Rick says a bunch of interesting things in his new column about whether you need to a be highly networked individual to succeed online. I especially relish how he ties geography into the conversation, alluding to a midwestern startup.
And many, many more hyper-social New Yorkers and San Franciscans make successful startups than antisocial Midwesterners. Or even antisocial New Yorkers. These are things you can control. You can move to San Francisco. Better yet, you can move to New York. You can go to meetups. You can go to conferences. You can email investors. You can go to classes at General Assembly. It's in your control. Or, you can stay at home in the Midwest, reading TechCrunch and talking about how it's all rigged and an insiders game.
This will frustrate my friends in Minneapolis -- those dozens of startups trying to compete at CoCo and other places. They're trying to create their own scene right now. Creative acts are becoming increasingly dependent on groups of people. Being part of a "scene" in music was undeniably important in the '80s and '90s, but now it's become as true for fashion, technology, theater, and nearly all creative arts.
It's an interesting dilemma building a company in the midwest: Your success is as much a factor of your peers' success -- the community's success -- as it is the brilliance and execution of your idea.
I 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."
When you read things like Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker, which uses psychomusicology to explain the popularity of Adele, do you end up liking the artist more or less?
In addition to Weekend Edition subtly asking for some slack for Lana Del Rey, Liz Phair also whips up an op-ed for WSJ.
Lana Del Rey is exactly what I was hoping to inspire when I took on the male rock establishment almost twenty years ago with my debut record, Exile In Guyville.
In other SNL music act news, I think Bon Iver is the new Michael McDonald.
1) Klosterman on Tebow. The interesting thing here is that it seems to start as another analysis of hater culture, but then it does a few back-flips and turn-arounds and, oh christ, it's about faith!
2) Kabletown. Ive heard NBC employees including executives actually refer to Comcast as Kabletown, even at work. Ill be surprised if this will be allowed to continue forever.
5) The Verge. The Verge is the tighest merger of magazine thinking and blog culture that weve ever seen. Its also proof that even crowded spaces can be broken into with the right execution.
NYT's profile of Girl Talk is a good read and has some fun anecdotes, but check out this online audio feature they put together to accompany it: musical mash-ups from the last 104 years. Mostly just excerpts, but you can find almost all of the full tracks on YouTube.
How can this possibly be real? Or not real? Amy Winehouse's high school diary was found in the trash, so naturally The Sun published it. The money shot: What will she do when she gets famous? "Live like the bombshell I really am. Get teeth fixed."
is miley cyrus a liberal trojan horse into the country music world? or does this guy just really, really hate her? also, if you want to feel the warm embrace of the country community, do scroll down into comments, because it's fun to call a teenager a tramp. -- FB
When She & Him recently released a new album, lost in the shuffle of Tumblr-crushes on Zooey was the fact that Merge also released a disc by British band Let's Wrestle (streams here).
If it sounds like music written by 18-year-olds, it's because it is. It's a trashy Strokes-meets-Arctic Monkeys mix of moroseness and fuck-you swagger - and the drunker you get, the better it sounds. -NA
After The Runaways, what music biopic comes next? Don Cheadle has signed on to play Miles Davis. Forest Whitaker will soon star as Louis Armstrong. Someday maybe the Janis Joplin and Jeff Buckley movies will be made. In the meantime, enjoy "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" - JM
You've got 4 days left to hear this Radio 4 episode on electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, best known for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop including the theme for Doctor Who. -JM
You may recall that PBS rebooted The Electric Company into a hip hop inspired take on the disco reading for kids version from the 1970s. If you are a fan of the show from way back when and haven't taken the time to check out the new version, you should- it's great, and they have a YouTube Channel! I wish I knew more 4-10? year olds so that I could be the hip aunty that turned them onto this awesome show. The music is great, the stories are cute, the cast is super talented, and I find myself singing along whenever I have time to play an episode from the tivo while I'm internetting or whatever. (Also notice how I'm all set with the educational TV ready to go in case any 4-10 year olds DO come over. You should see my nature videos! Anybody need a babysitter?) Here's one of my favorite clips from the new version of The Electric Company, with Chris "Shockwave" Sullivan and Lin-Manuel Miranda rappin about Hard and Soft G. :DS
Noted NYC graffiti artist Lee Quinones has responded to readers' questions at NYTimes.com. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, he appears in Wild Style, and he painted Luis Guzman's truck in How to Make it in America. Even if you don't like graffiti, his responses are worth reading just for their musicality. --ADM
It's interesting to me that no sector of the mass media learned from any other sector as each one got its turn to react to the ongoing digital revolution. The newspaper industry is in the same throes as the film industry was, just as the film industry's struggle mirrored the music industry's.
For the last year or so, it's been the book publisher's turn to demonstrate it has learned something -- anything -- from the last 15 years. But, as the kerfuffle over pricing and DRM have demonstrated so clearly -- they haven't.
You want to buy the book soon after it's published? eBooks take care of that. You can have it a few seconds later, in fact. If the publisher delays releasing it because it's a "paperback," they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
You want a collector's item? Too bad! THEY PUT DRM ON THE EBOOK. Not much resale or nostalgia value there!
If you like the Flaming Lips, you may feel like an amateur fan when you read this conversation between Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Mark Richardson of Pitchfork about their 90s-era music--but you'll enjoy it anyway. Richardson, who wrote the newish 33 1/3 book on The Flaming Lips' 1997 Zaireeka, discusses the importance of Wayne Coyne's age difference with Kurt Cobain, the band's early theatricals and their consequent influence on bands like Of Montreal, the contrast they set against 90s grunge grimness and much more. --FD
[Note: I originally wrote that Richardson discussed Coyne's "mild schizophrenia" but that was actually in reference to former guitarist Ronald Jones.]
Jimi Hendrix's stepsister, Janie Hendrix, let it slip during an L.A. Times interview that a Hendrix edition of "Rock Band" video game will be coming before the end of the year. Any new Hendrix music in the Rock Band franchise will be part of a slate of new products being planned to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his death. --MM
But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.
With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?
So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)
29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.
28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast.
(See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)
27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)
26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."
25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what itisnot. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)
23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)
22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)
21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)
20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)
19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.
18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.
17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.
16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internetcommentthread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)
14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer -- and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be "The BoingBoing it's okay to like."
(See also: Hey, It's Noah and Waxy.)
12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense.
(See also: Obama Foodorama.)
11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking -- especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly -- and a reassurance that it's okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren't for those pesky copyright issues.
(See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)
9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn't sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it's also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl).
(See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)
8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn't sound like he has an agenda, who doesn't have a consulting agency on the side that he's pumping his half-baked theories into.
(See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)
6) Harper's Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago -- this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind "the future of books" into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print.
(See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)
5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre's Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now.
(See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)
2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn't ask, "How the hell will they make money?" But let's set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, "Why has The Awl become an internet love object?" I've done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scoccha chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it's just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don't know how they'll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck.
(See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)
1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet.
(See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)
Vevo, the new music video site with buy-in from Universal, Music, Sony and EMI (not to mention Google/YouTube), debuted last night with a big NYC party.
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.
I'm sure this isn't news to Minneapolitans, but I just noticed that The Uptown Bar is closing. (It was famous locally for a variety of musical reasons. The Replacements and Soul Asylum and Husker Du practically lived there, and Tommy and Bob Stinson's mom still worked there.) I saw my pals from Communist Daughter play there last time I was in town in May. [via]
It's like asking me, after I put together a band of musicians, why I didn't choose the musician who spoke Portuguese. What difference does it make if a musician speaks Portuguese? I'm going to pick the band member based on how good of a musician he is, not which languages he speaks. That's completely unrelated. Of course, if our band planned to tour in Portugal, it might be a different story, but let's put it this way: the band is not planning to tour in Portugal.
Here's something I think about a lot: In the span of my life, I've seen the coming and passing of many music formats. I vaguely remember 8-tracks, cassettes populate all of my high school memories, walls of CDs took off in college, and records seemed to persist steadily through that entire era. But then there's the MP3. After all of that change in so few years, it now seems likely that I will die with the MP3 as the dominant format. Anyway, this new Pitchfork thing is long, but it's highly recommended: The Social History of the MP3.
In 1991, Norwegian churches started to burn, just after an underground circle of metal musicians had formed. While reporters and police scrambled for answers, more and more churches went up in flames. They had no leads until Varg Vikernes, one of the architects of an underground music-art-political scene known as BLACK METAL took credit and was quickly arrested. While he was in police custody, the media ran a largely fabricated story of satanic rituals, abductions and sacrifices. This film reveals the true story behind the music, murders and church burnings, and shows what happened when these young men, who tried to change the world using music, art and violence, found that they could not control what they had created.
You may have heard of Varg before -- he was charged with four counts of arson (all historic churches) and of murdering his bandmate (via 23 stab wounds). He smiled as he was convicted to a 21-year sentence. After 16 years in prison, he was released a few months ago on parole. Here are the documentary's creators, who also seem crazy, but in the exact opposite way satanist nazis probably seem crazy, discussing the film in a sorta Christopher Guest kinda way. [via]
There's a new video of Leighton Meister on the internet. No, not that video! This one, a video from Cobra Starship [snicker]. The plot is pretty much an episode of Gossip Girl, and except for that breakdown bridge at the end, it's pretty good, right?
"Purple Rain really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it that way or not. You have Prince himself, a very unusual-looking figure, five feet tall -- pretty much anybody considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of odd physical feature, i.e., Biggie's lazy eye. And then the whole idea of beefs -- Prince and Morris. Morris' whole pimp attitude, that was something you didn't hear since the blaxploitation films of the early '70s. Prince sang about sex and he worked with drum machines."
That's ?uestlove in this month's Spin cover story, which is an oral history on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain.
So I watched the first episode of It's On, MTV's new show to replace TRL, starring the extremely likable Alexa Chung. Probably the most surprising thing: it's basically a talk show. There were a couple sketches (Jack Black and Michael Cera painfully talking over the trailer to their movie), some interviews (Spencer & Heidi), a performance (Soulja Boy). They didn't play a single music video. Anyway, they seemed to handle the twitter/facebook integration into the show pretty seamlessly, which was the biggest question going in. So I think it worked and I'm ready to now ask: Alexa, will you be my friend?
If you missed it, Kim Gordon sorta slammed Radiohead's In Rainbows biz model last week. "They did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out. It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn't catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don't sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever."
When it comes to music videos, is anyone out there even still trying to create the epic? Kanye tosses out the occasional ode to MTV yesteryear, but no one else seems invested in the grand narrative arc. With that prelude, say what you will about Lady GaGa, but her new video for "Paparazzi" is conceptually.... something. Perez Hilton himself says: "It is her strongest work to date. It is a mini-film. It is art. It is visual pornography. It is satire. It is commentary. It is brilliant! And, we are NOT exaggerating." Okay then! See also: GaGa channeling Madonna channeling Warhol, and big dicks.
We Are Hunted, a billboard chart for the P2P Generation. It develops a daily chart of the 99 most popular songs on social networks, forums, music blogs, torrents, and twitter.
Points to Sasha for connecting the gap between "real life and the web" by suggesting "these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language" which connects it all with "the professional songwriting team" which is actually the first graph of a review of The-Dream's new album.
A music vid practically made for Friday blogging: "Kitty Get Down," The Ropes. (Also, note the conversation about the "metaphor" of the kitty. C'mon, we all know what that kitty means.)
Your favorite band for the next five minutes: School of Seven Bells. No really, watch the My Bloody Valentine-ish video for "Half Asleep" and then watch this interview with the twins and then say "dream pop" three times while clicking your ruby converse. Then go do a Google Image Search for "Deheza sisters" on your own. Just remember me when this replaces your sicko Taylor Swift / Miley Cyrus fantasy left over from the Grammys.
Josh Schwartz (creator of Gossip Girl) new online show: Rockville, CA. Filmed in Echo Park, it has beautiful people pretending to be musicians, but the music is decent.
Conversant Life: Are You a Christian Hipster? If you don't like contemporary Christian music, megachurches, and mimes, yet do like "Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important," then yes, you are a Christian Hipster!
Village Voice does something linkable: Interview with Carles of Hipster Runoff. The guy uses square quotes like there's no tomorrow: "I don't think I'm looking to 'shame' people. I just think that 'being yourself' is a bold decision. However, the decision to declare 'yourself' can leave you vulnerable to criticism. Not sure if that has to do with our modern world or if it has 'always been that way.' So whether you attach yourself to a band, an idea, a fashion sense, or a general aesthetic, I feel like we're all open to criticism and analysis from various perspectives. I just feel like in our world, 'how you present yourself' matters more than ever to everyone else but you." [via]
So not to be snotty about this, but what does the new Muxtape offer that MySpace doesn't? Does "less is more" apply in this case? UPDATE:Sasha interviews Justin in the New Yorker and asks a similar question: "But the beauty of MySpace is that anyone can start a page and put music up quickly. I can't think of a musical act that isn't on MySpace. Will acts be able to make Muxtape pages easily, or will they have to go through a submission process?"
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.
Everyone is doing their predictions for 2009 right now, and everyone who isn't is claiming that the future is too bleak or complex to predict. What you see below takes both perspectives into account and says: fuck it, let's have fun with this.
However, don't mistake this satire as an empty gesture. If not literally true, I believe most of predictions below in some metaphoric sense. In other words, to hell with the Black Swan!
So here we are again -- playing Nostradamus in media, technology, and pop culture -- with 36 predictions for 2009:
Hatahs. 4chan digitally antagonizes an entire race of people into self-inflicted genocide.
Facebook. By the middle of summer, you realize that you're logging into most websites via Facebook Connect. You get a creepy feeling in your gut about this, but it's so damn convenient.
Politics. After a freak caribou attack injures Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin joins The View.
Newspapers. At least three major daily newspapers cease to exist. The most likely members of the carnage: the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Yahoo. Fuck it, Lycos buys it.
Twitter I. Facebook finally buys Twitter, but only after a price war with Google ramps it up to a ridiculous nine-figure valuation. Unsurprisingly, this is Twitter's big plan "to make money."
