
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.)
Prank Wars migrates to MTV.
Nicholson Baker, who as you remember really liked Wikipedia, isn't so much into the Kindle. Somewhat counter-intuitively, he suggest that reading on the iPhone might be better. Which is good news for Apple, because they're probably releasing a tablet by Christmas. Update: Edward Champion thought to make the same comparison and debunks Baker.
Klosterman's new book has a cover and release date: Eating the Dinosaur. The format will be similar to Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.
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 prominent sites. 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.
See also:
Howard Kurtz: Just the Messenger.
I kinda dissed the New York Observer's new site design a while back, but something I've noticed lately is that the homepage currently serves up almost all external links. Even the top story, right now, is currently a link off site. It's the largest attempt to go full-on aggregation since Drudge (contra HuffPo, which is an ingestor, not an aggregator). None of these are in their RSS feed, but I'd subscribe to something that included only those links.
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?
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.
Quick review of the new blogging history book, Say Everything, which comes out in early July.
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.
The Onion just announced it will be releasing an "obsessively specific pop-culture list book" called Inventory.
Scott Rosenberg asks Who Was The First Blogger? His new book, Say Everything, chronicles the birth of blogging.
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.
On The Media: "It seems the lowly infomercial is finally enjoying its moment in the sun. So far this year it has garnered a book, a reality show and even a television documentary by CNBC." Update: Inside, SABF plugs Pitchmen, which I haven't seen yet.
"One includes a 'meter system,' in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter." Hey that sounds familiar!
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.)
I know I shouldn't bother hating such things, but... "It's official. Boys text, therefore girls must learn how to flirtext!" Flirtexting. It's a book. Ugh.
That new big Kindle: expensive!
Given the number of renowned media types that were involved with Inside.com (Kurt Andersen, Deanna Brown, David Carr, Michael Hirschorn, Stephen Battaglio, John Battelle, Sara Nelson, Michael Cieply, Rafat Ali, Noam Cohen, Fred Wilson, Richard Siklos, Alex Pappademas, Kyle Pope, Greg Lindsay, and, in the end, Steven Brill), isn't it a bit strange that it has no wikipedia entry? Update: Waxy started one in the comments.
Technology Review has a manifesto on how to save newspapers. Update: Good comment, inside. I completely agree that about the notion of expertise within journalism being mostly bunk (especially in the form of host or anchor), but I'm not sure if I'm willing to go so far as to imagine that big media serves no purpose.
It's not even in theaters yet (it played Tribeca last week), but you can already rent the Soderberg/Grey project The Girlfriend Experience on Amazon.
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.
My friends gave me a lot of heat for putting Lady Gaga in my Top 10 albums last year, but look: Sasha says she isn't dumb!
Pynchon's newest, Inherent Vice, is on Amazon with a release date: August 4. [via]
JG Ballard died today. Just a couple days ago Joanne (who has a great obit) gave me Super-Cannes as a gift. Also recommended: Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights.
Following their SNL appearance, Phoenix just released a video for "Lisztomania," this year's first entry for "song of the summer," if it ever warms up. (The brat pack mashup of the song was better through.)
You probably saw the moot is atop the reader's poll for Time's "100 Most Influential People". They acknowledge the idiocy of these polls in this video: Moot vs. Rain.
I should have applied more thinking to those Tweets (reax) yesterday, but props to Galpert for turning them into a visual.
Your favorite Robert Longo-inspired video for the next five minutes: "Dancers," Circlesquare. My pal Colin turned me onto Circlesquare just as I was writing my top albums of '08 post, which they should have made. He recently interviewed them in Prefix.
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.).
NYT thinky-think piece that compares the evolution of wikipedia to that of cities. The argument frames itself around Andrew Lih's new book, The Wikipedia Revolution. Meanwhile, over in Arts, there's an urban planning piece: Reinventing America's Cities: The Time Is Now.
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.
Evelyn Waugh reference? Blowhard! (I kid, Nick.) Two other notes on the flowchart:
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]
Anil's theory on why The-Dream is a hyphenate: it's SEO-friendly. Btw, album of the year, so far.
Last night I randomly asked, "what makes my link blog different from my Twitter different from my Tumblr different from my Facebook stream?" Mat Honan then answered on Twitter ("Replies"), on Tumblr ("Reblogging"), on Facebook ("Comments"), and now he can answer here.
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.
Just in time for SXSW, foursquare is now available in the iTunes store. [Previously.]
I didn't know that John Berger's Ways of Seeing actually started as a 1972 BBC documentary.
So the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going to become the first major metro daily to go online-only. The staff will be slashed to 20 employees. Although this sounds sad, can you imagine what you could do with good technology and a staff of 20 people to write about everything going on in town? Either way, it's worth looking at my old friend Mike Davidson's post on this whole thing. Mike started Newsvine with six employees in the P-I building, and it's amazing to think that it out-lasted (big time) the daily.
You can buy U2's new album for $4 at Amazon. Reminder #1: the files are 256 kbps MP3s -- yay for that! Reminder #2: Pitchfork gave the album a 4.2. Reminder #3: U2 is on Letterman all week.
n+1 interviews Astra Taylor about that documentary, Examined Life, mentioned here last week.
n+1: He's always billed as "Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst." That made me wonder, is he really a psychoanalyst in the sense that I could be his patient?
AT: Absolutely not. And he's never successfully gone through analysis. He tells this story about how he lied his way through a few sessions with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. He would invent dreams, tell Miller he was having sexual fantasies that he was making up.
I bought a new Kindle, which I'll write about soon. But first, the single most important item I am looking forward to is Instapaper support.
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.
Quick announcement: I've been working with Jim Miller and Tom Shales, the authors of the legendary oral history of Saturday Night Live, Live From New York, on a new project: the website for The Untitled ESPN Book. Similar to the SNL book, this will tell the inside story of ESPN, from launch to present. They've got a Tumblr, which will feature regular updates on the book's progress. (Press release with more info inside.)
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.
Jorn's "Web 3.0 is going to be about filtering Web 2.0" got retweeted 50 times, which elicited the post Twitter's Two Cultures (retweeters vs. favrders). Update: Honan gives a pretty good counter-argument in the comments.
...and the inevitable /b/ post following the interview. Welcome, newfags!
An Interview With The Founder of 4chan
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.
"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."
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 now they'd probably agree.
Yeah, once Nancy Pelosi does a RickRolling video with her cat on YouTube, you know it's done.
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?
"I'd be happy to email you something. I've seen some horrible shit."
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 those articles 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."
"I've been asking myself, what have I learned about the internet, what have I learned about myself?"
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.
The Lonely Island album, Incredibad, dropped today. Update: reviews from Paste, Pretty Much Amazing review, and NewTeeVee.
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.)
It's official: Kindle 2. $359.
Micropayments are back!
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 trounce the idea, 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.
Thoughts?
Not that I like to admit it, but I was kinda sorta maybe rooting for Denby in some vaguely subconscious way. As with Gessen, there is a subtle point to be made here, but perhaps it's too nuanced to ever really find its voice. Or at least this clearly seems the case from his blundering appearance on Charlie Rose last night. He sounded so completely out of touch that I somehow ended up sympathizing with Maureen Dowd by the end of it.
Days after sinking Dodgeball and everyone (in NYC, at least) jumps on Brightkite, Google launches Google Latitude. Update: Dens' response (as always, on Flickr).
Video preview of Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do? Update: Actually, this is part of a 23-minute "video book" available for $10 on Amazon.
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?
On the first day of creation, GodHeadHipster created the Animal Collective record Merriweather Post Pavilion. (He was quite pleased with himself.) On the second day, he ordered Pitchfork to give it a 9.6. (GodHeadHipster already kinda fucked up.) On the third day, Hipster Runoff wrote Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet. (This is when all fucking hell broke loose.) On the fourth day, GodHeadHipster grew angry and told Idolator to jump on board; on the fifth, Spin fell in line. (GodHeadHipster has more loyalists than Obama.) But then on the sixth day, the woeful sixth day, Nick Sylvester told GodHeadHipster to get off his ironic ass and do something about it. (All was not well in the kingdom.) On the seventh day, everyone was too tired to rest. (Realzy: that Sylvester rant is in the running [hipster runoff!] for most inspired pop/internet writing of the year. Read it for this line alone: "Culture is a mating ritual. We are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves so as to attract one another. That is the deep dark secret of everything we do.")
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?
Financial Times reviews three recent books about celebrity (Fame by Mark Rowlands, The Star as Icon by Daniel Herwitz, and The Fame Formula by Mark Borkowski).
Winner of best documentary at Sundance: We Live In Public, about the O.G. of oversharing, Josh Harris. Trailer. The director, Ondi Timoner, also did Dig!. Other links: Cinematical review, Variety review, Spout review, original Wired profile, original New York profile, more recent Radar profile, and my most-recommended item of all time, Errol Morris' First Person, which contains a profile of Harris.
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.
Oscars were just announced. Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader for best picture. WALL-E and The Wrestler got screwed. The rest inside.
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 web efforts 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.
The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? Wired looks the various obstacles for opening up governance on the internet: a ban on endorsements could limit external links, all written communication must be stored so all previous versions of web pages must be archived, the first amendment might limit comment filters, etc. Update #1: WhiteHouse.gov has been updated (my side-by-side comparison photo went sorta viral), with a blog post on change. Update #2: Kottke notes the robots.txt change. Update #3: Change.gov is now shut down.
RCRD LBL asked me to do a playlist, which got me thinking about remixes. The accelerated release of music has created a situation where the remix is sometimes released before the original, which leads to some complex blurring of the terminology. But it also led me to ask on Twitter, what's the most remixed song of all time? Most people replied with the notorious "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample that you hear everywhere. My first instinct was to say "that's not a remix -- that's a sample." And the distinction seemed valid. But then the most musicological person I know, Michaelangelo, theorized on Facebook that the answer was in fact "My House" by Chuck Roberts, a house sermon staple. Now here was an intriguing case. When the sermon is used in house music -- such as here, here, and here -- is it a sample or a remix? The answer seems like... both.
I've been using Flickr to store little ideas lately: His Girl Friday, Warhol, The Prophet, Tower of Babel, and Shake It, Start Over. I'm sure there are better examples, but is anyone using Flickr as a essay/blogging platform?
Boxxy is about to explode into LonelyGirl15 proportions. UPDATE: Waxy transcribes the video inside, it made Buzzfeed, and this thing will only get bigger throughout the day.
Your favorite nine-girl Korean pop group for the next five minutes: Girls' Generation's "Gee." UPDATE: From the comments, something even more inexplicably wonderful.
SNL extra that didn't make it on-air: Ann Coulter.
Kottke.org redesigned. No more yellow -- bold! UPDATE: not sure why, but the comments on this post took off, and Jason showed up to say he's now written about a post about it.
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?
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."
To go with my annual 36 Predictions for 2009 in Media/Tech/Pop, here are a few other prediction links: Rachel's The Year Ahead in Media, Jon Fine's Media Predictions, Path 101's Crowdsourced Predictions, Folio's Magazine and Media Predictions, Read Write Web's Web Predictions, CNN's Political Predictions, The Edge's What Will Change Everything, Peter Kim's Social Media Predictions, Socialized's Facebook Predictions, Biz Week's What Won't Happen, and Louis Gray's 10 Predictions In Tech.
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.
Previously: 2007 predix | 2006 predix
I was on NPR's Talk of the Nation earlier today talking about the year in blogging [listen]. Some of the things I talked about: Kiva, Tumblr, Twitter, FiveThirtyEight.com, Ana Marie Cox, Robot Wisdom, The Daily Beast, and The 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008.
As 2009 encroaches, and "What are you doing for New Years Eve?" becomes the question you hear five times an hour, the list of 2008 lists is finally wrapping up. Here are some of the best recent additions: Merlin Mann's Top 10, The Copycat Effect's Top Ten Evil Clown Stories, NYT's Year in Pictures, PC Mag's 100 Favorite Blogs, Esquire's Best Bars, Fortune's 21 Dumbest Moments in Business, fourfour's 44+ Reasons To Love 2008, WSJ's Best And Worst Ads, Daily Beast's Top Ten Thinking Man's Sex Symbols, Wired's Vaporware Awards, Cracked's 12 Most Embarrassing Photos, This Recording's 13 Personalities That Mattered Most, DJ Earworm's Mashup of Billboard Top 25 Hits, and Howard Wolfson's favorite music (yep, that one).
Awesome new song from the upcoming Lonely Island album: We Like Sports, starring Kiva and Jorm.
If we could bundle up the internet into a few snappy headlines, 2008 might look like this:
+ Commenters Went Crazy
+ Twitter & Tumblr Went Mainstream
+ Rickrolling Went Very Mainstream
+ Big Media Went Nowhere
+ Oversharing Went Wild
+ Politicos Went Online
+ 4Chan & Lifecasting Went Awry
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.)
25) Last Night's Party
While others were pointing to the rise of the street fashion blog, the party photoblog made a surprise resurgence this year. The fascination has always been curious -- sure, there's some prurient interest, but there's also that moment of abhorrence. The disturbing mix of envy and disgust are why party shutterbugs seemingly reinvented the moribund genre that seemed frozen in the summer of 2006. Perhaps the resurgence can be attributed to stack of party photo books that topples on you when walking into Urban Outfitters and Virgin Records -- or maybe it was the death of the hipster. (See also: Cobrasnake, Nicky Digital, Guest of a Guest, Hot Chicks With Douchebags, and Random Night Out.)
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.)
22) Very Small Array
Chart porn: instead of dying this year, it almost seemed to flourish. Very Small Array made beautiful images out of random data sets, such as My Love Is A... (Google searches), Largest Minority Population (NYC demographics), and Hit Songs (music charts). (See also: emo+beer = busted career and infosthetics.)
21) io9
Though it already seems like it's been here forever, io9 launched in January as a less didactic BoingBoing. Some of the most memorable posts have included Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life, Imagine an America Where Socialism is No Longer a Dirty Word, and Kevin Kelly's remembrance of Gary Gygax. Hurry, before Denton slices it into space shrapnel. (See also: Offworld and SF Signal.)
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.)
15) Keith Gessen
You can say this about the guy: he tried. While the commenter meme was raging this summer, Gessen had taken up the noble peculiar cause of trying to tame the unwieldy beast. This didn't exactly go so well, but you can't help feeling like we all learned something from his mistakes along the way. (See also: The Millions, Lit Mob, Geekcentric, and Emily Magazine.)
14) Videogum
Launched in April as a Stereogum offshoot, Videogum aggregates, dissects, and comments on everything happening with viral videos. If you saw a funny video this year, it was probably on Videogum first. While popularizing such phenomena as the live puppy cam, Amelie Jr., and the Ice-T / Soulja Boy feud, Gabe and Lindsay mixed in the occasional funny routine themselves. And Videogum elicited the best overheard faux-insult of the year: "I hate you. I hope your viral video doesn't go viral." (See also: Tilzy, First Showing, Antville, and Flavorwire.)
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 Mag cover 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 Radar folded, 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.)
2) FiveThirtyEight.com
Nate Silver for president! (See also: Politico, Talking Points Memo, and Flowing Data.)
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.)
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Special thanks to Rachel, Noah, Andy, Emily, Spencer, Matt, Lindsay, Joanne, Matt, Karina, Kelly, Robin, and Taylor for their tips -- and inspiration -- in compiling this list. See you next year!
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This list on previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007
After exchanging blows for the last two years (2006 | 2007), Seattle and Minneapolis TIE this year for most literate city.
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.
2) MGMT, Oracular Spectacular
It wasn't easy, but they survived the summer.
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.
33) Foals, Antidotes
Previous Yearly Music Roundups: 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007
If you haven't looked through the list of lists yet, now might be a good time. I added a couple hundred more over x-mas, pushing it near 650 entries. Some of the best recent additions: College Humor's Best Pictures, Reality Blurred's Top Reality TV Whores, Get The Big Picture's Best Movie Posters, IGN's Best of 2008, Spin's 20 Best Songs, The Hypeful's 25 Best Cover Songs, I Love Typography's Favourite Typefaces, Adman's Top 10 Celebrity Ads, Magnet's Top 25 Albums, Mashable's 10 Most Memorable Twitter Moments, Videogum's 10 Worst People, Village Voice's The Year in NSFW Photos, The Onion's Your Favorite Band('s Merchandise) Sucks, New Yorker's Architecture's Ten Best, Slate's Best Books, and Roger Ebert's Best Foreign Films.
See, it's no fair if you put me in a list, because you know I have to link to it: Best Male Bloggers of 2008. (I guess you're forgiven!)
Lists are a constant stream right now. Some recent additions: NYT's Year in Buzzwords, Violet Blue's Top 10 Sexy Geeks, Archaeology Magazines's Top 10 Discoveries, The New Yorker's Ten Best Art Shows, Entertainment Weekly's Best and Worst, NYT's Year in Culture, and Pop Candy's Top 100 People.
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.
Some recent highlights from that list of lists things: Antville's Best Music Videos, Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums, Jezebel's 25 Most Annoying Elisabeth Hasselbeck Moments, AdFreak's Freakiest Ads, Smoking Gun's Mugshots of the Year, WATCH's 10 Worst Toys, Esquire's 10 Worst Members of Congress, The Onion's Year in Film, Time's People Who Mattered, The Big Picture's Year in Photographs, Yale Book of Quotations Most Notable Quotations, KEXP's Top Tens, and Regret The Error's Year in Media Errors and Corrections.
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.)
The top list of the year, NYT Mag's Year in Ideas is out. Other items recently added to the list of lists include: Discover's Top 100 Stories, Spin's Top 40 Albums, Rolling Stone's Albums of the Year, Videogum's Best Viral Videos, Urlesque's Year in Internet, and Stereogum's Gummy Awards.
Some of the lists recently added to the 2008 list of lists: Google's Zeitgeist, Pitchfork's 20 Worst Album Covers, Pantone's Color of the Year, Time's Top 10 Everything, New York Magazine's Year in Culture, Jonathan Yardley's Best Books, Christianity Today's Top News Stories, London Times' 100 Best Records, Salon's Book Awards, Sasha Frere-Jones' Best Of 2008, Mr. Skin's Top 20 Celebrity Nude Scenes, Global Language Monitor's Top Words of the Year, Roger Ebert's Best Films, ArtForum's Best of 2008, PetFinder's Most Popular Pet Names, and Candy Addict's Best Candy.
The yearly ginormous list of lists plods on this year. Thanks in advance for emailing me links. Some of the best lists added so far: Pitchfork's Top 40 Music Videos, Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year, Yahoo's Top Searches, Entertainment Weekly's 25 Entertainers of the Year, This Recording's Top 20 Albums, Paste's Top 50 Albums, Yahoo Movies' Top 10 Trailers, Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations, and NYT's 100 Notable Books.
The book blog The Millions is doing their annual Year in Reading list where they ask people to write about their favorite book of the year. My submission attempts to go to bat for Hot Chicks With Douchebags (seriously! read it!) but eventually meanders its way to Live From New York.
On today's episode of I'm Just Saying: Twitter Talk, which is about Twitter and Mumbai. Special guest Caroline McCarthy brought decent game to this week's scarf wars, but nevertheless lost.
Everyone's talking about the Britney doc on MTV last night: Choire, Rich, Tracie, Lindsay. [New album released tomorrow.]
For those of that persuasion, I've created a Tumblr that approximately duplicates this site: fimoculous.tumblr.com. (There will be nothing over there that isn't here.)
It's that time of the year again: the annual list of lists for 2008 is being primed. There are just a handful of things there now, but last year ended with 600+ links, so check back often for updates. (Also! Because this is a monster time suck, I'm looking for a sponsor this year, so that I can hire some help. Email me for sponsorship details.)
With a commenter name like "ratman," you would probably expect a lulz onslaught. But whoever is commenting on this site with that username (here, here, and here) is my favorite commenter in the world. They are such non sequiturs that at first I thought they were spam, but now I see it's some sort of crazy genius. I hope they all come together to form a story.
Among the unsolved mysteries of the internet is how last week's post about Lipstick Jungle's cancellation was taken over by outraged women. Nonetheless, they've decided to use it as a place to store news -- including the tidbit that maybe it wasn't canceled after all.
The [mostly positive] reviews are rolling in for Gladwell's Outliers, but here's a long excerpt for you to judge yourself. (See also: one of the email discussion things from Slate.)
In early 1997, the alt-weekly in Minneapolis, City Pages, wrote a profile of writers at The Onion. Unless you were from the deep midwest, you likely never saw this profile, and even more likely, you didn't yet read The Onion. But that piece has somehow become the model for an endless stream of Onion profiles ever since. This seems to have culminated this weekend with the mother of all profiles, a sprawling 7,000-worder in the Washington Post Magazine. If you've read the other profiles through the years, this one will reveal nothing; if you haven't, it's now the official definitive account of the paper's editorial process. (It could have dedicated some of those words to being more of a business story.)
An update from yesterday's post, some stuff I watched on MTVMusic.com today:
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]
Marina, you should get in on this lawsuit. After all, we have evidence.
Twittering the Day Away. "I have Twitter block...."
Looking at this gallery of blog homepages when they were launched triggered the idea to look up the first design of Fimoculous.com. HORRIBLE!!!
Without irony, Apple's response ad to Microsoft's recent ads is to insinuate that they spend too much money on ads. The marketers always win.
Robin goes to bat for the Amazon MP3 store. Are others using it? Update: @amazonmp3 provides daily sales on the site, including some entire albums for $1 or $2.
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.
If you're into that kinda thing, the Pitchfork 500 book has its own website and is available for pre-order.
One year ago today, we (my former employer, msnbc.com) announced our purchase of Newsvine.com. One year later integration work continues, and the good news is that registered users are up 996 percent -- according to an interview with Mike Davidson, Newsvine's CEO.
As a follow-up to my product placement post, a new idea: Product Displacements.
Vallewag rumor: Google wants to buy EveryBlock. (Previously: my interview with Holovaty.)
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?
Discover: Einstein's 23 Biggest Mistakes. What a retard. (There's a corresponding book.)
As suspected at launch, Muxtape is dead.
New TV on the Radio, Dear Science, lands a 9.2 on Pitchfork. And the new Cold War Kids also arrives tomorrow.
I won my bet with my name twin Rex Hammock about whether WSJ.com would go free (I predicted it wouldn't). He owes me a bottle of Rex Goliath. Yay! Also noted: Davidson, you owe me $50.
"Minneapolis" managed to tie for 3rd best place to be single. Minneapolis?? Who goes to college and says, "Fuck getting my MRS degree HERE, I'm moving to Minneapolis after I graduate because I hear it is totally the Third Best City Ever for Singles and I am going to bring new meaning to the made-up word 'manizer' and carve dozens of notches into my new Mac lipstick case!" This means war, babe. [Answer inside.]
Last month I mentioned aloud about doing some data crunching on the most recent Girl Talk album. Except it wasn't exactly aloud -- I sorta thought Waxy would jump on it. And he did, with greater success than I anticipated. While working on it, he mentioned that he might use Mechanical Turk to churn some of the data. Several interesting data trends emerged, including a plot graph with release dates (and some interesting info on how much Mechanical Turk cost). Most importantly, he provided the data for others to crunch. So we have open source music meets open source data meets crowdsourcing. Nice work!
Valleywag is doing a photo caption contest on my Kissinger / Hurley photo from the Google / Vanity Fair RNC party.
Mitch Hedberg has a new live album coming out in a few days. We'll give you one, but please don't turn him into Tupac. [via]
NYT catches up on the Truman Show Delusion (in Styles, nice). [Previously]
Thank you, Howie Kurtz: "Sklar discovered an ancillary benefit [of Twitter] in June when she wrote to a casual acquaintance, blogger Rex Sorgatz: 'Your latest twitter is one of the reasons I like you without knowing you so well.' After that e-mail, she says, 'he wrote back suggesting we have lunch.' They are now dating." See boys, it's that easy.
Cool Slate infoviz slideshow: data visualizations and artists. Included: some history on treemaps, They Rule, Jonathan Harris, Name Voyager, Jason Salavon, Visual Complexity, Radiohead's "House of Cards" video, and several other Fimoc favorites.
Remember that Josh Hartnett film about the internet startup scene circa 1999 (the one with a Calacanis cameo)? You forgot already, and it opened in theaters a month ago! Refresher: it's called August, and it comes out on DVD tomorrow. (Also noted for tomorrow: the fourth season of Entourage.)
We debated whether Muxtape would survive the RIAA a while back, and it looks like they're finally running into problems.
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.")
I had an idea for an iPhone app last night. If someone makes it and sells it for $1, they will be millionaires.
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]
Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story on Adrian Holovaty (cover), whom I interviewed earlier this year. Update: EveryBlock has launched in three more cities... Seattle, DC, and Boston.
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.
"Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations"
by Peter Oresick
Andy Warhol said, Always leave them wanting less.
Being born, Warhol said, is like being kidnapped.
Everyone will be famous, Andy said, for 15 minutes.
I thought everyone was just kidding, said Andy.
Being born, Andy Warhol said, is like being kidnapped.
Think rich, said Warhol, look poor.
I thought everyone was just kidding, said Andy.
Dying, Andy said, is the most embarrassing thing.
Think rich, said Andy Warhol, look poor.
I am a deeply superficial man, said Warhol.
Dying, Andy said, is the most embarrassing thing.
Andy said, I'd like my tombstone to be blank.
I am a deeply superficial man, said Andy Warhol.
Fashions fade, Warhol said, but style is eternal.
Andy said, I'd like my tombstone to be blank.
Isn't life, said Andy, a series of images that repeat?
Fashions fade, Andy Warhol said, but style is eternal.
Everyone will be famous, Warhol said, for 15 minutes.
Isn't life, said Andy, a series of images that repeat?
Andy said, Always leave them wanting less.
Isn't life, said Andy, a series of images that repeat?
Isn't life, said Andy, a series of images that repeat?
Always leave them wanting less, Andy said.
— "Andy Warhol for Familiar Quotations" by Peter Oresick from Warhol-O-Rama
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?"
"Fimoculous.com: Your Relentless Source For Mad Men Links since 2007." How's that sound? On Videogum: Mad Men Plot Predictions Based On Other 1962 Events.
Rachel performed with Lisa Loeb last night. I was the giddy and supportive boy in the audience taking photos.
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.
Mary-Kate and Ashley's book is available for pre-order -- and look at that cover! Get it? You see, they're twins, but their handwriting... it's DIFFERENT.
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.
Karina updates us on Midnight Kiss.
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!)
Anyway, back to porn... It turns out that the legalities are even more complicated [via]. The basics are this:
- 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!
The other day I noticed that there's a Mad Men display in Bloomingdale's. Update: Mad Men on the Grand Central Shuttle, which is the most immaculate NYC subway I have ever seen. [via]
Daft Punk's movie, Electroma, is released tomorrow on DVD. Update: in one of the strangest promotions in a while, Lycos (?!) is livestreaming Electroma tonight at midnight.
An update from the Girl Talk video project from a couple days ago: "What's It All About", my favorite track on the record.
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!
In addition to a live appearance on Letterman last night, The Hold Steady were also part of a skit. The new album, Stay Positive, came out a couple days ago. Pitchfork: 8.4.
Of course I'm eager to read David Carr's new [oversharey!] book, The Night of the Gun. I'm very curious how much of it is set in Minneapolis...
Marina (this dumb site's best commenter!) is in the Hot Chicks With Douchebags book.
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.)
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.
This response to the Jezebel Incident is getting passed around a lot right now in Tumble-land. I think there's something smart to this reaction... but I also think there's the voice of dad saying "You kids should learn your place." (I shouldn't be trying to unpack this on a link blog!)
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.)
The new Beck album, Modern Guilt, is getting mixed but mostly positive reviews. I haven't listened yet, but people tell me it's an album that I'll like.
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!
Book blog update! Stuff White People Like and Hot Chicks with Douchebags are both out. Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle hits stores in a month.
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.
See also: MeFi erupts in speculation.
UPDATE #1: BoingBoing responds, sorta.
UPDATE #2: Valleywag floats rumors.
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.
Tomorrow Museum takes up the issue of BoingBoing deleting posts from people who are marginally critical of the site. It happened to me a few months ago too, seemingly because I wrote this, more as a disappointed fan than a disgruntled rage machine. It's a nasty moment online right now, where a lot of people are trying to figure out how to write critically about internet society and its participants while not joining the throng of noisy hatah culture. BoingBoing's tactics suggest they are on the wrong side of this debate.
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.)
Oh yeah, that Hercules & Love Affair album dropped today. Plaudits are everywhere, you know where to find them.
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.
Day two of the new Girl Talk record, and it isn't old yet. That is the worry, right? That the gimmick will wear thin. So far, we're good though. It's really quite amazing -- why does this record sound even better than the last one? And what the hell does "better" mean in this context? Is it the track list? The mixing? It's like we need a whole new vocabulary. On this occasion, I'm yanking out this thing I wrote a couple years ago: 11 Reasons Why I Won't Shut Up About The New Girl Talk Album. It's more true than ever, and I am now going to attempt shutting up about this one.
Earlier this year I wrote a retrospective piece on the 15-year-anniversary of Wired's first issue. I mentioned the Otaku feature in passing, and today Gawker is wondering if the article was plagiarized. UPDATE: Nevermind.
The One Red Paperclip Guy (refresher: he started with a paperclip and kept trading up until he had a house -- and then he published a book about it) is now trying to trade his house. So far, he's gotten one proposal: a red paper clip.
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....
The Amazon page for Chuck's new novel, Downtown Owl, now has a description. Release: mid-September.
I'm pretty sure you didn't see it in a theater, but the dvd came out today: Be Kind Rewind.
Thrillist, I am so breaking up with you. (Blakeley? Fucking Blakeley!?) I stayed home and puppy sit.
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.
Tom Vanderbilt's new book looks like it will be up my alley: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do. More: Freakonomics interview and the accompanying blog.
You might think that when The Atlantic put Britney on the cover a couple months ago, it would have been a newsstand rout. Turns out, nope, it sold half of what the mag usually does. (I thought the story was decent though.)
New releases today: N.E.R.D.'s Seeing Sounds and Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III. More raves for the latter.
This is the view out my window now. This is what it is supposed to be. I could be waiting a while.
New MGMT video: "Electric Feel", which has this sorta retro Duran Duran thing going on. I haven't talked about it much here, but Oracular Spectacular is definitely one of my Top 5 albums of the year.
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...
Remember what I said yesterday about MuxFind? Yeah, it's been nuked.
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.)
Brijit, the site that I praised for its 100-word article capsules, has closed shop. Just three days ago, Owen at Valleywag wrote of the site, "Until someone finds a cure for logorrhea, both Brijit and Valleywag will have a market." Guess not.
Last time Knight announced their News Challenge grants, it was basically a cross-section of friends that I instantly became jealous of. This year's winners -- just announced -- seem lesser-known. (And, at first glance, less compelling, though some are definitely interesting.)
After I lost my iPhone over the weekend, I twittered about how a cabbie returned it -- and how this will now become my "nice new yorkers" story. Then today this Nice New Yorkers story popped up, and everyone blogged it. I dunno.
Continuing with our theme of verisimilitude in Grand Theft Auto, here's a Flickr set with side-by-side comparisons of the fake Liberty City and somewhat less fake New York City. (See also, only vaguely related, Kottke's post on the uncanny valley, which takes up the recent New Yorker article on photoshopping.)
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.
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.
This is an open thread. I would actually like to hear what you want more or less of from this site, but you can say whatever the fuck you want.
First description of the new Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, previously characterized by some as a "space opera." [via]
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?
Your favorite song for the next five minutes: Santogold's "Your Voice", a reggae-tinged (as if punk, electro, hip-hop, and dancehall weren't enough) extra track not found on the album. (Psst, watch RCRD LBL for more upcoming Santogold tracks.)
The NYT Mag column on Brawndo, which was in the swag bag at ROFL Con, reveals that the faux-turned-legit soda's creator is also behind the energy drink Cocaine.
I've been babbling about the potential of Red Lasso for interesting tv curatorial work, and here's a good example: Final Jeopardy, a tumblr with one post per day, video from that day's Final Jeopardy question. [via]
More proof of my Lost in Translation theory regarding that new Scarlett video: that freaking old guy canoodling with her is Salman Rushdie!
The media roundup from my party at The Chambers in Minneapolis last weekend: photos from Chuck, video from Paul, and photos from me. Great to see all of you!
Three big albums drop tomorrow from Santogold, Madonna, and Portishead.
Narcissism post... I'll be at ROFL Con in Boston on Thursday and Friday -- drop a comment if you will be too. Then I fly to Minneapolis on Saturday, throwing a party at The Chambers -- drop an email if you want an invite!
It looks like CNN.com has fixed the hack. (With a javascript redirect? Somebody is gonna rehack that.)
Your afternoon is saved: stream of the entire new Portishead album on Last.fm. (Third drops next week.)
The only thing you need to know about music this week: four remastered Replacements records are released tomorrow. And Stink, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Hootenanny, and Let It Be all have extra tracks. (P-fork drops the 10 on Let It Be.)
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.
Your favorite '80s throwback synth pop manifesto for the next five minutes: M83's "Graveyard Girlfriend." Their new album, Saturdays=Youth, which Onion A/V gave an A and Pitchfork gave an 8.5, drops today.
Chock full of extra scenes, Juno comes out on DVD tomorrow.
Andrew is auctioning his Twitter account on eBay. He has 1,395 1,542 followers, which right now is worth $510 $1,125. I have 1,034 followers, and plan to sell all of them up the river if that bitch hits four figures. Update: It hit four figures. But if you look at the bidders on the auction, you see lots of people who have recently tried to purchase domain names on eBay. So, sorry Andrew, but I think you're selling yourself to spammers.
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.)
A quick update to my RedLasso post yesterday, after speaking with someone there today... RedLasso's model is actually to develop a three-way revenue split between copyright owners (tv and radio stations), syndication sites (bloggers), and RedLasso itself. Broadcasters are aware of the site, but official deals have not been signed. My take? Red Lasso exists in an interesting middle-ground between two factions: a) bloggers who would enjoy making a little money and be able to safely embed content and b) broadcasters who are wary of content misuse and distribution splits. The question for broadcasters will be: can they accept this revenue split versus forcing bloggers to find/embed/link content from their own site? The question for RedLasso will be: can they can keep enough broadcasters in the fold to make the site a destination for this kind of content and become the holy grail -- the Google of video?
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!)
Three new releases coming out tomorrow: R.E.M.'s Accelerate, Moby's Last Night, and The Black Keys' Attack and Release.
Quotably tracks Twitter conversations -- a feature that Twitter desperately needs. [Me on Quotably and Twitter.]
Women's World is a novel constructed entirely from words cut out of 1960s women's magazines. Nerve has an interview with the author.
Some new releases that come out today.... Music: The Teenagers' Reality Check, Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward, and The Kills' Midnight Boom. DVD: Southland Tales, Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, and the Criterion of The Ice Storm.
[SXSW-influenced post #4.] So yeah, Lacygate. Not that you need another opinion, but since I was there... My take is that the audience reaction was unnecessarily harsh, and based mostly on style than substance. Some people have criticized her for "softball questions," but I don't think those people have ever been to a keynote before. Rather, it was mostly her passive-aggressive interview style that seemed to annoy the masses. And make no mistake about it -- the audience really was annoyed. (It's interesting to read the opinions of people who weren't there -- their perspective is similar to that of Lacy herself, who was clueless of the mounting tension until nearly the end. But if you were sitting in that room, you could feel something horrible was about to happen.) Even if the crowd was over-reacting, it was surreal how aggressive Lacy became toward the audience once she realized what was happening. She could easily have recovered pretty quickly, but instead chose to get combative with a couple thousand bloggers. It was like a lesson in how not to manage a community -- like Web 2.0 in reverse.
[SXSW-influenced post #2.] You know what? Fuck Michael Eisner. As pseudo-documented on Twitter, Eisner's message at his packed SXSW conversation with Mark Cuban was that the future of online video is basically television. Seriously. That's the best he could do. And then later he rolled out this one: "I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights." He really said that! I heard it! (It was slightly misquoted but even worse that my original Twitter quote, snagged from this Techdirt post that addresses Eisner's whack revisionist history involving Abraham Lincoln and copyright. He really said that too!) If these two separate themes have a colliding philosophy, it's this: old media hopes that the future will be the same models, methods, and commodities as the past.
If you're one of those people who likes anime but doesn't follow it close enough to know what's good, I highly recommend Blood+: Volume One which is released tomorrow. It is produced by Production I.G, which also made the spectacular Ghost in the Shell series. More info at Wikipedia.
Your favorite remix for the next five minutes: XXXChange's remix of Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes". Update: looks like Santogold's much-anticipated debut album has a release date of April 22.
Two recommended books that come out later this week: Jessica Hagy's Indexed (a collection of notecard graphics from her site) and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (which will be the book that gives Web 2.0 the articulation it needs).
Even though it won't be in bookstores for seven months, Chuck's new book, Downtown Owl (cover), is now available for pre-order on Amazon. His first novel, it is set in North Dakota in 1983, a time and place I know quite well!
If you read the EveryBlock interview, you might recall Adrian mentioning that they would later explain why they decided to eschew Google Maps and instead build their own mapping application. The explanation has been posted.
An Interview with Adrian Holovaty
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:
- San Francisco public housing listings by accessibility status. Just over 90% of the public housing listings posted to the San Francisco city site are not accessible.
- Chicago has a special business license type of "Wrigley Field," which applies to the famous rooftop decks across the street from the park.
- Many elevator violations are reported in New York -- more than any other type of building violation that we tabulate.
- Building permits for bath houses in San Francisco. You know, just because.
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.)
In case you missed it: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.
Is it just me or does no one ever talk about Peter Greenaway any more? I just noticed that The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed & Two Noughts were released on DVD yesterday.
For die-hard Wired historians: Louis Rossetto responds to my Wired 1.1 post.
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.
When I realized that Wired was turning 15 years old this month, I went sorta bonkers and wrote a long piece that looks back at the first issue. Don't worry, it's mostly pictures!
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.
FeaturesFor all the peculiar editorial choices in the early issues of Wired, the strangest must certainly be giving Camille Paglia license to talk about Marshall McLuhan.
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.
Remixes with Cat Power and Biggie of that David Lee Roth vocal track.
Remember that Heidi Montag worst song evah that I linked to last week? There's now a VIDEO with her rolling around the beach in a bikini -- and whaddya know, it's now suddenly the BEST SONG EVER! [via]
The new album you will buy tomorrow is Hot Chip's Made in the Dark. (Yes, it's weird that I still live in a world where people buy physical music.)
I hope everyone else sees the hypocrisy of Google's press release on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. Invoking the spectre of monopolies hardly seems like a good move here. The "wise Google-ish thing to do" here would have been just to stay quiet. (Update: Microsoft's response came in quickly.) [More inside.]
An interview with Monica Peters, who wrote the book Build Your Own Army of Web Bots Within 24 Hours and has started the site AIlegacy.org which offers support for those looking to create text bots.
Two recommended new releases tomorrow: the debut Vampire Weekend album and The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters on DVD.
Extending my thoughts on prediction applications, there's now HubDub, another site that lets you make predictions on news stories. AP story.
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."
Oh, this is RAD... The Hypeful figured out all the songs played at Rob's party on Cloverfield and created a playlist (with mp3s) called Rob's Party Mix. What's the creepy factor of playing this at a party at my house?
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.
People seem enthralled with the isolated vocal track to "Runnin' With The Devil" that I hooked up yesterday, so I dug up something even better that I originally linked to three years ago: John Bonham outtakes. If I were a DJ, I'd be all over these.
I had this stupid idea this morning that -- you know what? -- relationships and recessions work in exactly the same type of cyclical patterns. Suddenly, a 2,000-word essay popped into my head. Thank god Twitter exists, so I don't actually have to write it.
"Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room." -- New Palahniuk novel, due in May. [via]
Cat Power's new album, Jukebox, drops tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the author of Love + Sex With Robots comes off as a boring academic on his Colbert appearance. I'm reading the book right now and will report back soon. [via]
NYT Sunday front page story on Japan's best-selling cellphone novels, mentioned here a while back.
I made two $50 media bets last year: one with Mike about whether Microsoft will buy Yahoo (me: no) and one with Jim about whether WSJ.com will go free (me: no). EVERYONE thought the latter bet was crazy, but I held strong because no one seemed to be doing the math. And now it's starting to look like I might actually win this bet. Which means that Murdoch and I think alike!
In this Washington Post story about the online debates encircling The Wire, "something called Fimoculous.com" is name-checked in the second graph as part of "the poly-linked blogfest tempest." Whee! Later on, my post is quoted: "Vulture contested the copy-editing scandal, but today David Simon himself took issue with Vulture taking issue with David Simon taking issue with the word ['evacuate']." To which we can now append in tidy fashion: "...the Washington Post notes..."
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."
Seeing Borges portrayed in the Times (via the book Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds -- gimme!) as an oracular visionary who predicted the internet is one thing... but, whoa, it's a completely different game to see him show up in Vanity Fair as an answer in Karl Rove's Proust Questionnaire to the "favorite writers?" query.
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.
Hm, I missed this one... Love and Sex with Robots could be worth reading. NYTBR review and author interview.
The best thing about wrapping up the year is that I can put the 2007 List of Lists behind me. (Note to self: never, never, never do this again, you goddamn fucking idiot.) Here are the best ones from the past week: Entertainment Weekly's Best of Everything, Idolator's Worst Album Cover, Neatorama's Year in Cats, Cool Hunting's Best of Transport, Radar's Year in Lies, Curbed's Top 10 Craziest Architectural Renderings, Cinematical's Ten Best Trailers, AdTunes' Top Ad Music, Mashable's Dumbest Startups, and Reality Blurred's Top Reality TV Whores.
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.
Marc Andreessen's blog should probably have made the best blogs list. Today's little find about a 1951 New Yorker prediction that television would increase literacy.
In 1989, a book called Future Stuff predicted consumer productions that "should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000." They were pretty bad predictions.
The weekly recap of the best 2007 lists (as always, culled from the master List of Lists): Book Finder's Top 10 US Out of Print Books, Director File's Ten Best Music Videos, Time's Person of the Year, Sports Illustrated's Sports Pictures of the Year, The Onion A/V Club's Year in Film, Forbes' Top 25 Web Celebs, Antville's 500 Best Music Videos, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums, Neotera's Top Ten Stupid Criminals, Pop Candy's Top 100 People, Billboard's Year End Charts, and Baby Center's Top 10 Baby Names.
It's probably the only worthwhile thing I do all year. Here are the Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading.
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.)
29) Songs About Buildings and Food
Imagine if your favorite college prof got hooked on meth and The Hills -- and you were more concerned that the latter was killing him. That's this blog. (See also: Advanced Theory Blog and The Medium.)
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.)
25) Rock Band Logos
Design criticism applied to rock band logos? Yes, please. (See also: Book Covers and Core 77.)
24) WTF CNN?
FTW! (See also: Best of CNN.)
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.
18) Passive Aggressive Notes
Take the Found magazine genre and thin-slice it to only include the notes you left for your college roommate. (See also: Best of Craigslist and Overheard in The Office.)
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.)
13) La Blogotheque: Take Away Shows
Drag a band out into the street, shoot video of them playing, upload it to the internet... and magic. If you're looking for a place to start, I suggest The Cold War Kids, but there are 70+ more. (See also: RCRD LBL.)
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.)
4) Smashing Telly
Smashing Telly is the antidote to all those skull-numbing viral video aggregators. Instead of gathering 30-second clips of dogs on skateboards, the site meticulously curates long-form clips that will make you wishing to extend your office hours. It's where I found the Mailer/McLuhan interview, Manufacturing Consent, a random Clockword Orange documentary, and countless other things. (See also: First Showing and vidoes.antville.org.)
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.
And finally, thanks to Taylor, Ben, Robin, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Alisa, Gavin, Jason, Peter, Matt, Choire, and Anil for their tips on this project. See ya next year.
NY Mag's annual Reasons to Love New York. (My Twitter account has lately seemed like "Reasons Not to Love New York," but I'm really loving it so far. No, really.)
For those who like their music list links: Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks of 2007 (same #1 as me), Rolling Stones' 100 Best Songs, Spin's Top 40 Albums (crazy #1 choice), Blender's Top 25 Albums, and Slate's Music Club.
Good NYTBR: P.J. O'Rourke's review of Starbucked.
Culled from the list of lists, some of the best lists of the past week: Google Zeitgeist, Slate's Year in Books, Pitchfork's 20 Worst Album Covers, The Gummy Awards, The Year in Media Errors and Corrections, Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos, and Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year.
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.
Culled from the list of lists, here are the best 2007 lists of the past week: Radar's New Radicals, AOL's Top 10 Political Music Moments, Village Voice's Best Books, Ask.com's Top Searches, Art Forum's Best Music, Yahoo's Top Trends in Search, XLR8R's Best Albums, Drawn's Favourite Comics and Art Books, Sports Illustrated's Ten Best Trades, The Economist's Books of the Year, RealClearPolitics' Worst Election Mistakes, Mark Ronson's Albums of the Year, and of course my Top 25 Albums. Also of note: Goody Bag's rant about lists.
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.
13) Radiohead, In Rainbows
Trent Reznor paid $5,000; I paid $5. I got a better deal.
14) Jay-Z, American Gangster
He really is the godfather now.
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.
17) Dan Deacon, Spiderman of the Rings
This is what Girl Talk would sound like if he wanted Sonic Youth to like him.
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.
And finally, here are some albums that I tried to like this year, but it just never happened: Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew - Spirit If..., Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder, The Good, the Bad & the Queen's The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Air's Pocket Symphony, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero, Timbaland's Timbaland Presents Shock Value, T.I.'s T.I. vs. T.I.P., 50 Cent's Curtis, Arctic Monkeys's Favourite Worst Nightmare, Amon Tobin's Foley Room, The Shins' Wincing the Night Away, The National's The Boxer, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, Bjork's Volta, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, Low's Drums and Guns, PJ Harvey's White Chalk, Jose Gonzalez' In Our Nature, Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Feist's The Reminder, and Les Savvy Fav's Let's Stay Friends.
Previous Yearly Music Roundups: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006.
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
24) Chinese Democracy comes out.
Whahahaha. (Okay, some tracks leaked.) Score: 3
25) Courtney Love come-back.
Not so much. Score: 2
26) Britney's album tanks.
Hm, tough one. It went gold. Score: 6
27) Ze Frank ends up at Comedy Central.
You wish. Score: 0
28) Amanda Congdon on ABCnews.com = success.
Shoot. Me. Now. Score: 1
29) lonelygirl15 fades.
Totes. Score: 9
30) The planet warms.
Yawn. (I mean, OMG!) Score: 7
Average: 4.9
Meh, not bad. I should have predicted that I would buy Newsvine though.
If you're thinking of buying a Kindle, please do so through this link so I get a $40 referral fee!
Some of the best items to make The 2007 List of Lists so far: Mr. Skin's Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes, Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories, Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, NYT's 100 Notable Books, Best Book Shelves, Best Magazine Covers, Best Book Covers, Rolling Stone's Top 25 DVDs, Amazon's Top 10 Games, and the Top 60 Japanese Buzzwords.
Shepard "Obey" Fairey has always seemed like one of those anomalies in the indie fame machine. On the occasion of his L.A. solo show, here's an essay showing his plagiarist tendencies. UPDATE: in the comments, Jeff Croft makes the artist-free-to-appropriate argument.
I Want Media's annual Media Person of the Year nominees has been added to the list of lists. (Murdoch has it cinched this year.)
The NYTBR review of the Fake Steve Jobs parody novel is pretty positive.
Once again, it's time to announce the stupidest thing that I do every year around this time: collect year-end lists. You probably know there's a long history here (2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 -- 2002 was my 1960s), with last year clocking in at a head-hurting (and browser-dragging) 712 lists. This takes ridiculously too much time, but I bleed lists for you, people. As always, email me your additions.
That Nirvana Unplugged DVD is released today.
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 NYT story 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.
From Sarah's review of the Jim Walsh's new Replacements oral history: "One testimonial after another tells the same story: The Replacements got wasted before the show. Then they played a bullshit set of cover songs. You've been a teenager, so you know why this is cool: It made them look like they didn't care. If they really had no talent, no one else would have cared, either. But if you have the proven ability to write genius rock songs, and you have an adoring crowd of fans in front of you, and you choose to risk alienating them by laughing your way through five renditions of 'Hello, Dolly,' you relay a very powerful message. In Reagan's America, with its yuppie consumer worship, jock-filled high schools, and submoronic hair-metal gods, you have just said 'No' to success, popularity, and rock star-ism. Do you remember the vileness of the culture in the '80s? The Replacements were reacting against it, and maybe they were immature drunks, but maybe they were also...sorta...philosophically rigorous?" This is great for several reason, but mostly because it's also subversively a bit of Sarah autobiography too.
I actually linked to it almost a year ago, but Robin reminded me to drag out this video of a Mailer v. McLuhan debate.
Here's a good extension of my life-as-game notion: David Byrne considers Ikea as a video game. [thnx Alan]
New releases: Although the new Jay-Z will most likely top the charts, White Williams has the best new disc this week. Also, Flight of the Conchords came out on DVD today.
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.)
The new guy over at Kottke.org has a couple interviews: Douglas Wolk (author of Reading Comics) and Jessica Hagy (creator of Indexed).
Brier Dudley's Blog: Rex "Fimoculous" Sorgatz leaving MSNBC.com.
Not much in new releases this week, except a couple tv dvd compliations (all of My So-Called Life and all of Twin Peaks) and a couple soundtracks (Control from the Joy Division biopic and I'm Not There from the Bob Dylan biopic). There's also the new Britney album, if that's your thang. The reviews have actually been pretty good.
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."
Prediction sites are popping up like mad. Predictify pays you for predicting future events. [via]
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).
So now, your turn.
(Also, thanks to Tom, Matt, Robin, Carrie, and Beth, who all helped shape ideas for this piece.)
This week's new releases: A big Kubrick collection, the final season of Veronica Mars, Godard's Breathless on Criterion, and the Fake Steve Jobs book.
Mildly amused that tomorrow's DVD release of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is billed as The Complete Series. Other DVD releases this week are Transformers and Grindhouse: Planet Terror.
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.]
The news broke here a couple months ago about Tay Zonday performing with Girl Talk at First Ave in Minneapolis. The show was last Friday, and Twin Cities Live has good video. [via]
For those who haven't heard the news: we announced our purchase of Newsvine today. (Mike Davidson's post | msnbc.com story.)
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.
You can read elsewhere about the details of the deal, 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-existent enemies as they go down.
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?
I have been musing about the absence of Ze Frank. NewTeeVee does a little round-up of some potential Ze replacements.
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.
This week's recommended new media releases:
Books: Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief
Music: The Pipettes' We Are the Pipettes, PJ Harvey's White Chalk, Bruce Springsteen's Magic
DVD: The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 2, Season One of Metalocalypse, Season One The Sarah Silverman Program
Months ago, I asked what the over/under of LinkedIn adding profile photos would be. Now it's happening. I think of this as the contemporary version of the New York Times switching from b&w to color photos (a controversy at the time -- and not all that long ago, kids).
A couple weeks back, I mentioned Cory Doctorow's short story "Scroogled" being published in Radar. Today, WSJ interviews him and includes a response from a Google spokeswoman.
Convergence happens to everyone -- even Gawker. Book available for pre-order on Amazon. Oh, and the requisite dumb viral video.
Only two items make this week's recommended new releases list: Apatow's Knocked Up on DVD and Halo 3 on xBox.
Fimoculous.com is in San Francisco for the weekend, trying to convince Waxy to come out and play. See ya next week!
Finally! The trailer to Southland Tales is out. (It's Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko, which I've been frothing over for over a year.) It looks different than the earlier clips though. [via]
fimoculous -- 1.16 million hits. filmoculous -- 57 hits. Statistically, I guess it ain't so bad that a small number of people spell my blog name wrong. But you'd think that Broadcasting & Cable would at least spell it right! (But thanks for the mention, Lisa.)
It's time for this week's recommended new releases:
DVD: Tarantino's Death Proof.
Music: Les Savy Fav's Let's Stay Friends, Thurston Moore's Trees Outside the Academy, Jose Gonzalez' In Our Nature.
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?)
Lindsay tears apart Michael Hirschorn's "quirk" piece from The Atlantic (mentioned yesterday). Good little debate there. UPDATE: Buzzfeed turned it all into a meme.
In one of those moments where you're so glad he's back, Kottke digs up the bibliography to Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.
It's a huge week for new releases:
DVD: 40th Anniversary Collector's Edition of The Graduate.
Books: Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Music: Kanye West's Graduation, 50 Cent's Curtis, Simian Mobile Disco's Attack Decay Sustain Release, Ghostland Observatory's Paparazzi Lightning, Go Team's Proof of Youth.
Music Reissues: Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, Young Marble Giants's Colossal Youth.
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.
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]
Great collection of remixes of tracks from Kanye's new album (out next week). [via]
My idea is to have the Olsen Twins play the roles of J.T. LeRoy and Laura Albert. Hollywood's idea is to have one-half of them star in the adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' The Informers. I like my idea more, but Hollywood's is pretty inspired too.
Not much to recommend in the new releases this week, except for a couple of Jim Jarmusch Criterion releases (Stranger than Paradise and Night on Earth) and several TV shows (Season Three of The Office, Season Two of Robot Chicken, Season One of 30 Rock, Season Two of Prison Break, and Season Three of Desperate Housewives).
I was actually just thinking someone needs to do a new story on Rick Rubin. NYT Mag gave him the cover.
So I'm throwing a party tonight -- a Trapped in the Closet viewing party. (It should be crazy fun -- if you're in Seattle and want to stop by, email me.) I've been asking people what the signature drink of the evening should be, and since no official answer rose to the top, I decided to Ask Metafilter.
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).
Because I don't have time to write a legit record review, here are some quick notes on listening to Kala:
8) First, the politics. Maya's critics seem to present her songs as equivocally advocating various causes. This seems foolish. I suspect what MIA is actually doing is more like acting. And I don't mean just conveniently sampling subversive agitprop (she seems to legitimately understand the cultural issues). Rather, Maya uses songwriting to play out the roles of various third-world revolutionary characters. So when you hear her talking about the Tamil Tigers or Palestine, it's not exactly "her opinions" as much as the voice of people she's encountered. Critics insist on imposing autobiography on this album, but it seems more like contemporary historical fiction.
7) Someone could write an entire review of Kala's aggressive stance against being danceable.
6) It's difficult to come up with musical comparison points with MIA -- The Clash is probably the best lazy comparison right now. But do you know who Maya should really be compared to? Star architects. I'm totally serious -- they fly around the world, observe a society, pick up pieces local culture, and adapt it to their own style. MIA is a starchitect. She's more like Rem Koolhaas than Gwen Stefani.
5) Most confusing culture reference on the new album: "Price of living in a shanty town just seems very high / But we still like T.I."
4) Second place: "So I woke up with my Holy Koran / And found out I like Cadillac."
3) And yet: "Sex is cheap / I get it at the KFC."
2) The best song on the album is "Paper Planes," which also happens to be produced by the somewhat estranged Diplo. As Margaret said to the me the other day, there's never been a better song in which sound effects replace words. But beyond all that, the production of the song is so strange -- it has a reggae-light beat, but the sounds underneath are totally like nothing else.
1) This is the only album I can think of in which the remixes will likely be better than the album. And it's not because the songs are bad, but rather because there's something sorta raw about the tracks. It's like an album of source-material.
This week's recommended new releases:
Music: New Young Pony Club's Fantastic Playroom
DVD: LOL, Air Guitar Nation, and Heroes: Season One
If I were in college right now, every term paper would somehow contain references to Trapped in the Closet and every night would be spent arguing with Chuck about some nuance of R. Kelly's masterpiece. Thankfully, I've grown up, and now my stupid blog is obsessed with the 22-chapter series while Klosterman writes about R. Kelly in The Guardian. (It's pretty great -- go read it. After you've watched the magnum opus.)
I don't know which I was anticipating more -- M.I.A.'s new album or Pitchfork's review of it. Both are out today. (Update: Spike Jonze interviews M.I.A.)
A good week for recommended new releases....
Video Games: BioShock.
DVD: House of Games and Trapped in the Closet.
Music: M.I.A.'s Kala.
A little late to the scene, NYT does its cover feature on mumblecore. Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) was also profiled by Klosterman a few months ago. (Update: the trailer for Hannah Takes the Stairs is out now too.)
Breaking! To hell with Prince, Tay Zonday to perform with Girl Talk at First Ave in Minneapolis! October 5. What a perfect match.
Just seven more days until the new M.I.A. album, but in the meantime here are this week's recommended new releases.... Music: Junior Senior's Hey Hey My My Yo Yo; DVD: David Lynch's Inland Empire and the Collector's Edition of Taxi Driver
The NYTBR review for The First Word makes the field of evolutionary linguistics sound rife with intrigue -- with Chomsky as the foil!
The cinematic event of the year is nearly upon us: starting Monday, a new episode from the chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet will be posted at IFC.com/trapped every day. Two other dates to watch... Aug. 21: the DVD comes out; Sept. 7: all the episodes (1-22) will air on IFC. When art historians look back on the 21st century, this is what will stand out. I'm being totally serious.
I'm guest-editing the meme-tracking site Buzzfeed today and tomorrow. Please send me your ideas for hot cultural trends (the more outlandish, the better).
Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games -- the book) was on Colbert last night. [via]
A couple random new releases: the collector's edition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and William Gibson's new novel Spook Country.
I'm finally watching Kate Modern. For the uninitiated, it's a video blog from a hot, young, confessional artist -- oh, and it's from the creators of lonelygirl15. So the question is: will you watch it? Although this clip will bring you up-to-speed on the plot, this clip in which she discusses Derrida's The Truth in Painting will pretty much make you decide one way or the other.
M.I.A. unloads on Pitchfork over Diplo. New album out in three weeks. [via]
Tomorrow's new releases.... Music: Common's Finding Forever. DVD: 300 and Hot Fuzz.
Electrophunk is my new thing this week, so go buy the new Chromeo record so we can talk about it, okay? Stereogum has the new video. (Ben, Colin, and I tried to see them last weekend, but the morons at the War Room don't know how to manage a door.)
Amazon.com interview with William Gibson: part 1, part 2, part 3. Spook Country is out in a couple weeks.
Time for this week's new releases...
DVD: Zodiac and The Host.
Books: Warren Ellis' first novel, Crooked Little Vein.
Music: Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs' The Is Is, Prince's Planet Earth, and Sebodoh's reissue of The Freed Man.
VH1 is out to get me right now. My ridiculous obsession with Scott Baio is 45 and Single is like therapy in reverse, and the upcoming show The Pickup Artist (starring Mystery from Neil Strauss' The Game) will be the best worst thing on tv -- and it will likely kill me. Fuck, I hate my '30s.
NYT on Prince: "He doesn't have to go multiplatinum -- he's multiplatform." The new album (Planet Earth) comes out this week. (Update: I love that this story is on TechMeme right now.)
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.
Fake Steve Jobs' book is on Amazon: Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody. October 8 release date.
In Wired, Clive Thompson describes the "telepathic awareness of the people" that makes Twitter so engaging. I described this as "ambient friend awareness" a while back, but I love Clive's analogy: "It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are.... Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination."
Must-have DVD release of the week: Yo-Yo Cop Girl. It involves an underground website, terrorism, a lesbian relationship, and lots of fighting girls. From the producer of one of my favorite films, Battle Royale.
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?
Today's new releases: Justice, Interpol, Spoon, and Smashing Pumpkins.
William Gibson has posted a lengthy video in which he talks about his new book, Spook Country, which hits stores early next month. Also interesting: Amazon has the original proposal for the novel, which sounds nothing like how the novel actually turned out. [via]
I'm not sure what the third-world message is for the new Chemical Brothers video, "Do It Again," but it sure makes the Moroccans dance. New album drops in a couple weeks.
While we wait for Southland Tales, Richard Kelly (that's the Donnie Darko director) has signed Cameron Diaz for his next movie.
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.
This is one of the strangest stories I've seen in a while. Did you see the story about the professional wrestler (Chris Benoit) who killed his wife, son, and himself earlier this week? Apparently, he may have been involved in editing his own Wikipedia entry right after doing it. Best part is that the entry seems to have revealed his wife was dead before anyone actually knew this. Update: the comments and this Newsvine post have more on this. Update #2: Dude who edited it says it was a "terrible coincidence."
A year an a half ago, I predicted (#24) that CNN.com would drop Pipeline. They finally did. Now if Times Select would just disappear... [via]
Browsing the bookstore last weekend, I saw a copy of this Gothic and Lolita book -- and it totally freaked me out, even more than Phaidon's other similar releases Fruits and Fresh Fruits. For a sample, check out the slideshow on Radar. Update: Wikipedia entry for "Gothic Lolita" (thx Gavin).
The Criterion Collection of Chris Marker's La Jetee and Sans Soleil comes out today.
New albums from The Beastie Boys and Metric drop today.
It looks like Douglas Wolk's new book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean is making an impression. Salon has an excerpt and the Star-Tribune has a review.
I haven't read Nassim Taleb's new book Black Swan yet, but today Jim pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for Ludic fallacy, which is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations." Taleb was on The Colbert Report a few weeks ago, and his book is getting some buzz lately.
New releases? The new White Stripes album comes out today: Icky Thump. That's all you really need to know.
Terry Semel is out at Yahoo. Yet another one of my predictions comes true (#15). If only I had gotten that iPhone one right (#3), this would be a good year.
Rotten Tomatoes has the 100 Best-Reviewed Sci-Fi Movies, presented in the most annoying way possible (one film per page), so I've put the top 10 in the comments.
Another story on the video game farming trade, this time from Julian Dibbell in the NYT Magazine: "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer". (Dibbell is the author of Play Money and the canonical work on virtual identities "A Rape in Cyberspace".) Includes a pretty great slideshow and video.
More good 10 Zen Monkeys: RU Sirius interview with David Weinberger, who recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, which I read a few week ago and should really review here, but will just lazy link instead.
I've mentioned in several places my suspicion of rallying around Josh Wolf as a First Amendment hero. I hope his appearance on The Colbert Report makes it a little more clear why.
That new Sonic Youth deluxe reissue of Daydream Nation? A 10.0 on Pitchfork. I listened to it again last night, and if you run into me in today, I'm very likely to tell you about how this album was ridiculously perfect for 1988.
New music releases today: Datarock's Datarock Datarock (which will be a surprise contender for Top 10s at the end of the year), Mark Ronson's Version (that's Amy Whinehouse's producer), and the Deluxe Edition of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (one of the best albums of all time).
MediaPredict.com. (Huh, sounds like a good idea.)
Time for this week's best new releases. Music: The Afghan Whigs' Greatest Hits. Books: The Cult of the Amateur. DVD: The Sergio Leone Anthology.
I have this little theory that trends and predictions can be stand-alone narratives, so I wrote a little essay about it, which doubles as a note announcing a new work project: iPredict, where you make predictions around news events.
That book from the Fark guy came out today: It's Not News, It's Fark.
Whoa, didn't see this one coming: CBS Acquires Last.fm for $280 Million. Except I did see it coming! Check out my 30 Predictions for 2007 in Media/Tech/Pop (written in December) which says "23) CBS. The digital unit will make a few acquisitions that seem peculiar." Money.
A few days ago, I took a picture of a "iPod Amnesty Bin" at Zune HQ. It has since exploded as a blogosphere item. Weird how that happens. Update: lookie there, it's now an InfoWorld and PC World story too.
It's New Releases Tuesday, with my media recommendations for the week. DVD: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto | Music: Battles' Mirrored and The National's Boxer.
We've seen alternate reality games for movies and for music and for video games, but I believe the game for Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts is the first ARG built around a book. The adventure starts at LostEnvelope.com and includes clues left on Flickr, YouTube, and other sites, all ending a real-world prize. More details at Vulture.
Over the weekend, I finished the new Murakami novel, which somehow manages to be both tremendously cinematic and wildly unfilmable at the same time. (One of the main characters is actually a camera, which is a proxy for us, the audience. This causes parts of the plot to be told in first-person plural -- "point of view" is a prevailing phrase.) A few reviews: L.A. Times | San Fran Chron | Wash Post.
I'm not sure what to make this: the dude from Fark has written a book (out in couple weeks) subtitled "How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News." Isn't that the definition of Fark?
This book looks interesting: Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived.
Discover magazine set up an experiment in which a couple IM bots chat with each other. I actually wrote a program that did this very thing several years ago, but it looks like the language models have advanced a bit since then.
That Battles album I've been raving about? 9.1 on Pitchfork.
It's New Media Tuesday, with one new releases in each category. DVD: Pan's Labyrinth; books: Don DeLillo's Falling Man; music: Wilco's Sky Blue Sky.
Two unrelated-yet-strangely-related new releases that drop today: Bjork's Volta and Murakami's After Dark.
NYTBR takes notice of the four Philip K. Dick reissues from Library of America.
Following up to a post last month, Discover has the finalists to the "String Theory in Two Minutes or Less" video contest.
William Gibson's new book. Not out until August. [via]
I suppose movie posters are one of the things I collect, so I created a short photo tour of some of posters around my house. (I have a Dead Ringers poster above my bed, a Slacker poster in my bathroom, and a Breathless poster in the closet -- now's your chance to psychoanalyze.)
There has been surprisingly scant buzz about David Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, which is out next week.
This week's must-have new albums: Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare and Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5:55. And on DVD: Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away.
My favorite new song: "Atlas" from the band Battles whose debut album drops in May. Math rock meets post rock meets laptop mashup.
News.MySpace.com. [Comment on how lame it is inside.]
What is it that makes me want to buy the new Nine Inch Nails album, which comes out today? (Update: Idolator gathers the reviews.)
Krucoff breaks the news that the founders of Dodgeball have left Google. This will all seem very sad when Google buys Twitter. [More thoughts inside.]
I just noticed that in addition to The Pervert's Guide To Cinema (which is my movie of the year so far -- NYT profile), Slavoj Zizek has another biopic-ish film being released: The Reality of the Virtual (out next week), which is in addition to the 2003 film Zizek.
Let the Web 2.0 backlash begin! An upcoming book found cruising around Amazon: The Cult of the Amateur. Subtitle: "How today's Internet is killing our culture." Ouch! [See also: Secrets of Online Persuasion.]
Looks like that Barbarella remake is moving forward. I am silly elated about this. [Update: in the comments, speculate on who should be the lead.]
Warning: work-related post. The review for our branding treatment (which I mentioned last week) is out and we got a RAVE. More notes on the redesign of MSNBC.com coming through the summer...
Somehow, Paul Graham's Microsoft is Dead is catching on, even though it basically reads like a day in the life of Scoble. [more inside]
Seattle Weekly has a decent (and thorough) profile of the CapHill-based music recommendation engine iLike (my profile), which so far I like more than Last.FM.
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.
A great thing: The website for Miranda July's new book, No One Belongs Here More than You (out May 15).
A SF Chron columnist summarizes some of my earlier worries about Josh Wolf, even using a similar closing statement that I did here.
I will only tell you this once: the second season of Twin Peaks finally comes out on DVD this week.
The new DeLillo novel is called Falling Man (out May 15), a reference to the World Trade Center falling man from 9/11. [via]
My role as unabashed Twitter propagandist is now complete. In addition to the G4 Attack of the Show appearance yesterday, I was on NPR's Future Tense (along with my old Minneapolis pal Aaron) this morning. This time around, I describe the "existential anxiety" that Twitter creates. So there, it's not completely unabashed.
The video from Low for "Breaker" is exactly like something that Thom Yorke would do in his spare time. (The new album is okay, but I can't help feeling Low is trapped in a space where ingenuity ceases to exist.)
I was live (live! on tv!) on G4's Attack of the Show today, propagandizing about Twitter.
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!
Children of Men comes out on DVD today. And the much-hype Klaxons CD, Myths of the Near Future, also drops.
10 Strange Facts About Einstein. UPDATE: Walter Isaacson, who has a biography of Einstein out next next month, wrote about him in Wired.
In addition to last Sunday's Times, James Murphy is in The Voice talking about the idea of commissioned music. The new LCD Soundsystem is so far my favorite album of the year.
Kottke's take on Twitter. Back in December, I talked to Jason a bit about Twitter, and he already had evolved thoughts on it... glad he's putting them up now. (Me on Twitter.)
Good week for new music releases... new albums come out tomorrow from: LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse, Low, Andrew Bird, and Pierces.
Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton has a surprising new book coming out that looks like a bit of pop philosophy: The Meaning of Life. The Guardian reviews it.
Nicholas Carr's lucid argument, In Praise of The Parasitic Blogger, reads something like the manifesto that I never wrote when I launched this blog eight years ago. Except his analogy is to bacteria, whereas a Fimoculous creates and consumes its own waste.
Today's new releases in... DVDs: Borat and Fast Food Nation. Music: Arcade Fire, Air, RJD2, Amon Tobin, and !!!. Books: Kurt Anderson's Heyday and Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop.
The cover art of the new Borat DVD (out Tuesday) is designed to make it look like a bootleg. [via]
Bracketology is the most recent addition to the growing list of books that use a graphic schema to organize the world. (More? I just got David Byrne's Arboretum, for instance.) The subtitle says it all: The Final Four of Everything. Bracketed concepts include memorable lines in speeches, jock films, and mondegreens, or misheard lyrics. [via]
How's this for snack culture? Discover magazine is sponsoring a contest in which people attempt to describe string theory in less than two minutes.
The cover story on the new issue of Wired is Snack Attack!, a mini-manifesto on the notion that culture is becoming more bite-sized. I wrote three short pieces for the compilation -- on t-shirts, lists, and link blogs. These happen to be three things I'm ridiculously qualified to prattle on about.
Snack Culture is a notion that, once stated aloud, seems almost obvious: society is speeding up, so of course culture reflects that acceleration by providing smaller, easier-to-consume bits. Just think about ringtones and texting, iTunes and Twitter, online profiles and speed dating -- nuh doy, right? Aren't FlashMobs just really nano-protests? Isn't H&M just fashion in fast-forward? How about the mashup -- couldn't we argue that it is simply a way to consume two songs in the time it takes to listen to one? (I remember an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation in which Data was listening to five Mozart symphonies at once. This seemed like utopia to this attention-deficient teenage mind.)
Steven Berlin Johnson's decent counterpoint, Snacklash, makes a compelling argument that miniaturization is actually an illusion created by surplus. But his points about movies and music (old media) seem to crumble with recent inventions (new media): games, startups, webisodes, memoirs, gossip, widgets, highlight reels, and all the rest -- just let your mind wander and you'll think of some.
Some bite-sized notes on the items I wrote:
T-Shirts
I've had this theory for a while: the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media. Whereas t-shirts used to be a retroactive way to classify yourself in a social group, now t-shirts seem to broadcast news. From Wii tees to Dick in the Box halter-tops, the t-shirt is the nano-ist of nano-publishing.
Lists
It's strange to be known as the list guy. Since at least Nick Hornby (or Letterman?), it's become easy to be cynical about cultural lists. But lists are like malls -- we may hate them, but they can never perish in the age of micro-niche. Lists have a mathematical elegance, an efficiency. Lists are ways to editorialize, to predict. Lists are nostalgia and futurism at the same time.
Link Blogs
Stacks of links, neatly organized, precise and discrete: you have your version of beauty, I have mine.
Released on DVD today: Babel and the first season of Family Ties. Which you gonna buy?
The new album from Noriko Tujiko is out today. I'm going to call her a Japanese version of Bjork, and then run for Mount Fuji, leaving behind only a video link.
My current favorite new song/video: "Boring" by The Pierces. The album is out next month. [via]
As previously mentioned, Fox News has been working on their take of the Daily Show. And now here it is, The Half Hour News Hour. It never really occurred to me until now: the laugh track was likely invented by a Republican. [via]
New DVDs out this week: Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, and Criterion version of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves
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?
When I moved to Seattle, I revisited the 12-year-ago publication of Microserfs, Douglas Coupland's take on software culture. Published right around the same time was Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, which The Laboratorium revisits to reveal some amazing predictions and blunders. [via]
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."
Apparently the Seattle Times got a lot of negative feedback from the hot barista story that was posted here last week.
NYTBR: review of I Am Plastic, the new book about the designer toy explosion.
The Stranger interviews Girls Talk, who's playing Seattle tomorrow night. See ya there. (Previously on Fimoc: 11 Reasons Why I Won't Shut Up About The New Girl Talk Album.)
As if killing Aeon Flux for future generations wasn't enough, there's some talk of a live-action Ghost in the Shell flick. On the plus side, the rights were acquired by the producers of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which I can't praise enough. [via]
Some biopic-type-thing called McLuhan's Wake came out on DVD yesterday. You so know I did. (And brilliantly titled, since he was famously a Joyce fan.) See also: A debate between McLuhan and Norman Mailer.
New Yorker: The History of Vegetarianism, which is a review of the book The Bloodless Revolution. See also, HuffPost: Vegetarian is the New Prius.
Though I was friends with his older brother, I never knew the singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau, who grew up in my college town, which he has taken as the name of his new album, Grand Forks. The Stranger gives it a decent review, while also recounting the Grand Forks flood of 1997, which inspired the album and which sorta made me a mini-celebrity that year -- get me drunk and I'll tell you the story.
Ze Frank jumping to Hollywood? At least one of my predix may be true.
For nerds and nerd-lovers: brand new book, Dreaming In Code, follows an open-source programming project in order to understand just why it's so hard to write software. Also, sometimes programmer and former McSweeney's online editor Kevin Shay has a new novel: The End As I Know It: A Novel of Millennial Anxiety, which looks sorta Couplandesque.
On the House floor: "There are Klingons in the White House." (That one's for you, Lex.) [via]
The SciFi Network announced a bunch of new shows, the most exciting of which by far is the Clooney-produced miniseries of The Diamond Age, which is my favorite Neal Stephenson novel. Awesome.
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.
On Amazon: Gangsta Rap Coloring Book. Contains portraits of Ice-T, 50 Cent, Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and more. [via]
The Illusionist came out on DVD today. Also, Snakes on a Plane came out last week, without an ounce of internet hype.
This NYT story on new portable devices pretty much states that Apple will be announcing an iPhone this week, which means I'm already getting some of my predictions wrong. UPDATE from the comments: Red Herring says it ain't happening.
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.
Yesterday I mentioned that Obama smokes, and today I can update this to note that he was also into coke. Awesome.
As we get close to wrapping up lists 2006 (650+ lists and counting), here are the best lists of the past week: 100 most annoying things from Retrocrush, best of the web from Art Fag City, the art of science gallery from Princeton, the year in reality tv from Reality Blurred, the year in culture from Slate.com, top 12 online media stories from Cyberjournalist, top ad music from AdTunes, top sex toys from Fleshbot, top 5 lists from Comic Book Resources, top science stories from Discover, the year in games from Wired News, top 10 sex stories from San Francisco Chronicle, personalities of the year from Gawker, and a deluge of top 10s from Time.
What'd I do on my xmas vacation? Devoured Battlestar Galatica and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Which is why I'm now reporting on items like a possible direct-to-DVD Battlestar Galactica movie.
Culled from the list of lists, it's time for the weekly list wrap: top 100 baby names for 2006 from Baby Center, top reality tv whores from Reality Blurred, top 100 wines from Wine Spectator, top 10 cryptozoology stories from Cryptozoo, worst vlogs from 10 Zen Monkeys, top 10 cited Wikipedia entries from Wikipedia, vaporware from Wired News, least essential albums from The Onion A/V Club, best of everything from IGN, 10 best unseen films from Film Threat, artists of the year from City Pages, dozen dumbest press releases from Collateral Damage, best albums from eMusic, entertainers of the year from Entertainment Weekly, 10 best celebrity trends from Best Week Ever, 99 most desirable women from AskMen.com, and buzzwords from the New York Times.
While writing my Predictions for 2007 in Media/Tech/Pop post, a small little idea crept in: we tend to think of websites on a scale similar to that of tv networks -- large, permanent, liquid. But what if a better comparison were sitcoms -- small, ephemeral, risky. Due to media hype, MySpace is perceived on a scale next to Fox (as AOL was to Timer-Warner), but maybe it should be considered more like Lost (which turns Yahoo into The Simpson's). And before this freaks you out, think about how we might use this to our advantage.
Best new lists over the last couple days: most popular time-shifted shows from TiVo, worst movie trailers from iFilm, best recut movie trailers from Rolling Stone, top 10 creepy fossil finds from Cryptozoo, the year in viruses from CrunchGear, top stories from The Onion, top 50 albums from Pitchfork, and the year in film from The Onion A/V Club.
Best of the recent additions to the best-of lists list: top 10 politically incorrect words from Language Monitor, most expensive champagnes from Forbes, buildings of the year from Business Week, top 100 songs from Pitchfork, top 10 tv shows from Time, year in review from the L.A. Times, 15 who had 15 minutes of fame from Time, the year in culture from NY Mag, top 10 cryptozoology mystery pics from Cryptomundo, top 10 movies from Stephen King, and of course Google Zeitgeist.
Some of the best lists of the past few days: top 10 YouTube moments from AP, top 10 TV moments from TiVo, top 100 people from Pop Candy, top 50 albums from Rolling Stone, 25 worst album covers and 25 best music videos from Pitchfork, the year in corrections from Regret the Error, photos of the year from Time, favorite podcasts from iTunes, 9 most surprising business moves from Valleywag, best music from The Onion A/V Club, and 100 things we didn't know this time last year from BBC.
Mid-week best of The 2006 Lists round-up: 5 most expensive phones from Luxist, 100 best songs of the year from Rolling Stone, best films from the New York Film Critics Circle, favorite fiction and non-fiction from the L.A. Times, top 10 tech words from Valleywag, and top 40 sports figures from sports bloggers.
Best of The Lists weekend round-up: words of the year from Merriam-Webster, banished words list from Lake Superior State University, book awards from Salon, video game awards from Spike TV, worst book covers from Ed Rants, top 10 books from Stephen King, best songs and albums from Sasha Frere Jones, year-end recap from Other Music, the year in catfights from Radar, librarians of the year from the New York Times, and of course the year in ideas from the New York Times Magazine.
More '06 lists? M'kay: top 50 music videos from DoCopenhagen; top 5 movie posters from Sam's Myth; best nude scenes from Mr. Skin; the year in books from Slate.com; best books, music, film, and art from Art Forum; and of course a whole lot more.
So it took two entire days to really figure out the perfect use of Twitter. Come be my friend.
I was on the NPR technology show Future Tense this morning, talking about the 30 blogs and the list of lists. Gawd, I hate my radio voice.
Chuck wrote about that Ali Rap thing in ESPN that I mentioned a couple days ago. "While it's difficult to prove Ali invented rap music, it's almost indisputable that he spawned what is now referred to as 'the modern athlete,' a term that's generally used as coded, pejorative language."
New 2006 lists? Okay, NPR's listeners' picks, Bookslut's best book covers, CrunchGear's gadgets, NME's best albums, The Onion's cheap toys, Leite's Culinaria's 20 best cookbooks, and of course a whole lot more.
Yahoo has released their Top Searches of 2006, which of course has been added to the ever-growing list of lists.
Wow, this is pretty amazing: if you go to Del.icio.us right now, 6 out of the top 10 "hot" links were featured on yesterday's Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading post. I guess that makes the title of the post already obsolete.
George Lois (the guy who practically invented the magazine cover at Esquire, including this famous one) has a new book out called Ali Rap, which is a "biography" consisting entirely of quotes from Muhammad Ali. There's also a DVD. [via]
So Twitter. The idea is that you constantly type what you're doing at that very moment. Some people think this will be big, but I'm just wondering why.
Jeesh, Merry Christmas: Essential Art House - 50 Years of Janus Films. 50 DVDs, $650.
Amazon has been surprisingly quiet about this: Unspun. It's basically wisdom of the crowds applied to lists -- like Digg but for real stuff. Not bad, but you know how I like lists. [via]
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?
30. Starbucks Gossip
Romenesko's other other blog, Starbucks Gossip is the kind of idea you wish more people would rip off. A gossip blog for fans and employees alike, the site has been on the forefront of such controversies as the ghetto latte and the tipping debate. (See also: Mini-Microsoft.)
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 random pieces 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.)
23. We Make Money Not Art
There's an easy way to get me to fall in love with your blog -- just link to a meat chess board, and I'm all yours. The international talent on this blog covers topics in the digital arts: social media, electronic design, wearable computing, etc. (See also: Design Observer & reBlog.)
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.)
19. Journerdism
From the esteemed tradition of Waxy and Snark Market comes Journerdism, a link blog from Floridan new media journalist, Will Sullivan. (See also: Magnetbox & PaidContent & Innovation in Colllege Media.)
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.)
16. Marmaduke Explained
There's only one way to make Marmaduke funny: attempt to explain why Mamaduke is funny. Brilliant. (See also: Silent Penultimate Panel.)
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.)
10. BuzzFeed
It might be too early to judge this recently-launched human+computer buzz hybrid, but so far the meme detector has caught Hipster-on-Hipster Hatred, Evil Hippies Ruining Stuff, and Racist Jokes as strangely recurrent cultural themes. (See also: Hype Machine & Blogebrity.)
9. Pulse Laser
Matt Webb is the kind of nerd that all nerds aspire to be. His amazing presentations mix science fiction, Coke commercials, and brain chemistry in ways natural only to polymaths. With his partner Jack Schulze, Webb has worked on such projects as redefining news with BBC, understanding phone personalization with Nokia, and writing about mind hacks for O'Reilly. Impressive work, but this blog tracks their random ideas, such as the social letterbox or a collection of robot arms. (See also: Ratchet Up & v-2.org.)
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.)
5. Corpus Obscurum
It's an inspired idea: track the obits of those whose accomplishments vastly exceeded their fame. So you get the last boxer to fight Muhammad Ali, the animator of Fred Flintstone, the tuba player from the Jaws theme, the first physician convicted of illegally performing an abortion in a hospital, and many, many more. (See also: Blog of Death.)
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.)
3. Google Operating System
Like William Gibson famously decreeing that the future is already here but not evenly distributed, this blog's name alludes to the ongoing rumor that Google is starting its own operating system, which is essentially already here but we don't even realize it. The site offers "news and tips about Google" (hey, they put ads on their maps; wow, only a handful of sites have a 10 PageRank; huh, you can mute threads in Gmail), but the best posts have top form theorizing on what the future holds for the online operating system. (See also: Google Blogoscoped & John Battelle's SearchBlog.)
2. History of the Button
A blog about the history of buttons? Yes! A blog about the history of buttons! Finally, someone has come along to try to say something sensible about this year's wretched Adam Sandler movie Click, to trace the history of game show buzzers and buttons, and to analyze Push! The! Button! cries in Lost. Next thing you know, you're seeing buttons everywhere. It's a button nation. (See also: Boxes and Arrows & Signal vs. Noise.)
1. Indexed
Is this seriously the best blog on this list? Who knows -- but it's a minor form of genius. (See also: McSweeney's Lists & 10,000 Reasons & Gaping Void.)
Thanks to Andy, Greg, Lock, Matt, Jim, Robin, Andrew, David, Ted, Matt, Karl, Andrew, and Chuck for their advice on this project.