Twitter II. But seriously, just like those stories in 2001 about people who [shock!] make a living off of blogs, the "Twitter professional" will somehow become a reality.
Twitter III. A major news event happens that no one live twitters. NYT writes three stories (Styles, Tech, and Media) about this phenomena, quickly dubbed "Twitter Shock."
Starbucks. After trying everything else imaginable, they introduce a new "buffet" option, which is a surprise hit.
Daughter Moguls. In the most convoluted assassination plot ever devised, Christie Hefner, Shari Redstone, and Elisabeth Murdoch join forces to commit triple patricide. Vanity Fair dedicates three eInk covers to the incident, with heads that morph from father to daughter.
Magazines I. Some rich kid on the west coast launches a magazine called Charticles, which consists only of... yeah. Choire Sicha commits suicide in his St. Mark's apartment by paper cutting himself to death with the debut issue.
Magazines II. Monocle raises its newsstand price to $1295.00.
Magazines III. Doy, of course Portfolio goes under. The final cover story is mysteriously about cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney.
Gossip Girl. In the Christmas '09 episode, Chuck and Blair finally fuck again. The recession ends.
Subscriptions. Against all seeming rationality, several new online subscription publications show up on the scene.
Where The Wild Things Are. You know what? The movie actually does suck. Gen X icons Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are pilloried by a millennials who claim old people just don't get it. They're kinda right.
New York Times. After Brian Stelter notices that David Carr has refriended Jayson Blair on Facebook, the New York Times asks Carr to take a drug test. Upon failing, he returns to Minneapolis to run City Pages, which ends up being the last remaining alt-weekly at Village Voice Media.
Online Video. Something's gotta give. Two of the "big" three -- Revision3, ON Networks, Next New Networks -- cease to exist by the end of the year. And when 23/6 and Funny Or Die expire on the same day, Alley Insider's headline is "Funny Or Dead In 24/7." Normal people have no idea what any of these things are.
Terrestrial Video. Something's gotta give. One of the "big" five is morphed into a cable outlet.
Daily Beast. Tina Brown uses her consulting role at HBO to pitch a reality series about her own website. No one thinks it will go into development, but then Aaron Sorkin and Mark Burnett sign on. Julia Allison and Arianna Huffington are super pissed.
Tina Fey. First woman knighted. Now Oprah's pissed too.
Google. They do a lot of stuff that no one expects, but the surprise application of the year is some sort of mashup between three core Google products: Reader, Chrome, and Docs. Oh, and maybe Android, just to make this pshit sci-fi.
FriendFeed. Not only does your mom still has no fucking idea what it is, but your friends don't either.
Publishing. 49 books are published that chronicle the end of publishing.
Music. Proving that fake stuff always wins, Lonely Island's album debuts platinum -- the only album to do so this year.
Lara Logan. Dueling February covers of Parenting and Playboy.
Gawker Media. Nick Denton predicts armageddon, using copious Excel graphs to elucidate his point.
Mad Men. After negotiations break down with AMC, a rumor floats that a movie is in the works. It is eventually released in 2012 on the same day as the Arrested Development movie.
Diablo Cody. Released in September, Jennifer's Body becomes the first young adult movie since Heathers and Clueless that resonates with grown-ups. While you try very hard to think of a new reason to hate her, Diablo casts Sasha Grey in her next film. Backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash ensues.
Words. Webster's Dictionary names undershare word of the year.
Online Media. Trying to take advantage of cheap labor, hundreds of "me too" small startup publications launch. They will call themselves "online magazines," but they will be blogs.
Microsoft. They! Will! Suprise! You! (Actually, no they won't. You hear this every year. Their online version of Office will be begrudgingly cool, but it will have one severe flaw that renders it unusable.)
Apple. After Biz Week's "Is The Innovation Over?" story appears, Steve Jobs retires at the end of the year, surprisingly citing health reasons.
Education. 37 percent of the people you know go back to grad school.
Digg. It does not get bought and Kevin Rose does not go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. Every boy in the Valley weeps at a shared realization: their sense of worth is over-valued.
Rupert Murdoch. He dies in a freak yacht accident. Sumner Redstone, Padma Lakshmi, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Rachel Sklar, Hoobastank, and Shaquille O'Neill are also on board, but all survive. Foul play is suspected, and an investigation reminiscent of the board game Clue ensues. A rumor spreads that Murdoch's cryogenically frozen brain is in an Anaheim basement next to Walt Disney's frontal lobe and the Arc of the Covenant. Michael Wolff sells his next book, The Brain Eaters, for $10 million. 17 people buy it; 4 read it.
If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.
In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.
Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:
30) New York Times Blogs Given the variety, it's probably unfair to group them all under one heading, but the old gray lady boldly stuck her neck further into the blogosphere guillotine during a year when retreat would have been forgiven. Old mainstays like Krugman, Freakonomics, DealBook, and City Room continued to drive daily conversation, while new additions like Proof (drinking), Laugh Lines (comedy), Measure for Measure (songwriting), and Ideas (their first foray into link blogging) proved big media could still navigate the niches. The most consistently important, however, was probably Bits, a disarmingly lucid tech-biz blog that proved you don't have to be bombastic or supercilious to win the category. (See also: L.A. Times Blogs.)
29) Boner Party If you operate a celeb/entertainment/snark blog, you know how you are supposed to talk. The voice, now deeply entrenched in the genre, must be mimicked by any new entrant: bitchy, sneering, unimpressed. Boner Party somehow hit REFRESH on the whole genre this year by instead being celebratory, horny, fanboyish. Unlike, say, The Superficial, which is all attitude and no love, Boner Party is pure happy-happy-boy-boy. Imagine remaking Cute Overload but with pictures of girls next to giddy prose, and you've got yourself a boner party. For instance: "For guys, vaginas are like a cross between a pocket knife, a really cool nightclub, and a wizard. It can do SO many things, you REALLY want to get into it, but you have no idea how it works, and therefore it must be magical." (See also: Street Boners and TV Carnage, Golden Fiddle, and Tumblettes.)
28) Newsless Matt Thompson packed up his belongings this year and moved to the middle of Missouri to think about the future of news -- not a bad gig if you can get it! (Matt is also known for being half of Snarkmarket, the voice of EPIC, and the founding editor of Vita.mn.) His fellowship at the University of Missouri provides time to explore the issues that many of us in online media are grappling with: poor news filters, a top-down approach to news gathering, the lack of pertinent local information, a broken breaking news model, and so on. While he's been researching these problems and writing about them on Newsless, he also put his ideas into action by launching The Money Meltdown, a site that aggregates the most essential information about the financial crisis. Though his research proposal involves Wikipediaing the News, he isn't naive enough to believe that simply turning on wikis will necessarily produce anything of value -- the right solution will be more complex than that. With the news industry in crisis, it's good that someone is trying to find models for maintaining an informed populace. (See also: PressThink and MediaShift.)
27) Urlesque Shouldn't someone really be keeping track of all these memes? Oh good, Urlesque is. (See also: Pop Candy, Metafilter, and Listicles.)
26) NonSociety While a vocal minority of stoic internet enthusiasts screamed bloody murder when she landed on the cover of Wired (and others advised to just don't look), Julia Allison did something this year that many people have failed at: living a publicly transparent life -- or at least as close to it as possible. The snark machine may resent this, but it has been nothing short of notable. (See also: Reblogging Julia and Jake and Amir.)
24) Gannett Blog Have you ever wished there was an official record of the downfall of Rome? Welcome to the 20th century newspaper version. (See also: McClatchy Watch, Journerdism, and Romenesko.)
23) Know Your Meme A subset of Rocketboom, the "Know Your Meme" series has been one of the few beacons of hope in the inspiration-deficient genre of videoblogging this year. The genius is that the episodes are funny while being actual history lessons -- sorta like the Daily Show for the internet. Personal favorites include Magibon, Reaction Videos, and FAIL. (See also: ROFLcon, Internet Superstar, Pop 17, and Internet Famous Class.)
20) Ta-Nehisi Coates In one of a few areas that it seemed edge out The New Yorker this year, The Atlantic maintained its provocative blogging tradition with Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and James Fallows. But it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who leapt from the monitor like no one else writing about politics and culture this year. In his remarkable profile of Bill Cosby, Coates took on one of the most complex areas of race (comedy) while teasing out Cosby's occasional similarity to Obama. In a political season strangely devoid of genuine race commentary, Coates was one of the few keepin it unreal. (See also: TNR's Blogs, The Assimilated Negro, and The Root.)
19) Magic Molly Of course, we need a Tumblr in here somewhere. The Tumblr Awards highlight the idiosyncratic characteristics of the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative. Magic Molly embodied all of these things, as her itinerant persona flitted around the internet, from penning the definitive piece on adderall for n+1 to contributing to This Recording. If the Tumblrverse seems like high school, Molly is the smartest girl in the class -- the quickest with the Phillip Roth quote but never hiding her Sasha Grey guilt. (See also: TopherChris, CatBird, hrrrthrrr, Kung Fu Grippe, Soup Soup, Dear Old Love, Mediation, AntiKris, Frangy, and so on and so on....)
18) What Would Don Draper Do? and I Am Chuck Bass After serving as a useful foil for the past couple years, the fake personality blog expired this year. But a new form arose from its ashes: the blog inspired by a character. Rather than feigning a famous person, these sites explored a character through a different set of criteria. The outcome was such projects as What Would Don Draper Do?, which imagines the Mad Men mad man as a self-help columnist, and I Am Chuck Bass, which invokes the notorious boulevardier's name to explore the inner-torment of Gossip Girl. (See also: Fire Nick Douglas and Rex's Scarf.)
17) Tomorrow Museum Responding to last year's list, Kottke made a semi-plea for "blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck." He's right, of course -- many of those sites get lost in the fracas of the mega-blog. One of my favorites this year was Tomorrow Museum, which contained nimble think pieces about such topics as Microcelebrity and Frienemies and New Media in Fiction. (See also: Marginal Revolutions and The Morning News.)
16) Buzzfeed After first landing on this list in 2006, Buzzfeed has been slowly transforming from a blogger favorite to a legitimate cultural force. It has also become unbelievably fast at identifying online trends before they happen. (See also: Radar Archive and Stuff White People Like.)
13) The Big Picture It seems illogical that a photoblog using generic wire service photos and sitting atop a MovableType installation could possibly cause such a stir, but The Big Picture did one simple thing right: super large photos. After its June launch (by Kokogiak), the design/photo blogs instantly sent their link love, causing Boston.com's traffic to reportedly skyrocket. (See also: Media Storm and Getty Moodstream.)
12) Gawker & Radar Fourteen months ago, not long after the Grigoriadis story, I guest-edited Gawker for a few days while Choire went off to Fire Island to feed his demons or some such thing. Everything was chilly at the office, but I had no idea I was living in antediluvian times. Since then, too many things have transpired to even count. But let's try: Denton introduced a pay-per-click model for bloggers, Emily quit, Choire quit, Josh quit, Denton hired himself, whoa -- NYT Magcover story!, Josh responded, Emily landed a book deal, Moe had that unfortunate incident, Moe went to Radar, no wait she didn't, ack, Denton axed pay-per-click model, Choire hopped to Radar, a new Gawker editor joined, Moe was laid off, poor Balk, oops Radarfolded, Denton predicted the end of the world, Sheila published photos, not you too Pareene, and a few redesigns happened. What'd I miss? If this all seems like some sort of horrid bukakke ritual performed by the blogomedia on you -- it is! And yet, we somehow ate it up. So give the guy credit -- he knows how to turn his empire into a compelling, twisted tale.
(See also: Fake Nick Denton and Cover Awards.)
11) The Technium Kevin Kelly seemed determined this year. The mission: to use technology as a stick, or perhaps a poker, to shake and jab at society. No one has written more clearly about how technology is shaping -- and can be used to shape -- culture. In influential essays like 1000 True Fans and Better Than Free, Kelly showed how to use an emerging network economics to your advantage, while Cloud Culture, Screen Fluency, and Tools For Vizuality illustrated a future that is more evenly distributed. (See also: Metagold, Text Patterns, and TED Talks.)
10) Alley Insider I'm as surprised as you are. When Alley Insider launched last year, it seemed like another unessential tech/biz blog whose purpose was to clutter the internet with more rewritten press releases. But Henry Blodget, the infamous former Wall Street analyst taken down by Eliot Spitzer in the first dot-com boom, had something else in mind. What immediately differentiated Alley Insider from the fracas of other also-rans was analysis -- sometimes provocative, generally accurate, and occasionally funny. A Wired profile chronicles Blodget's difficulties with living down his past, but the empire is growing with spin-offs like Clusterstock (financial dish) and The Business Sheet (business gossip). (See also: Paid Content and Techmeme.)
9) This Recording From what I wrote in July: "What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice.... It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup." (See also: Public School Intelligentsia, Fey Friends, and Hipster Runoff.)
8) xkcd It's been around for a while, but the pithy cartoons on the unpronounceable xkcd seemed especially poignant this year -- especially after YouTube took one joke and turned it into a reality. Known for poking at our peculiar online passions, some of this year's best strips involved pointing out the obvious weirdness of Wikipedia and the Large Hadron Collider. (See also: New Yorker Cartoon Lounge and Gaping Void.)
7) The Daily Beast I don't know if it's really a blog either, but Tina Brown is creating, well, something over there. She has claimed in interviews that the site's intent is to sift through the online detritus for the best information -- a noble cause, but it already seems to be busting at the seams with its own information overload. Then again, features like The Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, and Big Fat Story are at least trying to winnow the data flow to something manageable. (See also: Culture11 and AllTop.)
6) Kanye West At some point in October, I made the most difficult decision of the year: I finally unsubscribed from Kanye's blog. The fatigue of trying to keep up with his 50-posts-per-day pace had finally set in. But I still say everyone should be forced to ingest all-things-Kanye for at least one week. And I mean everything -- including the random cut-and-paste jobs from IMDB and Google Image Search. And the comments -- oh yeah, you gotta read the comments. And you know what -- who cares if he's really writing all this stuff! You don't think Warhol made every painting, do you? (See also: Aziz is Bored, Lovely Package, and Pretty Much Amazing.)