1If you believe Technorati's numbers, it's actually about one blog per second.
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.
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.
17) LCD Soundsystem, 45:33
Run. Run fast, very fast.
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.
10) Lady Sovereign, Public Warning
We made way for the S.O.V. and she ends up on TRL. Didn't see that one coming.
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.
This Year's Disappointments: Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics, Emily Haines, Knives Don't Have Your Back, DJ Shadow, The Outsider, Thom Yorke, The Eraser, Beck, The Information, Outkast, Idlewild, Nellie McKay, Pretty Little Head, Lily Allen, Alright, Still, The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers, Beyonce, B'day, Bjork, Drawing Restraint 9, Peaches, Impeach My Bush, Morrissey, Ringleader of the Tormentors, Prince, 3121, Kool Keith, Nogatco Rd.
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).
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.
Mickey Avalon! Mickey Avalon! Mickey Avalon! Score: 9.
27) FBC -- Fox Business Channel -- will launch.
Pft. Score: 0.
28) Ten major cities will release city-wide WiFi.
I had to use the word major. Score: 3.
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...
Guess what time of the year it is, kidz? That's right, time to launch the meta-list machine. Here it is, the yearly crazefest: 2006 list of lists. It's skimpy now, but there were 700+ last year, so bookmark that boy. I even added some new features: sorting and category pages (and will try to add filtering and search later).
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!)?
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.
Our furry friend Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy (first mentioned way back with their first show at Creative Electric in Minneapolis) has spread the word to NYC according to a Village Voice story.
This book could be fun: American Hair Metal. Pop Candy has some photos.
Want me to make your day? Go listen to Mickey Avalon (MySpace | album). Here's a video for "So Rich So Pretty" and the audio to his best track, "Jane Fonda."
Illustrating a little bit too much nostalgia for the '90s, the two big music releases today that I'm looking forward to are PJ Harvey's Peel Sessions and Pavement's spectacular Wowee Zowee re-release.
It seems gauche to link to items that both Jason and Robin already got to, but I can't let this Gears of War promo go by. (Song reminder: that's a cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World," which appeared on the Donnie Darko soundtrack.)
Some of you know that I've talked about starting a blog about fake news for a while. A few years back, I even had semi-serious conversations with media playahs (people with names you've heard!) about what I was dubbing "Romenesko for the Rest of Us." At the time, it seemed that we were in the Renaissance of Fake News, as the culture industry seemed to be obsessed with fakery. But lately it seems we've got a glut of the pseudo, which is why I almost fell for this fake story claiming that The Onion is going to switch to a real news format. Almost. (UPDATE: The Onion's Sunday Magazine parody.)
NYT revisits "the National Anthem of Hip-Hop," Incredible Bongo Band's Bongo Rock which is being reissued next month. Michaelangelo gets props for first calling attention to it at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle (which, by the way, has opened the paper call for '07). Oliver Wang has MP3s of just some of the tracks that sample "Apache" (Sugar Hill Gang, Moby, Nas, The Roots, etc.).
I need a Halloween costume. It needs to be nerdy. A couple years ago, I was the yellow AOL guy and last year I was a spam filter. Any ideas?
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.
Damn, there are too many interesting books lately. Designing Pornotopia (subtitle: "Travels in Visual Culture") looks like it's worth checking out.
Potentially interesting book: The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. The corresponding website lists 50 of them.
Wired snags the six words meme (previously mentioned back here). [via]
I missed this DVD release from earlier this month: The Vice Guide to Travel. "We dispatched correspondents all over the world to vist the planet's weirdest and most dangerous places. We went to such farflung locales as the Pygmy villages in the Congo, the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl, and the illegal arms markets of Pakistan. We looked for mythical beasts, met the PLO boy scouts (suicide bombers of tomorrow), chatted with a man who sold black market nuclear warheads and hung out with Osama bin Laden, and got shot at in the slums of Rio. This is travel at its most bizarre, equal parts LSD and adrenaline, and sometimes we can't believe we made it back."
An update on Wonder Showzen via Radar: the boys are "90 percent" sure that MTV2 has cancelled the show. On what might have saved the show: "I honestly think that if the second season had a controversy, it would have been better for the show." I guess that's a lesson for the cultural conservatives. Also: Season 2 came out on DVD last week.
New Lady Sovereign video. Her new record drops in a couple weeks, and I'm told that "Love Me Or Hate Me" is a #1 hit on TLR.
Spy's How to Be Famous videos. (See also: a brand new best-of book: Spy: The Funny Years. Kurt Anderson interviewed about it.) [via]
Has it really been 25 years? Reds came out on DVD today.
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 Report had 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....
I don't know if this has legs, but a second incident where Colbert has used blogger content (jokes or video) has surfaced. [Previously.] It's an interesting question though: how do you source material in satire?
If you chose only one week to buy albums this year, this would be it. New releases from The Hold Steady, Beck, The Decemberists, and The Killers come out today. Two or three of those will make several year-end top 10 lists this year.
Design Observer: good essay about Beck's new sticker album cover art [Wired interview], with comparisons to Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The new album is out this week.
I like the angle of approaching the new Hold Steady album, Boys and Girls in America, from the perspective of a travelogue. (On the last album, I itemized the Minneapolis references.) See also: Craig interviewed in Fader and The Pitchfork review (9.4).
Chuck's new book is doing well. Some reviews: New York Times Book Review, L.A. Times, Onion A/V Club, Slam, Akron Beacon Journal, and Portland Mercury.
Steven Johnson's new book, The Ghost Map, has a trailer -- yes, a trailer -- on YouTube. [via]
Boondocks creator says he's retiring the comic strip but has just signed a second season of the Comedy Central show (which is so, so, so good -- first season on DVD).
Fimoculous.com got another dusting and cleaning today. Drop your thoughts in the comments.
I probably wouldn't have read the DJ Shadow SF Weekly cover story if I weren't in The Bay last week, but it's pretty great. New album out this week. See also: DJ Shadow video gallery.
Mastodon has a new album out Tuesday; NYT reviews it.
In a surprisingly good story from The Boston Phoenix about slacker web entrepreneurs (examples: the million dollar webpage and one red paper clip dudes), the final example is Julian Dibbell, who is sorta a hero of mine, for simply having written one of the greatest articles about virtual worlds, A Rape In Cyberspace, for The Voice over a dozen years ago. I had no idea what happend to him, but the story informed me of his brand new book: Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot.
Banksy punks Paris Hilton. Photos. Sorta funny. Banksy also has a new book out.
Hey look, Winger has a new album coming out.
Somehow, a post right here on Fimoc got taken over by emo lovers and hatahs in the comments.
David Byrne describes his strange new book (published by McSweeney's) as "Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist."
New Murakami out today: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
Michiko reviews a new cultural history of jeans.
Brick is released on DVD today.
Thomas Pynchon's next novel, Against the Day, will be out in December. It will also be 992 pages long. Slate thinks he's shown up on Amazon.
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.
New records from Peaches and Thom Yorke come out today. (Video: Yorke playing solo & acoustic on the Henry Rollins show.)
Pitchfork hands TV on the Radio a 9.1 for the forthcoming Return to Cookie Mountain.
New Yorker review of The Long Tail, which is finally out. I wonder if it'll end up on the short or long end of the tail?
Robot Chicken is on DVD? How come no one told me?
A gigantic Bjork box set comes out tomorrow.
TOYS
GenPets. For real.
FILM
Anton Corbjin is directing a movie about Joy Division: Control.
I noticed that A Scanner Darkly has an elaborate MySpace page. I wonder if they had to pay for the special treatment or if they just hacked it.
MUSIC
A gigantic Bjork box set comes out tomorrow.
Vice: How To Make A Playlist For A Girl. Condescending as fuck, but funny as hell.
WORDS
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.
Updike jumps up and down like a baby (an eloquent baby, I suppose) over Kevin Kelly's NYT Mag book story from a several weeks ago.
TV
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.)
Robot Chicken is on DVD? How come no one told me?
ONLINE
Wikipedia: List of problems solved by MacGyver.
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.
Finally, a reason to wed.
DRINK
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?
T-SHIRTS
We're half-way through 2006 and I've been listening to more music than usual. So here are my favorite thirteen albums so far:
1) Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
2) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones
3) Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
4) The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living
5) Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
6) Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom
7) Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics
8) Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon
9) Danielson, Ships
10) The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon
11) Be Your Own Pet, Be Your Own Pet
12) DFA, Remixes
13) Built To Spill, You in Reverse
ONLINE
It's not at all fucked up that someone launched a celeb gossip blog in the form of Digg -- it's fucked up it was Conde Nast.
Drop a prospective hottie into SingleStat.us and it emails you when their status has changes to single (after you pay $4).
Google Map of the Apple iPod space advert (zoom in).
MUSIC
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.
FILM
The Criterion version of Dazed & Confused comes out today.
Trailer to Woody Allen's newest (already?!), Scoop, starring Scarlett Johansson.
TV
Daily Show takes a swipe at Katie Couric in industry ad.
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:
MUSIC
National Review's Conservative Top 50 Songs. Fuck you, classic rock.
I started watching this commercial for Beck's beer thinking it was a new Beck music video. Actually, is there any difference anymore?
Suicide Girls interview with Mike Patton, whose Peeping Tom came out this week.
ONLINE
The New Yorker revisits Jason and Meg. The original, from six years ago. Gawker's take.
TV
I wonder why Pinky and the Brain isn't on DVD.
Holy shit, there's a lot of bad reality tv coming to network this summer.
LISTS
Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Lure of Lists.
WORDS
Guardian Mag profile 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.
FILM
Google has movie trailers now too.
BOOKS
I've been buying up "Choose Your Own Adventure" books on eBay for the past couple years, and now it turns out they're being reissued.
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.)
T-SHIRTS
Colbert Has Stones. (Buy the video on C-SPAN.org.)
TV
Best. Website. Ever. IsLostARepeat.com.
CBS launched Innertube, AOL has In2TV, ABC launched full-episode stream, MTV has Overdrive, Comedy Central has Motherload, and NBC.... the Dwight Bobblehead!
FILM
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.
ADS
The new Apple ads, starring John Hodgman.
ONLINE
For the archive, Kurt Anderson on Web 2.0.
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...
Six months ago, I wanted to write about the trend in which a new type of blogger was emerging -- one who was not happy with just one blog, but needed two or three to satisfy different appetites. Now, however, I want to write about all the bloggers who seem to have let their sites go a little gray as they work double-time for big companies or small startups. Oh wait, both of those are autobiographical stories.
Hey look, some links:
MEDIA
The Times is hiring a futurist. Too bad I'm too busy with the present right now.
ONLINE
Patent infringements that most of us actually believe in: Netflix sues Blockbuster, TiVo sues Echostar.
Danah Boyd was on The O'Reilly Factor talking about MySpace. I wish she had mentioned either a) that MySpace is owned by FOX or b) MyDeathSpace.com.
Gawker has a headquarters.
TV
EW has a screengrab of the Lost map that Locke saw, which you can now stare at for 20 uninterrupted minutes.
Now this is TV blogging: 10 Best 80s Movie Music Videos.
BOOKS
Steven Johnson is writing another book you probably should have written first.
MUSIC
What's the new Spin gonna look like? This! OMG JK!
Onion A/V: Seven Songs With Factual Or Logical Mistakes In The Lyrics.
Tapes 'n Tapes album now available on Amazon.
Relive the Replacements' "Bastards of Young" video. Or fast-forward to today with the new Flaming Lips video.
Sebadoh III is being reissued and Pitchfork reviews it. Love this line, from Barlow himself: "Turning personal vendetta and small-minded revenge tactics into eventual cult status."
PERSONAL
Kurt Cobain died 12 years ago today in the city I now live in.
You know what? My workspace ain't that much different from Bill's. Except I think I have bigger monitors.
I can't possibly be the only one who saw Google Romance (April Fools!) and thought it was real. "When you think about it, love is just another search problem." Nay, hoped it was real.
My life coach (Daily Show | NYT Styles) says I better get blogging again because not even Amanda reads me anymore. So here are some links:
FRIENDS
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.
Diablo Cody was on Letterman last week. So best, go girl.
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.
Waxy is still fighting Bill Cosby.
Elizabeth Spiers' DealBreaker.com launches on Wednesday. Interview.
Chuck Olsen interviewed Bruce Sterling.
Klosterman wrote an essay for the upcoming Criterion version of Dazed & Confused. His forthcoming book, Chuck Klosterman IV, is a collection of his previously-published work.
MNstories did a video of my farewell party in Minneapolis. That's really not me crying at the end.
TV
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.
The first season of Wonder Showzen is coming out on DVD this week.
BOOKS
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 liked V is for Vendetta.
A second Scanner Darkly trailer.
MUSIC
Go read Douglas Coupland's "interview" with Morrisey, which is really an essay on the state of the interview.
Even Tom Waits once did a commercial -- for dog food, no less. It's especially interesting since he later sued Frito-Lay for impersonating him.
ONLINE
There's hope for all of us: Jason and Meg got married. Remember when they sorta spatted on Blogumentary?
Newsweek's cover story: Putting the 'We' in the Web.
You've probably read Danah's essay on why Friendster lost to MySpace, but here's the link anyway.
CITIES
The Top 15 Skylines in the World.
GAMES
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.)
On the new Google Finance, you won't find this info: how much of Google stock that Google execs have sold.
FOOD
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.)
QUASI-PERSONAL
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.
FILM
Put this one together: Michel Gondry will direct a Rudy Rucker novel with a screenplay written by Daniel Clowes and starring Jack Black. C'mon, that doesn't even make sense.
A Scanner Darkly trailer. Sweet.
TV
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.
MUSIC
Video. Of. The. Year. Kanye's "Touch The Sky".
That Arctic Monkey album that the English won't shut the hell up about comes out Tuesday.
So there's new buzz on the internets that Axl will actually release Chinese Democracy soon. Even Slash says so. Stereogum has some MP3s. They suck.
ONLINE
Video of Daily Show's MySpace segment. Brilliant. Here's Demetri's MySpace page -- 19,000 friends!
Daytrading is back -- in Japan.
Just when you thought you heard everything about Web 2.0, how about a Marx comparison!? Oh, Weekly Standard. Doy.
WORDS
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.
TV
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.
Biz Week: Can MTV Stay Cool?
DATING/SEX
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.
Found on Amazon: Pierced Attachable Nipples. C'mon, for real?
DESIGN
T-SHIRTS
That controversial Mohammed cartoon has been turned into a t-shirt.
Cheney gun t-shirts already.
BOOKS
There was actually a book (Nic Kelman's 2003 novel, Girls) that had blurbs on it written by both James Frey and JT Leroy.
FILM
Kottke on Ebert on "hyperlink movies."
ONLINE
The Huffington Post's Contagious Film Festival is out. Meh. I wonder if the Gawker one will be better.
Which internet company is the least willing to provide financial information about itself? Not Google -- it's Amazon.
NYT has does a quick story with examples of searches on the new Google.cn.
Google, cover of Time. Blah, blah.
ART
On made-to-order artwork for offices.
MUSIC VIDEOS
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.
This feels like turning in a term paper a month late, but here's an idea I've been playing with: James Frey blew it.
Or rather, James Frey blew it twice. First, he blew it by writing a mediocre fictional tale and passing it off as the truth. But then, he blew it again by posturing as guilty and sorrowful and repentant and worst of all -- tedious.
Hear me out.
Do you remember how Jason Blair handled his succès de scandale? Bold, without regret. How about the author of Sokal Text? With absolute glee. Sure, these are different scenarios (Blair was trapped; Sokal's entire plan was to expose the academic publishing as fraudulent), but they open a glimpse into a radical alternate history, one in which James Frey had scoffed at Oprah's wimpy "embarrassment" and laughed this in her face:
"Ha, ha, gotchya sucka."
Frey could have quickly followed it up with a perfectly lucid explanation: he was merely trying to expose the slippery line between fact and fiction that our age has created. He could have pointed out that his book isn't all that different from, say, Brett Easton Ellis' novel Lunar Park. In fact, Lunar Park has probably as much truth in it as A Million Little Pieces, and everyone wanted to know which of the stories were real. He could have laughed in the face of authenticity, chuckled at the do-gooders and their truthiness. He could have cited that Harold Pinter nobel speech that everyone surprisingly saw online. He could have ripped apart the artifice of reality tv and MySpace profiles and tabloids. He could have torn down the curtain that is PR being passed as news -- and don't forget our government's staged news events. Instead of the pathetic villain, James Frey could have been the heroic villain, the necessary foil that exposes the weakness of all you self-righteous supermen.
Who oh why, James, didn't you just suck it up and call the whole damn thing a sham, one big fucking Matrix, dude.
Imagine for a moment how the punditocracy would have reacted. Would Gawker have applauded him? Would Oprah book clubbers have gasped? Would Jon Stewart have called him wile? What the hell would the Situation Room have said? Who would get the next night's interview -- Charlie Rose? Or just Larry King? Would he have sold more books? Would Gawker have changed its mind by the end of the day and condemned him?
Would Oprah have recanted?
James, I wish you could go back and do it all over again -- not erase the lies, but dared us to live with them. Alternate histories are always the scariest.
FILM
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.
T-SHIRTS
Is Chuck a t-shirt merchant now? I guess so. His newest (and strangest) Esquire column invites you to buy one of these t-shirts.
ONLINE
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.
Tag everything: TagWorld.
Last year's totally old rumor is back: Yahoo to buy Technorati?
Current.TV has put up a training module for citizen vlogging called survival guide. Meanwhile, Blogumentary has Vlognomics.
TV
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?
Outrageous Firsts in Television History. First toilet on tv, first use of the word fuck, first abortion, first rape, and of course first lesbian kiss.
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?
GADGETS
Although I've already got a Harmony 880 remote, this new SimpleRemote with WiFi sure does look tantalizing.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Wikipedia entry for Trapped in the Closet. The DVD is awesome.
3030Media.net is collecting some of the best hip-hop vid clips on tv, including the amazing Lil Wayne / Robin Thicke performance on Leon last which, which Kelefa gave a NYT shout-out to.
ADVERTISING
Cool Sony commercials in which balls are set free in San Francisco.
The Go Daddy commercials that won't air on the Super Bowl. Boring.
MEDIA
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.
I should really start a whole blog about last week's James Frey scandal, but here are just some related links: mammoth Kottke thread, Laura Miller at Salon offers her take, a history of literary hoaxes, and what will happen to Frey's and JT Leroy's movie deals?
MOVIE TRAILERS
Idlewild, the new Outkast film.
Miami Vice, the Jaimie Foxx / Colin Farrell version directed by Michael Mann.
Apocalypto, in which Mel Gibson goes native.
Tristram Shandy, the first postmodern novel turned into movie.
Manderlay, in which Lars von Trier continues his Beckett-inspired movie-plays.
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....
+ The annual list of lists got some press attention again this year. A sampling: NY Times mention (text), WCCO story (video), WAMC interview (audio), Rocketboom mention (video), Rex Blog interview (text).
+ For City Pages' annual "Artists Of The Year", I wrote about Arianna Huffington (second entry).
+ 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:
1) Mug Shots Of The Year from The Smoking Gun
2) Top 100 People from USA Today's Pop Candy
3) The Year In Ideas from New York Times Magazine
4) 100 Most Annoying Things from Retro Crush
5) The Best Links from Kottke.org
6) Top Viral Videos from iFilm
7) Top 20 Public Domain Files from Public Domain Torrents
8) Year In Review from Week In Review
9) 100 Most Annoying People from Am I Annoying
10) The Year In Swag from The Onion A/V Club
11) Top 50 Music Videos from DoCopenhagen
12) The Year In Corrections from Regret The Error
13) Top 10 Baby Names from Babycenter
14) 10 Sexiest Geeks from Wired News
15) Best Cast & Dogs from Dogster / Catster
16) Words of the Year from Merriam-Webster's
17) Banished Words from Lake Superior State University
18) Google Zeitgeist from Google
19) 10 Grossest Things We Saw On TV from Entertainment Weekly
20) Top Cryptozoology Stories from Loren Coleman
Are we there yet?
While everyone else tells you that 2005 was the year of disasters and chaos, I was too busy trying to figure out the cultural significance of Million Dollar Homepage and the E!'s Michael Jackson trial re-enactments.
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.
FILM
The trailer to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette looks almost like a parody music video.
TV
NYT Styles tries to convince you that men like Neanderthal TV.
Rocketboom is now available on TiVo. (Lookie, Amanda in the Times.)
Season Seven of The Simpsons came out on DVD yesterday. And so did Season Two of Miami Vice.
SEX
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.
ONLINE
Yeah, you know already: Yahoo bought del.icio.us.
Adam Penenberg used to write a column at Wired News, but has moved over the Slate where he's done a couple great piece on Apple/iTunes/iPod: Apple's Next Move | The Right Price for Digital Music.
GAMES
MUSIC
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.)
New Fiona Apple video.
TV
Lost + wikis = Lostpedia
WEALTH
Everyone keeps emailing me Forbes' list of the 15 Wealthiest Fictional Characters to add to the list of lists, but it's not a "of the year" list.
CHRISTMAS
Sarah Silverman: "Give The Jew Girl Toys" (video).
FRIGGIN WEIRD
Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot. And I thought North Dakota was nuts.
Eminem is getting back together with his ex-wife. This guy is so Axl it's sick.
ONLINE
So yeah, CNN.com launched Pipeline, their subscription broadband multi-stream portal. I haven't even looked at it yet.
Google's 10 Golden Rules.
DESIGN
Someone did a parody of Jakob Nielsen's infamous 2000 column about Flash 1996 column about frames and pretty much just supplanted "Ajax" for "Flash" "Frames" -- even the Slashdotters got tricked for a bit.
Uh-oh, lookie what's changed: Macromedia.com.
BLOGGING
Kottke: do you keep a secret site?
The Gawker kids launched another: Consumerist.
43 songs about the blogosphere.
The annual list of lists has started to take off. Rex (no relation) at RexBlog did an interview with me about list-making.
I have some big personal announcements to make soon, but first a small one: I have an essay in this new book from the American Press Institute.
Okay, some links:
MUSIC
Everyone I know wants to talk about Camille Paglia on Madonna in Salon. Seriously.
Remember The Strokes? Here's the new video for "Juicebox," the first single off their next album. It, like, rocks in that, like, MTV way, right?
DATING
Rexie's dreams really do come true: Poddater.
TV
Whoa, Veronica Mars this week, right? See the alternative ending. Double whoa!
See the new TiVo features?
ONLINE
Rocketboom: IE or Firefox? Good.
That's a whole lotta words that SF Weekly gave to Craig Newmark.
The debate at the New York Public Library between publishers and Google is now online (mp3).
Google has started a new blog for Google Base. Hopefully it will tell me what the hell to do with Google Base.
BLOGS
Panopticist: Gawker as purchased by NYT.
Holy nobody-cares-but-everybody-cares: Calacanis and Jarvis are cat-fighting.
FILM
Long Ebert profile in Chicago magazine.
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...
New York Magazine has six sex columnists compare notes.
BOOKS
Not sure what this rebranding is about, but print.google.com has become books.google.com.
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.
CELEBRITY
Google Maps + Celebrity Addresses = Celebrity-Maps.com
PHILOSOPHY
Deborah Solomon calls up Jean Baudrillard for an interview in the Sunday Times Mag. Peculiar answers.
TV
Did you hear about this supposed reality show where contestants will be tricked into believing they're in outer space!? (via)
FILM
The trailer to some crazy ass shit that Tarantino produced.
Wouldn't it be fun to turn this into a Maureen Dowd blog for a couple months? Yeah, okay, maybe not.
TV
Arrested Development is going bye-bye. Steve Holt!
Rich people love The Apprentice.
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'."
Paris Hilton doesn't change facial expressions.
For the true nerd: digg vs. dot.
MUSIC
Madonna's new album comes out this week. Have you seen the video to the first single? Yowza.
New White Stripes video staring Conan, directed by Michel Gondry.
New Shakira video. NYT is all hyped on her this week: The Shakira Dialectic.
A large Wikipedia entry on Paul Is Dead.
FILM
NYT has a small item on the film Zizek, which I saw here in Minneapolis last week.
SARAH SILVERMAN
Even more: Rolling Stone | Slate | Newsday | NYT.
MUSIC
Panopticist has the first music video shot entirely using cell phones, from the Presidents of the United States of America.
New Boards of Canada out today.
TV
NYT Mag: Chuck watches too much tv.
Don't have Current.TV but you'd like to see that Google Current thing? Then Google "Google Current" on Google Video.
ONLINE
Fortune has a long profile of BitTorrent.
You know about this already, but I need to put it here for the archives: Yahoo Podcasts.
SEARCH
New blog search engine: Sphere.com.
New news search engine: Inform.com.
NEW BLOGS
Business Week has a new blog on media and advertising: Fine On Media.
Regina Lynn (the sex columnist at Wired News) has a blog.
Blogebrity relaunched.
PUBLISHING
The American Society of Magazine Editors chooses the top 40 covers of the past 40 years. Nice.
Congrats to Elizabeth on the book deal. Last week's Gawker drama was just too much.
TECH
NYT Mag's life hackers story does a good job of getting its arms around a complex topic, but I gotta believe that so much of this is still sci fi.
Time assembles a bunch of smart people to talk about technology.
Yo, I'm in Seattle Oct. 12-15. If you are too and wanna hang, drop me an email.
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 have Everybody 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.
Oh hell, Google launched a newsreader.
Blogebrity has more details on the Weblogs Inc deal with AOL.
After weaning myself off Gawker, the comments on threads like this just might bring me back.
WORDS
A full list of Dubya nicknames.
Chuck did a face-off with Bill Simmons last week. It turned out pretty good, except when they talk about blogging.
MUSIC
List: cool musicians who blog.
Ratsin-fratsin Spin.com didn't put up all of Phoebe's outrageous interview with Courtney Love, so here it is.
Pitchfork reviews the new Director's Label Series.
FILM
Hilarious remix of The Shining as a family flick.
Trailer to that new Woody Allen starring Scarlett Johansson.
SHIRTS
No, I Don't Want To Read Your Blog (or hear your demo).
GADGETS
Just the other day I decided I was tired of having eight remotes to run my house and bought a Harmony 880. And then PVRblog got one too.
MEDIA
Is it my imagination or has Wired News sorta fallen off the radar since they did those lay-offs a few months ago?
Salon.com redesigned. It looks like a mashup of Slate.com and The Huffington Report.
FUNNY
Aziz carries the world's shittiest mixtape around on a boombox.
The Onion: Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation.
The most awesome quarters players ever.
Hey, I was "on" the Harry Shearer show (audio) a couple weeks ago.
TECH
Biz Week profiles 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).
Engadget gets their hands on the new Windows-powered Treo 700. Looks like an upgrade to Rexie's life is coming soon.
ONLINE
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.
MEDIA
Nominees for the 2005 Online Journalism Awards. I'll be in NYC for the awards & conference next month.
NYT Mag's Funny Pages archive.
NYT interviews Christie Hefner: It's Not Her Father's Playboy.
Reporters Without Borders publishes a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents (pdf).
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.
Stereogum has Liz Phair doing a cover of "Mother's Little Helper" (and here's a NY Daily News profile) while Dreams of Horses has M.I.A. covering the Kaiser Chiefs.
Ultragrrrl has a book, and I don't.
TV
Reality Blurred reports that the next Real World will be in Key West.
Boston.com: Top 50 Sci-Fi Shows of All Time.
FILM
Joss Whedon interviewed in the Times.
Trailer to Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck, about some guys named Murrow and McCarthy.
TV
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 first season of Lost came out on DVD today.
The NYT Mag cover 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.
If you're a fan of Lost, I suggest The Lost Master Plan.
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!
FILM
New Atom Egoyan, starring Kevin Bacon: Where The Truth Lies.
MUSIC
Who will be the first to sample Kanye's "George Bush doesn't care about black people"? Here's the video.
ONLINE
Ballmer: "I'm going to fucking kill Google." Heh.
WORDS
NYTBR wonders what happens to letters in the age of email.
DVD
The Suicide Girls have a DVD out. Amazon says 15% of the people who buy it also bought the Prozac Nation DVD. Not rated.
MUSIC
Lookie! New Franz Ferdinand video.
Plastic discusses "the perfect album."
New music releases today: Kanye West's Late Registration and Death Cab for Cutie's Plans.
TV
Awesome news for the best show on tv: Charlize Theron to be in this season's Arrested Development. She'll play Jason Bateman's love interest.
New on TV DVDs today: First Season of Roseanne.
MEDIA
Even the New York Times is paying attention to the Flying Spaghetti Monster now.
ONLINE
The Onion has a big new redesign, and the lead story right now is Google Announces Plans To Destroy All Information It Can't Index. Ouch, Google backlash from the hipsters.
Doonsbury: I'm so stealing that blog idea.
Why lie, I need a beer. Correction: why lie, this is a link blog. As of today. Again.
FILM
Encyclopedia of Lesbian Movie Scenes.
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.
WORDS
NYT calls Brett Easton Ellis "The Man in the Mirror." His new book, Lunar Park, comes out next week.
GAMES
Busting open machinima to the masses, the NYT Mag: The Xbox Auteurs.
TV
If you heard that HBO's Entourage was good, here's your chance to judge for yourself.
MUSIC
Cool (literally) Ladytron video.
T-SHIRTS
GADGETS
It's been a long while (a whole year!) since I cared about new cellphones, but the Treo 670 running on Windows Mobile is intriguing.
BLOGGING
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.
Don't ask. Really, just don't ask.
DVD
You saw that Errol Morris' First Person and DVD Collection came out yesterday, right? Delish.
BLOGS
Forbes: Best of the Web, The Blog Edition.
Lockhart (Curbed, Gawker) has a strange video profile where you see him blog. And Elizabeth Spiers (Mediabistro) has a profile of her own.
ONLINE
I'm not unbeaten at AimFight, but I've got a pretty good record. (Username: ibsrex)
How Craigslist has changed New York.
OJR is trying to do a Wiki story on video journalists.
MUSIC VIDEOS
ADVERTISING
Yeah, another Burger King minisite. This one is a faux metal band named Coq Roq.
FILM
The reason you've seen Natalie Portman bald: V for Vendetta trailer.
DATING
Whoa, this NYT story says that 58 percent of people have dated someone at work.
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.
PUBLISHING
A long academic paper that studies students' motives for using RateMyProfessors.com. There's irony in there somewhere.
FILM
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.
Kevin Smith has a blog.
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.
GAMES
Wired News on the new alternate-reality game, Perplex City.
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.
Tony Pierce lists the 100 Greatest American Men of All Time.
FILM
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.
NYT reports 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.
CELEBRITY
Finally, it took Tom Cruise to get the brilliance of Brooke Shields onto the NYT Op/Ed pages.
BOOKS
Suicide Girls interviews Rick Moody.
DESIGN
158-image slideshow from IDEA / Business Week's annual designs awards.
SHOES
Casa Camper is a Barcelona hotel designed by Camper shoes. Yeah, I don't get it either.
ART
Decent NYT story on wetware (aka bioart).
Let me tell you a story.
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.
But I can still totally kick his ass.
The link farm:Buy the book
Listen to part of the book
Discussed on Stereogum.
On The O.C.
Entertainment Weekly review
KYTL being made into movie.
The Dessert Island Question.
Book Notes from Large-Hearted Boy
TV
The stupid TiVo auto-recorded the final episode of the Capital Gang this weekend, and it made me wonder if political shows have always been this dull.
MUSIC
NYT Mag profiles Nic Harcourt, "the star maker of the semipopular," of KCRW radio.
Nike rips off Minor Threat. And Hot Topic is selling John Coltrane t-shirts.
BOOKS
Why someone isn't translating these Saddam Hussein novels into English is a complete mystery to me.
The world's most popular authors (according to Google Adsense).
Apparently NYTRB couldn't avoid reviewing The Washingtonienne and finally caved in.
ART
The Salvador Dalí Museum (which is right next to the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg) is moving, thanks to Jeb Bush.
McSweeney's: Things Not Overheard At A Conceptual-Art Gallerying Opening.
MISC. WORK THINGS
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, NYT chooses 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.
MUSIC
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?
TV
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.
ONLINE
Suicide Girls DVD trailer (NSFW, duh).
FUNNY
FOOD
New York jumps into the foie gras fracas.
DESIGN
ART
Finally! Bjork and Matthew Barney are working on a project together: Drawing Restraint 9.
ONLINE
Good stuff: EFF's Legal Guide for Bloggers.
The winners of the Contagious Media showdown have been announced.
GAMES
McSweeney's: Top Three Things Q*Bert Is Pissed About.
FILM
The 30th Anniversary DVD of Jaws came out yesterday.
Huffington Report: Errol Morris interview.
MUSIC
This week's new releases? Oh, alright: Foo Fighters, Dwight Yoakam, and Pernice Brothers.
WORDS
Wonkette's novel, Dog Days, is now available on pre-order on Amazon (though it's not out until 2006). Oooh, read the description -- looks like there are some roman à clef opportunities there.
The Anarchist Cookbook author disavows his book on Amazon.
ONLINE
The Washingtonienne snuck onto bookshelves this week. A few reviews: Wired | DCist | WashPost. And an excerpt.
The Gawker kids launched a new blog: Oddjack, about gambling.
MEDIA
80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form. Comes out in October. Amazon pre-order.
MUSIC
Someone must remix these: World Livestock Auctioneer Championship MP3.
New White Stripes video: Blue Orchid. Also, Jack White just married a Brazillian supermodel.
Some of my favorite music bloggers have created the Music Blog Network.
Celine Dion Weird Al-ing Michael Jackson. Strange.
MARKETING
MTV's new viral campaign: MTV Video Awards Categories That Didn't Make It.
Interview with Rob Walker, who does the highly-recommended "Consumed" column in the Times Mag.
EDUCATION
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.
New Wong Kar-Wai! New Wong Kar-Wai! New Wong Kar-Wai! (We've only been talking about it for two years, but at least there's a trailer now.)
I haven't read it yet, but you can be sure it's bookmarked: Zizek on Revenge of the Sith.
ART
LOCAL
I've been putting a lot of time into MNspeak lately, so we've been a little slow here on Fimoc.
WORDS
Awesome: List of fictional curse words.
McSweeney's: Pickup Lines: The First Drafts.
Random House: Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers Contest.
ONLINE
First indication [?] of who's behind Blogebrity.
I haven't been following Podcasting on this site, but I found it odd that TV Guide is now podcasting.
MUSIC
That immensely annoying frog song is at the top of the British charts.
Kaleefa Sanneh sings the praises of the new White Stripes.
New releases today: A Bjork remix and covers album, a new Oasis (which is getting a surprising amount of attention), and a new Smog.
New Yorker: The Record Effect.
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."
Nerve.com: Sex Advice from Accordion Players.
TV
The first and second seasons of Moonlighting came out on DVD today.
TVsquad interviews Kendra from The Apprentice, who will be heading down to Palm Beach to oversee construction of a new Trump mansion, and according to this Palm Beach Post story, taking a salary cut.
FILM
A lucious six-flick Steve McQueen box set came out today. Makes me want to watch Bullitt right now.
Oliver Stone Arrested on Drug, DUI Charges.
MEDIA
Are you reading NYT's series on Class? Here's a fun interactive graphic showing how much class you have.
Kurt Andersen thinks Radar looks just a wee bit like another magazine from the '80s.
BOOKS
Bookforum: Pynchon From A to V.
NYT Styles this week looks at the glut of sex-themed books, which I won't say a thing about because I know at least two girls writing these.
I don't know if anyone is reading Umberto Eco's new book, but here's a profile of him in the Telegraph.
BLOGS
Jessica Coen of Gawker interviewed in Gothamist.
I'm on Blogebrity's "A-List." Now I'm blushing. Anyway, this attempt to get megalomaniac bloggers like me to link to it is of course part of the Contagious Media Showdown.
Did I say jokes are dead? Your blog is so....
MUSIC
Pitchfork's Summer Reading List.
New albums from Sleater-Kinney, Gorillaz, and Steve Malkmus came out today.
Billy Corgan hates Zwan too. And it turns out I've seen James Iha 5 more times than Billy has in the last four years.
Early warning: I'll be in New Orleans June 7-9. If you will be too, let me know.
MEDIA
Yeah, Radar launched. We have officially entered the age of The NYC Media Glut.
MUSIC
Gang of Four's Entertainment! was re-released today.
50 Fun Things To Do With Your iPod (besides listen to music with those white earbuds).
Whatever happened to the kid on the Nirvana Nevermind cover?
TV
What's life really like for one of Donald Trump's apprentices?
FILM
Fearless Freaks, the Flaming Lips doc, came out today on DVD. So did Season Three of Six Feet Under.
WORDS
In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews the new Steven Johnson book.
MUSIC
Le Tigre is writing a track with Paris Hilton.
Weezer's new album, Make Believe, which Pitchfork gives a 0.4, came out today. So did Spoon's newest, Gimme Fiction.
The Hold Steady are reviewed in the New Yorker and are on the cover of The Village Voice.
M.I.A. finally reviewed on NPR.
DJ Spooky Raps in Wired News on Remixing.
MARKETING
Nike finally created a spot to follow-up Tiger Woods' 16th hole shot at the Masters.
TV
I haven't given the Huffington Post a real ride around the block yet, but I did read Tina Brown's mildy funny 10 Things I Learned at Topic A.
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.
DVD
Four notable new releases today: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Complete First Season of The Partridge Family, Hoop Dreams, and Kinsey.
ONLINE
I feel like the entire internet is debating the Google Web Accelerator at this very moment.
T-SHIRTS
CONSUMPTION
The Japanese keep inventing new ways to tell time.
WORDS
Steven Johnson's new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, came out yesterday. If you don't know about it, Kottke can bring you up to speed.
Amy Sedaris interviewed in Bust.
MUSIC
NIN covers Johnny Cash. Heh.
FILM
Buried in this piece about Hayden Christensen it says that Tom Stoppard was a writer behind the new Star Wars.
MUSIC
It's Tuesday, so what are the new music releases? Glad you asked. We have a new Nine Inch Nails (With Teeth), a new Raveonettes (Pretty In Black), a new Aimee Mann (The Forgotten Arm), and a new Hold Steady (Separation Sunday).
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."
CELEBRITY
I thought the Michael Jackson trial on E! was pretty creepy, but putting Elizabeth Smart on People's 50 Most Beautiful People is downright insane.
NYT: Paris Inc.
TV
Does CNN have a stupid keyword stuffing campaign going on?
ONLINE
That's cool, Peter Rojas got a Bill Gates interview on Engadget.
WORDS
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.
FILM
New blog: Posterwire, a movie poster blog.
WORDS
They'll let anyone write a book nowadays... even fictional characters.
How Google is conquering TLS's Author Author quiz.
DESIGN
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.
MUSIC
Video of New Order performing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on Jimmy Kimmel's show.
NPR interviews Ian MacKaye about his new band, The Evens, which sounds surprisingly like a lot of Twin Cities bands.
SHOES
New book: Sneakers: The Complete Collectors' Guide.
LOCAL
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.)
MAGAZINES
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).
TV
No surprise, NBC's version of the The Office is about to get cancelled.
Ladies and gentleman, the most boring tv show of all time.
FILM
BLOGS
ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com. "hard" is such a nice touch.
The Guardian pretends 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.
MUSIC
The big music release this week is New Order's Waiting for the Sirens Call. If that's not your thing, there's also a new Essential Barry Manilow.
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.
BLOGS
NYT has more on Arianna Huffington's crazy blog adventure.
DrudgeReport turns 10 years old.
Cool Hunting redesigned.
DVD
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 Translation value 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. NYT says 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.
Koerner's column this week is on the Star Wars version of the game Risk. (In other Star Wars commercialization news, here's Darth Vader in an Orange advert And more.)
CONSUMPTION
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).
MUSIC VIDEOS
Music videos and movie trailers belong in approximately the same category, so why not just mix them? Voila: the new Unleashed trailer / Massive Attack video.
NME has the new Juliette Lewis video.
New Sleater-Kinney video (.mov) for "Entertain," off the new album coming out next month.
SIMPSONS
For no apparent reason, another profile of The Simpsons / Matt Groening.
Real Life Simpsons House. Freaky.
A gigantic MP3 archive of Simpsons music.
MUSIC
Been a while since I read an entire ILM thread: Songs about Heroin and Songs about Crack. Okay, I didn't read all of that one either.
A tidbit on Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping says that Wal-Mart is not stocking the new CD.
Tom Waits, who won a lawsuit against Frito-Lay in 1992 for using a voice that sounded like his, now unhappy with Opel commercial.
Pitchfork can't decide whether to give the new Rob Pollard album a 0.0 or a 10.0, so they give it a (1)0.0 .
MEDIA
New rule: No using "MSM" unironically.
BLOGS
I finally read the Biz Week cover story Blogs Will Change Your Business, which says nothing important to important people. The accompanying blog looks pretty elementary.
CONSUMPTION
The trailer to the new Lars von Trier flick, Manderlay, gets an internet NSFW rating for its use of the n-word.
T-SHIRTS
Some good ones at Future Relic and Glarkware.
If you've got a kid, dress it in something from PottymouthShop.com.
WORDS
London Review of Books Personals. Hot. [via]
LOCAL
Psst, wanna hear a secret? This LOCAL category will be disappearing soon, as we launch a new Twin Cities blog. We? Yes, we! Shhh, more details soon.
TV
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.)
Video of Ann Coulter getting freaky on FOX.
FILM
Here we are in 2005, and who could have guessed the words "the new film by Rob Zombie" would appear?
Those Taschen books are always so tempting, aren't they? Erotic Cinema. [Amazon link.]
ONLINE
You knew it was big news when you saw the 40-point hyperbolic headline on Drudge: GOOGLE KNOWS WHAT YOU SEARCHED LAST NIGHT.
WORDS
Village Voice hangs out with the famous lit bloggers.
MEDIA
It's been a while since we've seen a Romenesko profile.
MUSIC
Slate recounts the Fiona Apple fiasco, addressing the obvious Wilco comparisons.
LOCAL
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.
If you watched Arrested Development on Sunday, you heard them close with the line "Next season on Arrested Development...." What'd that mean? This season is over and next season is still iffy. And in a profile of GetArrested.com, NYT says we'll know next month whether FOX renews the show for next year.
The first season of Dynasty came out on DVD today.
PUBLISHING
Scary Ann Coulter on the cover of Time. (UPDATE: Drudge's take and giving bon mots at St. Olaf.)
MUSIC
Dinosaur Jr. tour schedule.
FILM
Out on DVD today: House of Flying Daggers and Primer.
BLOGS
Andrew Krucoff launched a blog mostly about obits (I think): Young Manhatttanite.
LOCAL
How come it took some NYC guy to inform me about The Walker's New Media Initiatives Blog?
TV
If you're watching The Apprentice, you know that Chris being arrested for disorderly conduct couldn't be scripted more perfectly.
Big (and by big I mean bad) day in DVD TV releases today, with all of these first seasons coming out: Knight Rider, The A-Team, Magnum, P.I., and The Bob Newhart Show.
C|Net has a three-day future of tv series.
GAMES
New Xbox to debut on MTV next month.
ECON BOOKS
Kottke has an interview with Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics, which comes out today.
MEDIA
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?
FILM
Out on DVD today: Almodóvar's Bad Education and Hotel Rwanda.
MUSIC
NYT: What's on President Bush's iPod? Everything from Alejandro Escovedo to Kenny Loggins.
And what's new in music releases today? The only noteworthy item this week is the new Garbage album.
BLOGS
I seem to be trading nicely on Blogshares.
LOCAL
Sarah Vowell is reading tonight.
Greil Marcus and Crooked Fingers and Ben Lee (all audio links) did in-studio's on The Current.
If you know me, you know I love t-shirts. Compulsively and annoyingly so. Saying I'm a t-shirt collector would be stupid, but I do occasionally buy sweet tees with a "just to have it" mindset.
I dug through my closet and pulled out my favorites (an idea blatantly stolen from Preshrunk's "What's In Your Closet" feature). Click the thumbnails to see the fullsize (or view them on Flickr).
Atmosphere Keepin it real. |
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Stryper I bought this beauty during a drunk eBay binge. Klosterman tried to buy it off my back one night. I told him I'd trade it for his Cenex tee. |
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Rx It's, like, personalized for me, dude. |
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Save Mary Kate Yep, the one that brought on a lawsuit. |
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Wonkette Operative Shill. |
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Hyperboy Probably my fave, this is early Bjork. |
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Talk Nerdy To Me This tee doubles as my pajamas. |
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Sheena, Suzi, Judy No one gets this one. They're all Ramones girls. Bought it from a store in Portugal for vastly too much. |
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Nordeast Local favorite. |
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I Read Your Email Total ThinkGeek. |
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I Just Love Corporations My only remaining Onion t-shirt. The rest burned in the fire of '97. |
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Not Helping From a Creative Electric show. |
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Rumsfeld This guy is friggin Nietzsche. |
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Radiohead The last non-ironic band tee I bought. |
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Sonic Youth Very, very old. Long out of print. |
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I Fuck Like A Girl I really do. |
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Faux News I'm technically a journalist, but I still wore this to work one day. To hell with objectivity. |
Thanks for stopping by my closet. Here are some resources:
PreshrunkCool Hunting
Threadless
Nerdy Shirts
Busted Tees
Non-Zero Chance
MEDIA
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.
MUSIC
McSweeney's: Implausible Claims Made By Vanilla Ice In His 1990 No. 1 Hit "Ice Ice Baby." "My style's like a chemical spill."
Tuesday is new-release day, but there's not much. Hot Hot Heat has a new album (Elevator) and so does Fisherspooner (Odyssey).
ONLINE
Google Maps has added Keyhole data, so you can now see satellite pics too.
FILM
Stereogum is all over this Pretty In Pink sequel.
New on DVD today: The Corporation and Sideways.
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.)
TV
FOX is creating a reality tv cable channel.
If you feel like dropping $160, The Complete First Four Seasons of The West Wing came out on DVD today.
PEOPLE
Xeni lives in L.A.? Huh.
LOCAL
The Strib likes The Rake this week.
TECH
Can you imagine getting a text from the Vatican saying the Pope died? TTYL.
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.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Cool pop & lock video: Futureshock's "Late At Night".
Bloc Party did a second (and better) video for "Banquet."
The new Moby video is peculiarly Flaming Lipsish.
New Interpol video: "C'mere".
The new Weezer album isn't out until May, but here's a video for "Beverly Hills", filmed at the Playboy mansion.
FASHION
John Malkovich has started a clothing line. If it weren't $70, I might buy this tee.
DATING
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.
GAMES
NYT has a nice profile of New Games Journalism, which includes a link to the manifesto.
John Woo to direct and The Rock to star in the Katamari Demacy film. What the hell with this script look like? Like Super Mario Bros. minus the brothers? Stupid April 1.
DRINK
Moby released a book about tea and shit last week.
Google's April Fool's drink: Google Gulp.
Not a joke: Kabbalah Energy Drink.
ART
It seems odd that NYT Mag 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-Tribune fell for an April Fool's gag claiming that a Three's Company remake was coming to St. Paul.
Lookie! A school for strippers, right in our backyard.
ONLINE
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.
The Guardian on how Yahoo just passed by Google.
FILM
Onion AV on Bad Scenes in Great Movies and Great Scenes in Bad Movies. Fun.
Ebert gives Sin City four stars. Enteratainment Weekly only gave it a C+. But Metacritic is clocking in at green. See also: Wired's profile of Rodriguez.
MEDIA
Those damn bloggers are killing Liz Smith. Finally, an answer to Jack Shafer on the good that comes from Gawker.
TECHTV
Engadget scores a beta peak at TiVo Desktop 2.1.
Couple new blogs: Chuck Olsen's Digital Television Blog and TVsnob.com.
FOOD
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."
LOCAL
INdTV is holding a contest that will give $15K to the best video submission. I hope the winners are these hip-hop kids who give Mark Dayton a bling-bling chain and get Walter Mondale spinning records. Excellent.
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!
Star Tribune and Pioneer Press stories on the death of Mitch Hedberg, a MN native. Some other resources: Metafilter thread | LA Weekly profile | Wikipedia entry.
See ya at the opening party for M-SPIFF this weekend? Good.
POLITICS/CULTURE
The America Spectator names 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!
Pitchfork has a surprisingly good essay on The Pop Culture of 9/11.
BLOGS
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 our secret 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.
MUSIC
Beck's new album, Guero, is out today.
The new Chemical Brothers video is adequately rad.
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.
Somewhat funny New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs today: My Exes: The Set List.
FILM
David Duchovny is blogging. And not one damn word about Scully.
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.
TV
Grandmothers rejoice! The First Season of Murder She Wrote came out on DVD today.
Gotta love those fake blogs: I'm Stuck In Rehab With Pat O'Brien.
Salon pepper-sprays and then pees on PoweR 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.
ADVERTISING
Fast Company profiles Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
ONLINE
Andy added some new features (tagging, API, etc.) to Upcoming.org. Cool.
LOCAL
The Rake's story on "Minnesota's greatest invention," the Post-It Note, is quintessentially Rakish.
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":
"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.
+++++++++++++++++
Links:
Soul Asylum's After The Flood on Amazon.Flood Stage And Rising on Amazon.
Red River Rising on Amazon.
Voices from the Flood on Amazon
Archive of the story on CNN.com.
Bill Clinton's Speech.
FILM
A movie about Friendster? Oh, boy. Well, it stars Topher Grace...
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead came out on DVD today.
Parker Posey joins Superman cast, playing Kitty Koslowski, Lex Luthor's partner in crime.
TV
The Star Wars kid inspires this week's Arrested Development. With video.
Mars Investigations, for catching up on Veronica Mars, the best teen-show-really-for-adults on tv.
MUSIC
A flotilla of big new releases today: M.I.A.'s Arular, Block Party's Silent Alarm, Queens of the Stone Age's Lullabies to Paralyze, Moby's Hotel, Decemberists' Picaresque, and MF Doom's Live From Planet X. There are even a couple big re-releases: Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me and Brian Eno's Music for Films.
BLOGS
USA Today reports on "Inside the Blog," created by Joe Klein, the new head-honcho at CNN previously known for dissing blogs. From a couple weeks ago: Wonkette playa-hating the segment.
MSNBC story on vlogs [via Blogumentary].
Just a little bit jealous of Kottke today for landing an Eyebeam fellowship.
ONLINE
Ourmedia.org launched, and then quickly crashed. JD has the details.
ADVERTISING
New Yorker: Do ads still work?
LOCAL
The website for the MSP International Film Festival (April 1-16) went public today. Here's the schedule and the parties. At a quick glance, Olivier Assayas' Clean looks like the highlight.
FILM
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.
War of the Worlds trailer. Starring Tom Cruise; directed by Steven Speilberg.
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.
Adidas' computerized sneaker.
Converse's "Spin The Bottle" commercial.
Reebok's controversial 50 Cent spot.
TV
Someone is aggregating all the Daily Show video links on one page. Sweet.
The video of the Lessig on West Wing episode.
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.
MUSIC
Tom Waits lists his top 20 albums.
Pitchfork gives the new Moby album a 2.4.
SXSW
Why can't it be SXSW every day? Here's a small selection of people that I had the great pleasure of speaking with for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours in Austin last week: Malcolm Gladwell (author: Blink, Tipping Point), Chuck Olsen (blogger & filmmaker: Blogumentary), Rex Hammock (blogger: Rex Blog), Rob Davis (marketing maverick: Mozilla Foundation), Tara Hacker (blogger: HumminaHummina.com), John Vars and Ted Rheingold (web guys: Dogster), David Hudson (blogger: Green Cine Daily), Andrew Krukoff (blogger: Krucoff.com), Amanda Congdon & Andrew Barron (videobloggers: Rocketboom), Michaelangelo Matos (writer: The Seattle Weekly), Molly Steenson (blogger: Girl Wonder), Chuck Klosterman (author: lots of stuff), Lockhart Steele (editor: Gawker Media), Jason Kottke (blogger: Kottke.org), Jake Dobkin (publisher: Gothamist), Jason Calacanis (founder: Weblogs Inc.), Ricky Engelberg (digital guy: Nike), Ross Raihala (writer: Pioneer Press), Melissa Maerz (editor: Spin), Jennifer Maerz (editor: The Stranger), Matthew Haughey (web community guru: Metafilter & PVR Blog), Lindsey Thomas (editor: City Pages), Craig Finn (rocker: The Hold Steady), Bridgette Reinsmoen (editor: City Pages), Dave Campbell (publicist: 2024 Records), Alex Pappademas (editor: Spin), Anna Lee (fashionista: Voltage), Keith Harris (writer: freelance writer), and that one coke dealer. And how come no one told me Tony Pierce was in the house? Here are a few pics.
LOCAL
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.
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 Mag profile 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").
Mike Skinner talks to the Guardian about starting a label.
Axl is the cover story of the Sunday NYT Arts section.
ONLINE
Fred Durst sues Gawker . (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.
Google adds weather search. Brr, it's cold again this week.
What Happens to Your Online Self When You Die?
TV
NYT previews what the Fox vs. CNBC match will look like.
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.
FILM
McSweeney's: "Who's On First" at the video story.
NYT: Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?
Amazon.com: Short Film Competition.
PUBLISHING
Issue #2 of Work mag is out.
MEDIA
It looks like Michael Musto is outting Anderson Cooper.
Dan Rather historical interactive at CBSNews.com.
Kurt Andersen on the state of journalism in the age of bloggers.
Interview with Craig "Craigslist" Newmark where he talks about getting into citizen journalism.
GAMES
For New Yorkers, Moving Image Exibition on Digital Play; for San Franciscoans, Start SOMA Video Game Art Show.
DESIGN
All of Mediabistro's interviews in the Design Spotlight series.
LOCAL
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?
The Current launches an events calendar.
The local right-wing bloggers are officially scaring me. I can already hear the echo chamber that is SwarmingTheStrib.com.
The Rake asks: Will Time Out come to the Twin Cities? (No.)
POLITICS
Another design contest from MoveOn.org: BushIn30Years.com.
DRINK
Adjectives Rarely Used By Wine Tasters.
MUSIC
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."
Beck is debuting five new songs on The O.C.
Dizzee Rascal arrested (cops found pepper spray and weed).
Rafat at PaidContent.org has started a blog with Billboard on the economics of digital music.
FILM
You've been hearing me complain about movie trailers getting their own releases, and now we have an example of a trailer to a trailer. Madness.
Just noticed the Illegal-Art.org is selling a DVD-R that contains a bunch of good stuff, including that banned Todd Haynes / Karen Carpenter video.
The SXSW Film site has trailers to most of the films. Here are some that jumped out at me: Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic | Childstar | Palindromes.
DESIGN
Amazingly cool visual representation (using Flash) of Coltrane's "Giant Steps."
Google Image Search Montage Maker. Fun.
TV
Lawrence Lessig on CSPAN's Digital Future Series (that link has an archive).
The "I Hate Arrested Development" Contest.
I wonder how many other people (besides me) googled "4 8 15 16 23 42" after this week's episode of Lost. Yep, nothing.
VH1's Best Week Ever has completely revved up their website. Includes lots of video and a new blog.
BLOGGERS
Video to last night's Daily Show segment on bloggers-as-journalists that featured Jay Rosen.
As a run-up to her keynote at SXSW, Wonkette interviewed in the Austin Chronicle.
Kottke interviewed in Newsweek.
MEDIA
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?
Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism.
ONLINE
The guy behind GroupHug.us has written a book. Boston Globe interview.
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.)
MARKETING
Dunkin Donuts is trying to go middlebrow.
LOCAL
Best news since they tore down the plexiglass: First Ave redesigned their website.
Cool! Amusement rides as transportation!
New Patriot is delving into video blogging by interviewing a candidate for Minneapolis Library Board.
Club 331 quietly opened in Northeast this week.
LIFESTYLE
Slate.com asks Which Condom Is Best?
ONLINE
Yahoo is 10 years old today. A 10-Year Netrospective. They're giving away ice cream.
TECH
No! It looks like NYT is 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
NYT has more on the reality tv show about the art world mentioned here a couple weeks ago.
FILM
WSJ reports 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.
More ridiculous trailer premieres: Star Wars Trailer to Premiere On The O.C..
MARKETING
Slate loves that "All about the 'O'" commercial from Overstock.com.
T-SHIRTS
Some new ones at Non-Zero Change. I like "I'm Somebody's Fetish" and "I'm Not Your Damn Search Engine".
TIVO
Forrester Memo to Steve Jobs: Buy TiVo.
LOCAL
Dylan Hicks does a great job on a suite of stories about 89.3 The Current in CP. Paul Demko talks about the successes (sometimes forced) of the station, Diablo Cody looks at the personalities behind the station, and Dylan critiques the whiteness of the programming. Have you noticed that everyone is talking about radio lately?
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.
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.
TV Sked: When is Law & Order on? Answer: pretty much always.
Anderson Cooper becomes a tough guy when interviewing Jeff Gannon.
WORDS
Hunter S. Thompson killed himself.
Microsoft: A parent's primer to computer slang. Can you say grungegate?
CELEB
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 Chron writes about it. Includes mentions of other bloggers who have quit, including Andrew Sullivan, Peter Merholz, and William Gibson.
Gothamist interviews Best Week Ever's Jessi Klein.
IPOD
Wikipod, a wiki for iPods.
FASHION
Devastating. Dolce and Gabbana have split up.
FILM
Huh, they're letting David Duchovny direct: House of D trailer.
MUSIC
Guardian: 10 Greatest Rock 'n Roll Myths.
Performance video of Arcade Fire's "Wake Up."
LOCAL
The New York Times continues its fascination with all-things-North-Dakotan with a story that mixes Grand Forks fishing and podcasting.
IPOD
11 percent of America owns one.
ONLINE
Yahoo released a little new search tool called Y!Q (beta). The idea is that you do contextual (rather than keyword), inline (rather than new window) searching. I don't think this will take off (except maybe in automated cases, like "related links" on pages), but I like the idea. Interview with the creator.
I'm so going to blog hell. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
DVD
The director's cut of Donnie Darko came out on DVD yesterday.
WORDS
Why stop now? Malcolm Gladwell interviewed in Nerve.com.
No one even noticed that Bill Clinton won a Grammy (his second).
MEDIA
Michael Wolff, who I actually like, goes a little crazy.
Mark Cuban: Political Bloggers - The New Paparazzi.
The first issue of Make is out.
Al Jazeera is hiring executive producers in D.C. for its English-language network. [via LR]
TV
The first cool app to come out of TiVo opening the box to developers is an eBay client.
If you're one of those people who didn't understand the Buffy phenom until it was too late, then you should be watching Veronica Mars right now. It's the best show on TV that isn't Arrested Development. A couple stories: Veronica a Worthy Successor to Buffy (Philly Daily News) and Alyson Hannigan Talks About The Show.
T-SHIRTS
MUSIC
The much-anticipated LCD Soundsystem album came out yesterday.
ART
I swore not to write a word about The Gates in Central Park, until Greg.org did some math on the $20 million price tag. Also: space image and flickr photos and saffron is so hot right now.
DESIGN
Design Observer (today in the form of Tom Vanderbilt) on band fonts -- or actually on the rise and fall of rock and roll graphic design.
CELEBRITY
Jenna Elfman: crazy Scientologist.
LOCAL
The Current's playlist on Valentine's Day (audio). See, I told you it was pretty good.
Rob Nelson and Terri Sutton do their entertaining side-by-side film views again -- this time on Inside Deep Throat. Meanwhile, a long look at the history of Clear Channel.
FOUND ONLINE
Found on Amazon.com: JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. ($20K. Read the reviews.)
Found on Wikipedia: Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsauce
lettucecheesepicklesonionsona
sesameseedbun.
Found on McSweeney's: Necrophiliac Pickup Lines.
MUSIC
Someone mixed that Nina Gordon cover of "Straight Outta Compton" with video from NWA.
NYT: We Hate the 80's. The premise is GenX-ers aren't buying the nostalgia machine. I wonder.
New Gorillaz. Excellent.
WaPo: the future music format is no format.
FILM
A mobile film festival: Mobicine.com.
New film from Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur Miller): The Ballad of Jack and Rose.
Hanging out in Roger Ebert's four-and-a-half-story Chicago town house.
PUBLISHING
NYT profiles 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.
Nerve.com: My Unrequited Love For A McSweeney's Writer.
At Salon.com, Laura Miller profiles H.P. Lovecraft, "America's greatest bad writer."
MEDIA
Rolling Stone profiles 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.
NYT: Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters.
FUNNY DOGS
NYT Mag: Questions For Triumph The Insult Comic Dog.
TV
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.
NYT: The History Of Girls Kissing On TV. (I thought the first was Roseanne -- turns out, it was L.A. Law.)
B&C looks at the insurance costs inside Fear Factor and others. Includes a list of all the lawsuits filed against reality tv shows.
DESIGN
Cool interface for looking at baby name popularity.
NETFLIX
Ever wondered what a Netflix distribution center was like? Okay.
LOCAL
Did you know that Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson are hanging out in the Iron Range?
Chalk up another quasi-win for Minnesota bloggers. Captain's Quarters was one of the leading blogs behind Eason Jordon's ouster.
MUSIC
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.
Smoosh, a shockingly good indie rock band consisting of two sisters, ages 10 and 12. Album and samples on Amazon. [via Waxy]
MUSIC VIDEOS
Another Beck video: "Black Tambourine". Is he planning to do a video for every damn song on the new album?
ONLINE
Video from Vloggercon is now available.
Salon.com looks closely at 43 Things, which is funded by Amazon.
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]
TV
Marcia Cross: not gay. And a good thread tracking the rumor.
Onion A/V: Interview with Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development. At the same time, bad news for the show.
Questions Frequently Asked About TiVo, Answered by Someone Who Loves TiVo Too Much. "Is TiVo male or female?"
NY Observer: The SNL Skit That Paris Hilton Wouldn't Do. What's she got against Joey Buttafuoco?
Cory at Lost Remote has some ideas on how to fix tv for our demographic. Includes ideas sampled from Fark, reality tv, and viral marketing.
WORDS
ART
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.
I guess MPLS Happy Hour wasn't enough -- we also got Thrifty Hipster.
Ross reports that The Current has started airing "Sounds Eclectic," the KCRW show which everyone cites as "what Minneapolis really needs."
Guess who's #1 on ESPN.com's Top 10 Overpaid Players? Spreeeeeeweelllll!
KARE11 did a long piece (5+ mins) on the power of blogs. They actually use the word "information superhighway" in the video.
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 more reputable gadgeteers 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.
8:00 AM -- Treo
The alarm on the PalmOne Treo goes off.
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.
8:02 AM -- Cuisinart Coffee
I can hear beans grinding in the coffeemaker.
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.
8:05 AM -- GoToMyPC
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."
9:30 AM -- PC
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.
3:40 PM -- Razor Scooter
Time for a break.
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.
6:00 PM -- Sirius
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.
6:30 PM -- RadioShark
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.
6:45 PM -- iPod Mini
Time to go running.
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.
7:15 PM -- Treo SMS
Alexis texts me that she'll be coming over later to watch last night's Desperate Housewives.
She uses SMS more than she uses the phone. I've always thought that texting was for people under 25, but she's out to prove the demo wrong.
8:15 PM -- TiVo
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.
8:30 PM -- TiVoToGo
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.
9:00 PM -- Creative Zen PMC
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.
11:00 PM -- Blogging
Time to blog. The mechanics of this part of my day are a complete secret.
Midnight -- xBox
I play a couple rounds of Halo 2 before falling asleep. No need to set the alarm for tomorrow -- the Treo knows.
LOCAL
Chuck has a post about yesterday's Blogumentary screening.
IDEAS
Since everyone else is interviewing Malcolm Gladwell, why not ESPN. Probably the best conversation that I've ever read about the Super Bowl.
MEDIA
Buy Might magazines through the 826 Valencia site.
Strange yet cool Flash thing at BBC: Onelife. You feed your little dancing boy some booze, coke, weed, E, shrooms, or speed -- and then you watch him dance. Pro-drug or anti-drug?
ONLINE
The Absolute Bottom 50 Blogs. #50: MyBlogAboutHowLameIThinkBlogsAre.com
I've been complaining for a while that Amazon doesn't offer special deals to heavy users of the site -- people who spend, say, a thousand bucks a year there (who you lookin at?). A small step is Amazon Prime, which gives a year of free two-day shipping for $79. (But if this takes away free shipping for the $25+ orders, I'm gonna be pissed off.)
Oh goodie. MSN is launching a gigantic ad campaign for its new search engine. And if you're into that kind of thing, MSN redesigned their homepage -- and it's even using strict XHTML.
In Business 2.0, a profile of eBay's global expansion. Almost half of its business is now from outside the U.S.
BLOGS
Yahoo Japan launched blogs, so you can probably expect it in the U.S. soon.
The Associated Press is starting a blog called Bad Language.
In addition to the all the new blogs, MediaBistro changed their entire front page into a blog.
Wonkette has hung up the typewriter while she finishes her novel. Choire Sicha fills in.
TV
Martha Stewart has been hired by Donald Trump.
Wired's profile of Comedy Central.
MUSIC
For you music journalists who will be interviewing Beck when his new album comes out this spring: The Secret Life of Beck Hansen - A Guide for the Professional Journalist. Who will be the first to get him to talk about Scientology?
The new Index (the one with the real Yoshimi on the cover) has a one-page blurb on Kim Gordon, but the picture of her is priceless.
Coachella lineup announced. Surprisingly '90s.
Audio-Video Mashup of Monkees' "I'm a Believer" and Beatles' "Paperback Writer."
iPoditude.com: The iPod Blog.
Pitchfork: The Top 100 Singles: 2000-04.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Kinda cool 360-degree video. The music is by a band called Two Lone Swordsmen.
Death Cab For Cutie's "Title & Registration".
FILM
"The first film to be made from a Don DeLillo script, Game 6, had its premiere at Sundance a couple of weeks ago." More info.
Michael Tortorello reviews the documentary Game Over, which recounts the 1997 Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov match.
Flashback: trailer to Godard's Maculin, Féminine.
Another maybe-interesting documentary: Inside Deep Throat.
MARKETING/BIZ
Top brands of 2004. 1) Apple 2) Google 3) Ikea 4) Starbucks 5) Al Jazeera.
Business 2.0's 101 Dumbest Moments and The Smart List.
DESIGN
MediaBistro interviews the legendary Roger Black.
LOCAL
CityPages.com is doing a redesign, and here's a screenshot of what it will look like. Hm, looks busy.
Yo, yo, guess who's blogging. Your mayor (and it's not fake -- PiPress article).
I think I'm on Jim Walsh's side on our new radio station. "Predictably, and sadly, within hours of the station's launch last Monday came the bitching. It wasn't this enough or that enough. It was too soft or too hard. The porridge wasn't just right." My friends like to debate The Current, and that's what I like most about it. Plus, it does things like interview Low.
TV
Petition to make the Daily Show an hour long.
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.
Coming to a DVD nearest you: the first season of Dynasty (April 19 release).
NYT: Class issues in The Apprentice. Glad to see the grad schools are still churning out people who talk like this.
BizWeek: Microsoft May Be A TV Star Yet.
Waxy has more on the A9/OC connection, including video of the episode.
MEDIA
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 Chronicle profiles 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.
Guardian: Top 20 Music Videos Ever. "Thriller" isn't #1!
BOOKS/IDEAS
NYTBR gives the backpage to Steven Johnson to ruminate on software that helps the writing process. His blog has more info on the software. Recommended.
Bookforum takes an extensive look at copyright.
The Guardian has an excerpt of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
GAMES
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.)
DESIGN
Probably the coolest Flash slideshow that I've ever seen.
POLITICS
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 Strib puts 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.
Following a Blogumentary screening, I will be on a panel at the U of M St. Paul Campus Theater. The author of We Media, Dan Gillmor, will be there too. More details.
ONLINE
I know, you already know: Google Video Search.
The 2005 Bloggies site is back up. (It was down most of last week.)
ANT is out. It allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds that automatically download video.
Amazon has added a new feature onto its A9 search engine that lets you see photos of the location you're trying to find. (Only available in 10 cities right now.) Here's how they did it.
That Wired Firefox story is now up. So is the faux-memo-from-the-future that imagines Linus Torvalds dropping Bill Gates a note.
TV
Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won't See on CNN This Week.
Prices are dropping! The entire first season of Buffy is on sale at Amazon for $15. That was short-lived. It's back up to $30.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Beck, "Hell Yes". Directed by Shynola.
The Postal Service, "We Will Become Silhouettes". Directed by Jared Hess (director of Napoleon Dynamite).
Death Cab for Cutie, "Title & Registration".
LCD Soundsystem, "Daft Punk Is Playing at my House".
BOOKS
Do you need another Malcolm Gladwell interview? Okay, here's one at Nerve.
WORDS
Wikipedia: Heavy metal umlaut. Take that, Encarta!
FILM
Hal Hartley did something or other that got the attention of Wired News.
David LaChapelle made a movie about krumping, which is mix of clowns and hip-hop.
Yahoo heads for Hollywood. And here's an interview with the mastermind.
Crispin Glover asks too many questions.
LOCAL
The 89.3 The Current blog had 265 comments on its first post-launch post.
CP's story on the Art Shanty, which a few of my friends are part of.
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:
APPAREL & ACCESSORIES
Reaction Kenneth Cole 'Over the Moon' PumpBABY
HALO SleepSack Wearable Fleece Blanket in BlueTake-Out Baby Bibs - Moo Baby
BOOKS
Alexander The GreatAmerican Dream
Art Objects
Art Theory
Blink
Blood Song
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
Doomsday Book
Fargo Rock City
Goodnight Moon
Hadji Murad
He's Just Not That Into You
Home Baking
How Do I Feel?/Como me siento?
I Love Colors
Jemima J
Jorge el Curioso (Curious George)
Life and Times of Michael K
Life of Christ
My Clothes / Mi Ropa
National Geographic Almanac of World History
Nobody's Fool
On Food and Cooking
On the Road
Peace of Soul
Peekaboo Baby
Spongebob Superstar
Stan Lee Presents: Elektra: The Complete Saga
The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare
The Cluetrain Manifesto
The Complete A**hole's Guide to Handling Chicks
The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook: Anniversary
The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia
The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen
The Trouble Begins
The Way You Wear Your Hat
We Media
What Color Is It? / Que color es este?
What Happened at Midnight
Where Is Baby's Belly Button?
White on Black
Youth
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
DVD
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Complete First SeasonClassical Pilates Technique
Da Ali G Show - The Complete First Season
Eyes Without a Face
Fat Girl
John Cassavetes - Five Films
Purple Rain
Secret Honor
Tell Me What Rockers to Swallow
The Lord of the Rings
ELECTRONICS
Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD PlayerKITCHEN & HOUSEWARES
Hamilton Beach 26200 Flip 'n Fluff Belgian Waffle BakerLa Pavoni Burr Grinder
MUSIC
Sigur Ros, ( )Lawrence Welk, 22 All Time Big Band Favorites
Miguel Migs, 24th St Sounds
The Streets, A Grand Don't Come for Free
Interpol, Antics
Anything Goes
The Walkmen, Bows & Arrows
John Fogerty, Deja Vu All Over Again
Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll
Dfa Records Presents: Compilation 2
Arcade Fire, Funeral
Joan Baez, Greatest Hits
Madvillain, Madvillainy
Guided by Voices, Mag Earwhig!
Royksopp, Melody A.M.
Jim White, No Such Place
Alison Krauss, Now That I've Found You
Tom Waits, Real Gone
Mark Knopfler, Shangri La
Mission Of Burma, Signals, Calls and Marches
Brian Wilson, Smile
Queens Of The Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
Tea Party, Tangents
The Brown Bunny
The Very Best of Judy Collins
Le Tigre, This Island
Earlimart, Treble & Tremble
Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
Nirvana, With The Lights Out
SPORTS & OUTDOORS
Ninja Utility BeltTOYS & GAMES
Cranium Balloon LagoonJuice Box Personal Video Cartridge
Juice Box Personal Video Cartridge
Sunshine Safari My First Toy Set
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.
Whatever the definition of "my little experiment in ego-casting" (as I like to call it), I am honored to be nominated by Wired for a Rave Award (press release).
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.
Digital Media Predictions
Here are my digital media predictions for 2005.
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).
ONLINE
I'm sure your inbox filled up yesterday too. All your nerdy friends sent the link to Bill Gates striking a pose in a 1983 issue of Teen Beat. Hot!
The New Yorker picks a strange site to profile: CollegeHumor.com.
Up next: Google is buying.... dark fiber?
The world's first blogger, Justin Hall sort of had a breakdown in January 2005.
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.
Time lists 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.
T-SHIRTS
PHONES
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!
MUSIC
Getting there before Pazz & Jop do, Amy's Robot applies the old algorithm methodology on the best albums of 2004.
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.
TV
NYT story 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.)
ONLINE
Media Lab Europe is shutting down.
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.
NYT: Blogs help reform in Iran.
BOOKS
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.
Newsweek reviews the new Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore.
It appears no one has even noticed that Douglas Coupland has a new novel out: Eleanor Rigby: A Novel.
ARCHITECTURE
Amazing photos of Hong Kong: Michael Wolf's Architecture of Density.
MEDIA
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.
LOCAL
Mark your calendars for the Blogumentary screening Feb. 3, which will include the special guest Dan Gillmor, who is the author of We The Media and who made my blogs of the year list.
Chris Butler is doing a movie about the '90s Minneapolis band Walt Mink. Here's the blog and an ILM thread.
Randomly, people are talking about Husker Du on Metafilter.
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....
DESIGN
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.
Nerdy Wired-ish graphic of the Apple's Tipping Point.
MUSIC
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."
Because I know at least one old-school indie rocker still reads this blog: Steve Albini talks about food.
MEDIA
E&P: All about the International Game Journalists Association.
New magazine: JPG Magazine.
This week, Media Hack looks at bloggers who are also reporters, with observations from Chris Allbritton, Om Malik, and Peter Rojas.
New WSJ column, The Numbers Guy, "a new column on the way numbers and statistics are used -- and abused -- in the news, business and politics."
BOOKS
The Chicago Tribune profile of Jessa Crispin (the proprietor of Bookslut) contains a list of her favorite books of all time. (Bookslut was one of my blogs of the year.)
Malcolm Gladwell's book tour dates.
TECH
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.)
NYT: Google corrects advertisers' grammer.
T-SHIRTS
LOCAL
Mary Lucia posting about the new NPR music station.
ONLINE
WaPo introduces 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 about Project 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.
MUSIC
The sheet music to Super Mario Brothers.
Sasha in The New Yorker: When I'm Sixty-Four.
MEDIA
Letterman: Top Ten Proposed Changes At CBS News.
OJR has a good roundup of the business and legal complexities of the online distribution of the homemade tsunami video.
NYTimes.com sent out its most-viewed stories of 2004 via email. Here's the list:
- Magazine: The Girls Next Door (January 25)
- Magazine: Without a Doubt (October 17)
- Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad (August 20)
- Movie Review | 'Fahrenheit 9/11': Unruly Scorn Leaves Room for Restraint, but Not a Lot (June 23)
- Frank Rich: On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide (November 14)
- Iraq Videotape Shows the Decapitation of an American (May 12)
- How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence (October 3)
- Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq (October 25)
- Editorial: John Kerry for President (October 17)
- How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly (December 31)
LOCAL
According to CP, TCF Bank pulled advertising from the Star Tribune after the Nick Coleman column that criticized the blog Power Line.
CP blurb on the Ron Jeremy appearance.
Add Mark Cuban to the people complaining about Randy Moss.
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.)
A blog for Vloggercon has launched. (WSJ story on video blogs.)
It could be a mirage, but it looks like TMFML might be back.
IDEAS
The annual Edge Question this year: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
FILM
I reopened the Year of Lists page again just to add Top 20 Nudes Scenes (NSFW, duh).
TV
Buy the dress that Buffy wore on her first day of school on eBay.
A Daily Show writer makes a joke in New York mag about the show's plans for 2005: "Then we invade the blogosphere, since that's where the money is."
ART
LOCAL
In a move that everyone in the Cities who knows a shred about radio saw coming, Mary Lucia has joined the new MPR station, 89.3.
Chris Danforth has joined my #1 for Picked To Click this year, The Deaths.
Slanderous Minneapolis is telling its readers to answer the Strib's call for MLK events by emailing fake events.
Dara's Top Dozen Dishes of the Year is out. Delish.
BEST YEAR EVER
I'm closing the doors on Lists 2004 with over 550 links and nary a word of rhapsodizing from me. See ya next year.
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.)
BoingBoing has put up the video to ABC's "people of the year" award that went to bloggers. The piece included visuals (but no links) of Gawker, Kottke, Instapundit, and Wonkette.
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.
TiVoToGo has launched. AP story.
T-SHIRTS
I wish I had thought of this idea: Preshrunk, a blog about t-shirts. My two faves pointed out so far: I Fuck Like A Girl (from Mighty Girl) and I Liked You Better Before You Sold Out (from Diesel Sweeties).
MEDIA
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.
Future of media predictions from Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, NY Post, and L.A. Times.
IDEAS
The Fast Company profile of Malcolm Gladwell is online.
MUSIC
Nellie McKay gets the long profile in NYT Mag.
ART
Choire Sicha interviews the creator of CremeasterFantic.com, which turns out to be a quasi-hoax.
DESIGN
Somewhat funny: The Vice A to Z of Design.
LOCAL
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.
BESTS
A small fraction of the new Of The Year Lists added to The Mega List:Artists of the Year from City Pages.
Top 10 Most Memorable Ad Music from Ad Tunes.
Sports City Rating from ESPN.
Biggest Stories in Technology & Business from Salon.
Top 100 Science Stories from Discover.
Top Ten Books from Christianity Today.
Media Follies from Seattle Weekly.
Top 10 Country Albums from CMT.
Best and Worst of Sex from Village Voice.
Year In Culture from Slate.
CELEB
On Gawker today, I played Santa to the celebs of 2004.
TV
Found online: Desperate Housewives T-Shirts. Including I ♥ Bree and Sex in the Suburbs.
ONLINE
Waxy has gathered an amazing collection of first-person videos from the Asian tsunami.
Question posed on Ask.Metafilter: Have you ever dated a Suicide Girl?
Long L.A. Times story on Iraqi bloggers.
FUTURE OF MEDIA
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.
Terry Heaton on 2005: A Year of Trouble for Broadcasters.
ACADEMIA
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.
Steve Perry Fan Fic. Scary.
LOCAL
This has all sorts of potential: Slanderous Minneapolis, which is basically a "Minneapolis Gawker." The author appears to be anonymous.
In one of those battles you wouldn't mind if everyone dies, Nick Coleman goes after the Power Line guys.
Over at 89.3, it looks like the new station will be doing artist interviews. Could this end up being our own little KCRW?
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:
Google Zeitgeist from Google.
Best Films of 2004 from Roger Ebert.
The Year In (Your Catchphrase Here) from NY Times.
Top Six Reality TV Whores from Reality Blurred.
Top Cryptozoology Stories from Loren Coleman.
20 Best Music Videos from Rolling Stone.
10 Greatest Music Videos from RES.
Top 50 Albums from Pitchfork.
10 Best Albums You Didn't Hear from Spin.
Media Person of the Year from I Want Media.
10 Moments In Bad Journalism from L.A. Times.
Best Architecture from Time.
Best Architecture from NY Times.
Best Video Games from Time.
Best Video Games from San Francisco Chronicle.
Top 100 People of the Year from USA Today.
Entertainers of the Year from Entertainment Weekly.
Best Live TV Moments from NY Times.
10 Best TV Show from Entertainment Weekly.
Most Watched & TiVoed from NY Times.
10 Ads You Won't See from Ad Age.
Best Ads from Adland.
The Year in Satire from Salon.com.
Best Comix from Time.
Take 6 from Village Voice.
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.com triggered 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.
See also:
It looks like we will wrap this up at around 350 lists, making '04 a record year for list making. Please email me if you find one that I'm missing.
Here are just a few of the lists to show up in the past week:
The Year In Bad Sex from Salon.
Year In Review from New York Magazine.
People of the Year from Rolling Stone.
Most Annoying People of 2004 from Star.
The Year in Swag from The Onion A/V Club.
Best Webcomics from Web Comics Review.
Ten Best And Worst Unseens Films from Film Threat.
20 Best Videos from Rolling Stone.
10 Best Albums You Didn't Hear from Spin.
Top 10 Albums from me.
Top 10 Albums from Melissa.
MEDIA
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.
PEOPLE
Who's the Time Person of the Year? Not bloggers. Of course, plenty more "of the year" action in the constantly growing list.
Guilty pleasure of the week: pics of our favorite home video experts, Paris and Pam, out shopping.
TV
Ursula Le Guin: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
FILM
Looks like Uma and Travolta do another dance scene somewhere in Be Cool (trailer).
MUSIC
PJ Harvey says she will never play live again. Me either.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" done with Legos.
TECH
Apple is working on a cell phone that works with iTunes.
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.
ONLINE
I believe this is what they call a meme. Remember Subservient Chicken? Sure you do. Okay, check these out:
All takes on the original. Watch it spread...Found on Amazon: Wonkette T-shirts! Also, it looks like C-SPAN has posted video of her appearance at ONA last month.
EDUCATION
FILM
New Blogumentary trailer. (Previously: my interview with Chuck Olsen.)
Trailer: The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn.
GAMES
The NY Observer: Xbox Invades the Bedroom. Gender discussion over Halo.
TV
My house has been obsessed with America's Next Top Model, and tonight Eva won. Yaya was robbed!
The NY Observer asked an eclectic group of media people (including our pal Cory at LostRemote) "What would you do with CBS?"
MUSIC
STYLE
On Style.com: The New Goth. Uh-yeaaaaah.
ART
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!
LOCAL
Peter's always-excellent Local Music Yearbook is out on City Pages. Dylan wrote the Top 10 Local Albums of 2004. And Melissa did the Top 10 National Albums.
Local radio news: Radio K's "Cosmic Slop" is done, and so is Kate Sullivan's "Pop Vultures."
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.
See previously:
23 Best Albums of 2003
16 Best Albums of 2002
20 Best Albums of 2001
See also:
New lists came in fast and furious over the weekend. The List of Bests is filling up quickly, but here's a quick list of some major newbies:
The Year In Ideas from New York Times Magazine.
150 Most Popular Tags from Flickr.
Top News Sites from Newsknife.
Media Web Awards from CBS Marketwatch.
The P.U.-litzer Prizes from Norman Solomon.
Ten Best Movies from Newsweek.
Ten Worst Movies from Newsweek.
Top 10 Games from IGN.
10 Most Fascinating People from Barbara Walters.
Five Best Reality TV Finales from Entertainment Weekly.
The 10 Best Books of 2004 from NYTBR.
Top 50 Albums from NME.
Top 100 Sellers from Insound.com.
Am I missing one? Email me.
What will 2004 be remembered for? I've got no idea, but plenty of other people have opinions.
The List of Bests has grown significantly in recent days, but it's still probably half of its final size. Here's a small sample of some lists that recently have been added:
The Year in TV from Village Voice.
100 Top Wines from San Francisco Chronicle.
John Waters does Best Films of the Year for Art Forum.