5) Fred Wilson Although there's no way to prove this, it seemed like the tech/media blowhards finally became less relevant this year. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the old guard of Scoble/Winer/Calacanis/Arrington/Cuban seemed to lose influence, while more sober voices emerged -- those who weren't creating incestuous diurnal feuds with each other to game Techmeme. In the vacuum, Fred Wilson, who has been around the scene for a long time, became the analyst to turn to. Though he is a venture capitalist (with investments in del.icio.us, Outside.in, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, FeedBurner, and Disqus), he uses his blog (and Twitter and Tumblr) to address everything from his music tastes and Halloween costume to investor liquidity and google juice. (See also: Shirky.com, Rough Type, and Steven Berlin Johnson.)
4) Waxy & Ana Marie Cox Whattup, old skool? Andy Baio and Ana Marie Cox are blog pioneers, which means they would be forgiven for getting crotchety and sedentary like several of their grumpy peers. But this year they adapted to the changing landscape and invented new ways to deal with it. Andy tore apart the data-centric stories that no one else was bothering with -- by using Mechanical Turk to collect Girl Talk data, by visualizing one-hit-wonder trends, and by investigating pirated Olympics video. (Along the way, he also coined "Supercuts" and tried to end FAIL.) Meanwhile, after losing her job at Radar, Ana Marie launched a pledge drive to cover her travel expenses on the McCain trail. Both of them repurposed old-fashioned blog ideas -- the tip jar and the online investigation -- for modern times. (See also: Young Manhattanite, ASCII, Alex Balk, and Tony Pierce.)
3) Twitter Though it came in tied at #1 on last year's list, Twitter gets a rare repeat appearance because it made a big jump this year from a chatty novelty to a legit news stream. Toward the end of the year, people were still struggling to define the microblogging platform on a continuum between publishing and communication -- a debate that only illustrated the complexity of a such a simple platform used differently by so many people. (See also: Posterous and 4chan.)
1) Single Serving Sites More than any medium before it, the internet is fueled by gimmicks. This particular gimmick, the single serving site, has been around for a while, manifesting itself in odd forms like YTMND and The Hamster Dance. While amusing, these sites were mostly inside jokes for the Goatse Generation. But then something happened last year when the concept was applied to a useful binary question -- IsLostARepeat.com and IsTwitterDown.com, for instance. These sites provided the kernel of an idea that exploded at the onset of 2008, beginning with Mat Honan launching BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com in February. Three days later, Jason Kottke officially coined the term, which unleashed the craziness. (In its own way, you could label Sergei Brin's one-post abandoned blog a single serving site.) This all concluded with the brilliant and inevitable IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com, the definitive academic investigation on one of those short-lived phenomena that makes the internet feel continuously new, even if hitting refresh changes absolutely nothing. (See also: RickRolled and ICanHasCheezBurger.)
Jon Pareles story on using music to sell products, which mentions that three-fourths of Santogold's songs have already been licensed by advertisers, is a decent survey on the scene, with a new nostalgic twist: longing for the record label.
It was a year that chimed in with idealism, and clanked out with pragmatism. "Hope" began the political season as an optimistic revelation, but concluded the year as a is-that-seriously-the-best-we-can-do? mantra right up there with "don't be evil."
Perfection was the goal, so music set itself to the task of eliminating the blemishes. Auto-Tune diluted the rough edges, but the economy fell apart and Kanye's mom died while undergoing plastic surgery. So much for perfection.
By the end of the year, we were searching for compromises. Once garish, Will.I.Am's take on "Hope" ended up sounding down right utopian.
There's a lot of fun to be had in the albums below, my picks for the best of 2008. Some of you will be disgusted by the likes of Lady GaGa, whose filthy rich party lifestyle is more gaudy than throwing a potlatch outside a homeless shelter (which is not that dissimilar from Kanye's Gucci soliloquy on SNL).
But compare that party-with-what-ya-got materialism to whatever "hopeful" nostalgia that the cosmoblogosphere was scolding you into: Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. When asked to pick between a luxury simulacra and faux authenticity, I'll take the loot any day. I have no idea where these indie kids found cause to overuse the word "beauty" in this weary pastoral, but this year's Pitchfork bands felt more like a retreat from the future than nothing else since -- fuck, I dunno -- prohibition. Fantasy, indeed.
Then again, I banged my head to Chinese Democracy, so what the fuck, right?
Here they are, my favorite albums of 2008:
1) Girl Talk, Feed the Animals
Depending how you want to construe it, Girl Talk is either the most cynical thing happening in music right now or the only relevant culture for our time. Or you can just ctrl-alt-delete the historicizing and declare it the Finnegans Wake of pop music: a difficult mashup classic that is as fun to discuss as to ingest. (And as my Joycean college mentor would proclaim, dance to.) Nothing this year made me think more about music: how it's created, where it's distributed, how it's discussed, who owns it, how fans have become critics, and how critics have become artists.
3) Santogold, Santogold
It felt like an eternity between the moment you first heard "L.E.S. Artistes" in 2007 to when the album finally became available. And then another eternity between the album and the inevitable Bud Light commercial. The elongated backlash sine wave was the funnest roller-coaster ride of the year.
4) Juno, Soundtrack
There's a little Mark Loring in all of us. Who? Mark Loring -- that would be Jason Bateman's character in Juno (and one of the many coded references for Minneapolitans -- a memorial to the famed posthumous Loring Bar). Trapped between eras, Loring couldn't find the right place between his rocker past and grown-up future. Like the Alice in Chains tee that his wife (Jennifer Garner) splotches in eggshell yellow, he's ill-equipped for the upgrade. That tension, which is also a prevailing narrative of our time, is the essence of this soundtrack.
5) Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
Kanye is your needy friend, Kanye is your worst blog commenter, Kanye is your John the Baptist, Kanye is your spoiled crybaby, Kanye is in your closet, Kanye is your form swallowing your content, Kanye is your everything, Kanye is your new bicycle.
6) Lykke Li, Youth Novels
Blonde, Swedish, design-damaged girl makes blippy, sullen, vulnerable album made for dancing around your apartment on a rainy day while waiting for your lipdub to finish uploading to Vimeo. Forget Suicide Girls, she's like the Tumblette of my dreams.
7) Lady GaGa, The Fame
Downtown NYC desperately needs a new hero. The hipsters, who eat their young faster than they can become zygotes, have already chewed up and spit out Lady GaGa, but she's the last great hope for a Madonna-esque crossover from naughty street creature to shiny pop diva.
8) Guns 'N Roses, Chinese Democracy
On the last page of the extensive liner notes, Axl gives his thank-yous for an album that he began recording before Dakota Fanning was born. Like the music itself, it's a hodge-podge of mysterious choices, with recognizable names and places jumping out of the jumble: Donatella Versace, Hoobastank, Suicide Girls, Ferrari, Weezer, SoHo House, Mickey Rourke, Bungalow 8, Apple Computers, Lars Ulrich, and Alice In Chains. If you stare at this list long enough, cross your eyes, spin around a few times, and throw some Hail Mary's at the Falun Gong -- Chinese Democracy sorta begins to makes sense.
9) Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
This year I almost ceded victory to the music blogs, MySpace, and HypeMachine. The single seemed to finally drive the nail in the jewel case coffin of the album, so I nearly replaced this annual "best albums" list with a "best songs" list. (How else can I tout Teyana Taylor's "Google Me" or The Count & Sinden's "Beeper" or Kid Sister's "Pro Nails" -- songs all released in early 2008 but still have no accompanying albums.) With producers rushing out tunes and leaks fueling an embeddable culture, the time gap between hearing the song and getting the album now seems agonizingly long [see above]. But so what? No one will care about Crystal Castles this time next year, but "Crimewave" was the best Depeche Mode song never made.
10) Beyonce, I Am... Sasha Fierce
Slinging "fierce" into your lexicon at this point is like lighting the fuse on the ticking timebomb of obsolescence. Unless you're Beyonce, who can slap on a robot glove and look like she just dropped in to say hi! from 2012. The futuristic, angry Beyonce songs are always her best, and half of this two-disc package is throw-away R&B, but the other half is loud, bitter, and -- okay sure, whatever you say, Comandante Knowles -- fierce.
My favorite part of Slate's excellent music mega-roundtable extravaganza (beware: 20 pages printed) is near the end when Christgau says: "Do you ever fantasize about being a movie critic? How many releases a year do they suffer through? Five hundred, something like that? Plus some righteous moaning about how the evil mothers at Miramax are holding up the new Kiarostami? Boohoo." (The joke is funny, but I also like the idea of critics thinking about what it would have been like to pick a different field.)
The HD-ish version of "Jizz In My Pants" looks pretty good on YouTube. Btw, this will be the first single off the Lonely Island guys' album, which hits the streets in February.
On the Media has a crazy little story about whether playing Enya as background music to a video montage of a murder victim's life is "unduly prejudicial." The U.S. Supreme Court won't take the case, but the California Supreme Court has issued a judgment that differentiated the music of Enya from that of James Taylor.
Kottke breaks down the cultural logic of old, by showing the half-life of movies and music. "Watching The Godfather today is like watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) in 1972." While this is certainly true in purely linear terms, I wonder if something has happened (postmodernism!) to cause the timeline to shrink in the past couple decades.
Exactly what you've always wanted out of a MTV website but never got until now: MTVmusic.com. Huge archive of videos, organized by artist (e.g., David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Prince, Madonna, Talking Heads) with an interface that resembles Hulu. This should have existed years ago. Update: MTV Networks also launched an API. (Is someone finally reading my "If I Ran MTV" rants from 2004?)
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?
New Yorker: SFJ on Timbaland. "When you hear a rhythm that is being played by an instrument you can't identify but wish you owned, when you hear a song that refuses to make up its mind about its genre but compels you to move, or when you hear noises that you thought couldn't find a comfortable place in a pop song, you are hearing Timbaland, or school thereof."
For those who still buy CDs, there's a buy-2-get-1-free sale on $8 albums at Amazon. Decent selection -- you could get Rain Dogs, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Daydream Nation for a total of $16. [via]
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!
My final post from RNC for Radar: Chad Hurley At The Google/VF Fete. Excerpt: "On television, political conventions looks like infomercials. In reality, they are like summer camps. They're like the Super Bowl without the game, or like SXSW without the bands. But everyone watches the big game for the ads, and uses music as an excuse to rub bodies. Conventions will always exist. You can't uninvent anything in politics."
Uh-oh. NYT gives Girl Talk the full feature, focusing on copyright, which could be the beginning of the end. Andy thinks the lawsuit drops with the physical album next month, which seems like a decent bet.
Repo! The Genetic Opera is an upcoming rock musical movie starring Alexa Vega, Paris Hilton, and Paul Sorvino. They all sing, and if the trailer is any indication, it will be bat shit crazy.
It's been a while since you've asked -- actually, you've never asked -- but let me tell you... my favorite new blog is This Recording. What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice. Most of the writers are, I think, from LA, or at least it feels like LA. It's not done-with-it-all jaded like NYC or earnestly passive-aggressive like the Midwest. It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup. Whatevski, I could read this Molly person all day. Update: "when Walt Whitman liveblogged Abraham Lincoln's funeral".
Least favorite Buffy episode? The musical. I KNOW, IT'S YOUR FAVORITE. Whatevski. You'll probably love Joss Whedon's newest project, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I wish I were gayer. [via]
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.
When the teenage version of me visited NYC, the destination was always the punk-infested East Village. I don't know if anyone has written about that moment at St. Marks Place, before hip-hop made it to MTV and grunge blew its head off, but it was a weird mix of stuff. Punk, at that moment in the form of hardcore, persisted as the prevailing aesthetic of the region, but it also seemed vaguely interested in the popular music of the time, which happened to be heavy metal and country music. It's a weird memory, but that strange influence created more hairsprayed manes and cowboy hats than you'd expect. It was punk, but it was punk trying to stay current -- somewhat humorously, or maybe ironically. And politically, punk seemed alive because it was a bit flexible, current, pragmatic. Now when I walk through St. Marks, I see something different. The punks who remain, in far smaller numbers, and now peeing on the Chipotle, all look like original '70s punks, with an aggressively retro aesthetic. Perhaps my philosophy of pastiche pragmatism would make no sense to these purists, but I can't help feeling that this reactionary anti-style is only style. Anyway, that's what I was thinking while reading this NY Mag story on the current punk scene at St. Marks.
Beck's Modern Guilt trailer. Yep, that's the way it's being billed -- as a trailer to an album. It's on the internet; it's a music medley; it's a video; it's a trailer to an album -- anything can be anything, everything is everything, que sera sera.
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....
So MTV has this new show called FNMTV, which is supposed to join together two important ideas: a return to playing music videos (yay?) and user-generated content (hmm?). The retarded idea is that they play hot videos like the new Pussycat Dolls and then people upload response clips. How Web 2.Ugh. Probably the best part is Heidi and Spencer getting called in to doseveralpromos, which says a lot about the state of ingenuity for music television. [via]
Audio of Sasha Frere-Jones talking about auto-tune and later recording a song with it, based upon his recent New Yorker story. I like Sasha's tone here, explaining the necessity and historical relevance of auto-tune.
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.)
We used to think of music videos as little trailers to albums. Now we have trailers to trailers in the form of "Everyone Nose" Sneak Preview, apparently a Young Jeezy / Lupe Fiasco / T.I. / Kanye West / N.E.R.D. collaboration. Love that chorus! [via, doy]
When Nicholas dished the rumor that HypeMachine had a $10 million bid from Viacom, I said it was perhaps "more complex than that." Anthony has now said the rumor is "not very accurate." And that ends this boring story.... for now.
All you music bloggers should just hand over the keys, cuz Kanye is crushing you. May Day, May Day, he just dropped an exclusive... your favorite video for the next five minutes: Justice's "Stress".
Santogold performing "L.E.S. Artistes" on Conan. (Btw, I just noticed that little closed-caption button on the upper-right corner of Red Lasso videos. This is awesome to play with during music appearances.)