Books of the year from Voice Literary Supplement, Salon.com, The Economist, and The Guardian.
Top 100 DJs from DJ Magazine.
Best Business Books from Business Weekly.
The Onion A/V Club's Best Albums of 2004.
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:
See also:
The Cremaster Cycle. Great site collecting many of the Cremaster images and themes.
Matthew Barney Gets A Brazilian. Greg.org on de Lama Lamina.
Cremaster Fanatic. Contains a bunch of upcoming iconography and tidbits related to Barney's upcoming work.
Art:21. PBS synopsis of Barney.
Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. The book.
CONSUMPTION
Great Times Mag cover story on viral marketing.
ONLINE
Media Mammon is a stock market of words and phrases.
Netflix has added a social networking component, Friends. You add friends to your network which Netflix uses to make suggestions for you.
Engadget interviews Caterina Fake from Flickr.
Tony Pierce has published a book, How To Blog.
NYT does a profile of Jeff Jarvis (but doesn't post it online).
MEDIA
I'm one of about five people in America who actually tried watching McEnroe's CNBC show. Which is why no one will even notice it's been cancelled.
Slate on The New Yorker writers speaking engagements.
TIVO
New blog: TiVo-bOrking, which is the practice of tweaking the length of tv shows by minutes to throw off DVRs.
POLITICS
Jon Stewart, Al Franken and Tom Wolfe write short essays in Rolling Stone on the aftermath of the election.
LOCAL
Lileks has a new book: Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s.
ONLINE
Microsoft has launched their version of blogging software: Spaces. Features include mobile blogging and picture sharing. (Video: Demo of Spaces | Interview with Spaces Team.)
Here's something new to play with: Singing Fish A/V Search.
WORDS
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year: Blog. It's of course added to the 2004 List of Lists.
CELEBRITY
New York profiles Molly Ringwald.
CONSUMPTION
This is interesting. Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting has published an online Gift Guide that he thinks will be so good, you'll pay $8 for it.
Recently discovered: Versace Barbie | Juicy Couture Barbie.
FILM
Trailer to Guerilla, a new documentary on the SLA and Patty Hearst. Looks great. (Voice review.)
Don Knotts plays George Bush in what would make a great real movie.
Waxy asks about the future of movie theaters, and generates some good discussion.
MUSIC
Motley Crue: reuniting.
INDUSTRY
Mark Glaser (OJR) and Jay Rosen (NYU) do a long thing called The Media Company I Want to Work For.
New blog: Newsblunty, "the blunt news about broadcast journalism."
Just think of the possibilities.
LOCAL
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.
Let's get this party started.
As usual, I'm collecting the "Best Of" lists this year. Last year, The Times wrote 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:
Words of the Year from Merriam-Webster.
Top 10 Games of the Year from New York Times.
Books of the Year from The Guardian.
The Year's Best DVDs from Rolling Stone.
The Coldest People In Hollywood from Film Threat.
Pictures of the Year from National Geographic.
20 Best North American Neighborhoods from Project for Public Spaces.
See Entire List: The Best Of 2004 List (a work in progress).
Am I missing one? Email me.
ONLINE
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.
Times reviews the new Nirvana boxset, With The Lights Out.
David Byrne, blogger.
INDUSTRY
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.
Safran does a write-up on How To Save CNN.
Another Nick Denton profile, this one in the UK Independent.
The big three (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are getting into video search.
ONLINE
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.)
16-year-old girl murders her mother and blogs about it.
Nathalie Chicha (she of Cup of Chicha) is newest addition to the MediaBistro blogger set. GalleyCat covers books and publishing.
Spoof of SubservientChicken: Subservient Stickman
MEDIA
Embarrassingly obligatory Frank Rich column link. (This one's about Desperate Housewives and the FCC and such.)
COOL
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.
House of Flying Daggers trailer.
ONLINE CONSUMPTION
Border's launched a viral personalized web gift-finder, GiftMixer 3000, which bases choice on five personality criteria: Romantic, Adventurous, Brainy, Imaginative and Funny.
Froogle has launched a wishlist feature.
Target.com starts its own strange quasi-film experiment: Wake-Up Call.
SEX
Call the FCC! Boobies on CSPAN.
L.A. Weekly is trying to make the case that the handjob is back. Silly kids, it never left the midwest.
Request a "realistic kidnapping" at ExtremeKidnapping.com.
Women from The Apprentice in Maxim.
SPORTS/ART
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.
Uptown Borders allowed to unionize.
Picked To Click, the annual best new local band poll from City Pages, is out. If you're into local (Minneapolis) music, here was my ballot:
- The Deaths
- Melodious Owl
- Spaghetti Western
- Olympic Hopefuls
- Thunder in the Valley
And the winner is: Olympic Hopefuls.
I wrote the blurb for the third-placer, Melodious Owl.
More local voters here, including my pals and yours, Dave Campbell, Marisa Collins, David de Young, Sonia Grover, Melissa Maerz, Steve Marsh, Ross Raihala, Matt Schmidt, Peter Scholtes, Lindsey Thomas, Karrie Vrabel, Gretchen Williams, and a zillion others.
Here's some miscellaneous local music commentary from the vote-casters.
See Also: An Unfortunate Case Of Where Are They Now?
2003 Winners: The Monarques
2002 Winners: The Soviettes
2001 Winners: Faux Jean
2000 Winners: Astronaut Wife
1999 Winners: Mason Jennings Band
1998 Winners: The Odd
1997 Winners: Brother Sun Sister Moon
TV
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.
Tom Shales slaps around Michael Powell in the Post.
CONSUMPTION
Best gift ever? The entire Criterion Collection on sale at Amazon for... go ahead, guess how much. Nope, higher. Higher. Higher still. That's right: $5,000. It's wishlisted for anyone who really loves me. (See also: Buffy, The Complete Series, for a measly $250.)
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.
ONLINE
The author of Defamer was revealed to be Mark Lisanti of Bunsen.tv.
David Pogue of Times Circuits started a blog.
MUSIC / STUPID BOOMERS
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.
LIFESTYLE
L.A. Times asks the intrepid question: Who hangs out at internet cafes?
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.
First Ave reopened Friday. First band? Gwar.
LISTS
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.
Ask.Metafilter.com answers What are some good pop culture blogs?
TV
The final season of Buffy came out on DVD this week.
FILM BUT NOT FILM
High Tension looks 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.
MUSIC
If you missed it, Vanity Fair launched a website this week. Check out the oh-so-1995 list of links. There's a long profile of kindler, gentler Eminem.
SEARCH
Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, Google launched an academic search engine.
TORTURE
New Scientist has a very interesting interview with chief interrogator in Israel's security service.
COMEDY
Decent Chris Rock interview in The Onion.
FOOD
Cooking With Cum (Dot Com). Uh-huh.
TECH
Whoa, Mel Karmazin has jumped to... you never would guessed this... Sirius Radio.
LOCAL
The Rake started a blog.
Lindsey wrote a funny piece about the Minnesota RollerGirls and Peter has some great pics.
IDEAS
Malcolm Gladwell on Intellectual Property in the New Yorker.
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.
Boston Globe: How 'Dungeons' changed the world.
Steve Rubel proposes that bloggers should be the "Time People of the Year."
It's almost endearing how the Voice doesn't care that it's always behind on things like this. This week: Derrida obit.
MUSIC
Vince Carter banned from using iPod during warmups.
Cool, TV on the Radio wins the Shortlist Music Prize.
FILM
The DVD for Broken Saints is out. A great culmination for Brooke and company.
TIVO
NEW BLOGS
Veiled Conceit, a blog all about New York Times Wedding Announcements. Good.
AdWeek starts a new blog: AdFreak.
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.)
LOCAL
McSweeney's: On The Utility Of Minneapolis-St. Paul As A Base Of Operations For Various Well-Known Superheroes Or Super Teams.
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?
More Resources:
Wonkette.com.My fave photo.
AP Article, which focuses on the exit polls stuff.
Paid Content post, with pictures, including one of Ana Marie.
WaPo Chat with Wonkette.
NYT Mag Cover Story.
More On Fimoculous From ONA:
ONA, Day 1: The Scene.ONA, Day 1: Tom Curley Speaks.
ONA, Day 1: Friday Night Party.
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.
Previously, From ONA:
ONA, Day 1: The Scene.ONA, Day 1: Tom Curley Speaks.
I am posting real-time from the Online News Association Conference in Hollywood. Here are some Day 1 observations:
+ 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!
+ AP story.
+ ONA Posts Entire Speech (thereby pretty much ruining my entire post).
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.
POLITICS
ONLINE
Hmmmmm... Amazon.com is getting into... filmmaking?
MUSIC
Slate does a ditty on the Depeche Mode remix album.
MEDIA
Worst headlines from Monday's Six Feet Under story.
If everyone were as cool as Adam Nagourney, we could kill all the lawyers.
Fuck, I hate Maxim.
Fuck, I hate the media.
TECH
I guess Mozilla officially launched Firefox 1.0.
WORDS
Malcolm Gladwell put a FAQ on his new book, Blink.
LOCAL
This week in CP: even more about First Ave.
CONSUMPTION
James Surowiecki brilliantly outlines the decline of brands in Wired.
ONLINE MEDIA
New: MediaBloggers.org.
Another cool media mapping application: 10x10. Here's how it works. (See previously: Newsmap.)
TV
The upcoming season of Six Feet Under will be its last.
L.A. Weekly raves about Veronica Mars too, comparing it to Buffy, Raymond Chandler, Twin Peaks, and The O.C.
GAMES
The reviews for Halo 2 are starting to appear on MetaCritic.
Slate asks Why Aren't Video Games Funny?
POLITICAL MAPS
Look familiar? (No, it's not the Jesusland one you've seen a million times already.)
FILM
Ocean's 12 trailer.
MUSIC
New on Technorati: Top MP3s.
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.
WORDS
Decent NYTBR this week, with David Foster Wallace putting Borges on the couch.
LOCAL
Blogumentary was a quite a success. Chuck posts some pics from the premiere.
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.
I recently interviewed Chuck Olsen, the creator of Blogumentary, a film premiering at the upcoming City Pages Documentary Film Festival. The film is important in numerous ways, and it will likely be touring around to a film festival near you. Here are more links to picque your interest:
Rex Interviews Chuck In City Pages.
Get Real Documentary Film Festival.
Some bloggers who are interviewed in the film: Jeff Jarvis | Jason Kottke | Meg Hourihan | Joe Trippi | Plain Layne | Rebecca Blood | Derek Powazek | David Weinberger | Heather Champ | Carmela Toninelo | Mathew Gross | Anil Dash.
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: WaPo chat 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.
Greg Allen does a NYT timeline about Nick Nolte's Diary.
TV
Desperate Housewives was the most-recorded show on TiVo last week.
Video of SNL's "TV Funhouse" from this week: John McCain Supporting Bush.
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.
Looks like R. U. Sirius has a new book, Counterculture Through the Ages. Plus blog.
POLITICS
From Audible.com: ListenBeforeYouVote.com
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.
GAMING
MUSIC
New preachy Le Tigre video: "New Kicks".
LOCAL
After the Vice President of the National Taxidermy Association's Board of Directors wrote to Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, Creative Electric is getting a ton of attention right now in the blogosphere. Boing Boing even linked to it. (More: CP profile and t-shirts.)
City Pages will be doing a live election night blog: Election2004.CityPages.com.
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.
Last year, I went as the little AOL guy for Halloween. Yeah, him: This year? I'm going as a Spam Filter. My nerd is bigger than yours.
POLITICS
Is it a surprise that the New Yorker endorsed Kerry? Yes, because this is the first time it has endorsed anyone.
BLOGGERS GONE MAINSTREAM
Couple things I missed from earlier this week:
Ana Marie Cox got a six-figure book deal (third item).
IDEAS
Listen to Malcolm Gladwell (his new book, Blink, is not out until 2005).
POP
Suicide Girls interviews Sarah Michelle Gellar.
MUSIC
Yo, politicos, Eminem's Mosh video. (Director notes.)
What do you think Pitchfork gave the Pavement re-release? Crooked 10.0.
The Wired Creative Common is out. Track list.
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.)
DESIGN
The Frank Gehry Furniture Collection.
T-SHIRTS
Stereogum crafts some Ashlee Simpson tees.
JON STEWART
Yeah, he was on 60 Minutes last week too.
LOCAL
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: PiPress responds.)
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 event anywhere 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.
We have a lot to get to today:
POLITICS
Bush & Kerry live together... as Sims.
Blood relatives of Bush unite for Kerry: Bush Relatives For Kerry Dot Com. (Back story.)
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.
MUSIC
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.
MEDIA
Boy-oh-boy, Tina Brown's new website is lame.
T-SHIRTS
WORDS
The Book Spoiler Dot Com. "The ending to these books will be revealed!"
Neal Stephenson does the Slashdot interview. Good.
John Le Carre hates Bush.
FILM
Fleshbot Films has an Amazon storefront. Anyone wanna guess what future titles will be?
Gibson reports on his blog that Pattern Recognition might become a Peter Weir film.
BAD BOOKS
This turned up on my Amazon Associates list of things purchased through this site: The Complete A**hole's Guide to Handling Chicks. Is this my audience?
PUBLISHING
As noted here last month, O'Reilly is getting into magazine publishing with Make, but now there's a Wired News story.
MARKETING
Waxy on the highs and lows of viral marketing.
JON STEWART
Wal-Mart nixes the Daily Show book.
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.
DERRIDA
Terry Eagleton responds to the "bone-headed."
LOCAL
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.
Wired's Great River Road Tour is in Wisconsin now.
Just when you thought the film festivals were slowing down, here comes Get Real, City Pages' documentary festival.
TECH
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 give Team 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?
MUSIC VIDS
New Michel Gondry video for Lacquer.
Britney's "My Perogative" video.
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.
Strib says there are three local bloggers blogging about the Twins.
Only in North Dakota: Enchanted Highway. [via]
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 Times story 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!
Drudge Exclusive! Did Kerry Have A Cheat Sheet? With video! What a faker!
William Shatner went to Riverside, Iowa saying he was going to make a movie. After hiring local actors and giving stories 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!
Times Book Review on the new Daily Show book, which debuted at #1 on the Times Bestseller List. Serious review of fake book!
Howard Kurtz watches the network anchors circle the wagons in the Wash Post Mag. What a bunch of fakes!
BoingBoing reviews the new Matt Stone / Trey Parker puppet political parody, Team America: World Police. Puppets are fake people!
A college newspaper columnist says The Best News is Fake News. The kids have spoken, and they want fake news!
You Forgot Poland Dot Com. Funny fake websites!
The Borowitz Report reportedly gets 100,000 uniques per day. Fake do-it-yourself news!
Onion Headline of the Week: Documents Reveal Gaps In Bush's Service As President. Classic fake!
Jon Stewart on Fresh Air. Jon Stewart does a promo video for Amazon. Jon Stewart is everywhere -- what a fake!
Torrent link of post-debate Daily Show. More! Fake! News!
Sunday Times Styles surveys the whole fake news scene. Fake fakery!
Even the political parties are getting into this game. The DNC released a remix video with footage of Bush from the debates. Fake politicking!
Steal this fake blog idea before someone else cashes in!
SEX/CULTURE
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.
Slate.com (Dahlia Lithwick): Why post-feminist women enjoy Trading Spouses and Wife Swap. I sorta hope this one becomes controversial.
Upcoming on VH1: When Stars Get Scammed.
The Gawker interview guys get recognized at the Hustler Club.
Library Journal: Porn Star(s) in the Library?
Confessional blog post on watching The Weather Channel: Am I Watching The Weather -- Or Porno?
Slate.com: Will male birth control ever become a reality?
Who was the gay Simpsons character? Nope, It Isn't Smithers. It also isn't Cynthia Nixon's lover.
POLITICS
Cool debate word frequency tool.
George Soros, blogger.
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.
EW: Our Favorite Phillip Roth books.
GAMES
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]
DIGITAL MEDIA
Denton is launching three new sites today: Kotaku.com (gaming), Screenhead (entertainment), and Jalopnik (cars).
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.)
Wired News: Google News Ain't Makin Dough.
T-SHIRTS
My Frat Is Cooler Than Your Frat.
GILF.
MUSIC
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 Mag profiles Nonesuch records, home of Wilco, Steve Reich, Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, The Magnetic Fields, and Kronos Quartet.
Mark David Chapman is up for parole.
Dan The Automator to produce next Franz Ferdinand.
FILM
Let's just get it over with and call it the best film of the year. Days of Being Wild trailer is out.
ART
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.
Margaret Cho on her appearance in Minneapolis last week.
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.
MUSIC
Next month's Wired will 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.
Streaming at VH1: Shatner's new album, with Ben Folds.
You Have Bad Taste In Music Dot Com. Funny vids.
WORDS
McSweeney's: Maxim Does The Classics. (See also, same place: David Brooks parody.)
Gothamist: Interview with a Scrabble Pro.
CELEBRITY
Will Olsen Twins t-shirts ever become passé? No! 'I Went Down on Mary-Kate'. 'I Fucked The Olsen Twins... Before They Were Famous'. Will they suffer a similar fate?
Dolly Parton wants breast reduction. You mean those were fake?
Fleshbot says there's another Paris Hilton video out there.
FILM
Trailer to Bridget Jones sequel.
Low Culture on making the heart for I ? Huckabees.
ONLINE
I guess I can't say for sure if someone stole my comment in the essay to the right about The Sims for this comic. But it surely seems close.
Found on eBay: a 300GB harddrive. So? It has 273G of DVD porn. Maybe Best Buy could learn from this tactic.
MEDIA
Interview with James Walcott in Salon.
Some Wonkette party gossip in the Post.
Will The Post buy Slate.com?
LOCAL
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. CP profiles 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.
Game on.
CELEBRITY JOURNOS
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 Show correspondent), 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.
Ultragrrrl reveals (or so it seems, but maybe it's a joke) that the person behind the recently defunct TMFML (which even got a NYtimes obit) is.... a hot scenester girl?
CONSUMPTION
Kobayashi (the hotdog-eating guy) to retire?
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.
James Poniewozik brilliantly looks at the niching of America in Time: The Age of iPod Politics.
DESIGN
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.
Times: What's Your Take on Cassavetes? The five-disc collection looks so luscious.
MUSIC
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.)
REM's entire new album streaming here.
Sinead O'Connor: "Stop making fun of me." Okay.
TECH
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.
GAMES
Everyone is waiting to see what Steven Johnson says about Sims 2.
LOCAL
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.
The Frank Stone Gallery is doing some great work. The Poster Offensive exhibits were both good. (And the parties were fun too.)
TECH CONSUMPTION
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.
Sidekick II review at Engadget.
MUSIC
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?
WORDS
McSweeney's: 20 Under-Used Yoga Positions.
DIGI MEDIA
New Wiki timeline from Dave Sifry chronicling weblogs having an impact on politics.
The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has left the building, and we never even figured out who the author was.
MEDIA/TV
Gobs of media fodder in the transcript from Jon Stewart's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor.
John Kerry's Top 10 List from Letterman: Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals. [See also, in Time: 10 Questions for Jon Stewart.]
FILM
CELEBRITY
Parker Posey, what the fuck is wrong with you? Blade 3? Christ.
PUBLISHING/MEDIA
Hm. Found on Amazon: How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men.
Itzkoff reviews the new Burning Man book, This Is Burning Man.
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?
OLYMPICS
The Voice takes on the Fetishizing Atheletes Question that has been a main talking point for this year's Olympics.
ONLINE
Google Answers on Geek Culture.
TECH/SEX
Wired News has started a new column called Sex Drive.
FILM
I ♥ Huckabees faux-ads. Naomi Watts is brilliant. I'm gonna love this film.
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 PiPress redesign has been an odd big topic of conversation lately. Poynter has an overview.
PUBLISHING
Wow, the blog Belle de Jour calls it quits and Reuters writes a story about it.
The Times reviews 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.
Errol Morris has a blog, or something.
Weird website for the DVD re-release of THX 1138.
TECH
I actually don't use Mozilla very much, but I kinda want the FireFox t-shirt.
GAMES
CNet interviews Will Wright.
MUSIC
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.
Julian Casablancas and Juliet Joslin's Target Gift Registry.
ONLINE
Choose your pop culture comparison: 1) The best part about Fontgate (© LostRemote) is that it forces publications like the L.A. Times to extensively quote an anonymous blogger named Buckhead. Not quite as cool as Deep Throat, but almost. 2) The best part about Fontgate is that the plot itself is a forgery! The denouement is stolen directly from Jagged Edge, starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges.
TV
Slate: A guide to the language of reality TV.
MUSIC
Google search jackpot: "index of /mp3"
The Thrills were the best band that no one listened to last year. Here are a couple MP3s from their new album, Let's Bottle Bohemia.
Stereogum has an MP3 clip of Britney's cover of "My Prerogative," which is coming out soon and might be the make-or-break moment for "new Britney."
Yahoo refuses to learn its lesson (I will forever blame you-hoo for making Mark Cuban rich and famous). The company bought MusicMatch.
POP
How You Might Explain The Olsen Twins To A Martian. I dunno, I laughed.
LOCAL
Minnesota RollerGirls. They're recruiting.
New Yorker has a strange story about a Minneapolis man who donated money to the city of New York and then died.
DIGI MEDIA
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.
WORDS
Slate reviews graphic novel Persepolis 2 in slideshow format.
ONLINE
CNN Money has a strange slideshow of the animated characters who will appear naked in next month's Playboy.
MEDIA
SF Chroncicle tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Maureen Dowd.
PERSONAL
My pal John Lamb wrote a column about blogs this week in which he makes fun of my Amazon Wish List.
LOCAL
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.
TV
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. Times essay 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.
ProjectCensored: The Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004. "Censored" is probably not the right word, but it's a good list.
MUSIC
Miscellaneous new videos from Dizzee Rascal, Modest Mouse, Duran Duran.
Pitchfork sez a Nirvana boxset with three CDs of unreleased material is coming out later this year.
WORDS
Media Bistro has an excerpt from Lads: A Memoir of Manhood by David Itzkoff, formerly of Maxim now at Spin. WSJ review.
ONLINE
Another Craig "Craiglist" Newmark profile.
POLITICS
Dick Cheney profile in Rolling Stone.
TV
Someone should make a list of the tropes from the Daily Show that have trickled into mainstream media thinking. This Times graphic 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 Times story about a Rock, Paper, Scissors tourney with phone numbers flirtatiously exchanged. (Zoinks, check out the strategies of RPS.)
WORDS
James Wolcott (Vanity Fair media guy) got a blog.
BOOZE
Slate asks the questions I ask myself all day: Which vodka is the best?
TECH
Good news for Skype: The Times is talking about you in smart ways. Bad news for TiVo: The Times is talking about you in boring ways.
FILM
The director of Garden State (who is also on NBC's Scrubs) is blogging.
MUSIC
New Yeah, Yeah, Yeah's video: Y Control.
ONLINE
Scott Lapatine of Stereogum.com is interviewed over at Gothamist.
LOCAL
Have you been to Robot Love yet? Git.
MEDIA/POLITICS
New York Mag: Dubya's nicknames for friends and enemies. Maureen Dowd is apparently "Cobra."
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?
The Best of Still Photojournalism 2004.
TV
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 Weekly piece (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.
MUSIC
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.
MEDIA
Friendster, the magazine (second item)? C'mon.
TV
Is it true that anything that airs on tv now will eventually show up on DVD?
ONLINE
Engadget interviews Jack Valenti.
One of my favorite sites lately has been AdTunes.com, a blog about songs used in tv commercials.
OLYMPICS
Who's on the new Wheaties box? Phelps, Patterson, Gatlin, and... not Hamm.
POLITICS
I've heard a lot of people asking lately why alt-weeklies haven't naturally risen to the top of the internet traffic destinations. I think there are many misguided precepts in the question itself, but I will say that The Village Voice's foray into blogging this week is pretty brilliant. "I work as a clothed cocktail waitress at a strip club on Manhattan's far West Side... It's not far from Madison Square Garden and, this week, the GOP convention."
The Bush Twins slideshow is really everything you wanna see at the RNC.
ART
A cool resource site on Warhol's Factory: Warholstars.com.
LOCAL
The Sound Unseen site launched today. One of the best events of the year.
ONLINE
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?).
McSweeney's: Email Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying To Give Out Over The Phone.
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.
The Yes Men. More liberal-docu-essaying.
And did you see Hero this weekend? It's either the best movie or the worst movie of the year.
WORDS
Rumors on Bret Easton Ellis' new book (involving the return of Patrick Bateman). And here's the cast list for the upcoming film version of Glamorama.
David Foster Wallace on RateMyProfessor.com. ("Very neurotic and tends to chew tobacco and spit in a cup while lecturing.")
Neal Stephenson interview in Wired.
MUSIC
Shatner has a new album, produced by Ben Folds.
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.
OLYMPICS
Olympic Medal Count by population.
Get it before Fark does: titty twister polo.
SEX
Everything I ever learned about sex and porn I learned from the Sunday Times' story What Women Want To Watch. Shoes, eh? Yeah, me too. Totally.
KY Jelly: it'll fit.
MEDIA
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.
New York Mag saucy feature on the Bush Twins.
MARKETING
The Apprentice cast on Friendster.
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).
SCI-FI
The Guardian asks scientists to pick their Top 10 Sci-Fi Authors and Top 10 Sci-Fi Films. C'mon, no Gattica?
LOCAL
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."
And such.
More blog details:
If you're new here, the definition page might help. Or not.
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.
Problems viewing? Email me.
Hey, I've missed you! It's good to be back.
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.
MIT Tech Review: Search Beyond Google.
Found on Friendster: John Edwards and John Kerry.
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.
I knew the day would come.... SMS Porn Bots.
TV
Can someone please tell me why the hell Donald Trump is still famous?
Season Two of Six Feet Under just went up for pre-sale at Amazon.
Slate on those fucking [or fucking brilliant] Quiznos ads. Ad Age too. (They're the spongmonkeys of RatherGood.com fame.) I would pee on that talking oven mit if I had the chance, though.
Who knew? Sarah Jessica Parker was in Square Pegs, Cynthia Nixon was in Little Darlings, Kim Cattrall was in Porky's.
DESIGN
Good blog post on the decline of the American magazine cover.
MUSIC
You've seen that new Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs video, right? Hot. So hot.
I've been predicting this Morrissey comeback since... oh, the Smiths broke up. Finally?
So I guess the Suicide Girls are in the new Probot video. (Hey, remind me to tell you about the Suicide Girls live burlesque show, 'kay?)
ARCHITECTURE
Gopnik on the new Time Warner Center.
ART
New York: Biennial Favorites.
LOCAL
Carry It Forward, a documentary about the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone.
Both The Triple Rock and Le Cirque Rouge have redesigned websites.
Fair warning: if Carrie doesn't choose Mr. Big, I'm so killing myself.
WORDS
It's a fine day for the English language. A semicolon saved gay marriage.
SOCIAL
Can you plagiarize someone's life? If so, The Onion has mine again. Just to be audacious, they even datelined here.
ENTREPRENEURS
The Segway: losing zillions of dollars...
...on the other hand, NutsForTrucks.com is not.
Buy Janet's nipple shield at... Janetsnipperling.biz.
TV
Slate: How Does Sweeps Week Work?
FILM
Perhaps the greatest movie of all time, Blow-Up came 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.
Coming not-so-soon: The Simpsons, the movie.
ONLINE
I find myself using Google's "Search by Location" page more and more often lately.
POLITICS
This is not a John Kerry / Jane Fonda photograph.
MUSIC
A very large collection of drum solos.
New video from Michel Gondry is all stop-motion knitting.
Joey Ramone action figure. Vinyl, of course.
LOCAL
The hell? The Times is writing about hip churches in Minneapolis? Hey you kids, get outta my yard!
Don't you fucking start with me. I'm doing my best, alright? I'm so goddamn tired. Okay, that's better. Here you go:
POLITICS
John Kerry, not hanging out with Jane Fonda at a 1970 anti-Vietnam rally. (Story and reax story.)
TV
Close to brilliant video of Jon Stewart's dissection of Bush's appearance on Meet The Press.
WORDS
Roddy Doyle disses Ulysses.
FILM
Star Wars is being released on DVD. Woo.
DESIGN
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.
TECH
NYT interview with the guy behind BitTorrent.
MUSIC
Pazz & Jop is out.
New Courtney Love album out today (new video). The Post reviews it. Meanwhile, she lost her kid at the Grammy's and is now on the lam.
Pixies reunite for first time in over a decade to play.... Canada? Where is my mind?
Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs audio player.
LOCAL
Walker attendance plummets and they blame 9/11.
I feel as fat as that Atkins guy.
POLITICS
DIGITAL
What does the porn industry think about digital piracy? The Times looks. In other NSFW news, Suicide Girls is syndicating to Playboy.com now.
ONLINE
Seattle Weekly goes ga-ga for Michael Kinsley. I like the chap too, but c'mon, 5000+ words? You think this is the New Yorker or something?
WORDS
I rather like that half of Paris' book proposal is pictures. Brilliant title.
David Foster Wallace parody winner.
MUSIC
In addition to a Friendster parody site, Lambchop has a couple new albums out.
FILM
Lost In Translation came out on DVD today.
DESIGN
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.
Historical look at nudity on television.
POLITICS
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!
New Beastie Boys album in June.
Jeff Tweedy, poet.
That new Stereolab is album is getting their best reviews in years. Pitchfork even gave it a meteoric 7.6.
Britney little sister's blog is surprisingly like Billy Corgan's blog.
LOCAL
New "most popular articles today" link at CityPages.com.
Read the story about KSTP using Ed Asner as a pitch man? Funny.
Need a body double. Simple can't keep up. Who won Iowa and New Hampshire? Who, you say? Here's what we've got:
WORDS
Salon is serializing Dave Eggers new novel.
FILM
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 adapt The Office. Ahem, no comment.
POLITICS
GQ profiles Joe Trippi.
PUBLISHING
Michael Wolff leaving New York, off to Vanity Fair, which sucks because now I'll have to start buying Vanity Fair.
WORDS
Another mainstream "theory is dead" story.
Huh, there's a Name of the Rose board game.
ONLINE
SXSW web awards finalists announced. I'm trying to get down there this year, but it's looking iffy.
I need a metaster too.
Busuiness 2.0's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.
CONSUMPTION
I bought a red Danish couch named Opus today. Hello, modern world.
New cut-n-paste agitprop flick: The Corporation.
MUSIC
Res feature on Air that includes an excellent videoplayer. Go buy the new one, Talkie Walkie.
Slate.com: Why Is Airplane Music So Universally Bad? NYT: A Better Night's Sleep, Flat Out at 35,000 Feet.
A very large collection of insects in rock and roll cover art.
Billy Corgan (or his 15-year-old sister) is blogging.
TV
The Voice gives The L Word a rave. So far, so do I. And the Joan Jett wannabe is my fave.
CELEBERITY
Tallying the celebrity endorsements.
Alex Trebek, genius driver.
If you missed it, someone uploaded a quicktime video of the Paris Hilton appearance on SNL a few weeks back.
LOCAL
Have you been reading Melissa's new don't-call-it-sex-and-the-city-ish column at CP?
Fog of War finally opens here this week.
Shhh... don't tell anyone else about our entrepreneurial genius.
ONLINE
Sure to top blogdex any second: I'll Have You Know I Have Several Black Friendsters.
Huh, that's what she looks like. The Today Show interviews Emily Nussbaum after her NYT story 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 Post story 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.
LOCAL
Holy fucking zen arcade, Bob Mould has a blog.
Yo, want your music to be the theme of the new light rail? Sign up!
Suicide Girls have a burlesque tour? Apparently so. They're at First Ave Feb. 21. Gotta go, just to see who goes. I wonder if it'll be as good as Le Cirque Rouge de Gus.
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.
New York Post scribbles something up about belle de jour, the blog of a London call girl. (Locally, we have Pussy Ranch.)
Red Herring interview with the CEO of Netflix.
LIFESTYLE
I'm thrilled to constantly discover myself in a new demographic. This week, it's Quirkyalone. There's a book, a quiz, a website, and way-too-long newspaper stories.
MUSIC
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.
Tina Brown in the Washington Post on Donald Trump: The Real Reality Show: An '80s Survivor. And The Minor Fall, The Major Life translates it.
The Economist: Babel's children.
Bloggers interviewing people is becoming more popular. Zulkey interviews Joel Stein. The Morning News interviews Jonatham Letham.
LOCAL
A super excellent photographic tour of The Replacements' Minneapolis.
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.
I Love Music thread: Worst Hypothetical Rapper Names.
Devo has a new DVD out. For a relatively cheap $13, you 17 videos and other stuff. Wash Post writes about it.
TECH
A couple decent pieces hypothesizing this year's technology advances: Robert X. Cringely's Predictions for 2003 and ExtremeTech's Predicting the Tech Flops of Tomorrow.
CULTURE
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.
Times: Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs. Question of the day: Is Eagleton losing it?
Slate: Should Students Be Allowed To Hookup With Profs? Answer of the day: Yes!
There's probably nothing funnier I could say in the NYTimes than "everyone thinks they can write about music" (second item). I'm gonna take a beating for that one. New in the big list: expanded art and architecture links, Google's Zeitgeist, Norman Solomon's annual P.U.-Litzers Prizes, Slate's Critics Critiqued, ESPN's Year in Sex and Sports, Car & Driver's 10 Best Cars, The Post Style section's In & Out, and, ya know, a whole lot more. Coalesce!
TECH
Even Wired is making lists now. 101 Ways to Save the Internet.
MUSIC
Elliott Smith's death might not have been a suicide.
CULTURAL STUDIES
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?
Today, the Christian Science Monitor mentioned Fimoc (last paragraph). What's new in the big list? Well, there's the eye-catching Top 20 Nude Scenes of 2003 (Justine Bateman?), Yahoo's Top Searches 2003, Roger Ebert's Top 10, The Year of the Liar from the luscious Heather Havrilesky at Salon, and a whole lot more.
ONLINE
MUSIC
Shatner to release new album, produced by Ben Folds.
FILM
Trailer for Kill Bill Vol 2 (Japanese version).
TECH
For a little bit of flashback fun, read this PC World story 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.
BAD POLITICS
Oh boy, gimme. Ann Coulter Talking Action Figure.
Newsweek put Jon Stewart on the cover, and wrote a boring story about him.
USA Today manages to pen perhaps the worst story ever on blogging and politics.
MEDIA
The Times has a suprisingly must-read-ish 14-story collection on the future of media and technology.
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.
ARCHITECTURE
Gehry: "I'm just an architect."
LOCAL
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.
LIFE/STYLE
The Times is writing about SuicideGirls.com. And ethnically ambiguous hotties.
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.)
Wash Post profiles Uma.
WORDS
Update to Google Print: a FAQ and a list of all the books in the database.
I've often wondered how drugs get named.
MUSIC
Steven Johnson's essay snippet on curatorial culture is pretty darn good.
TV
10 Ads America Won't See from Ad Age.
LOCAL
Metafilter thread on Southdale Mall.
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.
Ventura's MSNBC show is on "indefinite hiatus". See-ya.
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:
WORDS
Gawker's list of words to outlaw in 2004. Yes, yes, and yes.
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.
The world's largest book is on Amazon.
The founders of Spy magazine will split $1 million four ways to write about the magazine's rise and fall.
Not only was he reading Dostoyevsky after the war, Saddam was writing his fourth novel while the troops surrounded Iraq.
ONLINE
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.")
Match.com moves into Friendster.com territory.
LIFE
USA Today graphic: Do women want to date metrosexuals?
MUSIC
Walmart's $.88/song online store.
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.
POLITICS
Up next, Frank Rich writes about Howard Dean's online campaign: Napster Runs for President in '04.
FILM
New trailer: Osama. In "selected" theaters Jan 30.
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.
WORDS
It just wouldn't be Christmas without a David Sedaris New Yorker story.
Good to know that Saddam was reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in his hole. (The details here are amazing. Two cans of Raid? Palmolive Naturals soap? Lipton tea?)
ART
MoMA snatched up $40 million of new art.
FOOD & DRINK
NPR: winemakers.
G'head, try it, I dare you: VELVEETA® Fudge.
TECH
Exactly two years after Google launched Google News, another new product is starting to take form: Google Print.
Everything you wanted to know about the upcoming version of IE.
I missed this story from last weekend: NFL Receiver Uses Cell Phone From End Zone. Awesome.
Macromedia Flash Video Gallery.
MUSIC
Dizzee Rascal's first single, "Fix Up, Look Sharp" (mp3) and the video for "Just Like a Rascal".
LOCAL
Some pics from Dave's (Creative Electric's) Flash Boutique. Go!
While the year in review list page piles up, here are the Top 23 Albums of 2003, cuz I said so.
1) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell2) Dizee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner
3) Outkast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
4) Junior Senior, D-D-Don't Don't Stop the Beat
5) Fischerspooner, #1
6) Radiohead, Hail to the Thief
7) The White Stripes, Elephant
8) Grandaddy, Sumday
9) Broken Social Scene, You Forgot it in People
10) The Rapture, Echoes
11) The Decembrists, Her Majesty the Decemberists
12) TV on the Radio, Young Liars
13) Goldfrapp, Black Cherry
14) Prefuse 73, One Word Extinguisher
15) Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash
16) Pretty Girls Make Graves, New Romance
17) The Bad Plus, These Are The Vistas
18) Cat Power, You Are Free
19) Atmosphere, Seven's Travels
20) Blur, Think Tank
21) The Strokes, Room of Fire
22) The Wrens, Meadowlands
23) Steven Malkmus, Pig Lib
Previously: 16 Best Albums of 2002 | 20 Best Albums of 2001.
Sasha, Keith, and Rob are doing an end-of-the-year wrap rap at Slate.com.
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 (Times review). 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?
David Lynch: peace broker.
WORDS
Slate: Which Dictionary is Best?
Hanging out with The Believer.
TV
This is the saddest romance story of all time.... that involves that tramp Paris Hilton.
You saw the Miller Lite ad that uses human dominoes, right? Eric Zorn has a column in the Chicago Tribune about it.
How did I miss this? Tina Fey was interviewed in The Believer a couple months back.
MUSIC
Gobs of obscure MP3s from The Darkness.
Christgau: This ought to be indie-rock's moment. But no.
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 Stone says: "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..."
Press release: Friendster might actually speed up soon.
AOL launches Love.com (basically AIM meets personals). Headline writers go to work.
Other new stuff: ask.metafilter.com (everything answered) | hipstir (yet another social network site) | Hello. (photo sharing app) | friendsterslut.blogspot.com (cool friendster blog)
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.
MEDIA
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.
McSweeney's: Inaugural Speeches from our Action Heroes.
ONLINE
Okay, okay, more Paris. I was actually kinda waiting to see what The Observer and Nerve would say. And while Letterman apparently can't get to her, Abercrombie & Fitch can.
Check out the customer recommendations on Amazon for Michael Jackson's Number Ones.
The Guardian on Fleshbot.
Boston Globe: Google critics emerge.
FILM
Richard Linklater revisits Timothy "Speed" Levitch in a short film.
Fuggedabout Wired's boring Phillip K. Dick profile this month. Instead, check out Hermenaut's bio or Lingua Franca's profile from way back when.
It seems like an SNL skit, but there's really something called Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease Series. I recommend "Vol. 4 - The Lap Dance" on Amazon. Not rated.
GLOBAL
Interesting. IranFilter.
TV
Does cable get more absurd in its micro-segementation? NBC is considering a Law and Order channel.
Dolce and Gabbana are doing tv ads? Here's one.
Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" at Wrigley.
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:
TECH
Is it already time for the Best Of The Year lists? Time's Coolest Inventions of 2003 and Popular Science's Best of What's New of 2003.
Bye, bye, Sophia Loren. Miss Digital World.
Steve Ballmer's iPod (reference material).
ADVERTISING
See that KFC ad telling you how good drumsticks are for you? Yum. Slate commentary.
FILM
Naked Lunch on DVD came out today.
Salon has the full script to the Reagan biopic that CBS bailed on.
Chaplin just in time for the Oscars! Hmm.
Nokia shorts. Funny how 15 seconds almost seems too long.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trailer. Stars Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, and Jim Carrey.
ART
Decent NYT piece on the new digital art space, Eyebeam.
MUSIC
Collection of Pavement cover songs (including Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Velvet Underground, CCR, and The Beatles).
I can't explain why reading Strokes reviews has become my only post-summer cultural joy, but here's Sasha Frere-Jones doing his.
Excellent. Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
POLITICS
John Kerry canned his campaign manager.
The New Republic has a decent profile of Joe Trippi, the guy behind Dean's campaign.
ONLINE
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.
LIFE
CBS Marketwatch: Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.
LOCAL
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."
According to The Gematriculator, Fimoculous.com is only 37% Evil. Obviously, machines tell lies.
MUSIC
Get the credit card out. The video collections from Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are out today.
FILM
Nothing So Strange, the faux-documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, is available for download. Probably more interesting than the film itself is that micropayment ($3-$5) you have to pay BitPass to see it.
ONLINE
There.com (which, for the newcomers, is a avatar-driver online environment similar to The Sims Online) has a couple recent write-ups: Wired | CBS Marketetwatch | Cnet | Gamespot. I beta test There.com for a while, and then got too busy to keep up with it.
WORDS
ART
Wired profiled Takashi Murakami.
I discovered Elliott Smith.
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:
MEDIA
Compare: Faux CNN t-shirt vs. Faux FOX t-shirt.
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.)
Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker does his bit on Rush.
Ad Age names its Top 10 Mags of the Year, and I don't read a single damn one of them (and I read about 35 magazines/month).
ARCHITECTURE
New world's tallest building in Taiwain (specs).
L.A. Times slideshow of the Gehry Disney Hall Opening.
FILM
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 Yorker review 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.)