Nicholas says Hype Machine has a $10 million offer from Viacom. Anthony's site is my favorite music project on the internet, but I think the offer is bullshit -- or, perhaps more accurately, more complex than that. Either way, the post is still good because of the conversation about VCs and startups.
Interview with Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette. He shrugs of the copyright question. (Legally, there's no doubt he's screwed if the labels want to take him down. The only question is whether they think he's a threat or a help. I'll give it 50-50.)
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.)
For anyone interested in SXSW Music stuff, the Wall Street Journal had a story about clubs that are testing the limits of the event by holding concerts outside of the SXSW brand. As anyone who has witnessed the transition from SXSW Interactive (which is just about as egalitarian as you can get -- everyone knows about the same parties) to SXSW Music (which suddenly becomes about wrist bands and secret parties -- exclusivity reigns supreme) can attest, the corporatization of SXSW is the elephant in the room.
In The Clash ... Goin' Up?, The Observer looks at the pervasiveness of music in daily life. "Do we even listen to music anymore? Or is it all just sinking into the background, surrounding us like air-conditioning?" (The "history of Muzak" story comes out at least once a year [The New Yorker's lengthy example from a couple years ago], but this one ties in some iPod theory.)
Yay! A new video for the most-played song at Chez Rex: Santogold's "L.E.S. Artistes" (higher quality WMV). I don't get the horse stuff at the beginning, but I like the green blood later on! (Directed by Nima Nourizadeh.) UPDATE: someone in the comments remembers that this is a homage to Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain. You can see it around 9:30 in this clip.
Your favorite late-night talk show musical appearance for the next five minutes: Liam Finn on Letterman. It starts out hm'kay, and then about two-thirds of the way through it EXPLODES. [via]
The first time you try to describe EveryBlock to someone, it can sound kinda boring. It aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block. Hm, that's interesting, but is it compelling?
If you give it some time, the answer is absolutely. Once you start playing with the site (and "playing" might be the best word to describe the meandering sensation of floating around in the data pools), your mind begins to wander with speculation: how did they get that? what does this say about my neighborhood? what else could be done with all this data? how can I add to this?
Those were just some of the many questions I had about EveryBlock, which launched a few weeks ago with the help of a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant. A few stories and interviews popped up when the site launched, but I noticed that the interviewers seldom asked the other questions that I had about the site. So I decided to ask site's founder, Adrian Holovaty, some questions directly. Here's our exchange:
Last year, New York City famously banned trans fats in restaurants. I found a page on EveryBlock that shows all the violations of this ban -- several every day! I love these little hidden narratives inside of EveryBlock. Do you have any favorites?
Great question. Here are a few interesting nuggets:
Also, more generally, it's fascinating to follow address-specific breaking news/events on our site. For example, a couple of weeks ago, a water main broke on the north side of Chicago. Afterward, on the relevant EveryBlock pages -- for example, Ravenswood or the 1800 block of W. Montrose -- you could see a bunch of assorted news items about the incident: newspaper articles from the Trib and Sun-Times, TV station reports and Flickr photos of the torn-up street that were taken by some people who happen to live nearby. Each of those "raw" chunks of information was displayed in the timeline of news for that block.
We've seen a similar thing happen with trendy new restaurants. First you see the business license, then (possibly) the liquor license application a few days later, then the restaurant inspection, then a Yelp review or two, then a writeup by the newspaper's dining critic. The story slowly unfolds over time.
One of our post-launch priorities is to clean up the fire-hose of raw information, to introduce concepts of priority and improved relevance -- but I do think there's a certain appeal to that raw dump of "here's everything that's happened around this address, in simple, reverse-chronological order." When significant events happen, they sort of "pop out" of the list.
Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing behind-the-scenes? Are you using Django as a framework?
Sure. The first layer is the army of scripts that compile data from all over the Web. This includes public APIs, private APIs, screen-scraping the "deep Web," crawling news sites, plus harvesting data from PDFs and other non-Web-friendly documents. Some data also comes to us manually, like in spreadsheets e-mailed to us on a weekly basis. For each bit of data, we determine geographic relevance and normalize it so that it fits into our system.
The second layer is the data storage layer, which we built in a way that can handle an arbitrary number of data types, each with arbitrary attributes. For example, a restaurant inspection has a violation (or multiple violations), whereas a crime has a crime type (e.g., homicide). Of course, we want to be able to query across that whole database to get a geographic "slice," so there's a strong geo focus baked into everything.
The next layer is the Web layer, which is standard Django. Oh, and I should mention that we use Python for everything, from the ground up.
What has been the hardest piece to accomplish so far?
I honestly can't decide what the hardest piece has been. A number of pieces were all hard to pull off in their own way.
The user interface was, and continues to be, a challenge. How do you display so many disparate pieces of data together, without overwhelming people? How do you account for the variety of distinct data types? (That's both a user-interface and a backend challenge.) How do you maintain visual interest when dealing with so much raw textual data? How do you make the block page feel like a geographic home page rather than a search result? Wilson, our designer, has done a great job within these constraints, but we all agree there's still much room for experimentation and gradual improvement.
Dealing with structured data is relatively easy, but attempting to determine structure from unstructured data is a challenge. The main example of unstructured data parsing is our geocoding of news articles. We do a pretty good job here, but we're not crawling all of the sources we want to crawl -- again, there's a lot of room to grow.
On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.
How much of your data aggregation is scraping html pages versus getting structured data?
At this point, we're doing more scraping than consuming formal APIs and data feeds, but I expect (and hope) the balance will shift over time. It's been tricky explaining our concept to data providers in government, but we're hoping that gets easier now that we have a public site that people can browse and understand.
Do you have any fears of scaling the system?
Yes and no. We knew from the start that EveryBlock isn't something that can be scaled overnight to every city in the world. There are too many special cases, too many relationships to build, too many local quirks to work out. There's no nationwide database of restaurant inspections or building permits that we can magically tap into; every city is different. Aggregating local information is a deep, difficult problem.
Some companies try to scale pieces of what we're doing -- like geocoding every news story in the U.S., or making maps of blog entries, or aggregating crime, or aggregating restaurant inspections -- but we're the first ones to do all of that. That's why we're taking a depth, not a breadth, approach: I'd much rather do three cities well than 1,000 cities poorly.
Rather than use Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth, you built your own mapping service application. Why?
That, along with "When will you bring EveryBlock to city XXX?", is by far the most frequently asked question we get. Paul, our developer in charge of maps, is working on an article explaining our reasoning, so I don't want to steal his thunder. I'll just say that the existing free maps APIs are optimized for driving directions and wayfinding, not for data visualization. And, besides, having non-clichéd maps is an easy way to set yourself apart. Google Maps is so 2005. ;-)
How hard was it to build?
We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.
In many ways, what you're doing is taking a bunch of data sources and normalizing them for a single use case. Now that it's normalized, I imagine developers could do a ton of interesting things with this data. Are there plans to do an API?
Yes, I strongly suspect we'll have an API eventually -- it's one of the many things on our site wish list. We had to draw a line and call the thing "ready" at some point, so despite the fact that we're launched, we've got hundreds more features and data sources to add.
I was talking to someone recently about all the cool mashups you could do, and we decided that looking for patterns between Republicans and sex offenders would be the best!
Beyond the technical difficulties of creating parsers and algorithms for geotagging this data, have you had any political/legal obstacles? Is there data you'd like to get your hands on but can't for some reason?
Yes, and yes. I'd estimate we only have about 10% of the data we'd like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven't been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we've simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we're keeping at it.
An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location-specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer.
I'd like to even out the three cities' data offerings, too. We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities.
We're also working on improving the data we already have. An example is crime in San Francisco. After running into some problems having requested a formal data feed from them directly, we get the data by screen-scraping the SFPD's site -- but that site doesn't publish the location of each crime. In fact, the only location data the SFPD site publishes is implicit in the searches you do. The site lets you search for crimes by police district, ZIP code or neighborhood, so the best we can do is to deduce the police district, ZIP code and neighborhood that contain a particular crime. (If you search for ZIP code 94109, you can safely assume the resulting crimes are in that ZIP code.)
That's why San Francisco crime on EveryBlock, lamely, only geocodes crimes to the ZIP code level: because that's the only data we could get, and something is better than nothing. But, anyway, we're hoping the SFPD will release more granular locations in their crime data.
You've mentioned your hope that EveryBlock could introduce some standards for news organizations to do geotagging. I'm sure you've discovered wholes swaths of civic data that could use standardization. Can you talk a little bit about what you want to do in this area?
The standards we're thinking about are related to the geotagging of unstructured data -- namely, news articles. I guess there'd be some value in standardizing approaches to structured data (like, building a nationwide crime database), but we're more immediately interested in standardizing the geocoding of "blobs." The main premise is that locations in news articles should be defined in a machine-readable way. Look for something from us soon.
Everyblock lets me find everything in my neighborhood... except other people. Why is that? Do you have any plans to incorporate direct input of local voices into the site?
In time, Rex. In time. :-)
If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not --
are in support of that core goal.
Besides, we already have the problem of offering so many interesting data sets and features that people can only focus on one or two of them. The classic example is that a lot of people haven't noticed that we rolled our own maps (your question above notwithstanding).
I know you constantly get asked the question about scaling the site to other local areas, but here's an idea: say I'm an enterprising small town citizen who's willing to plug in data from my city by matching data to similar fields that you are using. Possible?
Yes, that's possible -- we've built the system in a way that would allow that to happen. Again, as in my response to your reader-generated content question, it's just a matter of implementing it. We had to launch with something, and if we'd included every one of our ideas in the launch version, we'd be on target for a launch in mid 2017. :-)
One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?
The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us.
I'll paraphrase something really smart that Wilson, our designer, said recently: We've created a machine that's capable of publishing address-specific news, and our initial launch is a demonstration of its potential. Now that we're live, it's time to improve the machine and improve the demonstration.
On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur.
I liked your answer to whether EveryBlock constitutes journalism in the OJR interview ("People can define 'journalism' however they'd like"). I'm curious, do you have traffic goals for the site? Or let me ask it a different way: how are you evaluating success?
This is cheesy, but I aim to help people, or improve the world in some way. The tricky thing is that there aren't many concrete ways of measuring that, aside from anecdotes. I suppose we could look at traffic numbers, but, no, we haven't set any traffic goals.
Okay, last question. It's a weird one. Your interest in gypsy jazz is well known. (The last time I saw you, it was in a Toronto bar that supposedly had a jazz scene, but was actually a frat bar. We were both gravely disappointed.) Do you ever think about the relationships between your musical interest and your programming/information interests? Is there anything -- structural, cognitive, performative, whatever -- that makes EveryBlock similar to Django Reinhardt?
Wow, a weird question indeed! Hmm. I guess that, in both music and programing, I strive for subtlety, for elegance.
And EveryBlock cannot be compared to Django Reinhardt. That's sacrilege.
Thanks, Adrian!
(Thanks to Ben, Matt, Robin, Andy, and Matt for suggesting questions for this interview.)
Oh, hello there! Were you looking for the definition of "backlash to the backlash"? (And you needed another example in addition to Juno?) Welcome! The Village Voice and Ad Age are unabashed about their love for Vampire Weekend. Bold!
Kiosk is an Iranian band that Henry Jenkins recently covered as an example of an emerging underground Persian music scene. At first listen, they sound a little too Dire Straits for contemporary tastes, but the video for "Love for Speed" is actually pretty great, especially when you check out those lyrics: "Living in the evil axis / Speed freaks in jalopy taxis." [via]
Wired magazine turns 15 years old this month. This column looks back at the very first issue.
Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release: Issue 1.1.
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can't help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the "Information Superhighway" yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn't even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren't even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn't even a dirty thought yet.
And yet there it was, the premiere issue: that blocky logo and Bruce Sterling peering out from the cover. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the nerds were about to take over the world... right up until the suits showed up a few years later to pummel them with their briefcases of money.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves in this story. Let's take a look at that first issue, piece by piece.
Staff Box
Started by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who moved to California from Holland in 1991, Wired opened with a staff box of unknowns, at least to the traditional media world. Many of them would become the most important technology writers of the next decade.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor, came from the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. John Battelle, who would later found Federated Media and write the definitive book on Google, was the managing editor. The rest of the staff box was sprinkled with names that are now recognized as tech pundits of various stripes: Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, John Markoff, Michael Wolff, and Nicholas Negroponte. And of course, the "Patron Saint," Marshall McLuhan.
(An aside: it's difficult to remember how McLuhan was perceived pre-Wired. Though certainly a revered scholar in his lifetime [let us not forget Annie Hall], I also seem to recall a huckster backlash around this time. But three years after the premiere issue of Wired, McLuhan was on the cover of the magazine. Today, even his worst theories get roundly quoted, especially by blowhards like me.)
Tired / Wired
Magazine editors tend to hyperbolize their craft, and nothing gets deliberated with more over-analysis than the opening pages of a magazine. The conventional wisdom is that the blurby, picture-filled front pages set the philosophical agenda of a magazine. The "front of the book," as they call it, psychologically defines who should be reading this rag by persuading you to join the club of similarly excellent tastemakers. So the Wired/Tired Index probably seemed like a stroke of genius. It was the perfect way to divide the world into two simple categories of people: There are those who are wired -- they get it! And there are those are tired -- they don't!
It's classic hippie logic. And congratulations! Because you're reading Wired, you're in the right category.
In retrospect, it's unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.
Other front-of-the-book items: a preview of a cult film called Jurassic Park, a review of a print zine called bOING bOING, and a report on a crazy new technology that could free up your cable tv lines for phone calls.
But the editors actually turned this stagnant interview into something a little funny by reprinting Paglia's handwritten edits scrawled over the top. From the first issue, one could already foresee that Wired was going to be a good publication, but this bit of whimsy suggested that it might just go beyond being the next Mondo 2000. This brand of self-awareness only comes along in decade-long chunks: a '60s Rolling Stone, a '70s Esquire, an '80s Spy.
Or it was just a dumb prank. Whatever.
The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender's Game, but doesn't leave out video game comparisons. "It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war." Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.
But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff's story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman's obstacles toward free software doesn't include the phrase "open source" because it had yet to even be popularized.
The Ads
Here's the prevailing question when persuing the ads in this issue: were they as unintelligible then as they are now? The two companies that bought this issue's very first ad and very last ad -- Origin and Trans Rebo, respectively -- were probably as unknown then as they are now. And it's unlikely that the 100,000 copies that the first issue of Wired sold on the newsstand helped them in any way.
A few pages in, the most emblematic page of the first issue of Wired appears.
He looks like an old John "I'm a PC" Hodgman! And look closely -- that screen really says "Fax Transmittal."
Oh, to be young again.
Design
Early Wired is often remembered for its edgy design aesthetic. The disillusion of this myth that you will feel in looking back at the first issues of Wired is comparable to when MTV replays those once-edgy Pat Benatar videos.
The Negroponte Index
MIT scholar, Wired investor, and OLPC creator -- Nicholas Negroponte is himself something of a patron saint to the digerati. But he's clearly crummy at making predictions.
In his inaugural back-page column, Negroponte takes on the emerging technology known as High-Definition Television. With the goggles of a decade-and-a-half to look through, the opening line hits you like a DeLorean hurled from the past: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."
Negroponte contends that the future will actually be fuzzy, arguing that it's a mistake to believe "achieving increased image quality is the relevant course to be pursuing." As anyone who's pored over debates about 1080 vs. 720 and counts their HDMI jacks like their children, this looks like the crazy ramblings of a fuzzy-headed college professor.
To be fair, the futurist gets it half right, such as when he prognosticates a burgeoning on-demand culture but mistakingly fetishizing perspective viewing:
What is needed is innovation in programming, new kinds of delivery, and personalization of content. All of this can be derived from being digital. The six-o'clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you. If the viewer wants an old Humphrey Bogart movie at 8:17 pm, the telephone company will provide it over its twisted-pair copper lines. Eventually, when you watch a baseball game, you will be able to do so from any seat in the stadium or, for that matter, from the perspective of the baseball. That would be a big change.
Sounds awesome! Too bad approximately 1 kjillion dollar were spent last year on cramming living rooms with big ass TVs instead.
Colophon
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
It sounds corny, but we loved this magazine because its creators drank the same soda as us. These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!
I don't know if this is surreal or predictable, but it's certainly obvious now: futurism and nostalgia are intricately linked with each other. Revisiting the early pages of Wired reminds one of a time when there was an underground culture -- when not everything was known by everyone else. Can you remember a time when there were secrets? It sounds so naive.
But it also sounds tremendously boring. Thankfully, we'll always have the future.
I've been obsessing over this post for the last two hours: Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music. It occurs to me that an entire generation of young singers are probably trying to emulate the auto-tune sound. [via]
Twitter + reviews = TwittCrit, which Jeff just launched. Almost a year ago, I was working on the exact same idea but for music. Of course I never finished it.
I could personally give a flying fistula about the return of the late-night talk-show graybeards (literal!), but I'm pretty pumped that the musical appearances are showing up on YouTube again: Lupe Fiasco on Letterman.
Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.
It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:
30) The Informed Reader As mainstream media organizations continue to close their foreign bureaus out of cost-saving desperation, the less expensive version -- "the international news blog" -- has become a staple property on nearly all sites (nytimes.com,msnbc.com, cnn.com, newyorker.com, etc.). Though the foreign news consumer might be tricked into believing these will reveal new forms of international reporting, it actually means that none of these sites stick out above the rest -- except for the Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader, which somehow kept my attention this year by finding the right balance between gathering links and providing context. (See also: Good Magazine.)
28) Paleo-Future If the dictum "the future is now" has any veracity, then what do we do with the past? This blog chronicles how past generations envisioned what the future would look like. With an archive that goes back to the 1880s, Paleo-Future is an essential compendium of a new historical category: nostalgic futurism. (See also: Subtopia.)
27) TV In Japan If ever there were a genre in need of aggregation, Japanese TV would be it. This site (from my friend Gavin Purcell, whose day job is running Attack of the Show on G4) is religious in its pursuit to bring you the best moments of televised weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun. (See also: Neojaponisme and Ping Mag.)
26) BookForum For those of us who have given up on the once-spectacular and oft-praised Arts & Letters Daily, the transformation of Book Forum to an aggregation blog has been nothing less than a savior. (See also: ArtsJournal.)
23) Metafilter Popular Favorites Every year I sneak a reference to Metafilter onto this list. And every year a Metafilter post ridicules its inclusion -- can't wait to see this year's! My longstanding love-hate relationship with Metafilter (check the archives) tilted back toward the negative this year, which is why the Popular Favorites feature was almost a panacea for my frustration. More big sites are adding this "favoriting" feature (BoingBoing, Gothamist, etc.), which I initially appraised as a cheap way of avoiding depth, but now find the only way I can continue reading some sites. (See also: Ask.Metafilter.)
22) Drawn.ca Drawn bills itself at "collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw," but it acts more like a comprehensive guide to visual culture. (See also: Design Observer.)
21) FourFour The overabundant jungle of pop culture blogging leaves little room for new voices to emerge. One can read only so many snarky reviews of every episode of every reality tv show on every network every night (I know!). As an antidote to Perez Hilton's pretty hate machine, FourFour's Rich Juzwiak (whose day job is blogging for VH1) has carved out something unique in the pop landscape by balancing critical insight with a celebration for the lovable. And what does FourFour love? For starters: Tyra, America's Next Top Model, Beyonce, Tyra, Project Runway, and... Tyra. (See also: Golden Fiddle and Best Week Ever.)
20) Reverse Cowgirl Her: "Why don't more sex bloggers make your list?" Me: "Cuz they all talk about the same thing." Her: "Yes, but in many different ways." It's true, sex bloggers don't usually end up on this list, but Susannah Breslin's blog was one of the few sites in the genre to stay in the "to read" pile all year long.
19) Kanye West: Blog Too much was made again this year about famous people getting blogs. Do you really want more insight into these people's opinions? Of course not -- you want to know their passions, their desires, their interest in dropping $7K on a bottle of cognac. Kanye's blog is more like a scrapbook of his id: some links (hey look, the new Lupe Fiasco vid), some photos (hey look, a Delorean), but surprisingly little ego.
17) Strange Maps Does saying "it was a big year for maps!" sound retarded? Well, it was. (See also: Great Map.)
16) Pussy Ranch Several years ago I included Diablo on a "hot new blog!" list. Now she's super famous, and I'm still making this stupid list.
15) Serious Eats Food blogging has always been a blind spot for me, but Serious Eats was the first site to find the right mix of editorial voice and community interaction.
14) Shorpy The photoblog genre is easy to overlook, but this blog puts itself in a curatorial role by collecting photos up to 100 years old. (See also: The Triumph of Bullshit.)
12) Jakob and Julia Jakulia was the worst best (and the best worst) thing of 2007. Don't know it? Just thank your lucky stars and move on. (See also: NYGirlOfMyDreams.com.)
11) The Daily Swarm Looking for an alternative to Pitchfork? Who isn't! But Daily Swarm isn't exactly that -- it's a music news source that somehow seems to break news before anyone else. And it's not "press release" news that Pitchfork delivers, nor the salacious celeb news of TMZ, nor even the industry banter of Idolator; rather, The Daily Swarm's beat is a rare kind of -- dare I say -- investigative work that no one else is doing. (See also: Stereogum and Culture Bully.)
10) A Brief Message Brevity seemed to only increase its role as the ruling doctrine this year (see: Snack Culture), and the designers hopped on board with their micro-manifestos on this site. (See also: Very Short List.)
9) The "Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks You've seen them -- too many times to count. And if you had taken pictures of every unnecessary instance of quotation marks, you "probably" would have made this list too. (See also: Apostrophe Abuse.)
8) emo+beer = busted career When Earl Boykins mixed the infographic with a passion for Brooklyn indie music, he ended up with several pieces in the New York Times that could have passed for art installations. (See also: Infosthetics.)
7) Frolix-8: Philip K. Dick What we once called "the news" is increasingly becoming different filters for perceiving reality. If you think about it, watching the news is just putting on someone else's reality goggles. Philip K. Dick would probably agree, and so this amazing site gives you today's headlines matched up next to which PKD novel the story corresponds with. If it seems that science fiction gets less fantastical every year, then this is the site for you. (See also: Cyber Punk Review.)
6) Snowclones A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it oughta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "No rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
5) Jezebel Gawker Media's modus operandi is to enter a content category (gadgets, politics, sports, music, etc.) by summarizing that industry with enough volume (in both senses of the word) to basically become the essential trade mag in that sector. This is why Jezebel represents the biggest coup in the empire's history. Rather than beguile its way into the women's magazine industry, Jezebel burst onto the scene in May by defining itself in oppositional terms. It isn't so much a thing as it is not those things. To be clear: it is not the celeb porn that Conde Nast and Hearst have been splooging on you from newsstands for decades. Whereas the average Idolator post would fit in just fine in Blender or Pitchfork, Jezebel was an entire take-down of Glamour, Cosmo, and the rest of the airbrushed crew. This is the holy grail of publishing: to find a voice that is completely unique while still appealing to a broad category. Nicely played, Mr. Denton. (Note: By the numbers, Jezebel probably doesn't qualify in the "overlooked" character of this list. But with as many dudes like me reading this "women's fashion" site every day...) (See also: Spout.)
3) Vulture New York Magazine is a perplexing contradiction. It is probably the best magazine on the newsstand right now (Wired is the only competition), but it also has an editorial voice that is occasionally annoying in its sense of privilege and entitlement. On its worst days, I call this attitude "Aggressively SoHo" -- as in, it surpassed believing that NYC is the center of the world by declaring the epicenter somewhere south of 14th St. and north of Chambers St. When my bestest friend Melissa (disclaimer!) said she was co-launching this blog (she has since moved onto Rolling Stone), I was worried that this voice would ring through on its cultural coverage. But the opposite has happened -- Vulture has kept the best parts of New York Mag (the nuance, the design, the clever), while leaving the Aggressive SoHo Tude at the door. (See also: Wired's Blogs.)
2) Ill Doctrine When Ze Frank sadly abided by his promise to shut down his much-celebrated but under-watched show in March (after exactly one year), the internet was left to gasp for unique video programming. Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine has been the only video blog to emerge with a distinct voice, a mature vision, and brilliant programming that mixes essay, criticism, and attitude. Check it: Chocolate Radiohead and Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People. (See also: Epic-Fu and Rod 2.0.)
1) Twitter and Tumblr "Blog" has always been an elastic term, just barely surviving the stress of containing everything from Hot Chicks With Douchebags to DailyKos to your mom's Vox account. But this year the seams of the term finally burst, and out spilled some brand new words, tweets and tumbls, and these two new forms of quasi-blogging that are more personal, more immediate, and of course more annoying than anything online communication has rustled up so far. Twitter and Tumblr are the Rubik's Cube and the Tetris of the blogging world -- simple concepts that are immensely more complex and compelling than they logically should be. I've explained Twitter to a hundred people in a hundred different ways, each time not quite capturing why it's different, why it matters. "You just have to play it to understand," I eventually say, choosing the only verb that approaches the nuanced complexity. And yet, there's another very simple way to say it: Twitter and Tumblr made blogging fun again this year.
Pretty fantastic package just released over at Wired... first, they got David Byrne and Thom Yorke to sit down together and talk about the music industry (with stacks of audio clips!) and then Byrne lays out six scenarios for saving artists from the industry's collapse (with charts!).
This year proved again that when it feels like the entire goddamn world is going to hell -- that's a good time to throw a dance party. Whether you were fist-pumping for Maya's admittance back into America, chanting "We are North American scum!" at the club, or just jumping in giddy delight that Justice somehow landed an MTV Music Video Award nomination, it was a good year to dance in the streets, especially to these, my favorite albums of 2007:
1) Kanye West, Graduation
Take away his ego, and Kanye's music ceases to exist. That's because Kanye is one of a dying breed of artist, like a Bob Dylan or a Woody Allen or a Bjork, who create art out of sheer force of will and ego. Art and life aren't binaries for these people. How else to explain this album's sui generis cocktail -- a sampling of his mentors in dance (Daft Punk), street (Jay-Z), fashion (Louis Vuitton), and art (Murakami). And, I suppose, literature (Nietzsche), by pinching that particularly arch aphorism about surviving adversity. "That which does not kill me..." might suggest that Kanye's force emerges from some sort of Ayn Randian individualism, but it's more clearly the power that comes from treating your life as collage.
2) M.I.A., Kala
The '80s would have been much better if M.I.A. were around to squelch that wretched little phrase "world music" -- she would drop some street on those marketers. Although she would resist this, Maya has somehow emerged as one of the few relevant voices in the language of globalization: descriptive not prescriptive, street not studio, itinerant not stagnant, and most importantly, local not global. This is why I've written before that M.I.A. brings to mind Rem Koolhaas more than anyone else -- one can visualize her building little markets (songs) on the streets of Lagos or Sri Lanka or Kingston. That's what this album sounds like: all the streets in the world playing music at once.
3) LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Though James Murphy's second album will fill your daily dance-punk requirements, it's the fifth track, the ballad "All My Friends," which stands out as the best song of the year. Pretty much the exact opposite of his glib underground hit "Losing My Edge," this song starts with a cold, repetitive keyboard line that's probably pinched from some minimalistic Steve Reich score. And it never really deviates from there, except by layering some lines about friendship, which becomes the song's theme -- not about a single friend, but about the celebration of friendship as a concept. "You spend the next five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five trying to get with your friends again" has been the mantra for a couple hundred 30-somethings who I know.
4) Justice, Cross
Even though they never released an album, one could call 2007 the year of Daft Punk. Between their Coachella appearance, their movie, and Kanye creating their first Billboard hit, Daft Punk was an invisible success story. And to complete the story, we could call this the best Daft Punk album in years -- and get away with it without too much guilt.