WORDS
Brushstroke has a cool post about why McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage is named such (it was a mistake at the printers).
The Guardian did its list of the 100 Greatest Novels Of All Time. Pretty British, eh mate?
David Foster Wallace full of contemptuousness on Talk of the Nation.
LIFESTYLE
I don't really understand what Nike's Keep The Ball Alive is, but it seems to have something to do with playing urban rugby with SMS devices.
Vodka: 500.
You can now shop online at Ikea.
Gothamist's Flirting 101.
Seth Stevenson is spending two weeks in Tokyo and writing about it for Slate under the idea of "One Cliche Per Day" (Wacky Food, Manga, Inane Protocol, Capsule Hotels, Earthquakes). Pretty good.
GAMES
Some of the quotes here are a bit dubious, but the idea of sitting down a group of tweens to play old-school video games (Space Invaders, Pong, etc.) is brilliant.
Video Games Awards to air on Spike TV in December.
Urban Outfitters pulls Ghettopoly.
TV
K Street has raised the ire of Drudge.
Did you know that Miami Vice isn't coming out on DVD because of the prohibitive costs of getting the rights to the music? I blame Phil Collins for everything.
MUSIC
Slatch has an MP3 to Albini's murkier original mix of "All Apologies," which is pretty amazing.
Jon Pareles talks about The Rapture, The Strokes, and the NYC scene (article).
LOCAL
C.J. has an amazing tidbit on Prince. Unbelievable. (Note: I'm just now seeing this cross the wires, so it will likely become a national story soon.)
SEMEN DONORS NEEDED!!! Roseville, $150 per specimen.
Melissa reviews Captured! By Robots and Chuck reviews Junior Senior, two shows I painfully missed last week.
Unfortunately, no one really paid attention when PDPal was being used at the Walker sculpture garden. Now, it's making big news in Times Square.
Social Hygiene Database from the University of Minnesota.
You probably read the Paul Westerberg profile (he looks so young!) in CP, but The Onion A/V Club has one this week too.
Just stumbled across Whither, a blog by a former Minnesotan with a good essay about the Twin Cities urban landscape.
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."
Doonesbury is doing Flash Mobs again.
WORDS
You don't get to see him, but Thomas Pynchon will be voicing himself in an upcoming episode of The Simpsons.
Book Crossing seems to be the Friendster for the literati.
Debate between Greg Easterbrook (The New Republic) and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) on "no means no."
Ulysses in audio.
MUSIC
Ladies and gentlemen, hide the kids, cuz the earth just shifted. Here's a video clip of Cat Power doing karoake to Slim Shady.
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.
Dismantling the Yahoo sign.
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.
New Magnetbox LazyWeb idea: Movie Friendster.
COMICS
COMEDY
Margaret Cho: blogger.
LOCAL
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.
An oldie: Worst of the Twin Cities.
INTERNET/MEDIA
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.
Red Herring on social networking software.
OJR's sprawling interview with the principal scientist behind Google News has many good tidbits.
POLITICS
Rolling Stone interviews Wesley Clark.
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.
MUSIC
The new Strokes album really is all that. (It's not out until Oct. 28, but if you look around you might find it.)
The Onion interviews Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian.
Did you see the New Yorker anti-RIAA cover this week?
UBER-CELEBRITY
Of course it makes sense that Vice is now appearing in the Style section. The Antic Muse rants.
Is Jack Black as over-exposed as Britney? That's my theory. Long profile in the NY Times Mag. (And a School Of Rock Blog.)
WORDS
Gigantic archive of the writings of Edward Said.
FILM
Yeah, yeah, yeah... the new Matrix trailers are up.
TV
Simpsons: If They Mated.
LOCAL
Former Minneapolitan, David Carr, now at The New York Times, interviewed in Mpls St. Paul Magazine.
The Rake interviews another ex-local, Al Franken.
I'd like to be the CJ of the online world. For instance: I spied Buy-Me-A-Beer and MinneapolisHappyHour in deep conversation at the Sound Unseen opening party. Could there be a merger in the works?
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.
Red Herring mag is back, online only.
L.A. Times story 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.
Amazon has added some goofy Flash games to promote their new sporting goods store. There's also word that Amazon is working on a search engine.
Nokia just released a new line of "Imagewear" products, wearable and mini phones and camera and such. Gizmodo has the links.
ACADEMIA
Edward Said has died: Times | Guardian | BBC | Zmag.
FILM
Preview for new Gus Van Sant: Elephant.
This is a little old, but I'm still playing catch up: Lost in Translation Translated. And Greg has tracked down the original Kurosawa Suntory commericials.
MUSIC
New White Stripes video: Hardest Button To Button.
Good: Pitchfork's list of 50 Most Common Used CDs.
LOCAL
Caribou Coffee sued for same-sex sexual harrassment.
ETC
Culturata that came out this week that you need: Salam Pax's The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, Outkast's Speakerboxx, and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (pst, Quicksilver wiki and Paul Boutin review).
LIFE
Two years ago today, I got on a plane that was over the Pacific when planes were flying into buildings in NYC.
WORDS
Idolatory review of David Foster Wallace's newest at Wired.
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.
Speaking of crazy promos, did you see the one for Coupland's newest?
MUSIC
Watch out world, Moby produced part of Britney's next "trance-y" album. I wonder if John Kerry is getting trance-y with Moby.
Pixies: reuiniting. Where is my mind?
Deliver love. Outkast videos for you already: Hey Ya | The Way You Move.
Great MP3 of Wilco's performance on Leno.
FILM
There are days I should just give up this category to Green Cine.
LOCAL
Nate Patrin reviews the new Atmosphere over at Seattle Weekly.
CP's Fall Arts Roundup includes a profile of a local film fave of mine, Melody Gilbert.
Aesthetic Apparatus' poster for the Liz Phair show was tres cool.
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.
Un, nice t-shirt slideshow at the Times.
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.
Al-Jazeera's English website is back after hackers nuked it a half-year ago.
On eBay, all 64 issues of Spy. Current bid: $255.00.
1938 issue of Better Homes and Gardens featuring a spread on Hitler's home.
FILM
The Sophia Coppola NY Times Mag cover story kinda sucked, huh? For fun, compare it to the Chloe Sevigny profile.
WORDS
Salam Pax's book comes out this month. Plasticbag.org got his hands on it.
The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll is out. Amazon's "customers who shopped for this item" list for this sucker probably says everything you need to know: The Hipster Handbook, the new Palahniuk, Traci Lords' new autobiography, and Chuck's new book. Here's an interview with the Vice gang.
Louise Gluck, the new U.S. Poet Laureate.
TECH
Looks like "Ask Gizmodo" will become a reality. I like to think I played a small part.
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.
It seems that Neal Pollack's VMA commentary is getting more attention than the VMAs.
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.
DESIGN
The Real Underground, an application playing with London's tube map.
COMICS
POLITICS
I think Brooke has my vote. Whaddya mean I can't vote?
Howard Dean is now doing goofy Flash ads.
LOCAL
I told you all the dangerous geeks lived here. His website is nuked, but here's a Google cache.
My new Papsea.com tee is on the webcam. CJ did a tv piece on the Papasea.com tees last week. Speaking of local t-shits, don't you want this one?
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.
TV
The Third Season of The Simpsons on DVD (which many say is the best) came out this week. Because I own the other two, am I obliged?
FILM
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).
MUSIC
Some new videos: Blur | Beck | Grandaddy | Hot Hot Heat | Massive Attack | Natacha Atlas.
Snag the new Strokes single here.
WORDS
A nifty girl bought me Nalda Said a couple months ago, and I still haven't read it, but The Stranger reviews it.
The Times profiled a fave of mine, Orhan Pamuk. Go read The Black Book right now.
Swimsuit issue stars Albert Einstein.
People are kinda talking about Laura Miller ripping into the new Chuck Palahniuk.
"Those who bought Radiohead also bought The Atkins Diet For Dummies." I want this book so bad. Here it is in practice.
GAMING
I like the headline, cuz I know it's true: Adult Women Like to Play Games. But Reuters means video games.
Dude, I never woulda left colllege if Video Game Studies were a major.
INTERNET/TECH
How to and how not to crop a photo for HotOrNot.com.
In PC Mag, Dvorak tells the story of DivX, which I didn't know. Not that it's stay-up-all-night reading, but it's an interesting history for geeks.
The mind goes wild with possibilities: lie-detector for cell phones.
LIFE
Burning Man Bingo. See also: Burning Man Definition.
DESIGN
Designers show off their business cards.
I need sleep more than I need air.
BURN!
Every year, I swear, Wired News times their boring Burning Man article to come out the same time as the predictable Onion Burning Man article.
WORDS
Short Neal Stephenson interview in Wired.
I dont' think anyone has written this kind of eviscerating critique in decades. It's practically parody.
Quickie Voice review of the new Palahniuk.
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 at each other 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.
And First Ave. is suffering again.
MEDIA
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.
POLITICS
Arnie's first campaign commercial. Well, it could be. There are a bunch more at Japander.
INTERNET
I like the organizing principle of this blog on urban transportation.
FILM
Snarky 50 Ways To Save The Movies.
LIFESTYLE
Prophetik has some okay tees.
NY Times Mag article on Flash Mobs that starts with a DeLillo quote. See also: McSweeney's faux invite.
WORDS
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.
MUSIC
Stick figure "Weapon of Choice" video.
Tricky gets nasty in Jane magazine.
Straight outta Seattle: Lollapalooza: Then and Now.
ASCII Rock in Quicktime. Click 'em. Wow. Simply wow.
At 43, Suzanne Vega learns to drive.
The new issue of Magnet does the Top 60 albums of the last 10 years. Here's the top 10:
- Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
- Nirvana, In Utero
- Radiohead, OK Computer
- Guide By Voices, Alien Lanes
- Belle And Sebastian, If You're Feeling Sinister
- Breeders, Last Splash
- Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
- Verve, Urban Hymns
- Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
- Tortoise, Millions Now Living Will Never Die
LOCAL
Lake Minnetonka is under attack!
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.
MEDIA
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.
ART
Connect the dots: NY Times analysis of David Byrne's PowerPoint universe, which is available through the book Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, a take-off of a classic by Tufte, who recently released The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. In Wired, here's David Byrne and Edward Tufte talking about their projects.
INTERNET
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.
Post: FCC to Allow Video on AOL Messenger.
HISTORY
The Victorian Sex Cry Generator.
GAMES
FILM
The Decalogue came out on DVD yesterday. So did Bowling for Columbine and Roger & Me.
So Tara Reid gets drunk and fucks around? How can this be news in Hollywood?
MUSIC
Gawker talks about Chuck's upcoming Esquire interview with Britney.
COMICS
No new links for you today! I gave so many yesterday, and I know you didn't really look at even half of them. So try again:
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.)
The future: Interactive Porn DVDs.
INTERNET/COMMUNITY
The Onion tackles Internet Social Networks.
Times Flash Mob story surveys the current state of Flashmobs, with an unlinked mention of Flashmugging.com. (I declined an interview for this story.)
You see, blogs aren't just about cute pet stories (1,764 comments!).
The Guardian looks at smart clients such as Macromedia's Central, which I've been beta testing.
Wired has a story (not online) about MIT's OpenCourseWare completely free online classes. This Fall, there will be 500 courses available. If they're as enticing as Media, Education, and the Marketplace (with video lectures!), this could be a very good thing.
Google's new calculator really is powerful: answer to life the universe and everything = 42.
TV
Emily Nussbaum's commentary on TV shows' DVDs is completely accurate for someone like me who uses Netflix almost exclusively to watch tv.
Mary-Kate and Ashley are on the cover of Rolling Stone. Yipe. See also: The Olsen Twins' Countdown To Legality Clock. (Random thought: you think Ashley is pissed she didn't get a hyphenated name? Was she dissed?)
MEDIA
6 MB movie file of The Daily Show on the Al Franken vs. Fox scandal.
Long Times Mag article 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).
MUSIC
I've watched all the episodes of Cooking With Rock Stars and Jack Black, was the best.
The New Yorker put their Cat Power profile online, but let's be honest, that Avednon photo was really worth a thousand two-dollar words.
NY Times: Weird adoring essay about Steve Perry of Journey.
Drag City is publishing the diary of Bonnie Prince Billy (aka Will Oldham) from his tour with Bjork.
Napster 2.0 (and a decent roundup of the other online music services).
The Strokes announce track list. Millions of scenesters search for MP3s. (Ahem, if you find them, please alert me.)
STYLE
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.)
Outlet malls are evil.
We Americans like to read articles about how other cultures consume our pop exports. But here's an article from Japan analyzing how we consume manga.
DESIGN
BBC on the dream desk.
LOCAL
Awesome collection of Minneapolis-themed t-shirts at Papasea. The MOA SUX one is being shipped overnight delivery.
A bunch of personal friends and acquaintances are interviewed in this Strib story about the dying local film scene being supplanted by an indie scene.
Fringe Festival: big jump in attendance this year.
New looks-promising blog: Reshaping Minnesota.
BEYOND CATEGORICAL
Who cares if it's true, I just like typing it: Marlon Brando is Courtney Love's grandfather.
FILM
The world's first online feature film: This Is Not A Love Song. The BBC has more details.
Post-teensploitation teensploitation? Trailer to Thirteen.
Kevin Smith is doing a prequel to Fletch.
Kieslowski's Decalogue comes out on DVD next week. The Times previews it.
PUBLISHING
Penthouse is dead.
Maureen Dowd: Blah Blah Blog.
Just doing my part to save democracy: Arnold Schwarzenegger naked.
Dan Gillmor links to four Microsoft job openings with the word "blog" in the description.
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 News slams the new Smoking Gun show on Court TV.
Conan's show is a decade old. A Hollywood Reporter interview.
DESIGN
Semiotics: A Primer for Designers. I rather like the idea of designers being introduced to Saussure.
MUSIC
Voice: Richard Hell on Lester Bangs.
LOCAL
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.
Go see June Panic at the Terminal tonight.
Special treat today.
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.
6. True!
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.
No MPR this time to judge my threads. The Flash Mob will not be the last time I wear this shirt:
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.
WORDS
A must-own: Kerouac bobblehead.
SOCIETY
Nerve: Sex in the age of the cellcam phone.
The Smoking Gun: Legal Document of the Year. Fucker, fucker and fucking fag.
Flocksmart steps smart/flash mobs up a notch.
The Onion: Area Man Knows All The Shortcut Keys.
POP
Good god, I could spend a week here: The A List. It's just a list of celebrity personality rumors, but it's magnificent.
GreenCine has a post with dish on Tarantino's Kill Bill and two Buffy-alum Fox shows coming this fall.
MUSIC
Half-hour BBC interview (audio link) with Morrisey that is very, very, very good. He's so articulate. Recommended.
TV
Sex and the City update: First Duchovny now Baryshnikov. (Secret message: Mr. Big, sorry for petty self-involvement.)
MEDIA
The New York tabloids are all over this. The Times' Bob Hope obit was written by someone who has been dead since 2000.
The Antic Muse: What magazine ads say about you.
LOCAL
Minneapolis is in Friendster.
One year ago today, McSweeney's released The Graffiti of Minneapolis.
MEDIA
Howard Rheingold was on a good On The Media piece this weekend talking about smart mobs. Dan Gillmor was also on talking about "we journalism."
NPR's new show with Slate.com debuted yesterday: Day to Day.
Bride magazine has a same-sex article this month. Gasp!
MUSIC
One of my favorite sites for the past year has been the music community blog I Love Music. But I have been afraid to link to it because it's always heartbreaking to watch a good community go to hell when the freaks move in. Anyway, this thread killed me: Did you really feel "welcomed" to the jungle by axl rose, or do you think that was sort of just insincere, halfhearted graciousness?
TV
Futurama: dead.
STYLE
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.
Go see Wattstax at St. Anthony Main. Pete's review and blog.
MEDIA
The Onion: The New New York Times.
ART
Finally, the news I've been waiting for. The Cremaster Cycle will be available on DVD August 26. (A trailer.)
WORDS
NYRB: Comics For Grown-Ups (starring Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes).
ARCHITECTURE
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.
Voice: My crush on Condoleezza.
POP
VH1's stupid 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons list.
GAMING
Decent Game Studies: Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? See also: Interactive Nude Lara Croft Gallery.
INTERNET/TECH
Blog Change Bot IMs you when your favorite blog is updated.
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"
New O'Reilly book: iPod: The Missing Manual.
Amazon.com adds RSS feeds.
LOCAL
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.
The Strib's Fringe Festival round-up.
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.
Stay tuned for round two.
Press Roundup:
Historical Links:
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. Times disses UC Santa Barbara's film school for being contemporary.
U.S. News interviews 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.
MEDIA
Michael Wolff reviews Steve Brill's new book.
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.)
Interview with Eric Umansky, the guy who does Today's Paper's for Slate.com.
MUSIC
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. Club interview 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 Post profiled Punk 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.
Erik Davis fake interviews Phillip K. Dick.
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.
Today in Literature in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published.
STYLE
Phew, I own nothing on Hipster Bingo.
TV
I'm a little pissed that the Carson Daly roast was almost a little funny. But mostly because of my growing crush on Sarah Silverman.
LOCAL
You already knew this (cuz everyone is talking about it at the water cooler), but Minneapolis is America's most literate city.
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.
Riemenschneider's best local CDs of the year (so far).
Old friend Catherine has started a music series at Theatre de la Jeune Lune.
Old friend Chuck was a guest on this week's This American Life. His new book is out next month, and you'll see a sneak preview of it here soon.
If you're interested in the Minneapolis Flash Mob (Wired story), drop me a note and I'll dish.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette looks 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.
TV
Does anyone out there have Trio TV? Is it any good?
Good profile of Alyson Hannigan. Did you know she was marrying the guy who played Wesley in Buffy/Angel?
MUSIC
New Prince album, available only via download on MSN.
AOL to sell CDs and DVDs.
Some dumb study says that your music collection says alot about you. Yeah, like I buy too much music.
Jon Pareles at the Times follows up the WSJ report about Dylan's "plagiarism."
MEDIA
Reality tv and online dating services are forging partnerships.
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.
CJR's Rethinking Objectivity. Made waves, but pretty dull.
Crazy pics of Britney Spears in W magazine.
Raines on Charlie Rose: I was forced out.
Washington Post is launching one of those free weeklies too.
IDEAS
Not something we needed: The New Criterion Weblog. What would Eliot think?
Times on James Bond and Nietzsche: Thus Spake 007.
NY Daily News story on people who willfully don't use cell phones. Cretins.
Daniel Dennett really thinks he's bright.
FILM
CP last week had a good review of By Brakhage DVD.
The Guardian looks at the legacy of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong.
The Stranger: How To Watch The Cremaster Cycle. Plus another Matthew Barney interview.
ARCHITECTURE
Frank Lloyd Wright gas station breaks ground. No gas.
DRINK
Top 10 Summer Cocktails. No surprises.
FASHION
Whoa, Nike bought Converse. Swoosh Chuck Taylors?
$200 Murakami Dr. Scholl's / Louis Vuitton sandals on eBay.
MUSIC
This is kinda weird. The Wall Street Journal is basically accusing Dylan of plagarism. Here is a side-by-side comparison of Dylan's "Floater" and Junichi Saga "Confessions of a Yakuza."
A couple of links snagged from LargeHeartedBoy: Maxim's 30 Worst Albums of all Time | Miss Minx' 100 Women in Rock.
FILM
Two movies that would make my "Top 10 Of All Time" had DVDs recently released: Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour and Wenders' Wings of Desire.
WORDS
Salam Pax got a book deal.
INTERNET
Is there such a thing as a "map geek"? If so, I am one. So I'm glad to see The Map Room, a weblog about maps.
COMMUNITY
Emmanuelle has a little review of Half.com (the website and the town, formerly know as Halfway, a weird dot-com bubble story I had almost forgotten).
TECH
Okay Guardian article 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.
Comic book artist and theoretician Scott McCloud is experimenting with micropayments with his newest comic. He has talked about micropayments before.
COMMUNITY
Buzzmachine talks about being invited to see AOL's new blogging tool. The ability to blog via IM is impressive.
Gothamist has some Friendster protocol questions.
FASHION
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)."
WORDS
MediaBistro interview with the guy who writes Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent for McSweeney's.
Michael Chabon, Jane Smiley and John Edgar Wideman on NPR's Morning Edition.
NEWS
Doonsbury on the dangers of internet communities.
That Japanese hotdog eater wins another match.
MUSIC
Snoop Dogg has decided he doesn't like "Girls Gone Wild" anymore. Because it's sleazy? No, because there aren't enough black women.
ART
Art Forum's Venice Biennale weblog.
LOCAL
I saw my first Segway in Minneapolis today. It was a middle-aged woman cruising around downtown in a long skirt. This seemed noteworthy.
Golly, there are a lot of links today. Kick it:
MEDIA
MagazinePriceSearch.com. Never ever subscribe to a magazine again without looking here first. The New Yorker for $19.46. Time for $4.67. Spin for $3.36.
Good Poynter.org convergence map.
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?
Cyberjournalist's mammoth list of blogs published by journalists.
MUSIC
Zowie, Pitchfork is going mainstream. Or something like that.
SFGate: Hip-Hop Intellectuals: A Radical Generation Comes Of Age.
The video for Foo Fighter's "Low," starring Dave Grohl and Jack Black, is a little extreme. I think it was banned from MTV.
FILM
Someone translated that Baudrillard interview about The Matrix into English. GreenCine ponders it.
FASHION
Gothic Lolita is in this week.
WORDS
Someone has spend a long time cracking the code of the intro page of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. The conclusion is amusing.
Pre-order David Foster Wallace's newest: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which tells the story of Georg Cantor.
Guardian essay on irony: The Final Irony. Recommended.
That funny Onion: Ask Raymond Carver.
Recommended summer reading from dozens of authors.
INTERNET
Game: Dr. Strange Blix.
CityCreator.com. And an elaborate block-building application.
A syllabus to a class I'd like to take: CTCS 505: New Media and the Consumption Cycle.
Tom Friedman in the Times asks Is Google God?
Lame Times story on internet dating.
A zillion Amazon RSS Feeds.
ART
Zoom and explore the art of the Renaissance.
ARCHITECTURE
Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of Baghdad.
FILM
"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."
LOCAL
The Strib dissects Block E. See also, from a while back, Peter Ritter's City Pages critique.
The Rake has a decent converging history of Schell's and Grain Belt beer.
According to Alexa, 40% of CityPages.com's traffic is now through Babelogue.
Did you hear that Rock Star closed? It has even been nuked from the City Pages database. Great food, horrible location.
A fun Friendster excercise. Pick an author/musician/filmmaker and search Friendster for it. Of the 70,000 people registered, 38 list Plato and 1789 list Bjork. I could do this for days.
A mysterious list of items purchased in the last month on Amazon.com by you, the readers of Fimoc, after clicking through from this site (giving me a 5% referral payback):
-
Comic Book: Daredevil: Out
DVD: Best In Show
Book: Red Planet
Book: Feral Children and Clever Animals
Book: Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials
Music: Duke Ellington Masterpieces
Software: Clive Barker's Undying
Magazine: American Baby
Book: Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker
One year ago today, I had an okay link-filled post about post-feminism, but most of the links are broken now.
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.
FILM
If my French didn't suck so bad nowadays, I might just try to translate this Baudrillard interview about The Matrix, his first public mention of the film that probably wouldn't exist without him. You can try the Babelfish translation. (Thanks greencine.)
TV
Proof that I should read Dissent more often, there's a new column looking at the anti-war subtext of the final episodes of Buffy. (Thanks Mark.)
Wanna be on reality tv? A nice collection of links to all the application websites.
WORDS
Interesting online writing exercise: One Word. You see one word and you have one minute to write about it.
Today in literature, the Pied Piper lured children away from Hamelin. With mention of Jethro Tull.
DeLillo interviewed twice on KCRW's Bookworm. Good stuff.
Slate.com: The Politics of Harry Potter. (Another one of those Slate.com dialogues.)
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."
MUSIC
Tom Waits interview in Onion A.V.
Pitchfork gives Liz Phair a 0.0 outta 10. Yes, that's even worse than the 0.8 they gave the new Metallica.
Ya know, I just bought that Zeppelin DVD. This is really unlike me. From a taste perspective. I hope I don't like it. Here's a review.
Another Greil Marcus Real Life Rock Top Ten in City Pages.
INTERNET
Gawd I love the internet. DuckHuntingGirls.com. Yes, pictures and videos of... Girls. Hunting. Ducks. No, it's not dirty. It's totally... ducky.
Sure to make you cringe, Time names the 50 Best Websites.
Decent interview with the CEO of IDEO.
Slate.com found an accidentally-released live prototype of Bush's 2004 campaign website.
FASHION
Nike released a new division of skateboard shoes. And they did a whack website to promote them. Macromedia is showcasing it as a cool use of Flash.
Times Style article on those Tommy Bahama shirts. I actually bought one a couple weeks ago. Shut up, I'm not an aging hipster.
LIFE
Milken Institute's new list of 200 Best Performing Cities. Minneapolis: #99.
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.
FILM
As a follow-up to yesterday's Times PBR link, Reason magazine's Hit & Run weblog (which I recommend) asks how the essay could overlook the obvious Blue Velvet cool factor.
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.
Very cool make-your-own-graph maker: NationMaster.com.
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.
MARKETING
Sunday Times Mag has a long but very good story on the marketing (i.e., non-marketing) of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Recomended.
A condom ad (video).
MUSIC
Smack in the middle of this hilarious Onion article about college DJs is a June Panic reference.
A must. SixDifferentWays has an MP3 of t.A.T.u.'s cover of The Smith's "How Soon Is Now?" I am human and I need to be loved.
NPR's Motley Fool had a good interview with the founder of KaraokeNation.com, who apparently has a book out now too: Karaoke Nation: Or, How I Spent a Year in Search of Glamour, Fulfillment, and a Million Dollars.
Apple's iTunes coming to the indies.
FILM
Let's call it the new Ghost World that was the new Crumb: preview to American Splendor.
Somewhat random L.A. Times Parker Posey profile.
LIFE
Dream job? It's not often you see "an interest in Wheel of Fortune, Q*Bert or Charlie's Angels" in a job description. Pay: $10.00/hour.
Harry, Sabrina, and Buffy Help Paganism Grow.
One year ago today, I must have been smoking crack.
LOCAL
The excellent local juice company, Fresco Juice, has started distributing at Kowalski's. Check it out.
Beck writes about his appearance in Minneapolis, and the chance that maybe Prince would show up.
In the soon-to-be-defunk Lost Cause, people talking about the Lifter Puller show.
MEDIA:
Al Gore is looking to get into the liberal media.
Two meta-media columns on bad writing: WashPost columnist writes about the scourge of The List. Meanwhile, MediaBistro attacks the scourge of The [fill in the blank] Nation.
Adbusters: Early Signs of Fascism.
MUSIC:
Salon.com has familiar-sounding speculation that iTunes could kill album-oriented music. Although I didn't write it, it feels like a condensed version of the last 15 music conversations I've had.
WORDS:
WashPost asks if Harry Potter fan fic is stealing. Answer: no.
Al Franken has a new book out: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He's interviewed on AlterNet.
On this day in 1816, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley gathered on Lake Geneva to tell ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. (I just love TodayInLiterature.com.)
TV:
If you missed it, video of Hillary on Letterman.
FILM:
Premiere and Playboy both have lists of the best sex scenes. Not one repeat in the top 10. See also: The Guardian's Sex on the Screen Quiz.
LOCAL:
Todd has posted a Fargo Forum story saying that Kirby's Bar is shutting down and that Ralph's might be next. (The City of Moorhead is on a buying spree.) This is even worse than the news the First Ave. might be on the way out.
WORDS:
Joy Press connects Hillary Clinton to Courtney Love in The Voice. (Same issue: Why Hillary Enrages Feminists.)
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.)
City Pages' Summer Reading Supplement is out.
The Guardian profiles the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who is new to me but sounds provocative.
TV:
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 Galaxy being made into a movie.
Trailer to yet another edgy, punky English Australian film: Garage Days.
MUSIC:
Bjork has a new haircut.
All the members of Duran Duran are reuniting for a tour.
The Rapture signed to a major label.
LOCAL:
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).
LIVING:
Tokyo surpasses Hong Kong as most expensive city to live. Top 10:
- Tokyo
- Moscow
- Osaka
- Hong Kong
- Beijing
- Geneva
- London
- Seoul
- Zurich
- NYC
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.
NEWS:
Photo of Bush falling off a Segway.
Weird Sunday Times story about gutter punks. Or, as the sociologists say, urban nomads.
INTERNET:
New blog: Amazon World highlights interesting user reviews found on Amazon.com.
Another new one: Tabloid Column, a collection of tabloid and celeb news.
Register: www.la
The elusive Plain Layne is back.
MOVIES:
Jack White just lost every stitch of cred he had.
Kottke made a silent film about the Chirac/Bush summit: Ceci n'est pas une guerre (c'est l'amour). Maybe he should have done it in the style of Woody Allen.
MEDIA:
Metropolis mag story on Nike that starts off quoting No Logo in the first graph.
Interview with Radar's editor-in-chief.
Adweek: 10 Lowest Moments in Advertising in the Last 10 Years.
WORDS:
Apparently Eggers wants to become Madonna. He's dropping his last name from his next novel. Maybe next he'll change his name to a symbol.
Someone's dissertation on the cultural history of the word cunt.
The Believer's Idea Share.
LOCAL:
Argh! StarTribune.com just made me register before reading.
Times story penned by Dylan Hicks on the Minneapolis Children's Theater Company winning a Tony.
Fargo Forum has a decent collections of stories on the Garrison Dam: The Unfinished Dream.
Camille Paglia interviews Matt Drudge in Radar. Among many bon mots: "In the end I really don't care what I'm called, as long as it's not blogger."
Season Four of Buffy and Radiohead's Hail to the Thief are out today. (Also, new Radiohead.com.)
New David Sedaris in The New Yorker.
Random thought: The guy in Memento should have had a blog.
V the miniseries was awesome. V the series sucked. Unknown: how V returns will be.
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.
Dumb link of the day: The Office Space sound board.
Season Four of Buffy comes out on DVD tomorrow.
Times update on the Jesse Ventura show on MSNBC.
Creepy or artful? In MeAndBillyBob.com, artist Jillian Mcdonald takes scenes from Billy Bob Thornton movies and splices in videos of herself.
Guardian: Blogging's Too Good For Them.
Onion A.V. Club interviews 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.
Gizmodo has a funny little post about reviewing gadgets from 1983.
Voice: Make Up Your Own New York Times Story. (Fine for print; should've been made interactive online.)
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.
Martin Scorsese to interview Bob Dylan for documentary.
Amazon.com and Microsoft in streaming deal.
And why/how is Amazon selling the "authorized edition" of the 'Iraq Most Wanted' Playing Cards?
The Onion: '90s Punk Decries Punks Of Today.
Diesel-U-Music just launched. There's also some new Diesel watches.
Email-writing campaign to bring former New Media Director Mark Dietz back to the Walker. (The signers are a who's who of digital art.)
Gibson on the future of media and arts (talk given to the Director's Guild).
Times Mag topic this week is architecture. Good stuff.
BuzzMachine has a Salam Pax interview (translated from an Austrian magazine). And the Ottawa Citizen gathers lots of details about the author by merely doing a close reading.
Two Times stories about blogging: Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It (cough, cough) | A New York State of Blog (about Gawker.com).
Story on City Pages' Babelogue.
Coming soon from O'Reilly: TiVo Hacks.
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.
Steven Johnson's contribution on blogging to the Rem Koolhaus-curated Wired.
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.
Everyone's watching the new Radiohead video ("There, There").
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.
Good idea from Nick: get Salam Pax a lit agent.
Sci-Fi author Samuel R. Delany profiled in L.A. Weekly. (I recommend Dhalgren.)
Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint".
The Conan Claymation episode airs tomorrow.
Media slut? Moi? Apparently so, judging from the MediaBistro.com party slideshow from the Interactive Media Conference in San Diego. I'm in one-third of the pics -- and look sufficiently wasted on Bombay tonics.
For a long time, there was only one performer who wouldn't allow Weird Al to produce parody pieces of source work. Nope, not Nirvana, not Madonna, not Nelly (all of whom have allowed Weird Al to profit from parodies). The one hold-out had been: Prince. But now there's another: Eminem.
Neil Stephenson's newest, Quicksilver, comes out this summer and is available for pre-order on Amazon.
I read half of the new DeLillo, Cosmopolis, and stopped. It's not bad, but it's also not great, and that's what I've come to expect.
Fun extreme GoogleNews searching: homely | smack | fucker | cocksucker. Wheeee!
Big news in sorta-local-but-really-national magazine publishing: Utne revamps (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.
Available at the Google store: Blogger t-shirt.
The complete set of Michael Moore's The Awful Truth on DVD came out today.
Tee-hee. Tom Brokaw discusses "tax cunts."
Quite excellent special supplement on Baghdad culture in al-Ahram. Spend some time there.
But really, who needs culture when you have Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! And Pizza Hut and Burger King are setting up franchises!
Unknown photos from Blow-Up, my favorite '60s art film, suddenly discovered.
Real bought Listen.com for $36 million. I'm mystified.
Good Slate.com: Rating News Networks War Theme Songs.
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 Post claims 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.
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?
NYTimes compiles a slideshow of Saddam's image being defaced. And BBC had decoded Iraq's symbols of celebration.
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.
Not to be outdone by Apple, now Microsoft wants Universal Music.
Bukowski: Nazi. That's probably less of a shocker than it should be.
Roger Ebert trashes Kiarostami's Ten.
I'm pissed I owe Kottke nothing.
Pick your story: General Motors Should Pay CNN For Hummer Placement | CNN Joins Attack On Iraq.
Obligatory Z Magazine Chomsky interview link.
What a dull day. This is all I've got:
The Pioneer Press does a list of local bloggers. Guess which former Knight-Ridder employee is not a included. (Yes, I mean me.)
Got Wi-Fi? Wired's Unwired issue.
Mediapost calls IBS (where I toil all day) an "esoteric online giant." I'll take that as a compliment.
I predict buzz: Soft Pink Truth's Do You Party. It's the solo album from Drew Daneil of Matmos, which doesn't sound buzzworthy, but here's what the new Wired writes: "Daniel cuts up Yiddish comedy records, '70s public-service announcements, phone sex pranks, and other found material to produce and amazing, totally schizo album."
Roger Ebert was complaining the other day that no movie critic has won the Pulitizer for Criticism since he did in 1975. And then yesterday the Pulitzers were announced and Stephen Hunter from the Post won this year.
Semi-highbrow digital conference worth considering: Digital Genres: Semiotic Technologies this Side of the Millennium. And Berkeley is having another: Weblogs: Information & Society. If you're going to either one, let me know.
Videos are up from the "Connecting with the Wired Generation" conference I attended last week at Berkeley. I would recommend two items: 1) John Seely Brown's keynote gave an invigorating critique of the social life in the digital age. Brown, former director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), used the post-structural concept of bricolage to assemble and re-assemble a hermeneutics of the digital age. And 2) Playing Games and Gaming the News saw the world of game-makers (including Will Wright of SimCity fame) interface with journalists who have been using game-like environments to deliver news. (In addition, here's more recently archived video: Berkeley Multimedia Reporting Workshop and U of Texas Online Journalism Symposium.)
Waxy.org threatened to not read my site ever again if I didn't finally make an RSS feed. So here ya go. There might be some flaws in that XML -- if so, let me know. (I've been using the RSS-reader Syndirella, but Waxy says he now prefers SharpReader.)
The Guardian has an episode of Cribs with Saddam.
Today in Literature: On this day in 1950, J. D. Salinger's "For Esmé -- With Love and Squalor" was published in The New Yorker.
Music Notes:
Just cuz: Sigor Ros video.
Interview with Spike Jonze.
David Lee Roth to release solo album with covers of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Beatles, and the Steve Miller Band.
This is really quite cool. A comparison of street shots from Vertigo (1958) to what they look like now: Vertigo: Then And Now.
Essential Field Guide to Fox Blondes.
I'd really like a subscription to the Japanese magazine Brutus. So I checked Amazon. Wow, it's there. Uh, for $173.73/year. Maybe not.
This video from Death in Vegas is pretty rad.
New MIT Mediaworks pamphlet: Writing Machines.
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.
City Pages' War TV Glossary.
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.
Apple releases Final Cut Pro 4.0.
An addendum to Friday's puff about Goole News: Press Releases Now News For Google News. Press releases make it but blogs don't? Now I'm flustered.
I hope no one in downtown Oakland saw me waving the new laptop around like a couple of rabbit ears looking for a wifi spot. I also hope that you didn't see me wandering down Valencia in San Fran, looking for 826 Valencia, but unable to remember the numbers "826." And I would be pleased if you didn't notice me on the plane watching episode after episode of Six Feet Under on DVD while simultaneously reading Google Hacks. It's good to be home.
I don't even know where to categorize this in my feeble blog mind. The Gannett tv station in Cleveland did a story about a military firefighter who legally changed his named to Optimus Prime. That would warrant a link on Fark.com. But now, the website for that tv station has given him a blog. The hell?
Stop the presses. The Pope published a book of poetry.
Transcript to the interview that got Peter Arnett fired. Maybe he and Geraldo can get a gig together. (Actually, here's his debut column for the Daily Mirror, where he says, "I am still in shock and awe at being fired.")
USA Today thinks education is going to hell because of IM.
Eggers new magazine: Believer. Here's a L.A. Times article.
An oddly-detailed but appropriate photo correction from the L.A. Times that led to the photographer's dismissal.
I wonder if Maxim killed Gear.
Oh hell. The Minneapolis International Film Festival started today. I've got absolutely no time for this.
Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is now out on DVD.
I highly recommend this Terry Gross interview with Joseph Cirincione from the Non-Proliferation Project. And if you don't believe those fuzzy-headed liberals, try this Time piece, which backtracks the Bush agenda to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz' philosophy. Scary shit.
Slate's Paul Boutin: How to watch Iraqi TV on the Web.
Heh, CNN.com Goes To Font Size 72. There's also Waxy's remixed decapitation version of CNN.com.
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.
Nerve interview with Thomas Laqueur, the author of Solitary Sex: A History of Masturbation.
Good J. Hoberman Voice piece on the history of the Oscars during times of war.
New Italo Calvino posthumous autobiographical collection: The Hermit in Paris.
MUSIC NOTES:
A collection of Protest Song MP3s, currated by Thurston Moore and Chris Habib.
Also, R.E.M. has their own protest MP3.
Internal memo from MTV Europe recommending videos not to air during war.
Photo: The Strokes hanging with Justin Timberlake.
You call that a weekend?
Kate Brigham did her MFA thesis at the Massachusetts College of Art on Decoding Visual Language Elements in News Content. It examines how image selection, cropping, and rendering affect news pereception. The interactive demo is cool.
Even the Times has caught on to that Nebraska scene.
From the Department of Defense, the ground rules for being embedded (pdf).
That Ms. Barb Palser is quoted in this Wired article about trans-national media. Here is that great thinker's most recent AJR column, about internet style.
The new Don DeLillo novel is out: Cosmopolis.
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.
Looks like Google Hacks is out.
Kieslowski's Three Colors on DVD came out today. Not too bad a deal either -- $30 for all three.
Weird. James Marster (Spike on Buffy) has a band called Ghost of the Robot who sings a song called "David Letterman" (audio).
The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. (A Wizard of Earthsea [#5] seems high; The Man in the High Castle [#33] seems low.)
"Get Your War" Mr. Rogers tribute.
Ad Exec Hired to Improve U.S. Image Resigns. In other government PR news, Logo-contest.com has whittled it down to nine finalist Dept. of Homeland Security logos.
Microsoft's Three Degrees, a mix of P2P and IM for kids, is out. Why does it feel sinister?
Atlantic: Caring for Your Introvert.
Melissa Maerz of City Pages has a long, personal piece on Sims addiction and the breakdown of real and virtual worlds.
Those in the content industry (blech, what a dirty phrase!) will like Michael Wolff's column this week: Stop, Thief!
Buffy was so excellent last night. It's a sad thing too, because it looks like there's no future.
Did you know you can get the entire My So-Called Life series on DVD? Tempting.
Meetup is catching on in Islamabad. Not so bad in Brainerd, MN either.
I haven't talked about Today In Literature yet, but I've become a recent fan. Today, for instance, is the day Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes.
Interview with the Dell Dude, post-arrest.
It'll never happen, but I like Saddam's proposition to "debate" Bush. That's reality tv I'd watch.
Guggenheim's Matthew Barney exhibit. (Here's some stuff for sale. Patches?) Why do I have no trips to NYC planned this Spring?
And here I thought NASCAR was a dumb activity for under-sexed southerners. In reality, it's a testing grounds for complexity theory, social network analysis, and game theory.
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.
New interesting semantic web Daypop idea: Top Word Bursts.
The Economist asks: Is there really a market for a $20,000 mobile phone?
The Saddameter adds historical charts. Remember the days when it was around 50%? The Iraq Attack Pool says it will happen March 3.
My new t-shirt arrived. It rules.
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!"
Adbusters: celebrity endorsement.
Who's going to be at the Barnes & Noble in Edina, MN tonight? Me. And William Gibson.
Newsweek is talking about a new Microsoft peer community application for kids coming out next week.
Shift magazine has published its last issue.
Bono is a finalist for a Nobel. Right, next you'll tell me Kissinger got one.
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.
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.
Woo-hoo! Gaming as a form of activism, says this AP story.
Anderson Cooper Trivia. Son of Gloria Vanderbilt. Was almost Ricky Shroder. Hosted The Mole.
Worried about the repercussions of war? Consider buying your own hazmat suit from Yahoo Stores.