5) Mark Ronson, Version
Prepare thyself for a strange reason to like a musician: Ronson exposes the weakness of Pitchfork. The plucky music site has been an aggressive foe of Ronson and his entourage (Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen). The reasons for this are somewhat paradoxical, since the Ronson aesthetic -- let's call it "synthetic retro" -- is usually a Pitchfork touchstone. But beyond all that industry prattle, Ronson is one of the few producers who can put together a cohesive solo album of his own. Some might tire of the ska inflections on a few tracks, but then Winehouse's cover of The Zutons' "Valerie" comes along to make you remember that synthetic nostalgia is the best kind.
6) I'm Not There, Soundtrack
Of course you want to hear Sonic Youth cover Dylan. And Malkmus, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and The Hold Steady, and Karen O, and two discs more of this.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55
Did Charlotte haunt you this year? Because she haunted me. And does she remind you of a long lost love? For me, she does. Are you glad that someone finally found something decent for Air to do? Yes, me too.
8) Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future
Fuck "new rave" -- this is "new Iron Maiden"! The album has enough arcane mythology to fill the new D&D manual. If you caught Klaxons in concert this year, you witnessed this strange spectacle: teenage kids dancing around on stage with a Mello Yello high, quoting Coleridge and Pynchon, and playing their instruments like they invented them.
9) Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release
Let's get this out of the way: there's a lot bullshit on this album. Some of these tracks are the worst offenders of the reductive, repetitive, retrograde kind of techno/house that gives the entire genre a bad name. But in those moments where humanity creeps in -- on "Hustler" and "It's The Beat" -- this turns into something like the best of Bjork's dance work.
10) Battles, Mirrored
What happens when you throw another "post-" in front of "post-rock"? Prog rock! No one expected this segment of the '70s to reemerge this year, but Battles at least added a little head-shaking to the shoe-gazing genre.
11) Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
When I forgot to bring my iPod on a trip to LA this year, I bought this CD to play in the rental car. And then I turned it up every time I started to fight with the girl who was traveling with me. I now know this album by heart.
12) Britney Spears, Blackout
Yep, above Radiohead. Why? Because while Radiohead is obsessed with dystopic futures, Britney actually is the future. Like one of those fake Japanese pop idols, Brit-Bot is the complete cypher that gets invented by producers and the media. This album is like a Wikipedia entry in which everyone -- The Neptunes, TMZ, whoever -- should get a writing credit. You may not like to hear this, but Britney is you.
15) White Williams, Smoke
Since no one seems up to carrying the mantle anymore, the title of The New Bowie could be passed onto White Williams. But more than pure retread, Williams rips '70s glam through a processor that admits the existence of disco, Beck, and laptop pop.
16) The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes
This album caused my dorky friends in San Francisco to actually dance. For getting nerds to shuffle, some might say this album should be much higher on the list.
18) Prince, Planet Earth
Although I didn't make it back to Minneapolis to see him perform at First Ave this year (which was a blessing, because the cops shot it down in less than an hour), Prince put out the album that's aesthetically the closest to Purple Rain that we've seen in some time.
19) White Stripes, Icky Thump
You could almost forget that the White Stripes released an album this year.
20) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is
If it felt like Karen O spent this year trying to figure out what people wanted her to be, this EP didn't necessarily contradict that. Even its title seems obsessed with self-definition.
21) Tomahawk, Anonymous
While we wait for Michael Patton to do something a little more digestible again (We! Want! Lovage!), he put out this strange Native American Heavy Metal album.
22) Chromeo, Fancy Footwork
Ever wished Hall & Oats dabbled in disco? Then Chromeo is for you.
23) Bloc Party, Weekend in the City
Bloc Party have me hanging by a thread. I want them to have staying-power, but this could just be their last relevant album.
24) Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
I think of this album as what happens when you mash together Chicago and Minneapolis. It has the sound of Drag City, but the aesthetic of Tim. Which makes sense, because Bird is from Chicago but the album with recorded in Minneapolis with some of its finest locals.
25) Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy
You know how Beck tends to alternate between doing a rock/hip-hop album and doing a down-tempo/acoustic album? This is like the response to last year's rocking Rather Ripped.
Chuck's newest Esquire column: Me, On Shuffle. The interrogative thesis might be puzzling (Chuck, you like '70s guitar riffs and things that sound like '70s guitar riffs -- dilemma solved!), but the nibbley multimedia format (a magazine article with music clips!) is sweet.
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.
Bill Wasik (who you might remember as the Harper's editor who invented flash mobs) writes about how hype builds in the music industry. It's chock full of indie rock things that I write about here all the time: KEXP, Tapes 'n Tapes, SXSW, etc. (This link is dedicated to Matt, my hype-backlash ninja.) Update: Taylor questions Minneapolis' third-place ranking in the musical urban archipelago. He's wrong, but he's right about MSP getting its own big music festival (like, I imagine, Bumbershoot, Siren, CMJ, or Pitchfork).
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."
My only problem with Sasha's New Yorkerscreed on the de-miscegenation of indie rock (which no one was talking about and now suddenly everyone is talking about) is that it feels like selective modern history. Sure, Arcade Fire is white, and they kinda suck. (Shut up, they do too. And so do The Shins.) But how about the other sectors of "indie rock" -- LCD Soundsystem or Bloc Party or M.I.A. and Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Sasha's analysis feels like choosing the Pixies in 1990 as the representative of everything, and then bemoaning that no one sings in Spanish anymore. That said, he makes great points about political correctness and sampling that I've never seen elsewhere. UPDATE: Sasha responds.
Bill Gates' music taste? Well, there's U2... and then the Beatles and the Stones... and then Broadway musicals. Stop by my office, boss man -- I'm gonna show ya some Kanye, Prince, Daft Punk, and MIA.
This is one of the weirdest things I've seen in music in a long time: Radiohead has just announced they have a new album coming out... in 10 days. I don't think anyone even knew they were making a new record. Some strange pre-order and format info on the site for the album: In Rainbows. UPDATE: the price for download will be left up to the individual buyer. Amazing.
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?)
"We're drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today's Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio's This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers's McSweeney's Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs." --The Atlantic.
"Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website." --The Onion.
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.
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.
I've spent 20 minutes on HBO Voyeur and I'm still not sure what it is. The trailer doesn't help much either. Read/Write Web even did a profile, and I still don't get it! Music is cool, though.
Meme watching: get ready, the 10-year anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky scandal is nearly upon us, which is the only way to explain NY Mag's extensive profile of Matt Drudge. Undeniably better than L.A. Timessimilar attempt from a few weeks ago, this one paints Drudge as something of a modern-day Howard Hughes. It avoids banter about Drudge's sexuality until the end (dude's totally gay, and he'd probably flip politically if he could ever out himself). It's full of good material, but this is the money quote: "Amid her snarls about privacy, [Camille] Paglia offers the morsel that Drudge is 'deeply knowledgeable' about dance music." After that quote, I officially declare liberalism dead.
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.)
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
This new Akon video is awesome. The word count on "sorry" must be near four digits -- he apologizes incessantly for... I have no idea, but he's even taking the blame for things he hasn't done yet. Does that work? Me too! (His nobility shines at the end as he apologizes for that dry-humping a 14-year-old incident. Except, if you listen closely, he blames some one else... but is very sorry, nonetheless.)
Just a random reminder of better times: video to Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted". Those Graduate-esque between-the-legs shots are from none other than director David Fincher.
The newest M.I.A. song to leak, "Hit That", uses lyrics cribbed from -- I kid you not -- Wreckx-n-Effect's "Rump Shaker." This is interesting to me because it's not a musical sample, but rather a lyrical sample -- and yet not a cover.
I saw Jonathan Lethem read last night at the EMP Pop Music Conference -- if you're in Seattle, consider stopping by; it's awesome and much less nerdy than it sounds. (Lethem presented an essay around the idea of the critic's/fan's relationship to art that was fascinating.)
NYT Mag has a fascinating little article on something that I think about constantly: to what degree random historical factors and self-fulfilling markets determine the success of cultural products. A study from the authors suggests that social influence can affect judgments of quality to exponential degrees.
So my pop music theory du jour is that we're witnessing a new backlash against the skank pop of Pussycat Dolls and Fergie. I call to the stand Natasha Bedingfield's "I Wanna Have Your Babies", which is somehow brilliant yet horrible -- just like the Pussycat Dolls. [via]
This week, all my music friends were talking about the Ultragrrrl cover profile in the Village Voice, while all my internet friends were asking "Who the fuck is Ultragrrrl?" Meanwhile, all my internet friends were finally hopping on board Twitter, while my music friends were all "What the fuck is Twittter?" We live in a divided society, people.
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.
Although I'm certainly not the only one who has been aggravated by the increasing appearance of the "This video is no longer available" message from YouTube, I didn't know how to quantify my frustration. So I decided to do a little test... do you remember Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos post from last summer? There was a brief moment where these types of posts opened our eyes to the potential of a new form of curatorial criticism of video, with a mashup of moving illustrations that were controlled by users. Suddenly, you could image whole new ways to conceive of writing about the history of visual culture. Now, just months later, that vision has been practically erased, as over half of the clips from the above post have been removed from YouTube -- to be exact, 54 of 100 are gone (I counted). I try not to be polemic about these matters on this blog, but I find it hard to believe this is good for anyone -- artist, label, critic, fan, and, especially, the marketplace of ideas.
So the news of a new Massive Attack album wouldn't normally be blog-worthy, except hearing that it will include vocals from Damon Albarn (Gorillaz/Blur), Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star), Tunde Adebimpe (TV On The Radio), Liz Fraser (Cocteau Twin), Patti Smith, and Mike Patton -- that's amazing.
Top 10 Songs About Wonderful Cities. Includes Kiss on Detroit, Sinatra on NYC, Elvis on Las Vegas, The Clash on Brixton, and of course They Might Be Giants on Istanbul.
NYT's decent reflection on what David Byrne is up to lately includes a nifty little clip sampler that compares his work to contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
While seemingly everyone builds music recommendations engines around the wisdom of the crowds, Critical Metrics goes retro by instead aggregating good ol' music critics. More importantly, the founder is Joey Anuff, who you might remember as the founder of Suck.com. [via]
So Jon Pareles' Sunday NYT Arts cover story on user-generated content was fine (most of us live with -- and spread -- this propaganda all day long (though the comparisons to folk culture are sorta new (and the references are medium fresh))), but isn't it sorta weird that it's basically one long essay without any reportage?
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."
Every year around this time, I attempt to summarize what's been happening online by publishing my list of the best blogs of the year [2002, 2003, 2004]. But I abruptly stopped last year because the list had become annoyingly redundant. Yes, dear blogosphere, after only six (or so) years of existence, you already have your canon, created either through fiat, power laws, or meritocracy -- you decide!
Sure, new sites break through (such as Techcrunch and Valleywag did this year), but a glance at the Technorati 100 shows that things aren't really that different than they were a few years ago. So do you really need me to prattle on about the significance of Kottke and Waxy, Romenesko and Gawker, Engadget and Scoble? I think not. Instead, this year I've gathered 30 blogs that you perhaps aren't reading.
Caveat: no human on the planet is qualified to do this, and the 500 blogs that I follow probably represents how many blogs are created in a second.1 On the other hand, this is not a list of esoteric blogs that you'll smirk at and never read again. I actually read all of these, because I think they're great.
And finally, please add your under-appreciated blog suggestions in the comments. Because really, aren't the overlooked ones the reason we're all here anyway?
29. TV Squad Blogging about tv sounds hard -- you're always a day late, yet you're always a spoiler. This surprisingly good Weblogs Inc. blog finds the right balance between last night's TiVo and tomorrow's buzzed show. (See also: Television Without Pity & Tuned In.)
28. Ballardian Sorry, this isn't actually J.G. Ballard's blog. As possibly the only science fiction writer who merits the adjectival form, Ballard is synonymous with technology, body enhancement, organic architecture, dystopia, car crashes, and other generally weird stuff. This blog is about those things, sorta. (See also: William Gibson's Blog & Bruce Sterling's Blog & City of Sound.)
27. T-Shirt Critic I've got this theory that the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media -- informative yet dispensable. Probably the most frequent email query I get is "where do you get all those t-shirt links?" The answer is all over the freaking place -- but this site is one of the best. (See also: Preshrunk & iloveyourtshirt.)
26. Pruned Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it, usually by gathering all sorts of randompieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.)
25. Ypulse You can count the number of people making a living by blogging on a couple of hands, but be sure to add a digit for Anastasia. If you think you know what teenagers are talking about today, you may reconsider after reading this blog, which tracks everything that the kids (Generation Y) are into. (See also: Agenda Inc.)
24. Eyeteeth & Offcenter Through some bad twist of misfortune, I never met the multi-talented Paul Schmelzer when I lived in Minneapolis. But I've been collecting all the marvellous little spores he leaves behind on various sites around the interweb, including these two. (See also: Greg.org.)
22. Dethroner Not that you care, but 2006 was a crummy year for the lad magazine. Could it be that the social internet is invading dude-ness too? This one-man site (from Joel Johnson, former Gizmodo editor, recently interviewed by Matt Haughey) is a good example of what one person can do in a niche topic. (See also: Daddy Types.)
21. Cute Overload Yes, hipster, I know -- you, your sister, and your mom have seen Cute Overload. But have you bookmarked it? Have you returned to it every day just for some cheery bunnies? You have not truly experienced Cute Overload until it has become a ritual. I dare you. (See also: Flickr: Interestingness.)
20. IFC TV Picking the best film blog is difficult. Luckily, picking the best one you perhaps aren't reading is easy! This link-heavy blog is the perfect mix of news and views on film culture. (See also: Cinematical & GreenCine Daily.)
18. Metafilter Joke, right? No, not really, because I bet everyone reading this post has at one time or another given up on Metafilter. And unlike the time you gave up on Slashdot, you eventually came back to Metafilter. (See also: Ask.Metafilter, the real reason this site deserves to be here.)
17. videos.antville.org You're going to see a huge surge of video link blogs this year, but this one has always stood above the others for good community contributions of quality music videos. (See also: ClipTip & Digg: Music Videos.)
15. Josh Spear Cool Hunting and The Cool Hunter are, well, cool. But they tend to track international trends that seldom seem to intersect with your life. Josh Spear's cool hunting includes stuff you might actually be able to afford getting your hands on. (See also: NotCot.org.)
14. Data Mining Yawn, right? Nuh-uh. Everything that's happening today in areas around buzz tracking, social media, geocoding, data visualization, and countless other subjects is tracked on this blog, where I consistently discover new ideas. (See also: Blog Pulse & Micro Persuasion.)
13. Make Magazine Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I'm including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make's philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)
12. 3 Quarks Daily 3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)
11. Screens I've had a boyish crush on Virginia Heffernan's writing since her days as Slate's tv columnist. This year, she started this peculiar little blog for the New York Times, covering the cultural side of the internet video industry before anyone realized there was such a thing. She was the first mainstream media writer to snag lonelygirl15 as a storyline (which I -- still boyishly -- think she first saw here), writing in a cozy vernacular that you were surprised in the old gray lady. (See also: Lost Remote & Carpetbagger.)
8. Subtraction An editor from The Atlantic who was doing a story on buzz-building recently contacted me about finding the source of a meme he saw on Fimoculous. He asked where I got it, and I said Subtraction, to which he replied, "that's what everyone else said too." A blogger's blogger, Khoi Vinh is the new design director at the NYTimes.com, which might sound high-brow, but his personal site has the quality you most desire from a blogger: curiosity. (See also: Anil Dash.)
7. Pop Candy I'm as surprised as you that a USA Today blog makes this list. Beyond the cute Chuck Taylors in her pic, what makes Whitney Matheson better than the slew of other pop culture blogs out there? Simple: while everyone else is there to out-snark and out-upskirt-shot each other, Whitney seems to actually like popular culture. (See also: Stereogum & Amy's Robot.)
6. Future of the Book Ostensibly about exploring the shift from the printed page to the networked screen, Future of the Book stumbles across a variety of new ideas along the way, such as creating a wikibook on gaming. Although occasionally windy, Future of the Books is on the precipice of something big. (See also: Read/Write Web & Smart Mobs.)
4. Information Aesthetics I suspect we need a chart to explain why this blog is so great, because just saying "this blog tracks instances of data visualization" sounds like it could be a weapon to kill terrorists with boredom. But this site is essential reading for anyone interested in the ways that engineers and designers turn the messy world into a clear visual representation. (See also: Visual Complexity & xBlog.)
For if you're the kind of person who makes their music selections based upon whether they're played as background music on Veronica Mars (like me!): veronicamusic.blogspot.com. [via]
Ubu Web is an vast collection of experimental film, music, and miscellaneous stuff. Curated by Momus, it is basically YouTube for the avant-garde, including material from Beckett, Nauman, Burroughs, Duchamp, Barthes, Apollinaire, Sontag, Picasso, and hundreds of others. [via]
For me, 2006 was the year of inconsequential hype. Wasn't this the year of Snakes on a Plane? And what ever happened to Pearl Jam's big comeback? And weren't The Raconteurs s'posed to be the best rock band ever? And don't even get me started on what the bloggers were telling you to like. Whatevah, you were too busy watching Journey on YouTube to care.
Despite the odds, this was a pretty good year in music. I've got 21 albums to prove it:
21) The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon No one realized it at the time, but Party Music was probably the most important album of 2001 -- but like everything else after 9/11, it had to be sublimated for a few years. Boots Riley returned this year to "laugh, love, and make love" -- while wearing camo. When the apocalypse comes, you know The Coup will be playing the soundtrack.
20) Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom The cast of characters alone -- Norah Jones, Amon Tobin, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, Massive Attack, Kid Koala -- make this a seductive record. But even after the novelty wears off, Mike Patton's obstinate weirdness and whispering/screaming vocals make this album continually engaging, if not terminally perverse.
19) Be Your Own Pet, Be Your Own Pet This is the kind of punk rock that your pre/post-cool skater friend in high school liked but you didn't understand. Then she made a mixed tape for you with a noisy mess called "Fuuuuuuun" on it, and even though it included a wink to "Stairway to Heaven" you still didn't understand, but you adored her for playing a song called "Fuuuuuuun" -- I mean, how couldn't you?
18) Sparklehorse, Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain I have no idea why people ignored this album, but I predict the hipsters will trackback to this release next year when DJ Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous collaborate on something called Dangerhorse (I'm not making this up). Linkous makes the kind of raspy pop static that everyone has forgotten is the reason that recorded music still exists.
16) Cold War Kids, Robbers and Cowards The first four songs on this debut record are so ridiculously good that it makes you suspicious of their ability to maintain it, which causes you to unfairly judge them on the potential of future work that you've never heard, which is grossly unjust, but is also the strange state of music today.
15) Bob Dylan, Modern Times He hates technology more than your grandma, but that's probably why he makes albums better than your kids.
14) Joanna Newsome, Ys This will take a moment to digest: Diamanda Galas meets Bjork and June Carter Cash in a dark alley. They magically morph into a harpist who makes an album engineered by Steve Albini that has only five songs but is still an hour long. And yet you love it.
13) The DFA Remixes, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2 No one asked for another version of Fischerspooner's "Emerge" or NIN's "The Hand that Feeds," but you couldn't pick anyone better than DFA to reconstitute nostalgia as futurism.
12) Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon It's the strangest thing in the world to leave town and watch your friend's band explode like this. One second you're playing Katamari Damacy and listening to GNR, the next they're trying to get time off work to tour Japan.
11) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale If you didn't know, fishscale is super-high quality uncut cocaine -- sparkly and glimmering like a fish's scales. This album is singularly obsessed with coke -- kilos and bricks, snorted and smoked -- all of it, in multiple different forms, which you can view as a metaphor of quality or race or economics... or not.
9) Girl Talk, Night Ripper One ritalin-and-coffee-induced diatribe about how this album is perfectly of its time yet paradoxically timeless is more than enough.
8) Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not Just when you think the dance rock thing has hit the windshield, along comes the best of the genre -- from a bunch of kids slamming on the gas pedal, no less. Two of the songs on this album include the word "dance," yet they're the least danceable songs on the album.
7) Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped The only thing that makes less sense than these old-timers writing what might be the most relevant love song of the year ("Do You Believe in Rapture?") might be the same fogies writing the best rock song of the year ("Incinerate"). "Do you believe in a second chance?" Totally.
6) The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living At the beginning of the year, Mike Skinner was in rehab; at the end of the year, he was preparing to run the New York City marathon. This sums up The Streets -- slacking yet overachieving, a bad decision that always turns good, a big story yet a complete fuck up.
5) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones I'm likely rating this album higher than almost anyone else will this year, but it probably deserves even higher. Why do you all hate Karen O for wanting to make a Blondie record? Sometimes I think you're bigger than the sound, too.
4) Mickey Avalon, Mickey Avalon Rock critics fucking hate Mickey Avalon -- my friend Missy thinks he's egotistical scum. But this is my kind of punk-rapping scum bag: he stylizes like Kool Keith, he narrates like Eminem, he snags the aesthetics of L.A. glam rock (but bi), and packages it all like Beck-on-meth-not-Beck-on-scientology. And despite that description, he sounds absolutely nothing like Kid Rock!
3) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain Can you imagine the pitch to the record label? "Okay, we're gonna make a doo-wop punk album. But it won't sound anything like that. It will sound more like a lazy day in the Prospect Park. Oh, but you can sorta dance to it. Got it?"
2) Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere The second you heard it, you knew it was going to be the song of the summer. By the second bar, you could visualize the sin wave over the next couple months: the pre-buzz, the raves, the saturation, the backlash, the overhype, and the backlash to the backlash (because you read NY Mag too). It was a crystal clear moment, which so many will remember as defining the summer of '06, when everything seemed to have a thrilling predictability.
1) The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America During a year that I moved away from the Midwest, no other record could possibly top this list. I'm not sure what non-expats do with all the Lyndale, Penn, and Nicolet references (cross-check them to their Replacements records?), but this will always be one of those records that will be impossibly linked to my life in mysterious ways that make me equal parts sad and hopeful. Every time Craig roars "We walked across that Grain Belt bridge / Into a brand new Minneapolis," I wonder why every city can't be so lucky as to have such a perferct homage. And then I remember only one city deserves it. I miss ya, boys and girls.
Decent story in Wired News about how a program in Second Life that can copy digital objects is creating a rift in the community, and the implications on what it means for copyright. "Are digital goods in virtual worlds more like music or fashion, more like movies or food?" [via]
Believe it or not, I make a living as a futurist -- in the same way that nearly all of us (writers, entrepreneurs, bookies... Miss Cleo) bring home the butter by trying to predict what will happen next. The Prognosticating Class has become so large that you now can't click 'empty trash' on your desktop without a futurist falling out.
Last year was the worst -- I made 33 Predictions for 2006 in Media, Technology, and Pop Culture. It's time to look back and see how well I did. In fairness to myself, this wasn't really a true attempt at clairvoyance -- several of the predictions were just meant to be goofy. Oddly enough, those were the ones that turned out to actually be right.
Next month, I'll publish some predictions for 2007, but in the mean time, let's review last year's effort, with ratings of 0-10:
1) Netflix will be bought by TiVo, which will be bought by Yahoo....
Um, not so much. Score: 0.
2) Absolutely no one will buy Knight Ridder....
Oh boy, this is getting ugly. Score: 0.
3) NBC's new Thursday comedy line up will be a big enough success that tv execs will once again try to invoke the phrase "destination tv"...
Wellll...30 Rock is a hit, My Name Is Earl still does okay, and the relocated Office is stellar. But, well, no one is exactly shaking the presents under the tree at NBC this Christmas. Score: 5.
4) A new Pew study will reveal something about internet use that will be drastically over-cited by people who are reading this blog post.
See, that's me being funny. Score: 5.
5) David Chappelle will do something that makes everyone ask "why the hell did he do that?" It will be "brilliant," but "enigmatic and frustrating."
Tricked ya. That was written after he actually did "enigmatic and frustrating" things. Score: 1.
6) Showtime will pick up Arrested Development.
Um, yeah. Well, MSN picked up the reruns. Score: 2.
7) "Hello Katie, welcome to CBS."
Doy. Score: 10.
8) After a guest appearance on Veronica Mars, Amanda Congdon will sign a deal to host a new show on UPN...
Okay, wrong about Veronica Mars (how cool would that be?), and wrong about CBS and UPN... sorta -- instead, she'll be on sister company HBO. And ABC. So I get some points. Score: 7.
9) Book publishers will drop their silly little fiat and announce a triumphant partnership with Google Print.
Sorta yeah, sorta no. Score: 5.
10) Nonetheless, Google's stock price will slip 20% by the end of the year.
Can I get negative points? Score: 0.
11) Someone in Seattle or San Francisco will get beaten to death at a dinner party after saying the words "Web 2.0" for the five-trillionth time before the first course.
I can't prove it, but I'm sure this has happened. Score: 6.
12) 2005: the year of search. 2006: the year of mobile....
Maybe next year? Score: 3.
13) Current TV will start to show up in Nielsen. The numbers will be good, not great.
Well, not yet. But they got closer. Score: 2.
14) The break-up of Viacom will have unforeseen repercussions...
Maybe I should have kept them all this vauge. I was thinking something big would happen, but nothing really did. MTV got older, CBS joined the YouTube revolution. Score: 2.
15) Steve Jobs will announce a DVR.
Not quite. He announced iTV. But still... Score: 6.
16) iTunes will give in to record labels and adjust pricing such that songs will range from $.50 to $2.
This is getting painful. Does Zune caving to Universal Music count? Score: 1.
17) Sirius will double subscribers but it still won't be enough to pay Howard Stern's salary.
They started the year with 3.3 million and ended with over 5 million. So close. Score: 7.
18) David Letterman will announce his retirement.
I'm a moron. Score: 0.
19) Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, will launch in mid-summer, and will get surprisingly good reviews.
Hah! Score: 0.
20) Despite the L.A. Times' dismal failure, several media organizations will release successful wikis....
One word: wikiality. Score: 2.
21) Martha Stewart will quietly become a nobody. Donald Trump, however, will still somehow manage to remain famous.
Is this even measurable? Score: 4.
22) Mary-Kate and Ashley will return.
Shoot. Me. Now. Score: 3.
23) One person will finally figure out a cool use for Google Base....
I'm still not sure this has happened. Score: 2.
24) At the end of the year, the New York Times will drop Times Select. Soon after, CNN.com will make Pipeline free.
You wish, blogger. Score: 0.
25) Despite some inspired ideas, Craig Newmark's new journalism project won't be a gigantic success, but it will inspire others sites that quickly take off.
What the hell happened to DayLife anyway? Score: 0.
26) News Corp's purchase of MySpace will yield a decent record label that has a surprise hit.
29) Fergie from Black-Eyed Peas will announce a solo album...
Rock out. Score: 8.
30) The New York Times Sunday Styles section will write a trend piece about the trend of trend pieces. It will then implode.
It didn't, but it still could. Score: 3.
31) Chuck Klosterman will announce he's writing new columns for Vanity Fair, Wired, and Modern Midwestern Living.
Well, he almost wrote some stuff for Wired. Score: 3.
32) Fimoculous.com makes a triumphant return as an "almost decent" blog.
Fuck yeah. Score: 10!
33) Anderson Cooper will claim he's the father of Katie Holmes' baby. A wicked paternity suit -- in which everyone refuses to take DNA tests -- ensues.
You wish, Andy. Score: 0.
Average score: 3.27. Before you get all schadenfreude on me, please consider that some of those predictions were intentionally outrageous. As will next year's predictions. Tune in soon...
Those friends and lovers (difference? none!) back home are doing such cool stuff. Matt and Margaret launched Vita.MN, a social calendaring/entertainment site in Minneapolis a couple months ago. Then yesterday, the print edition of the site came out with a cover story from Alexis (who will also be a columnist). Meanwhile, Steve, Alexis, Cristina, Juan, Leigha, Paul, Johnny, and everyone at Chasing Windmills (and Chuck at MNstories) were profiled on MPR's Morning Edition for their pioneering videoblog work (which will also be featured on an upcoming episode of The Tyra Banks Show). And last month, Sarah became the music editor of City Pages. Wheh, nice work.