Taschen has a new book about the Jaybird naked revolution.
New Yorker Google cartoon.
For info-graphic geeks, the NYSE MarkeTrac from Asymptote has launched.
Times: Amazon.com gives up on tv ads.
Yet another William Gibson interview (Globe & Mail).
Coming to the Sci-Fi channel: Children of Dune.
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.
It's one of those weeks where you're pretty sure hanging up the profession and working in a coffee shop is a good idea. Just saying.
Romenesko's MediaNews is changing its named to just Romenesko because of some fascist newspaper owners. (Why didn't they just go back to MediaGossip?)
The jig is up, North Dakota boys.
Animatrix. First of nine episodes, four of which will be available online (the rest available on DVD).
Slate eulogizes Leslie Fiedler, who, to be honest, I sorta forgot about. Salon had an interview with him a couple months ago.
This article in The Register talks about Akamai's push with something called EdgeSuite. We have actually been one of the companies leading the charge in using and testing their product, which has some marvellous potential.
William Gibson's new book is out.
Slate: Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games.
Judging from Entertainment Weekly's Top 25 Simpsons episodes, it looks like 1993 was the hey-day.
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.
L.A. Times thinks the indie film is dead.
New Yorker on Tokyo Toys.
Hunter S. Thompson has a new book. He's interviewed in Salon.
The naked Courtney Love photo shoot for Q magazine.
Conservative rag National Review tears 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.
On attending the DVD Premiere Awards.
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.
New designer phone from Siemens.
Transcript of Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, and Howard Kurtz talking about Iraq.
Oh no, dear god, please don't make him cool. Justin Timberlake Jams With Flaming Lips.
Dave Barry officially gets a blog.
"I Want To Have Your Abortion," on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk.
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.
The New Yorker has a funny piece on surfing with post-parole Mitnick.
I'll be playing the State of the Union Drinking Game tonight.
Work thing I made: Watch The Super Bowl Ads And Vote For Your Favorite.
In Wired: Killing Kazaa.
Interview with Phillip K. Dick's son.
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.
Review of new Sam Fuller autobio, A Third Face.
David Fincher will direct Lords of Dogtown, originally a skateboarding feature story published in Spin that Soundbitten has posted.
Witold Rybczynski on Why We're All Venetians Now.
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.
Hmmm, which to buy, the $185 Dante Encyclopedia or the $150 Beckett on Film DVD Set? Oh, who am I kidding, the next month is dedicated to SimCity4.
The company I work for runs 60+ tv websites across the nation, and not one meteorologist showed up in Playboy's Hottest Weather Girl survey.
Last year, Ween was hired to write a jingle for Pizza Hut, which of course was rejected. But you knew it would eventually show up online.
Splendid. The video of Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," directed by Mark Romanek.
Sports Illustrated named their Top 100 Sports Books of All Time last month. I've read exactly one of them: End Zone, by Don DeLillo (#45).
I just noticed that Amazon.com seems to have started their "in-store pickup" idea. At least it's available for Get Your War On.
Guardian: Samuel Beckett quiz.
New Cory Doctorow short story in Salon. Doctorow's free download novel is also being touted.
Speaking of which, Future Tense has been pretty good lately.
Pitchfork gives a 9.0 rating to Out Hud's S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., which makes me happy.
I just randomly clicked on one of the films at the Sundance site, but my completely random choice is a marvelous attempt at hip-hop tv.
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.
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.
Dan Gilmour's Tech Forecast for 2003 and Salon's Top 10 Technology Predictions for 2003.
Times: review of the new Microsoft Smart Display and how it isn't the Tablet PC.
I haven't browsed Google Catalogs for a while, but I just noticed they have a bunch of old Facets catalogs.
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 City Pages "Artist of the Year" issues is always the best of its kind because it has no pretense to being comprehensive.
If you were planning to skip all the Top 10 lists this year, I ask you to try just this one: Smoking Gun's Favorite Mug Shots of 2002. My favorite will be the cover of my first novel.
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.
AdAge: The 20 Most Effective Ads Of 2002. (Toys R Us lands 3 of top 5.)
Flyguy -- is it a story? is it a game? -- is da bomb.
This year's Time Best And Worst includes a category for design, which I think is new, although comics is not.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys. If you need a refresher, the one at The New Yorker will help. See also: The Pepys Project.
A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, such as "The longest word with the five vowels in alphabetical order is PHRAGELLIORHYNCHUS".
Not sure what to make of NewsKnife yet.
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.
The big Voice Film Critics Poll this year has this top 10:
- Far From Heaven
- Y Tu Mamá También
- Adaptation
- Time Out
- Russian Ark
- Punch-Drunk Love
- What Time Is It There?
- The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
- Talk to Her
- About Schmidt
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."
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.
This is awesome. In a narrative much better than it sounds, Creative Commons uses the example of adding a bassist to the White Stripes as a metaphor for the internet and copyright.
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).
More ads: Nike Bike Messenger series.
Post has a piece about the legal dangers of blogging at work.
Wired News adds its version of a "weird news" category (which are showing up on all news websites lately): Furthermore.
New Times multimedia: Envisioning Downtown.
Usually one of the best Year In Review pieces of the year (how's that for meta?), Salon's year in tech is ho-hum this year.
CyberJournalist: Top Online Journalism Stories of 2002.
Todd Haynes is working on a Dylan biopic, according to AICN.
The Beast: 2002 Most Loathsome People in America.
Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums and Tiny Mixed Tapes' Top 20 Albums of 2002.
These are the 16 best albums of 2002, cuz I said so:
- Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
- Sonic Youth, Murray Street
- Boards of Canada, Geoggaddi
- Sigur Ros, ()
- Street Dad, Out Hud
- DJ Shadow, The Private Press
- Beck, Sea Change
- Low, Trust
- The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
- The Streets, Original Pirate Material
- Clinic, Walking With Thee
- Lambchop, Is A Woman
- Mum, Finally We Are No One
- Amon Tobin, Out From Out Where
- Felix da Housecat, Kittenz and Thee Glitz
- Tom Waits, Alice
And, yeah, just What Is It that makes Minnesota music critics so different, so appealing?
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.
McSweeney's: Items from the Neiman Marcus 2002 Christmas Book.
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.
Visionary architectural drawings over at MoMA: Changing of the Avant-Garde.
Amazon's best music of 2002.
From The Philosopher's Magazine: How To Be A Philosopher.
Flash movie for art history majors.
For local hipsters, I highly recommend Mel's Beauty Bar, which I crashed this weekend.
Over the weekend, I started to watch my new-found favorite anime: Serial Experiments Lain. Skip Ghost in the Shell and head here for complex anime.
Gamespot has a lengthy Sims Online feature.
Forget everything I said before about the design fad, because the Times Magazine has a special issue this week: Design.
Interview with Mark Frauenfelder.
Wired: In Search of a Better MapQuest.
Transcript of Johnny Cash on Larry King.
This Metafilter thread on comedian David Cross, who has a new album out on Sub Pop, caused me to coin a totally new concept: grunge comedy.
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.
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.
More on The Sims, this time from NY Times Mag. Same issue has a Steve Ballmer profile.
The new Tate Magazine has an interview with Matthew Barney.
Archive Your Life, brought to you by Microsoft.
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.
If you're into chess, check out The Atlantic's recent article on Bobby Fisher's Endgame.
Terminator 3 site is up.
Darwin Mag has another Jeff Bezos interview.
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.
Fimoc Band Name Of The Day: Cash.
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 tons of press 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.
Pitchfork finished up their Top 100 Albums of the '80s. I'm totally enthralled by #1: Daydream Nation.
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"?
IHT gives Audible.com a rave review.
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
On the newstand this month, I noticed that Punk Planet is retaliating the surge of goth porn with punk porn. Or maybe it's the same genre.
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.
New Beck video: "Lost Cause".
The person behind the marvelous Making Sense Of Duchamp has created an online version of Aspen, a multimedia art mag published from 1965 to 1971. Issue 3 is Warholian; issue 4, McLuhanesque; issue 8, Fluxus, issue 9, psychedelic. Here's some Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet audio to whet the whistle.
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.
Salon is offering a free one-day subscription to its premium content if you view a Mercedes advert. It might be worth it, to get ahold of this Steve Earle profile and Deconstructing Buffy.
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.
Slate: Is Nancy Pelosi Really That Liberal?
New Kevin Spacey / Kate Winslet movie: The Life Of David Gale.
It's not often that I call New Yorker articles important anymore, but I think David Remnick's take on Turkey and Orhan Pamuk is really worth your time. Print it, snuggle into bed with it, and dream, dream, dream.
Parker Posey sound files. "huh huh hello!"
Shift has an okay Top 10 Defining Moments In Digital Culture. Attaching dates to events that seem long ago is probably the most interesting aspect (Aug 1995: Suck.com launches; 1997: first MP3 online; July 31, 1998: Jenni on Letterman).
Umberto Eco interview in the new Bookforum.
I hadn't heard that Dan Savage has a new book out.
More scary attempts by Republicans to use Flash.
McSweeney's: Windows Messages, As If Rewritten By Scott, This Guy Who Bullied Me In Second Grade.
I remember not too long ago when those handheld DVD players came out, priced around $1200. Now there's one for $200.
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.
I just give the headlines, you make up your own mind whether to gasp: Mariah Carey Covers Def Leppard On New Album.
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 Pages looks 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.
The Times has its way with Grand Theft Auto.
Things overheard at the STD clinic.
The Solaris remake website has launched.
The text archive, textZ has relaunched. 677 experimental, avant-garde, and theory-driven texts.
I missed this story from last week: North Dakota is considering paying college grads $10,000 to stay in the state for five years after graduating.
I received my very first PayPal donation today. Thanks Waxy! If you feel like contributing to the cause that is Fimoculous, here are your options.
I saw They Might Be Giants last night. That's weird.
The first BMW film of the second season is out: Hostage, directed by John Woo.
Wow, ever wanted to know what Kabukicho (the sex district of Tokyo) was like? Well, here ya go. (As they say in the chat rooms: sorta not safe for work.)
I need a last-minute Halloween getup.
42 hours of Buckminster Fuller online video: Everything I Know.
Betamax videoboxes and shells.
Japanase kids are suffering from an isolated psychological disease -- modern hermits. Weird.
Buffy fans are all bubbly over the new Once More With Feeling CD. I'm not biting, but here's a medley if you're curious. While you're at it, rate the buffy look-alike.
Datecam is using the Flash Comm Server to interesting success.
Black People Love Us. Dot-com.
In the rat-a-tat-tat of new post-industrial cultural forms, I had never heard of machinima (despite the Wired story I somehow missed). Although the elision of machine and cinema sounds like a Debordian/Cronenbergian hybrid, machinima is actually more fimoculean. (That is officially the first use of the adjective form of fimoculous. OED, here I come.) It refers generally to short films that are recorded and viewed in real time on a computer. Specifically, machinima is playing a video game in such a way as to create narrative scenes which are recorded and played back as legit movies. Excavating popular interactive forms (games, digital media) for traditional narrative (character, plot) is mind-bogglingly cool to me. Over the weekend, I watched a dozen of these filmlets at a Walker festival, Quake! Doom! Sims!, Transforming Play: Family Albums and Monster Movies. The curator, Katie Salen -- who worked on Linklater's Waking Life, is a contributing editor at Res, and is currently working on a new release for the Xbox Broadband initiative -- guided the audience of digi-film fans and gamers through various forms of Jackassian juvenalia and Warholian ennui. I want more.
p.s. Sorry, today it was either talk about machinima, or ceaseless Cobain memorbillia and the new the new Doonesbury blogger. Machinima won.
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 Books disses the new Umberto Eco novel.
Powerpoint Anthology of Literature.
The Japanese Apple Switch Campaign proves bodily language and Microsoft distrust are universal.
Boing Boing has a link to a surreal Urdu advert implicating Coke as "drinking the blood of martyred Palestinians."
New unreleased Morrissey songs.
Coming out on DVD tomorrow: Pavement's Slow Century and Jarmusch's Down By Law.
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.
Slate.com is so good at answering the questions of the day: What Happens to Recalled Meat? and Why Are Congressional Web Sites (Usually) Worthless?
National Post looks at Eggers and selling out.
Krispy Kreme nutritional information (PDF).
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.
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.
Stephen Ambrose has died.
Nerve has an interview with Irvine Welsh about his new book, Porno.
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.
A.S. Byatt asks what constitutes a European identity? in The Times.
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.
I think this is new. I'm not even sure. It looks like Amazon.com has "beta" categories for "Industrial Suppplies" and "Car Parts" and "Medical Supplies".
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.
New Voice Literary Supplement.
The Guardian investigates the radical Iranian underground.
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.
Slashdot thread on Alternative Media Art.
This is not The Onion: Punk fans set rock critic straight about their scene.
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.
The New Republic has a Guide to the Iraq Debate. The same issue also asks is Zadie Smith a pseudonym for Dave Eggers?
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.
Times op-ed: Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again.
More Buffy stuff: The Door Theologian of the Year. And season three on DVD finally has a release date: Jan. 7, 2003.
Should the media refer to Iraqi president as 'Saddam' or 'Hussein'?
Yikes, the Times Mag is gonna run a 68-page bank ad next week.
Pretend it's Friday, and spend your afternoon with the Theban Mapping Project.
Or just Hold The Button.
It's Microsoft Day here at Fimoculous. First, the office of the future. And Windows MediaPlayer 9 (beta) is out. And finally: pressthegreenbutton, the official band of the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
I had this very idea a few months ago. Glad someone made it: Make Your Own Bush Speech.
Get ready to adjust the pop culture lexicon, cuz you're gonna start hearing this word over and over: Crave. I unboldly predict Calvin Klein's new cologne will be enormously ridiculed and adored by millions.
What's the font called? You know what it looks like, but you don't know what it's called. Answer questions at IndentiFont to identify font names.
Ten Things I Hate About Tom Cruise.
New Ring trailer.
McSweeney's has a new Kurt Vonnegut interview Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.
I like getting asked to recommend books to people. A favorite answer of mine is Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. A visitor passed on a new book that made me think of it: Reel Shame. It has its own website.
The Guardian compares 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.
Just Switch, monkey.
TalkingPoints says Christopher Hitchens is leaving The 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.
A few days ago I linked to HelpMeLeaveMyHusband.com. Now there's a parody: HelpJesusSavePenny.com
Buffy season premiere is tonight. I could give you tons of links to tons of spoilers, but let's not bother this time.
Beck is on Morning Becomes Eclectic this morning. Also, Emmanuelle has hedged her assessment about Beck and Scientology. Read the interview. Q: "So, are you a member?" A: "As I said, I've been around it my whole life." Beck is on the Tonight show tomorrow night.
For the digi-art set, Mark Amerika has a new piece up: Film Text. Interesting use of placing chrome Flash interfaces over real landscapes.
"The Bomb Project is a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation."
I missed the local Blog Meetup and the Slashdot Meetup, but by the looks of the latter, it was a geek emporium.
For geeks: the new specs for XHTML 2.0 are almost finished, and there's a lot to start thinking about, such as no more <br> and <b>, and adding href to common attribute collection, which enables things like <li href="http://www.fimoculous.com">.
NBC might buy Bravo.
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."
The very popular link Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About has been turned into a novel.
Time has a pretty good Tarantino story, looking at his upcoming film Kill Bill.
Salon has a piece about big-name genre writers like Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Carl Hiaasen and Isabel Allende who are also doing children's lit.
The guy who made rock criticism relevant in the sociological sense, Simon Frith is interviewed over at RockCritics.com.
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.)
There's also an interview with Garry Kasparov.
Onion A/V: Sarah Vowell interview. Meanwhile, blogger Dawn Olsen has a Neal Pollack interview.
Jeanette Winterson on 007. She says James Bond is a girl.
Hurry, hurry, get there. Analogue Roam has some new Radiohead tracks.
Take 40 percent Twin Peaks, 40 percent X-Files, and 20 percent Traffic, and there you have Push, Nevada. The second episode was last night, and I found myself jogging to the computer to look at websites related to the show. The newest find: Sprint's Push, Nevada website, which says it will publish a wireless version of The Push Times. There's also a elliptical yet "official" arty website, a book coming out next month, a Yahoo Groups email list, and an unofficial community website collecting secrets and clues to the million-dollar prize. What is in that coffee?
Joss Whedon's new show, Firefly, premiers tonight. (Spoilers.)
All the Buffy spoilers you could want (scroll down half-way). Also, from Christianity Today: "Don't Let Your Kids Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (but you can tape it and watch after they go to bed)"
For locals, Sound Unseen starts tonight.
Creepy digi-art: R-A-N-D-O-M-com
You know, I've been wondering where the hell Dirty Vegas came from. Finally, Slate.com explained it to me.
Hilarious parody of the new Rollings Stone.
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.)
All the critics are talking about The Rise of Anthony Lane today.
Jeremy Allaire, the guy who created ColdFusion and the current CTO of Macromedia (and the guy whose software I use all day), has his own blog.
Jacques Herzog, who designed the new Tate and the Walker expansion here in town, attacks the MoMA and the Gehry Bilbao Guggenheim.
Wow. Cup Stacking Champion Video.
Beck and Flaming Lips announce tour dates. The tour opens here in Minneapolis.
Audio: Wallace Steven's "The Snowman" recited into voice-mail from a cell phone while parked at various locations.
I don't know if the original 9/11 thread at Metafilter was the largest (492 comments), but the new thread on The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy (which I blogged in friggin March) looks like it could be a contender.
Saddam as Britney? According to PBS Frontline, every night Iraqi television broadcasts a Saddam Hussein music video. The site has actual video for two of them. Stunning.
Internet = Weird. Barbie dolls dressed up as movie stars. "My Shirley Temple" is creepy. Ultimately weird, is the faux Sharon Stone with a link to "Adult Content" at the bottom of the page.
Salon: Forbidden Thoughts About 9/11.
Jeff Tweedy and Jim O'Rourke recorded album together.
For edgy lit types, BookPunk has videos from So New Media Punk/Lit Jam.
Gawd, I can remember the first issue of USA Today, and it turns 20 years old this week. Interview with the publisher.
If you're looking to surf the blogosphere, I suppose this is the place to go.
Kurt Cobain's Childhood Home on sale at eBay.
One year ago today, I got on a plane headed toward Hong Kong. While over the Pacific, airplanes were flying into skyscrapers back home. Hong Kong, already a mysterious and contradictory place, came to signify all things ponderous about the world.
Robert Pinsky 9/11 poem.
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.
Ad Age magazine ran a poll a couple weeks ago about fashion, food, and technology preferences among ad people. The results. (See also on Ad Age: Aeropostale's music-video-length advertisement shown on MTV [video].)
Two good McSweeney's lists this week: Crayola Crayons Included in Its New Hollywood Box and Vocabulary Words We Learned by Playing Dungeons & Dragons.
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.
I'm very excited. I just got June Panic's new album in the mail. (Previously: college friends who've punched me.)
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.)
The Guardian has an excerpt of the new Zadie Smith novel, The Autograph Man. And an interview.
Sunday Times Mag has a huge spread on the Twin Towers. You can spend all afternoon there.
The L.A. Times almost flatly says Biggie paid for Tupac's murder. Good long-form investigative journalism. Spend your evening there.
New Almodovar flick.
New Stereolab site.
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 dumb Maxim 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).
Super deal on the Pocket PC Phone at Amazon.com. And Nokia has announced a new camera phone.
Sullivan replies: "Hi Kurtie, Does anyone ever call you Kurtie? I assume not."
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.)"
CP thinks the Xenakis remix album (and I had to search in the "Classical" section of Amazon to find it) is good.
I guess I shouldn't be so befuddled by AJR profiling The Onion, but yet I am.
For local-yocals, mark your calendars (Sept. 20-27) for one of the events that makes these twin cities great: Sound Unseen.
Also for locals, my pal Brooke Burgess of Broken Saints is speaking at the Walker tonight. Broken Saints just finished up chapter 20, and it's become an amazing story.
Absolutely excellent: Classic Video Game TV Commercials. Nothing will take you back like 1983's Mario Bros and 1981's Discover Atari and 1982's ET Christmas Atari.
Will Self thinks John Gray is a genius.
Parody: GroundZeroThemePark.com
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.
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.)
Tony Pierce has something like a Sonic Youth review.
A new Danny Boyle film, 28 Days Later, has a soundtrack by one of my favorite bands, Godspeed You Black Emperor!.
Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" has been submerged for over a decade, but falling water levels of the Great Salt Lake have caused it to re-emerge.
Gallery of Imagined Sci-Fi Cities.
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.
I pretty sure I've never said this in my life, so here goes: I need a vacation. So where should I go? I'm leaning toward either Paris or Japan. Yeah, like usual with me: culture or technology?
Barb has a new AJR column, a comparison between tv and newspaper websites. It was the first time she's actually asked me to read it before sending it to the editors. (I've pretened to not be offended by this, but she claims it was because I give critcism that destroys entire tracts.) At this very moment, Barb is somewhere in Kentucky, en route to Minneapolis after leaving her one-year stint at Poynter.org and coming home.
There's been a lot of buzz about the new Tablet PC coming out this Fall. They're expensive, but Anil Dash thinks they'll survive, so I do now too.
Hah, I just caught a flash of a re-run of the MTV Music Video Awards, and they have removed the Eminem-Moby death match.
Last Nov. 4, I made reference to an article in the sci-fi zine Ansible about the title of Asimov's Foundation being translated to Arabic as "Al-Qaeda." The potential significance of this discovery first sprung from a Russian sci-fi website (!) in October (article here). I followed that up two days later with comments from a Jordanian journalist. Then, a couple weeks ago, I received an email from a journalist at The Guardian named Giles (this seemed noteworthy to me: a journalist from England named Giles -- of course!), asking about the connection. I put him in contact with the Jordanian acquantance. And now, his article has just come out in The Guardian. I highly recommend you read it, not only because it's a fascinating tale of language and literature and terror, but also because I feel as though I'm a very small part of this whole epic, like a lesser monk in an Umberto Eco story. (Late add: Colin Brayton, a blogger and Arabic speaker, has a strongly worded critique of this connection.)
The best news I've heard in a long time: Lingua Franca might return.
Drudge: future of MSNBC in doubt.
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.
Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins (qt video).
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.
Another great new McSweeney's list: Local TV Weatherman or Porn Actor?
There was a lot of talk last week about the new blog Gizmodos, mainly because someone (writer Pete Rojas) is getting paid to blog. (Megnut also has a new column on Blogging for Dollars.) Anyway, today it pointed me to these new gadgets: Sharp's Portable Video Player and Mitsubishi's Pocket PC Phone.
Spectacular trailer for Naqoyqatsi.
The Ring, starring Namomi Watts (Mulholland Drive), looks promising. (Trailer.)
There goes the neighborhood. blogs4God: Semi-Definitive List of Christian Blogs.
New DeLillo short story and a Murakami excerpt.
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.)
It's Duchamp for Dummies (redundant?), but Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp is still neat.
One year ago today at Fimoculous: Scary Politics.
If you know David Sedaris, you know his redneck brother, The Rooster. Some Rooster news for you: he just got married, he has his own hardwood floor company, and he's selling You Can't Kill The Rooster T-shirts.
Potentially great news: This American Life stories might be made into movies.
NY Times Magazine interviews 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.
Sunday Music Supplement:
Liza Richardson is the Music Director at KCRW and she's in the Apple Switch campaign.
Beck has officially told MTV that The Flaming Lips will become his backing band on tour. Also, be sure to listen to KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic interview and peformance with The Lips.
The Nation has more predictable Dylan reflections.
Neil Strauss on the Rise and Fall of the Backstreet Boys.
Review of Autechre's Gantz Graf EP.
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.
Just one of the many college friends who at one point punched me and is now quasi-famous, June Panic has a new album out soon. I'm having fun with Amazon.com. I made my first list: College Friends Who Punched Me. All true.
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.
My roommate made an insane movie.
New favorite Buffy quote:
Willow: You think I'm boring.
Oz: I'd call that a radical interpretation of the text.
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."
More new G-rated Iranian feminism: Secret Ballot (trailer).
SEPTEMBER:
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 Guardian review). 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.
DECEMBER:
Scorsese is back with Gangs of New York. I fear a dud.
SPRING:
Prozac Nation finally arrives. Or, actually, Christina Ricci finally returns.
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.
Where have I been? Did you know that Steven Soderbergh is directing an adaption of Solaris? Stanislaw Lem's novel is one of my favorite SF works, and I'm just itchin to see how this version (starring Clooney!) will compare to Tarkovsky's. From the trailer, it looks like it's out in December.
Still in the SF department, I recently stumbled across this collection of electronica/dance remakes of sci-fi soundtracks.
I love it when people insist that we should all be dumber. "I'm not stupid, you're pretentious," is the battle cry of these morons. If Annie Proulx is too difficult for you, think about going back to Dick and Jane, y'alright? Seriously claiming that Stephen King is a better writer than Don DeLillo should get you a public lashing. The book in question, A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, is based on this essay from the Atlantic Monthly.
For theory-headz: Jacques Derrida's eulogy of Gilles Deleuze.
Sight and Sound poll of 145 critics and 108 directors indicates that I like the director's list more than I like the critic's list.
I hope this can start a trend. Maybe it's called "literary flash art." Beckett's Bounce.
I just added a one year ago today link over there to the right under the calendar. It will automatically update whatever I posted here exactly a year ago.
And, of course, Friday fun: classic video games done in Flash.
We had an interesting "ethicial judgement" around the office recently. You know this story about the two teenage girls in California who were kidnapped and raped? First, in an effort to help find the kidnapped teens, the media released the pictures and names of the victims. Then, after they were found, the media had to stop running their pictures and names because they were suddenly now minors who had been assaulted. But then, days later, they were already self-appointed celebrities, appearing on tv programs like the Today show, at which point running their pictures became normal again. Phew, ethics really falls apart in world of big media and floating identity.
Submit your own WTC site proposal. (via Scrubbles, which has become a regular visit.)
I generally enjoy HowStuffWorks.com, but How Knuckle Cracking Works was precisely what I wanted to know today.
Gimme. Reservoir Dogs Action Figures.
Better commuting vehicles?
Saturday morning cartoons schedules from the '50s to present.
A geek's heaven: The Ladies Of Star Trek. Is that Bjork?
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.
More digi-art: Mark Amerika's FilmText. And since we're in the mood: Katuso and Life Is Simple.
I'm not exactly sure what Disciple Films is, but it contains some interesting projects.
Taboo Surfing: Click Here for Iran... ...And Click Here for China.
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.
The place to be seen in NYC: Michael's.
Too much linking to the Times today, but this story about the malleability of a pop star is just too good.
Dear god, I'm full of links today. Hang 10:
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.
Salman Rushdie has a WTC Memorial idea.
Until it's officially released August 27, Aimee Mann is streaming her entire next album online.
Remember that Adobe vs. Macromedia lawsuit? Well, it's over, but this isn't very revealing.
Forget Google's zeitgeist, I'd much rather know if Adorno is beating Deleuze or Godard is trouncing Truffaut at TextZ's own zeitgeist page.
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.
New Michelle Yeoh flick: The Touch. (Trailer.)
Peter Greenaway: "Cinema is dead." He said this at the opening for his exhibition of paintings. Knuck, knuck.
The guys who wrote Dow 36,000 still think it will happen.
Fascinating video of Philo T. Farnsworth from 1957 game show "I've Got a Secret."
McSweeney's: The Graffiti of Minneapolis. "Eden Prairie Sucks."
I finished reading Snow Crash last week, and now I'm on to Survival City by Tom Vanderbilt. The subtitle is "Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America," and the first sentence is "I want to get to where the Cold War is still ending in America, so I set out after sunrise one early July morning from Grand Forks, North Dakota, bearing west on U.S. 2." I'm gonna love this book. Vanderbilt has written similar pieces touching on Cold War architecture for Metropolis and ArtByte.
Here are the results of the new media convening I was part of a couple weeks back: What New Technologies Could Mean For Journalists. We also had a session in which we tried to imagine what the future of news holds for us. We each took on personas of an imagined media food chain. The outcomes.
What the critics are saying (worse than I expected) about Wilco's I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (trailer).
This might be cooler than the day that I learned Mathew Barney and Bjork were having a kid: Wong Kar-Wai directs DJ Shadow video.
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.
Hmmm, curious: blogs.salon.com.
Wired News profiles Karin Spitzer of No-Time.
Scoobie Davis media pranks Ann Coulter.
Coming soon: SMS TV.
Blasphemy! The Voice slags Sonic Youth.
Forbes maps the billionaires.
NoMoreEnrons.com has a movie that explains it all.
The hardest game ever. (But, yes, there is a way to win.)
The Times looks at the new Metroplis.
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?
Speaking of tv, Who Would You Kill On: Sex and the City | The Simpsons | Buffy | The A-Team | The X-Files | etc.
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.
In Europe, Nokia has released a new multimedia imaging phone, which this article suggests will lead to all sorts of subversive nastiness.
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?
Gimme. Frank Zappa's 1975 Rolls-Royce for sale on eBay.
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 Mag profiles 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").
Slate.com takes on worldwide Barbie, with surprising results.
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.
Neat thesaurus (never really thought I'd say that).
Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.
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.
Stupid Emmys slight Buffy again. In other Buffy news, I've finished the first season DVD, and have moved on to the second. The first ends with a horrible deus ex machina, but the second might be the single best season.
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.)
Lucky you, another theme issue: Music!
Just cuz: Debbie Gibson at Britney Spears' new restaurant.
Nostalgia: The Boombox Museum
The best file-sharing guide: How to Survive Without Audiogalaxy.
How bad is radio today? This bad. "Only the best parts of your favorite songs." Ugh.
I had no idea how gay I was: Top 40 Gay Songs.
Continuing their excellent (yet poorly named) "Masterpiece" series, Salon.com looks at The Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food.
Can you own silence? If you're John Cage, maybe.
The new Flaming Lips album doesn't come our for a couple weeks, but they have the entire thing available online
Where's Tarantino? Apparenlty, he's in Japan finishing up work on his latest exploitation film, Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman. Here's a cheat sheet and here's an interview with Tarantino translated from English to Chinese and back to English again. Ain't It Cool News has more inside scoop, including some information on the Japanese girl punk band The 5,6,7,8's (listen to them here) whose music is apparently in the film. Buy their stuff before all the other kids on the block love them.
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.
Gimme! Naked People Clothes.
The 2002 Sci-Tech Web Awards from Scientific American.
Three of the 10 biggest films of all time are in theaters right now.
This World Cup application is a really good example of when Flash can display information better than HTML.
Geeky and urban at the same time: Build Your Own Cityscape.
Cheap Hotels from Taschen Books looks like it might be my kind of coffee table book.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is 30 years old. An interview with Hunter.
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.
My first official summer activity: went to the Farmer's Market today with mom.
The wonderful Mirror Project is one year old. Fimoculous has a birthday in a week too.
The National Trust Historical Preservation 11 Most Endangered Historic Places now includes The Guthrie. That's bad news for The Walker.
NYC Flash Forward 2002 finalists announced. I spent the last two hours perusing those sites.
Is Russ Meyer, "the closest thing America has produced to Rabelais," really an artist?
Yahoo is going to redesign its front page to become more advertiser-friendly. Great screengrab of Yahoo's first homepage (wow, remember that?).
Sunday Times Mag has the theme of Money this week. There is the success story about Advanced Book Exchange and the non-success story of eToys.com. There's also a slideshow that looks at seven families who have nearly the exact median income of an America household ($54,400). Of course it must contain the proverbial family from Fargo.
I'm gonna say this once and only once: if you think blogging is about journalism, you really aren't aspiring to utopian moment of the medium, are you?
Slate.com is doing something interesting. Each morning this week, Nora Ephron and Kurt Anderson write little emails to each other about the media/culture of the day. What intrigues me is how it feels like conversations I have with friends -- synchronously personal and professional, intimate and public. I also love them because they sound like the only people in the world who consume more media than me.
The new DJ Shadow album is getting rave reviews (and so is that website). Haven't heard it yet, but I'm liking the new Flaming Lips.
Throwback in time: the guy that used to design the Dungeons & Dragons art has his own website.
The Lost Love Project sees people leave stories behind of, yup, lost love. Read 'em or leave 'em.
Loooooooonnnng (sorry, not feeling up to it tonight) City Pages article about the Twin Cities Literary Scene, written sorta like a guide book, but not quite pulled off as a navigable interface.
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.
Actor websites are always funny: JeffBridges.com
All this time I had thought Spielberg owned the rights to Ender's Game. However, it looks like it's finally being made into a movie, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, without him.
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....
Four Cannes stories: Mike Leigh Gives Hollywood The Finger | Adam Sandler In New P.T. Anderson Flick | Cronenberg's New Film, Spiders | Rosanna Arquette Doesn't Make Yesterday's Fimoculous List.
This is the first time I've felt squeamish about linking to something. Rotten.com has digitized the Daniel Death Pearl Propaganda Video.
Eric Alterman starts a blog (on MSNBC.com).
The Onion: Factual Error Found On Internet. Even has a quote from WIRED editor Paul Boutin.
Silkworm (remember them?) presents the Musical Correctness Calculator, based upon the Musical Correctness Scale.
Brooke Gladstone of On The Media is writing a column in Slate.com this week.
When HurryDate just isn't fast enough, try SpeedDating. Or RapidDating. Or, hell, how about 8 Minute Dating.
McSweeney's: Hardy Boys Novel Or Death Metal Album?
Good Winona gossip, about the self-deprecating episode of SNL.
Google is showing off some of its test products at Labs.Google.com. New things include a glossary, voice search, and keyboard shortcuts.
Crazy internet. Big, Beautiful Women Figurines.
Stephen Jay Gould has died. Looking back, here's a Mother Jones interview with him from 1997.
Thought Abercrombie & Fitch went too far last time? How about thong underwear for 10-year-olds.
Oh, alright, one more. Which Osbourne Are You?
Review of Belle And Sebastian's soundtrack to the flop Storytelling.
NPR's Geoffrey Nunberg has a piece (audio) on the term "blog" and the evolution of internet technology language.
Strange things found on Amazon:
Death Sticks
Rapid Ice Beer Chillers
Wine Saver Set
Litecubes 6 Pack
3-Car Complete Train Bar Set
Cow Vac
Homer Simpson e-Pal
The Best of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner
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.
The Strib somehow managed to find someone in Raleigh with a Swedish name to hire as its new editor.
This sucks. Politically Incorrect is being replaced with a show by Jimmy Kimmel. Not only that, but there's going to be a Maxim TV Network.
I should be in Norwich in October. For the first Buffy The Vampire Slayer conference, that is. I think I'd present on.... "Buff bodies, cool clothes."
The first season of The Transformers is available on DVD.
I've updated my Wish List with a bunch of DVDs.
I know, I said I was gonna stop linking to these, but I can't help it: Which Pixies Song Are You? (I'm "In Heaven".)
In Japan, the new Sony Vaio is out. Back here at home, I've decided not to get the Handspring Treo, and am waiting for the Nokia 9210i.
So You Wanna: Be An Indie Rock Expert? | Be A Vegan | Enjoy Sushi | Be A Model | Donate Sperm.
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.
Vanity Fair names Chelsea Clinton a sex symbol.
Still dwelling on architecture stuff: How to Build Skyscrapers, from City Journal.
If you haven't seen it yet, the Guerilla News Network is worth a peak. Radical politics served up as white Verdana on a black background. Hmmm....
If anyone knows anything about Vixen Highway, a Russ Meyers-ish flick filmed here in Minneapolis, please let me know. I'm so curious...
Stephen Ambrose finally responds to the plagiarism charges (after telling you he has cancer).
MediaBistro.com interviews Jeannette Walls.
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?
Where's Winona? Well, one place you'll find her is in a new Adam Sandler movie (preview). Sigh, poor Winona.
If you're up for a hefty read, the official World Trade Center Building Performance Study is out. I missed the NOVA special about why the towers collapsed, which I hear was good.
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.
The aforementioned new Wilco record is selling well. (Thanks Rob.)
Nipples as artwork. (Thanks Sheldon.)
Erik Natzke's interactive visual-sound-mixer contribution to the new Sky Blue site is sweet.
Next summer's blockbuster, Ang Lee's The Hulk (with trailer), is causing San Franciscan headaches.
RockCritics.com does an interview with Sarah Zupko, the brains behind PopMatters.com and PopCultures.com.
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.
A Glossary Of Hardboiled Slang.
What's the first word you want to type into the American Sign Language Fingerspeller?
Profile of the guy who writes the "Ethicist" column for the NYTimes Magazine.
New TV Guide: 50 Greatest Shows Of All Time.
2002 Webby Nominations announced.
Dickens: The First True Celebrity.
Gary Glitter has been hiding in.... Cambodia?
StCloudSuperman.com. I have no idea.
While we're at it: Minnesota's Roadside Architecture
I'm all about the Good Things In Life today. Here are some.
The new issue of my recently-decided-upon favorite magazine, Index, arrived today. It's such a delightful little thing. I mean, can you do something as cool as have Ian Svenonius interview Howard Zinn?
Saturday night's Iron Chef was the sushi episode. It was so excellent. It made me happy to be home alone on a Saturday night.
I listened to the new Wilco all day. Great record. It's somewhere between "The Flaming Lips suddenly remebers they're from Texas" and "What Neil Young promised but never delivered." The New Republic and PopMatters have reviews. Distance has a way of making love understandable....
The Russian Avant-Garde Book. I should be using that art history minor to make such good things.
Slate.com: The Filming of Philip K. Dick. Good writing, but butter thinking, just like Dick. It also tells me that Richard Linklater might direct A Scanner Darkly.
Amazon.com sent me a reminder last week about my encroaching birthday. Thanks Amazon. Thanks so, so, so much for reminding me. They told me to update my Wish List and send it to people. But I could never....
A work-thing I made for the 10-Year L.A. Riots Anniversary (today).
Jarmusch's Mystery Train brought to life in one picture: Japanese tourists in Bethlehem.
The Onion: U.S. Children Getting Majority Of Antibiotics From McDonald's Meat. I wonder what nutritional components will be in the new Vanilla Coke.
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?
The Sightseer's Guide To Engineering is a database of supposedly great engineering accomplishments. Here's the entry for the Mall of America.
Natalie Portman: college scribe. And here's the letter.
Are men afraid of successful women? In her much-commented-upon April 10 column, Maureen Dowd thinks so. Bruce Epstein at the Observer retorts.
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.
I went back to North Dakota recently for the annual writer's conference. I left the Grand Forks / Fargo region soon after the flood of '97. Grand Forks was in shambles, and so was my life after losing everything I ever owned in a fire. On the return visit, I was surprised to see the town revitalized, at least structurally. All the boarded store fronts of downtown were gone, replaced with new businesses or public space and sculpture. But this is all superficial reconstruction. I wondered how the city might actually have changed on the inside, from the cultural center. Two good signs were the magazine Agricouture, which "focuses on the new economy and the underground-marginal and youth culture in all its forms, on campus and off" and the related website, VastLane.org, a blog of culture/politics in the region. When I was there, there were a handful of us who worked really hard to make it a stimulating place to live, I'm so happy people are still fighting the fight against regional ennui.
Sonic Youth's website has become pretty intense.
BMW makes a skateboard ?
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.
Neat animated map of London's Tube.
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."
I linked to the 300 Most Common English words a week ago, and now Bruce Sterling has turned them into a story.
Wow, Punk Karoake in my neighborhood (thanks truck).
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.
The Biography of a Cow from The Times.
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.
It's Music Day, here at Fimoculous.
NY Times Magazine has a music issue, featuring Moby, Mingus, The Breeders, Barry Manilow, and Beck's 198-Track Mind. Kevin Kelly's piece about how we will get music in the future is also worthwhile, and Chuck has a piece about a Guns 'N Roses cover-band.
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.
Gallery of defaced Britney posters in NYC subways.
Me! Me! Me! I want to go so bad! Ted Nugent Kamp For Kids.
Newsweek reviews The Osbournes.
The Top Ten Gayest Songs Ever! Pac Man Fever?
It's not online, but the new issue of Magnet is pretty good. "The History of Shoegazing" rocks.
35 Things Every Rock Critic Should Know.
For reasons that I certainly can't appraise, even Slate.com is writing about Dan The Automator.
"No Future: U.K. Punk And The Philosophy Of Émile Durkheim".
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....
Google just added a news search (beta).
Hm-mmm. Graphic Designer's Judgement Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In.
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).
Of course you already bought the first season, but now the second season of Buffy on DVD is soon to be released.
Did you know you can't be an ATHEIST in Florida?
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.
I bought No Logo a while ago, and still haven't read it. Naomi Klein has a new essay in the Guardian: America Is Not A Hamburger.
Wanna piss off people? Try making a Hitler Action Figure.
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.
What Pre-1985 Video Game Character Am I?
The Incredible Rubberband Machine Gun!
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.
Tired and cold and sad, but let's see if the internet can shake us up, okay?
For those of you of that persuasion, the new Star Wars trailer is out: Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Here's one for you to scoff at: Buffalo Daughter is better than Cibo Mato. I'm not saying that to be contrarian, or to start an argument with someone who wants to tell me that we shouldn't compare them simply because they're both female Japanese electronic/hip-hop duos. I'm saying it only because it is true. Go buy I.
Hearing Voices contains a fine a collection of obscure radio pieces.
Yahoo has rolled out its new mapping software, after they shrugged of AOL-subsidiary MapQuest.
Fast Food simulation: a day in the life of a McDonald's employee.
Romenesko gets profiled by USAToday.
Hm, nope. Still cold and empty. Let's hope tomorrow is better, eh?
Let's call it Magazine Day at Fimoculous:
Well, golly. USA Weekend must be quivering in its shoes, cuz Parade Magazine has a new website. Check out What People Earn. And of course there's Marilyn vos Savant. But who cares, since she's wrong all the time.
FILM: The new Cineaste has a nice collection of Cassavetes articles. MUSIC: The new Wire has Kim Gordon on the cover.
NEW: Failure Magazine, a new zine dedicated to analyzing failures. Fat Channel, a showcase for "fashion, architecture, taste."
The print New Yorker this week profiles Patti Smith. Online, there's a guide to Smith's recordings.
The Osbournes starts tonight, and Chuck, who lived with Ozzy for a couple days, is supposed to have an article in Spin about it soon.
Momus has an article in this month's Metropolis about furniture after 9-11. But it's more interesting than that sounds. I've already mentioned it, but I've also enjoyed Momus' Thought of the Day page.
I am in utter shock. Columbia Journalism Review is saying that women's magazine are full of lies.
I've read through the first issue of The Rake, a new Twin Cities magazine. While some of the editorials long for '90s alterna-politics and snarky publishing (and, well, on some days, so do I), cheeky stories about the salt on the roads and bridge suicides give it some of that Suck.com quality we forgot we've missed.
And, finally, I just want to say that the state of magazines has never been worse in my lifetime. There was a time when I stopped by the newsstand and wrestled between 8 and 10 issues to take home. Now, I scrape out with The Wire and some weird fleeting thing, and that's it. Where, oh where, have you gone Lingua Franca? Speak? Grand Royal? Option? Hell, I'd even take Mondo 2000. This isn't even mentioning all the passed online zines like Feed and Suck. And it's not like something new has replaced these bygone beauties. We lose Factsheet 5 and get O in return? Hell, not even the mostly-sucky Talk or Brill's Content survived. When I was in college, we made fun of Details. I had no idea that it could get even worse (Maxim). Is there a story here? What happened? Who's to blame? Why on earth am I reduced to having a subscription to EW?
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.
FOX does it again. A new show will feature boxing matches between celebrities, including Amy Fisher vs. Tonya Harding.
Also on FOX, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore duke it out.
The Guardian does something funny: condenses Elizabeth Wurtzel's new book down to 400 words.
Going back in time: from 1979, Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno.
This week's City Pages asks: Penny/Pen-pinching at the Strib? Also, a somewhat inventive piece about 24 hours in Twin Cities music.
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.
An interview with Slavoj Zizek in the new Bad Subjects.
For those sorry Gen X saps out there: Say Anything is coming out on DVD.
Good piece from Michael Lewis on Satellite Subversives in Iran.
Thanks to everyone who sent soup recipes. And to those who suggested additional cover songs.
Today, a special feature: Fimoculous Radio. Well, it's both better and worse than radio: it's MP3s, which you have to download to hear, but which you can keep once downloaded. Today's theme: Women Doing Cover Versions Of Songs Originally Written And Performed By Men. This list obviously isn't comprehensive, but there are a few good finds on it. Let me know if you see egregious oversights. Right click and save:
Sleater-Kinney, "Fortunate Son" (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Tori Amos, "Real Men" (Joe Jackson)
Britney Spears, "Satisfaction" (Rolling Stones)
PJ Harvey and Bjork, "Satisfaction" (Rolling Stones)
Cat Power, "Satisfaction" (Rolling Stones)
Sheryl Crow, "Sweet Child O' Mine" (Guns 'n Roses)
Sheryl Crow, "Dyer Maker" (Led Zeppelin)
The Donnas, "Strutter" (KISS)
Liz Phair, "Beginning To See The Light" (The Velvet Underground)
Cowboy Junkies, "Sweet Jane" (The Velvet Underground)
Tori Amos, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (Nirvana)
Sinead O' Connor, "All Apologies" (Nirvana)
Hole, "You've Got No Right" (Kurt Cobain)
Hole, "Hungry Like The Wolf" (Duran Duran)
Emmylou Harris, "Wrecking Ball" (Neil Young)
Aimee Mann, "One" (Three Dog Night)
Kate Bush, "Rocket Man" (Elton John)
Rickie Lee Jones, "Rebel, Rebel" (David Bowie)
Dolly Parton, "Help" (The Beatles)
Kittie, "Run Like Hell" (Pink Floyd)
Diamanda Galas, "I Put A Spell On You" (Screamin' Jay Hawkins)
X, "Soul Kitchen" (The Doors)
Pretenders and Emmylou Harris, "She" (Gram Parsons)
Cyndi Lauper, "What's Going On" (Marvin Gaye)
Alanis Morissette, "King of Pain" (The Police)
The Bangles, "Hazy Shade of Winter" (Paul Simon)
Pointer Sisters, "Slow Hand" (Conway Twitty)
Don't know where to start? For quality, I'd recommend the PJ/Bjork "Satifaction" cover; for weird, Kittie doing Pink Floyd; for classic, Cowboy Junkies on the VU; for maudlin, Tori remaking Nirvana; and for rockin, Sleater-Kinney killin CCR. In most cases, I would say the cover is better than the original, with the complete understanding that "better" isn't really a word to use in the cover-song lexicon.
As I approach 30, I'm reflecting on how I've changed in the last decade. Professionally, I'm summarizing it this way: When I was 20, I wanted to do good; at 30, I want to not do bad.
New audio archives on Morning Becomes Eclectic: Ron Howard, Sandra Bernhard, Mercury Rev, and The Avalanches.
I NEED SOUP! Every Thursday, I make soup for the office. I have a nice little crock pot in which I've brewed Black Bean, Butternut Squash, Beer Cheese, Potato Leek, and Vegetable soup. But I'm running out of recipes. If you have a favorite soup, please email me.
Looking for a cheap, frivolous gift? Stupid Gift Shop is your spot. I enjoy the toys and all sorts of weird japanese stuff pages.
Do androids dream of First Amendment rights? A Net-controlled robot reporter from MIT may be headed for Afghanistan.
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.
Courtney Love To Publish Kurt Cobain's Diaries.
Ten Questions the Media Can't Answer.
Am-I-Hot-Or-Not: Party Edition sounds like fun.
The William Burroughs Cut-Up Machine.
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.
World's largest palindrome? 12,293 words.
An interview with John Perry Barlow, an internet name that I knew before Bill Gates or Marc Andressen.
I'm going to Storytelling tonight. I'll tell you how it is later. Some reviews for you, and a trailer.
Countering yesterday's speculation, Dig-It is apparently real. Too bad, cuz it sounds like it will really suck.
This game makes me want to get drunk. And this one makes me want to have sex. It feels like high school again!
Whaddya know, Maxim has a book review section.
NYPost writes a pro-NYTimes column (about the new Times headquarters).
A website that randomly generates the language of a 13-year-old's instant messages: It's like, so rad.
Beautiful illustration of the power of Flash: Flora: An Experiment in Growing Plant-Life Forms. Select two plants to randomly grow. Then graft them. Unique combinations every time.
Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less.
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.
I've been busy saying "no comment" all day.
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?
The graphic of the day at Reuters today: Ice Rink Layers.
New York Press interviews Michael Wolff.
Anyone buy the new Cornelius album? I didn't, but this interview reminds me I should nab it.
The Velvet Underground's signature album is being re-released as a double-album.
Inconspicuous Consumption is a site about the proliferation of products and the marketing language that surrounds them. (Thanks JK.)
Information Architecture for the Lit-Crit set. (PDF)
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.
Digital artists get their due. From the NYTimes: Getting Tangible Dollars for an Intangible Creation.
Old video from Fela Kuti's burial.
Watch the bouncing yellow ball: Death Metal Karaoke.
The Evil Dead is 20 years old.
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.
Enron/Enrage, the t-shirt.
Rolling Stone: 50 Best Album Covers.
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.
Momus: Thought of the Day.
Apparently, another new Flash book that I'll have to buy: Flash Math Creativity.
The new issue (#7) of McSweeney's arrived in the mail Friday. I'm pumped.
Michael Wolff profiles George Stephanopoulos. "He's a soft-spoken nonalpha male. He has really great hair." But he's not gay.
Hang on: Olympic Zoom Movie (video).
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.
A Map of Hip-Hop from the Geography of Hip-Hop.
Great to know you're just a statistic.
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.)
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.
Page of William Gibson stuff, including audio of him reading.
British Telecom claims to invent the link. Here's the supposed patent and some video.
C'mon, I'd love to have sex with a diesel robot. No, no, not that diesel robot.
Interesting profile of Okwui Enwezor who will curate Documenta 11.
Futurama, cancelled.
How to drink sake, I think.
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.
Michael Kinsley steps down as editorial chief of Slate.com. This honestly makes me sad. When I met him a few months ago, he became a minor hero of mine.
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?
Yet another dot-com movie.
The airlines will try anything to get people to fly again.
Tiffany gets on the internet to explain her upcoming appearance in the next Playboy. Except the explanation isn't nearly as interesting as learning that she hangs out with Axl Rose and Pink.
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.
(The multimedia version of) The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Purty: Mjau-mjau.
Another look at Greta.
Who's the world's fastest typist? Barbara Blackburn, of course.
I've been so busy at work lately that I've been eating Grape Nuts out of the box behind my computer for lunch, dinner and dinner. My entire office looks like a gravel pit.
Clay went to high school with Jennie Garth. For real. To prove it, he gave me a picture that he took of her during lunch. Yup, it's her, compare.
This year it won't be the goofy dot-com super bowl adverts to watch out for -- it'll be the goofy White House ads. Speaking of which, which is your favorite?
On the same day that Kmart files for bankruptcy, Amazon.com posts its first profit.
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!
"Mission of Burma is on tour again?" he asked incredulously.
I think I should get into the business of making movie websites. The site for Black Hawk Down is cool. Or, for the historian, What Black Hawk Down Leaves Out.
My MLK multimedia site (made last year).
Indeed. FreeWinona.com.
Dear God. YugoPop added another chapter of being better than anyone.
I'm so envious of this amazing collection at the Condiment Packet Museum. The lemon juice page is so inviting.
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 Pages reviewed 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.
Wallace and Gromit to return online.
Enron stuff for sale on eBay. Yo-yos!
"America's first reality sitcom," The Osbournes, starring Ozzy Osbourne.
The FlashForward2002 website has just launched. I went to last year's NYC conference, and haven't decided about this year's San Fran show.
Gimme, gimme, gimme: MiniUSA.
Paul Westerberg tries to prove he's still relevant.
Today in McSweeney's: First Lines To Books I Won't Write.
Clay, I link to these just for you: Frogger | Missile Command | Centipede | Super Breakout.
I've been saying that Stephen Ambrose is a vampire well before anyone noticed that he was ripping off people.
i was a 20-something dotcom dethroned ceo that went to work the counter at mcdonald's
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.)
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
POSTSCRIPT: Vera has taken the page down.
I Want My GayTV. I started a thread about this over at MeFi too.
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?
Odd. Ethan Coen is writing dirty limericks for Nerve.com.
Stephen Hawking turns 60 tomorrow.
George W. Bush: Honky.
Overly elaborate Guide To Lifeguarding.
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.)
Metropolis mag has a feature about The Walker.
My New Year's Blog Resolutions:
- Redesign this damn thing. Make it cleaner. Get rid of all that "personality" on the right.
- Build more unique dynamic applications.
- Make that damn XML-newsfeed page.
- Build that damn XML-Flash-MP3 radio app you've been talking about.
- When are you going to finish those damn surveys?
- And comments. Huh, what about those damn comments?
- Rex, you hate updating that calendar. Why don't you finally make the damn thing dynamic?
- That text page is one damn sorry excuse for PDA-accessibility.
- Those CFM-generated archive pages aren't cutting it. You know damn well search engines don't like them unless they're individual unique pages.
- Instead of uploading those images each day, finish that cfload.
- How long you been saying that you were gonna finish that damn XML feed?
- Stop talking in third-person, alright?
- Less talk, more rock.
350+ links later (I finally counted; I was guessing before), The Year in Review list is forever done. Right now, it's the number 5 most-linked page by weblogs according to Daypop.
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.
I haven't mentioned how much I hate Kevin Smith in at least a month. There. See also: What Kevin Smith Movie Character Are You?
"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.
Ahem. Maybe that dumb scooter thing will sell after all.
Slate.com reviews Fake Meat.
In other fake news, MapQuest invents South Yuba City. (See the map of the invented town.)
A good case for on-the-scene citizen journalism: The New York Times has obtained photos from the fracas on the flight with Richard Reid from a person sitting a couple rows behind him. And this weblogger tells his story about being in row 28E (Reid was in 29H).
20 factors that will change PCs in 2002.
SlashDot survey: Who is the most prophetic sci-fi writer?
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. Everyone loves Tina Fey now, 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.
Barb makes her 2002 predictions for online media.
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.
Blogger is [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?
Which are you? Oh, yes it is. Oh, no it isn't.
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 Post wrote 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.
From an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman about web standards, I learned that the WC3 is already hard-at-work on CSS-3 and DOM Level 2.
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.)
Another good idea, over at Idea A Day.
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).
The Year in Review page has a flock of new entries.
The Nation: The Big 10. (See also: Norman Solomon's 2001 P.U.-Litzers.)
"You're on my shit list."
Eurotrash, "devoted to chronicling this historic leap and the ensuing chaos." (See also: my little euro application.)
World's Funniest Joke Revealed After Internet Vote (not funny).
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.
Hmmmm... giving me ideas: Minnesota Law Summary: Adult Name Change.
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.
A map of The Simpsons' Springfield (found at BoingBoing).
Even Google can review the year. Check out the timeline. Yup, added to the list.
The Onion A.V. Club has posted its annual Best and Least Essential albums of 2001. They're studly. Of course, the link is added to the list.
"You are free to spend the rest of your life here"
Yes, come to think of it, I am tired. Thank you.
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:
- Memento dir. by Christopher Nolan
- Waking Life dir. by Richard Linklater
- Mulholland Dr. dir. by David Lynch
- Apocalypse Now Redux dir. by Francis Ford Coppola
- In The Mood For Love dir. by Wong Kar-wai
- The Royal Tenenbaums dir. by Wes Anderson
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon dir. by Ang Lee
- Ghost World dir. by Terry Zwigoff
- Baise Moi dir. by Virginie Despentes
- Kandahar dir. by Mohsen Mahkmalbaf
I wanna redesign this ugly blog so badly. When will I find time?
Rem Koolhaus' touted Prada building has opened in SoHo. Speaking of which, Hal Foster writes about Koolhaus in the new London Review of Books. It's excellent.
Buffy creator Josh Whedon is making a show for FOX.
The NYTimes.com has put together another great audio/visual piece from Afghanistan: Beyond the Veil.
Not the saddest dot-com loss, but notable: AdCritic.com dies.
I'm working on this: The Euro.
Have someone else ("coincidentally") find your dream wife (for $78,000).
An Amateur Guide to Architectural New York
New Money Mark video: "Information Contraband." (From HelloLogan.)
Smoking Gun releases Documents of the Year. Rex adds it to the Year in Review page.
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:
- Ágaetis Byrjun by Sigur Rós
- Rock Action by Mogwai
- Amnesiac by Radiohead
- Drukqs by Aphex Twin
- The Argument by Fugazi
- A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure by Matmos
- Things We Lost In The Fire by Low
- Stephen Malkmus by Stephen Malkmus
- Vespertine by Björk
- The Director's Cut by Fantômas
- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea by P.J. Harvey
- Feminist Sweepstakes by Le Tigre
- Confield by Autechre
- Innocence and Despair by Langley Schools Music Project
- Leaves Turn Inside You by Unwound
- Go Forth by Les Savy Fav
- Fetch the Compass, Kids by Danielson Famile
- Vision Creation Newsun by Boredoms
- Rain on Lens by Smog
- Standards by Tortoise
ABCnews.com asks whether racism exists beyond the skin, in the realm of voice recognition. This simple (if rather ugly) application has you listen to 10 people and try to guess the race or ethnicity. (See also: Linguistic Profiling Survey | AllLookTheSame.com)
Last year, the Associated Press wrapped up 2000 with a sampling of likely 2001 news developments. It's startling how little 2001 actually turned out to be like predicted, by even the most conservative prognosticator. Check out the Year In Review page for this year's roundup.
Nuck, nuck, nuck. Mr. Usability, Jakob Nielsen, had to send out a retraction email today:
From: alertbox@nngroup.com
To: alertbox@laser.sparklist.com
Sent: Sun 12/9/01 10:29 AM
Subject: Alertbox - correct URL this time
Please disregard the previous message (the URL pointed to the wrong column).
Use this one instead for the Alertbox for Dec. 9:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20011209.html
Everyone makes mistakes, right Jakob? (The actual column, about DVD design, is a good one though.)
The New York Times Magazine unleashes The Year In Ideas. It's one more link added to the Year In Review page.
The Onion: Who Says Java Programmers Don't Have A Sense Of Humor?
The New York Times: Interface Design Is Trickier Than It Seems
Nice collection of subway maps from around the world.
Damn, wish I would've thought of it: Microscope Webcam. It would have gone perfectly with the theme of this blog.
New Christmas Tenacious D Song: "Things I Want".
The AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts -- the leading designer organization) National Business and Design Conference is here in Minneapolis next year (October). I'm sure it won't be worth 725 frog skins, but I'll probably go. In addition, CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems will also be coming here (April). If you're coming to town for either event, lemme know.
According to this survey, these are the Top 10 places I should live, based upon my city preferences:
- San Francisco
- Boston
- D.C.
- New York
- Long Island
- Oakland
- Los Angeles
- Minneapolis-St. Paul
- Seattle
- Chicago
The Year In Review page is growing. Email me additions.
Sudan Owner Sues Clinton Over Missile Attack.
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.
Jesus. 11-year-old poet signs potential million-dollar contract.
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.
I'm putting together a special Year In Review page. Check it out and send me additions.
Hot off the presses: The National Enquirer: Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images. Here are some samples. (I love the one of Madonna.)
Wall Street Journal is getting a redesign, with color.
Click, click. Miss Afghanistan, 1972.
I should really create an Ashleigh Banfield blog. Someone at FOX called her "the Anna Kournikova of TV news."
Neil Young writes new song about doomed passengers.
Plastic.com is up to something.
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."
Two dumb Flash things: The Genesis Of Def Leppard | The Buffy Swearing Keyboard.
Anti-Pop Consortium is playing at First Ave tomorrow. I'm pumped.
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."
NY Times: 10 Best Books Of The Year.
Metropolis (the only architecture magazine that I bother reading) has a special section devoted to The World Trade Center. Interesting stuff, including an interview with Dave Eggers where he says this dumb thing: "I would vote for rebuilding the towers exactly as they were with a memorial in the middle including pictures and names of every victim."
Move over Barbie, Playboy is selling action figures.
Barb is at the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard this weekend. Speakers include Nora Ephron, Ira Glass, Gay Talese, and others. She says she's going to write about the event for Fimoculous, but I never trust a journalist.
I forgot to mention that I saw my parents over the Thanksgiving weekend and discovered that my father bought one of these. No, that's not a toy, it's a real vehicle. I had no idea that such a thing even existed. In real life, it looks like a concept car, unable to make up its mind if it's a truck, an SUV, a jeep, or a running shoe.
A new paper is coming to NYC:
37Signals.com has assembled what is basically a best/worst internet practices (what they called "good and bad contingency design"): Design Not Found.
What ever happened to Mondo 2000? R. U. Sirius recounts. Wait, what ever happened to R. U. Sirus? He's back. Who cares? The SF Gate does.
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:
Let's call it Book Day at Fimoculous:
New Murakami story at the New Yorker.
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.
V.C. Andrews died, yet the drivel keeps coming out. How? The Guardian unravals.
Stephen Hawking has a new book. He has a soft spot for Marilyn Monroe, The Simpsons and curry. Read on.
I stumbled across a good Walter Benjamin Research Page.
Time to Choose Your Own Adventure.
I wish I lived in an age of crazy yet cool literary movements. Well, I guess I have the former.
London Review of Books argues the case for Liking Tolkien.
1996 Revisited: The Sokal Hoax.
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.
I've finished Jakob Nielsen's Homepage Usability in record time. It reminds me of arguing with my best friend in college: it's difficult to differentiate smart-dumb from dumb-dumb. Nielsen tediously repeats the same thing over and over, but I have to admit that after I finished the book, he made me hate all of the websites I'm affiliated with because he's right: most web design is bad.
Speaking of arguing with college friends, it's been fun to watch Chuck's musical taste change through the years. Sure, it happens to everyone, but seeing him write about Suzanne Vega and the Vaselines a decade after the fact makes me grin.
My roommate once knowingly purchased a laptop computer online for $100 because there was a glitch in the checkout pricing. It created one of the most enjoyable ethical debates I've ever had (is it stealing? is it entrepreneurship?). This debate came up again when Amazon accidentally sold a $300 camera for $40. Metafilter has a great thread about it.
Chuck Palahnick (the guy who wrote Fight Club) has penned a piece about 9/11: The View From Smalltown, USA.
For your MP3 pleasure (amazing what Grokster yields): Beck Vs. AC/DC.
Electric Sheep has a new promising online comic: The Spiders. The first episode has Afghan women kicking some Taliban ass.
And the latest entry in Is-It-Art-Or-Eye-Candy: Uncontrol.com. Actually, I think this one is more about engineering and physics than art.
NYTimes Mag: The World According to Colin Powell
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.
Cool. Kottke has redesigned ObscureStore.com. Reaction.
I've always wondered what I'd look like if I were Japanese.
Seriously, I'm not joking: the preview to the new Britney Spears movie, Crossroads, is funny. Seriously. No, stop it, I mean it. Stop it!
Monty Python & The Holy Grail, Lego-style.
$25 million reward for bin Laden. Here's the text being distributed via radio in Afghanistan.
Yeah, it seems a little early to me too, but what the hell: Salon's Best Movies of 2001.
I'm 62% addicted to the internet.
How come no one told me Mulder and Scully did it?
Pictures of bin Laden's house in Zazi (found at Caterina.net.)
Score one for academia. One of my generation's most successful writers, Zadie Smith, is retiring at the ripe old age of 26 to concentrate on teaching.
A gift for dad? Okay, maybe not. Psychedelic Republican Trading Cards.
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.)
Interesting discussion going over on MeFi: Is Anorexia A Lifestyle Choice?
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.
I've been considering graduate school lately. I shuffled around undergrad, picking up three B.A.s and two minors, but could never make the jump to settling on a field for post-graduate work (though medical school, film school, and cultural studies were all strong contenders at various points). Lately, I've been exploring programs tailored to "New Media" or "Information Design" or "whatever else fits in quotes that doesn't quite have a name." These programs have piqued my interest so far:
San Jose State MFA in Digital Media
School of Creative Media at the City of Hong Kong
New Media Program at Columbia
Master of Arts in Media Studies at the New School
University of Baltimore School of Information Arts and Technologies
MIT Comparative Media Studies
American University's News Media Studies
USC's M.A. In Online Journalism
If you know of other programs that might fit this vague category, or if you have thoughts or feelings about these programs in general, please drop me a note.
ibsrex: sex?
ibsbarb: that'll work nicely. thanks.
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.)
I'm glad there's a webzine dedicated to cereal: EmptyBowl.com. I'm particularly fond of Top 10 Milk Substitutes.
Good god. There's a Minnesota Geocaching league. How did I not know this? Who are they? Where are they? Time to start hunting. (What, you ask, is Geocaching? The Geocaching FAQ should show you the way.) Wait. There's two more: MN Geocachers | Kingboreas Geocache Info. Great, just what I need, another hobby.
"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.
Don't toot your horn yet. Pakistan Warns Of Blood Bath as Taliban Retreats.
The New Yorker asks 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.
I've been bemoaning the loss of some of my favorite magazines: Lingua Franca, ArtByte, Bust. A minor respite is their archive pages: Lingua Franca Archives | Artbyte Archives | Bust Archives.
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.
The New York Times Magazine devotes itself to "Beginnings: An Issue About The Next New York." Good pieces include Colson Whitehead on the new and the lost, Jacob Weisberg on the return of NYC, Terence Riley on what to build, John Tierney on traffic, and Lynn Hirschberg on WTC TV. Not to mention NYC songs by Lou Reed and Run D.M.C..
Tom Tomorrow was on the NPR program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" this weekend. He was very sarcastic -- in the best way. Listen.
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 Stone considers the glossy model.
Who said Afghanistan has no culture? AfghanMagazine.com shows you're wrong. Includes a piece about Makhmalbaf muse Niloufar Pazira. (See also: the Wired.com story where I found this.)
Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif chimes in with a report about the current mood in Cairo.
This month's Digital Web is out. Feast on it, web-hedz. You might also check out this Times piece: With the World Redesigned, What Role for Designers?
I think I'm going to start playing Majestic. Disinfo.com has a dossier on the game.
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.)
The Times has a theory about How The Simpsons Survives.
BBC had a cool Afghanistan Who's Who.
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.
Is the Internet Archive Wayback Machine breaking copyright laws or providing a great service? Salon.com contemplates. (Check out the Web Pioneers page. Some might ask if they internet has become worse looking in five years.)
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 saw a Celia Pearce presentation last night that was really insightful. The topic: using game theory in interactive storytelling for journalists.
(Sidenote: Celia's site also has this interesting area: WTC. In one piece, she describes 9-11-01 as "a day without airplanes (or commercials)." And there's a somewhat intriguing use of an Excel spreadsheet as a memorial art object.)
I'm working up to a bigger piece about game theory and narrative, and here are some links that I'm pondering:
Towards a Game Theory of Game, by Celia Pearce
The Sims Take on Al Qaeda
Hamlet And The Holodeck Resource Page
The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution, by Celia Pearce
Zero Sum Game Solver, by David K. Levine
Game Studies
Cracking The Maze
Majestic: You only use 12% of your brain. Mind if we play with the rest?
NokiaGame
Feed.com had some great game theory and application stuff, but I'm worried the defunct site may have jettisoned its content.
Art Works Depicting Famous Journalistic Scenes In The Style Of The Game The Sims., by Jon Haddock
(Many of these links and the ideas sparking me are gathered from a UofM New Media Studies conference on this topic.)
Let me know if you have others leads.
John Lamb of HPR fame is back online. I even get a plug.
That Adorno card is plummeting but the Judith Butler card seems to hang in there. That Edward Said card is skyrocketing! Theory Trading Cards. Wow, action figures too.
How don't I know this? That other guy from Pavement has a band too: Preston School of Industry. The CD came out in August and I completely missed it: All This Sounds Gas. Anyway, here's an interview with Spiral Stairs in which he talks a bit about Steve Malkmus.
I'm generally not a fan of design books, but I'm reading two right now that are quite good: Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground and Understanding. The former, which is much better than the name implies, is a good tour of young web design structured in a sensible and somewhat provactive way. Quite unrelated, the latter is an attempt to make the American demography digestible in graphic form. The website is a good compendium to the book.
And the winner to worst domain name goes to: www.WeMadeOutInATreeAndThisOldGuySatAndWatchedUs.com
The Strib did a short IBS-NBC story on Saturday.
Winners for the Online Journalism Awards announced.
Here's the first (and maybe last) bit of media coverage I've read about the NBC-IBS partnership.
I haven't tested this, but the concept is ingenius: TV Eyes. You select words or phrases that you want to be notified about if spoken on television.
Yup, anthrax ties.
A very fine collection of foreign candy cigarettes.
Remember Zork? I sure do. Metafilter provided me with Zork link that appears to be the original game word-for-word.
Killing The Buddha is new to me. Based upon the manifesto, it looks like a promising publication. I enjoyed both Metal God and Muhammad Speaks.
Even the Olsen twins are covering Weezer.
Ooo-ooo, this is even better: Axl Rose and Jenna Bush on a date together! I don't care if it's probably untrue gossip; I love the idea.
Wonderfully simple flash games.
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."
Textism.com is scoring double points this week with a condemning Just Stop It rant and An Annotated Manifesto for Growth.
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.
Homesite 5.0 is out. Gimme, gimme, gimme.
Site news: I have the "email this day to a friend" function working now. It's the little icon below each day's entry.
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.
I'm in my office today, and for the first time in weeks, I'm listening to music. I've been compulsively glued to CNN and MSNBC for so long that I nearly forgot about listening to the new Laurie Anderson album. I guess this is recovering.
Today on the webcam, my new SmarterChild t-shirt.
The New York Film Festival forum "Making Movies That Matter" sounds like the biggest post-WTC event for the cultcha set to come along (and, no, I'm not disqualifying the endless benefit concerts). Attendees included Oliver Stone, bell hooks, Christine Vachon, and Christopher Hitchens. Rob Nelson at City Pages does another good job of summarizing the big film event of the day. (On a related note, I've been hearing from various sources that Oliver Stone has turned into a vegetable lately. I'm not sure if it's drugs or dementia, but he doesn't sound well. [Postscript: Aha! The New Yorker says it too.])
Dave Talbot blasts Andrew Sullivan.
A concise list of media lay-offs.
More time-devouring flash fun going on over at FlashForward2001: Amsterdam.
And once you're done with that, here's an absurdist blitz.
Debka.com sounds like the Drudge Report of the Middle East. The New York Observer calls 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 Nation writes "The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II."
Postcards From Hell has an amazing display of Afghanistan photos. The site even includes interviews with King Zahir Shar and the late Ahmed Shah Massud.
Some interesting maps from the Darunta Camp Complex in Jalalabad.
Another one of these articles: Web Logs Put a Face on a Faraway Disaster (L.A. Times).
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.
If you like Buffy, this BuffyBlog is a must.
Here's my most recent creation: Tour The Aircraft Carrier. If you have any thoughts about it, lemme know.
According to Howard Kurtz, 17 news organizations knew about the attacks on Afghanistan before they happened, but kept quiet about it.
Yesterday, I posted that weird Defense Department Anthrax site, and today you get the weird CIA Terrorist-Busters image.
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 Herald touches 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.
I got a lotta linking to do today, so let's kick it up.
Chatting with Noam Chomsky on MSNBC.com. Good stuff. (What? You missed the Hitchens-Chomsky debate? Catch up!)
Score one for the Bush multi-culti staff. Zalmay Khalilzad is the resident Afghan on the Bush staff. (His wife, Cheryl Benard, wrote Moghul Buffet.)
Oh, you were looking for a definition of postmodernism? Yes, well, Hollywood is helping the Pentagon figure out terrorist strike scenarios.
Um, er, you want another? The official Department of Defense Anthrax site. In Flash.
How about some more dull lit-crit parodies? Postmodern Pooh.
Wheh, back to Modernism: Understanding Turbans.
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.
Pre-Stern City Pages editor Steve Perry has been writing about Afghanistan/Terrorism/Bush on Cursor.org. Check out today's post.
War or football? No choice.
Long piece about what Google did Sept. 11.
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.
Vincent Gallo has a new album out on Warp records.
Grand Royal is throwing a going out of business sale.
I guess this would qualify as my first link to porn: Bjork naked.
Blogdex redesigned.
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.
The Online Journalism Awards finalists were announced. Nope, not nominated.
Huh, Suckster Tim Cavanaugh is writing for the Online Journalism Review.
Well, maybe something good can come of this. The National Review cans Ann Coulter.
I knew I shouldn't have linked to that "bin Laden calls mom" story yesterday. It's already being debunked.
Uh-oh. Austere Google has added nav bars. There's also a preferences page now.
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.
Chuck listened to Nevermind recently, and here's a song-by-song analysis. Those "in the know" will be amused by this entry about "Lithium":
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.
Hey, Mom, I'm blowing up the World Trade Center. I'll be home by Thanksgiving. Unbelievable. (Another tidbit: Osama bin Laden was adopted.)
I should have linked to this commentary from Slavoj Zizek a long time ago. Even though the events of 9-11 already seem like ages ago, this essay from a couple days after the attack still has resonance. I'm having difficultly finding incisive thought from the Left about these events (that Chomsky essay in circulation sounds shrill to me), but Zizek expectedly comes through. (For those who don't know Zizek, I recommend Looking Awry.)
A couple provactive passages:
Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested -- just recall the series of movies from Escape From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable which happened was thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the greatest surprise.
[...]
There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations" attested here -- witness the surprise of the average American: "How is it possible that these people have such a disregard for their own lives?" Is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice one's life?
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.
I'm so proud. I'm smarter than Miss America.
Does it make me callous that I'd like people to compare the design/interface of different major media news websites' "Special Coverage" pages? ABCNews.com | CBSNews.com | MSNBC.com | CNN.com | NYTimes.com | WashingtonPost.com | BBC.co.uk. (Here's mine, but frankly it's feeble by comparison.)
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.
The stories you can be thankful you missed. Condit? Yates? Poundstone? Who?
I'm going to link to it, even though I haven't read it it yet, cuz I trust it will be interesting: Clay Shirky, "In Defense of Cities."
Christopher Hitchens can certainly be a bitch, can't he?
To Howard Zinn: "What would you do if you were president?" The answer.
Three supposed pacifists who no longer are: 1, 2, 3.
No one ever could get Conrad right.
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.
That's wasn't so bad, was it?I'm in Hong Kong for a week.
I'm staying here. (Check out the virtual tour.)
Literally translated, "Hong Kong" means: Fragrant Port.
I'm going with: Barb. Oh, alright, Barb.
I'll be enjoying: movies, architecture, the airport, language, food, media, and funny Far East objects.
What does HK look like? This will give you some idea.
How's the weather?
What time is it?
I'll be trying to update fimoculous from afar. I just bought a new digital camera, so I'll try to post photos remotely.
Groovy. I'm the Blog of the Day.
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.
The website for the University of Minnesota Institute of New Media Studies recently launched.
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.
I leave for Hong Kong in 48 hours, so now's your last chance to tell me what I need to know about HK.
That Buddha:
What's up with the buddha? Some answers:
Adam from Oklahoma speculates Buddha is "holding the balls of his vanquished Taliban foes."
Simon just wants to touch it.
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."
There ya have it.
Other Miscellaneous:
Part III of that New York Times privacy series.
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!
NakedNews.com is hitting television.
I've made many many dumb javascript calculators in my life, but none are nearly as idiotically fun as this: Dew Death Calculator. It would take 210 cans of Mountain Dew to kill me.
The first in a three part series the New York Times has planned on Internet privacy: Giving the Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy.
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.
Rhizome has a new logo that never stays the same.
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?
The international Ars Electronica awards (which in the last two years have controversially gone to Linux and Neal Stephenson) have just been announced:
Golden Nica Net Vision:
Banja.com
Awards of Distinction Net Vision:
Sega Phantasy Star Online
ImaHima
Golden Nica Net Excellence:
Praystation
Awards of Distinction Net Excellence:
Warp Records
Manhattan Transformations
Have fun with those links, and then spend another hour with the groovy international net flavor of the Honorable Mentions:
micromusic.net
Gamelab's games
The Walker Art Center
Rhizome
360degrees.org
Kaliber10000
DMG:I.O* vs R3:DEV*
austropolis
BoomBox.net
Ultrashock.com
Fuckedcompany
Bytes for All
Chi-Chian
CUB
Netbabyworld
Tehelka
p.s. Jerra is back from Thailand, and she brought me a Buddha. He's on the webcam. Can anyone tell me what the hell it's doing?
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.
The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions by Scott Adams shows he has been a business guru all along.
The Trouble With Dilbert by Tom Tomorrow and Norman Solomon is a scathing critique of Dilbert culture.
Or maybe it's Communist propaganda.
Fargo Rock City gets the back page of the New York Times Book Review. (What I said.)
Is it weird that WashingtonPost.com has a local MP3 section? Big suprise: no Dischord MP3s.
Whitehouse.gov relaunches and who does the L.A. Times get to review it? Jakob Nielson.
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.)
An Idiots For Dummies thread over at Metafilter informed me that these are all frighteningly very real books The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cosmetic Surgery, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Bringing Up Baby, Retired Racing Greyhounds for Dummies, Diabetes For Dummies, The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Impeachment of the President, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Daytrading Like a Pro, and Complete Idiot's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer.
Two ThinkGeek.com t-shirts that I want: Go Away | I Run This Company. (This is the one you'll occasionally see me wearing on the webcam.)
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.
CNN is launching a Arabic-Language website. It will be called CNNArabic.com. (p.s. WE MISS YOU MARCIA!)
Eek! The IP addresses are running out!
The Dallas Morning News, The Toronto Star, the Houston Chronicle, and The Orange County Register have all cut their tech sections.
G'head, tell me you don't like saying Sill-vee-yah Poh-DJOH-lee. That's what I thought.
Chuck thinks David Sedaris Must Die.
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?
I'm going to do this once, and only once: my girlfriend's AJR column about email news alerts. Or, if you prefer, a column from a distinguished colleague about email news alerts.
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.)
Hey, whaddya know, people are reading online news. Huh, too bad it's all boring.
Oh, boy. The new Jakob Nielsen book looks like it will categorically piss people off. Again. What's that guy's problem?
And, I feel extremely dumb for linking to this, but IE 6.0 is out.
A couple days ago, I wrote to Google's new "Question and Answers" service (it was in beta mode; the link now says they're currently not accepting questions). I asked, "How much are you getting paid (per hour) to answer these questions?"
Today, I got my emailed response:
"We appreciate your interest in the business aspects of Google's Question and Answers. Unfortunately, due to the nature of your question, we are unable to answer it at this time. Your credit card will not be charged."
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.
Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, read -- or, rather, presented and danced and pontificated -- last night at The Walker. My entry into his work is odd. He was first revealed to me through information architects -- people looking at the organization and distribution of content. Then, later, his name came up in literary studies -- people looking at narrative forms. Put those two together, and you have Scott McCloud.
I didn't realize that in the eight years since his most seminal work he had become a spokesman for not only developing new comic forms for the internet, but something of an internet pundit in general. (The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, goes head-on into a topic that no one's ever mastered: digital narrative. It's next on my reading list.)
His presentation was insightful, and I highly suggest jumping into some of his online experiments which test narrative forms in interesting ways. Start out with "Porphyria's Lover" from a Robert Browning poem and "Coins of the Realm" about digital marketplace aesthetics. (These case-studies make me wish I was still an undergrad studying Structuralism, planning a senior thesis.)
When you've exhausted that, there's one site that McCloud suggested in his talk: Demian5.com. Killer stuff in there too.
Oh, I should mention this too: The Industry Standard is done.
There's another Kurt Cobain biography coming out, but this one is getting unusual raves. (Apparently, the author had access to Kurt's diaries, from Courtney.) You might also care that Robert Christgau wrote about Nirvana in this week's New Yorker.
Only I find this interesting? Newt Gingrich's Amazon.com profile page. He has reviewed 47 books and has a reviewer rank of 507.
In episode two of famous people's blogs, looks like Bruce Sterling now has one. Neil Gaiman, too. And Douglas Coupland has a cool website, but it doesn't really qualify as a blog.
Which dinos lived in your backyard?
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.
Late one night, I was hunting around the web for weird links about Barbie dolls. Turns out that an artist named Tom Forsythe went to court today and won in a battle with Mattel over the right to create this very weirdness. (Obviously, Mattel hasn't seen this yet.)
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."
Minneapolis cuisine reviewed in the Sunday New York Times.
Esquire's Korey Stringer feature.
No big media rants today, just a link to devilish fun: Perpetual Bubblewrap (requires audio).
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 Dave Hickey 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.]
Art Forum has a tete-a-tete about Frank Gehry, half of which is online.
Metropolis has an excellent design-as-politics piece, "A Call For Design Activism." Similarly, I picked up a copy of the journal Trace: AIGA Journal of Design, which makes the case for the necessity of a politics of design better than anyone since Tom Vanderbilt.
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.)
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.
In other movie news, How to Tell a Bad Movie From a Truly Bad Movie.
FAME DAY:
Unbelievable. Adam Curry has his own blog. Anyone know any other famous-people weblogs? Email them to me.
Check out Woody Allen with the babes.
And, finally, see what the original cast of Goonies looks like today.
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.
Nonetheless, I'll end the staid review format and jump to the Future Just Happened Random Quote Generator, which will hopefully give you a better impression of the book.
Speaking of bestiality (or is it miscegenation?), I saw Planet of the Apes tonight. Some thoughts:
- Anyone else wonder when Tim Burton will make a great movie again?
- 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.
Fragments of conversations heard at the Sunday ignoscenti dinner table:
"I don't get it. What's a blog? Is it a diary? A form of publishing? One of those zine things? Is it about one thing? Many things? A community? A loner? A poor excuse for people to post their Amazon wish list?"
"Why is everyone talking about this Michael Hardt guy? Why is everyone talking to him? Has his book really sold-out and become unavailable on Amazon? Should I pay attention?"
"Cormac McCarthy is so hard. So is Ulysses. Come to think of it, so is relativity."
"I love the New Yorker online!"
"I mean, who hasn't read John Berger?"
"I love heavy metal! And Fargo!"
"Finally. Bestiality is cool."
"I hear that comic books are being considered literature again. Must be true. No one is buying them but they make great movies."
"Eudora Welty... he's the one that invented my email program, right?"
"Should I buy a domain name?"
"Dave Eggers? The guy who did an interview with Mark Eitzel back in '97."
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."
I remembered this story when Kevin passed on a review by Peter Singer of a new book on bestiality.
(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.)
Lucky me. The Webby's are tonight, and I haven't finished my lesson plans for my class. Looks like they'll get to watch a movie!
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.
Long but satisfying John McWhorter feature. He voted for Nader but Clarence Thomas wants to hang out with him. (This is the book causing the fervor.)
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."
Anyway, read the first chapter or buy it and see what you think.
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.
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.
- Actual surveys that you can answer.
- A search engine that actually works.
- A palm version of these nuggets.
- An email signup, so you get this crap in email.
- More mindless opinions.
- It'll probably be redesigned, cuz I'm fickle.
p.s. yeah, the livecam is really live. and, so far, so is the phone number.