Zak Sally in a Pitchfork interview: "I'm not young and cool... I hate young people. I hate music. I hate haircuts." La Mano 21 (his graphic novel publishing project) got distribution through SubPop.
Big controversy in the Seattle music scene, in which it is discovered that someone in The Stranger's advertising department was writing reviews for the paper under a pseudonym. Dan Savage canned her and the editor, Dave Segal.
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.
The Nerve.com Future Issue, which will feature writing from Joel Stein, Walter Kirn, Jay McInerney, Douglas Rushkoff, Rick Moody, Ana Marie Cox, and others.
Screens (Virginia Heffernan!) is a new tv/internet convergence blog on... yep, NYtimes.com. I'm calling it a "Lost Remote killer." (Sorry Cory, I kid.)
I'm not on Second Life yet, though I know I should be. I've been watching the site pretty closely for years, and it's fascinating that it's finally taking off, though I have no idea why now. Anyway, there's some reportage that Amazon.com is planning on extending their web services to support virtual stores within Second Life.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to drink only beverages from Amazon's Sports & Energy Drink grocery category.
ARCHITECTURE
Believe it or not, I've actually read every single Zaha Hadid story over the past few weeks (her Guggenheim retrospective has created more press than anything since Bilbao). The only one I'll bother linking to is Slate's contrarian is she really visionary?
So in Minneapolis last weekend, I saw both the new Cesar Pelli library and the Jean Nouvel theater. L.A. Times has a good review of the latter. Those two plus the new Walker and new Michael Graves MIA expansion make Minneapolis the hottest architectural city of the last couple years. (UPDATE: Newsweek's "Design Dozen" drops Minneapolis as #1 in its Design City issue.)
So that little movie that got me in a little t-shirt trouble last Fall finally came out this weekend. I wish I still had enough agitprop in me to call for a boycott, but I'll probably go see it this week.
MUSIC
I doubt you watched VH1's Story of Heavy Metal last week, but the best part was a puffy, wasted, maudlin Jani Lane saying he could "shoot himself in the fucking head" for writing "Cherry Pie." Dude, Decline of the Western Civilization was decades ago!
North Dakota continues to befuddle me. I don't know how one can measure this, but it must be the most conservative state in the union, yet it still somehow elects Democrats to congress and has occasional socialist streaks. The latest is the North Dakota Farmers Union opening a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Agraria, which cost about $4 million to open, will feature home-grown product shipped directly from farmers -- about a third of it from North Dakota and the rest from family farms in 25 states. AP has somephotos.
Using Cobain's suicide note to see what Google Ads turn up. Ouch.
Awesome history of a ubiquitious six-second drum break, sampled in everything from NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" to jeep commercials. You've heard it a million times but never even realized it.
This is weird. Both The Times (Sia Michel) and The Sun write up Tapes 'N Tapes and cite blogs (positively and negatively, respectively) as the primary reason for their success.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
So at some point I'm going to start reading Future of the Book's experimental collaborative book project on gaming, GAM3R 7H3ORY. But here's the hard question: when do I start? By the very nature of the project, it is never done. More thoughts on Future of the Book.
Ya know, I haven't seen the Al Gore movie yet, but how fucking awesome is it that a gigantic powerpoint has been getting raves? It give nerds hope.... too much hope. On with the links:
Guardian Magprofile of Douglas Coupland, in which 1) he subtly disses Steven Berlin Johnson's game book, 2) we learn he has a movie called Everything's Gone Green coming out, and 3) he delivers his definition of irony.
I was just thinking the other day how strange it is that Amazon hasn't significantly monetized IMDB.com. Then along came this NYT profile of the founder.
Is Lost the best thing on TV, like, ever? There are too many topics to link to (Dickens?), but here's a strange interview on Jimmy Kimmel with the Communications Director of the Hanso Foundation?
Amazon.com has launched a grocery section. In other news, a certain nerd in Seattle decides his entire life will consists of the Microsoft cafeteria and whatever he can buy off Amazon.
ONLINE
PopURLS.com aggregates the aggregators, or something like that.
Brian Grazer and Malcolm Gladwell have a hair-off on the Charlie Rose show. Among other things, they talk about Gawker.
MEDIA
At the end of last year, I chose Arianna Huffington as an "artist of the year." My lede: "The Huffington Post should completely suck." David Carr notices the one-year anniversary of The Huffington Post in The Times. His lede?
"When it began a year ago, The Huffington Post seemed like a remarkably bad idea." Yo, just sayin.
WORDS
NYT Mag: Scan This Book! Surprisingly polemic towards the end, but spot-on.
Klosterman texted me from the ooh-ooh-big-deal GNR show in NYC ("Axl got thin again!"), but the big news is that Axl is obsessed with his online persona.
MNstories has a couplevideos of Mark Hosler of Negativland setting up his exhibit at Creative Electric in Minneapolis. Hosler has been hanging out in MSP for a few weeks now -- makes me miss home.
Excellent Daily Showsegment on Mini Kiss versus Tiny Kiss.
Remix David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
The Lloyd Dobler moment for a new generation, from The Office finale: Jim says "I'm in love with you." Response: "What are you doing?"
ONLINE
On the page listing the NYTimes.com blogs, I see they've given Stanley Fish an education blog called "Think Again," but it's barred in behind Times Select.
Back in Minneapolis, the new Ceasar Pelli library is opening, which could rival the Seattle Koohaas library. Alt-Text has some pics.
MUSIC
The new Gnarles Barkley video for "Crazy," from the album, St. Elsewhere, which comes out this week. It will be the best album of the summer. (See also: performing live on Top of the Pops.)
Syndey Pollack has made a documentary of Frank Gehry. Trailer.
The movie that almost got me sued has premiered in St. Paul. Back when the movie was being filmed, I published some exclusive photos of a sickly Lindsay Lohan from the set. She looks so much... less sickly now.
Finally, a follow-up to my very old Amazon list "College Friends Who Punched Me," I have created "My Year As..." in response to the spate of recent books in which people do something (strip, change genders, read the encyclopedia, etc.) for a year. Let me know what's missing from the list.
Do you remember Bill Paxton and Judge Reinhold being in the video to Pat Benatar's "Shadow of the Night"? And that it has a Nazi theme? And that it has Pat as a Dancer In The Dark-era Bjork-like character fantasizing in a Rosie the Riveter get-up? Is this really what the '80s were like?
Kerouac onThe Steve Allen Show, interviewed by William F. Buckley, and eulogized by Walter Cronkite. Is this really what the '60s were like?
SODA
I'm obsessed with Coke Blak in the same way I was obsessed with OK Soda.
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.
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.
Traffic is to Seattle as weather is to Minneapolis. People love to talk about hating it, but they're all resigned to its existence. Alright, here are a few links:
MEDIA
So I'm listening to last week's On The Media via podcast, and I hear Bob Garfield start swearing at an FCC official. It's both really funny and really good. But I'm thinking, "This can't possibly have aired. This must just be on the podcast." But no, it turns out that it actually was broadcast. There appears to be no fall-out yet, but I can't wait until next week's reax pieces, which seem inevitable.
I have much to talk about, but first here are some updates from various Friends of Fimoculous:
Tapes 'N Tapes were on last week's Best Week Ever. After taking SXSW by storm (and landing an 8.3 on Pitchfork), last night they played the last show on this tour here in Seattle. They were awesome.
Michaelangelo Matos has exited his perch as the music critic at the Seattle Weekly to join the up-and-coming eMusic. For his final goodbye, he gives a farewell mixed tape to Seattle.
Whoa, did you know Andy Milonakis is 30 years old? According to The Times, he has a growth hormone condition. He's the Gary Coleman of our times!
In addition to VH1's Web Junk 20 and Bravo's Viral Videos, other upcoming projects include a show on USA based upon eBaum's World and a show on NBC called The Net With Carson Daly. In the future, everyone will create a viral video.
Which is more peculiar -- that Terry Gross' interview with J.T. LeRoy is online without any notation of recent events, or that J.T. LeRoy sounds so obviously like a chick in the interview?
Enter the ISBN number of a book into BarnesAndNoble.com and get a quote for how much they will buy it for. Cool.
I've been busy alphabetizing my CDs and running to Ikea for book shelves, so somewhere along the way I missed that Malcolm Gladwell started a blog.
Although I'm morally obligated to read every book even remotely related to the internet (especially if it has something to do with blogging), I haven't decided whether to dive into Kos' Crashing The Gate. The decent NYTBR review includes the first chapter, so maybe that's a good starting point.
FILM
[Insert Snakes on a Plane link here.]
Well, at least William Gibson likedV is for Vendetta.
One of the many things I like about Wired is that it truly is a magazine. That is, for all the talk about the death of print, Wired stories are the best example of the perfection of a medium that doesn't easily translate into other mediums. You can, for instance, read most of Will Wright's game issue online, but it's not nearly the experience that the magazine is. (See also: Wright doing a walk-through of Spore.)
Every side-street around Microsoft campus seems to have one of those create-a-home-meal shops, so I'm not surprised to learn that Seattle is home to one of the biggest chains. From the NYT story: "The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction." (Old MNspeak thread on the MSP-based versions.)
I'm moving to Seattle in a few weeks and can't decide whether to change my phone number -- from a 612 area code to a 206 area code. NYT Styles tells me this is the existential crisis of our times, or something like that.
Similarly, there's also this little trend piece about girls taking pictures of themselves. I've asked girlfriends about this peculiar obsession, and they all claim that it's somehow liberating.
Did anyone else think that the scene in last week's Lost in which Hurley was caught with a stash of food was simply a ploy to explain that he wasn't losing weight on the island? Well, according to a Maxim interview, he has lost 30 pounds.
Could this be my first link to a William Safire column? Let's just assume so: Blargon, which looks at blog jargon. Some people are already looking for errors.
Good interview with The Smoking Gun regarding the Frey scandal.
FOOD
The real reason that people like a New York Times food critic should have a blog is so that they can occasionally write about Hooter's.
City Pages this week has interviews with Craig Newmark and... ME! It reads pretty nerdy, but it sprawled into an interesting citizen journalism conversation on MNspeak.
USA Todaygives props to our Olympics videoplayer strategy, but points to a future in which everything will likely be online. (This topic is huge, and maybe I'll write about it after the Olympics.)
Fox Reality is a new entire channel dedicated to reality tv. Reality Remix is a show -- staring Kennedy! -- that is now completely available online.
FILM
When did this sneak up us? Basic Instinct 2, starring MILF-ish Sharon Stone. Who knows, it could even be okay (I actually love the campiness of the first). No Michael Douglas though.
I've ditched my Netflix account because I had stopped using it (too much TiVo, too much DVD buying), but now I see they are testing a $5/month plan, which could bring me back.
DRUNKS
Nerve.com: Last Night on Earth, a photo-essay inspired by the wrtings of Bukowski.
MUSIC
Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the New Yorker. Would you like to see the video for the first single? Okay.
Did you skip the Olympics to see the last two hours of Arrested Development? Thank you, TiVo. (The show finished fifth in ratings for the night -- after the Olympics, Dancing with the Stars, WWE's Friday Night Smackdown, and a Ghost Whisperer re-run. Go America!)
It was pretty good, but it's also a mystery why the Pamela Anderson roast is being released on DVD.
TiVo is holding a Wishlist Mixer in San Fran. Dammit, I'm moving to the wrong city.
The editor of Modern Love give his stake on the state of love in contemporary America. I seem to disagree with half of it.
Mike Figgis made a short film, Tied up at the Office [not safe for the office], for lingerie peddlers Agent Provocateur. I get it as much as I got Demon Lover.
I don't care what you say, these last few Madonna vids have been good. Her new video for "Sorry" has more street dancing, this tine looking like crumping-meets-Barbarella-meets-Mad-Max.
Look at all this: 1) NBC is producing an internet-only reality tv show called Star Tomorrow. 2) Bravo will launch a site, OutZone.tv, with original gay programming. 3) AOL and Mark Burnett are working on an internet reality tv show called Gold Rush. 4) NBC is greenlightingCarson's Cyberhood, a showcase of homemade videos. 5) Amazon is starting an original talk show hosted by Bill Maher called Amazon Fishbowl. All of these online-only -- no broadcast.
Occasionally funny: MySpace: The Movie. "Why am I not in your top eight?"
Or how about fake trailers? Tarantino and Rodriguez have crazy ideas.
What was the weirdest part of the Super Bowl? Noticing during the Mission Impossible III trailer that Philip Seymour Hoffman is the main villain in the movie. Here's a PSH interview with David Remnick.
SPORTS
Klosterman's ESPN.com Super Bowl blog was quite fun, right? He talks about blogging here.
MEDIA
The editor of the SF Bay Guardianthinks that Craig Newmark isn't the hero you think he is. Anil responds.
TV
Time's tv critic, James Poniewozik, has a blog: Tuned In.
FAKE NEWS
A new journal for cross-disciplinary studies in plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification: Plagiary. [via NYTstory.]
Next time. Next time I'll live blog Frey on Oprah too. Kick it:
PERSONAL
Hey, I sold my community website, MNspeak.com. Now if I could only sell this dumb thing...
ROCKETBOOM
Psst, Amanda is going to be on this Thursday's episode of CSI.
Andrew has decided to auction off his first Rocketboom advertising on eBay.
ONLINE
So I had been away from the blogging world for a few weeks and I come back to see embedded video everywhere via You Tube. Looks like this could quickly become what Google Video and Current.TV and Brightcove (and several others) wanted to be overnight.
Wow, someone did the research that I've been dying to know: how much is a viewer in advertising revenue versus download revenue? The answer: $.57 for advertising to $1.44 for download (with a ton of caveats applied).
Media pundits are flopping around like suffocating carp over Soderbergh's new movie, Bubble (trailer), which will be released on DVD (now available for pre-order on Amazon) just a few days after it comes out in theaters.
From last month, a Rolling Stone profile of the guy who created NowThatsFuckedUp.com, which is extremely fucked up -- among other things, the site contains gruesome unedited photos of people killed in Iraq.
Anyone else notice that nearly all the skits on this weekend's SNL contained musical numbers, including the intro monologue by Scarlett Johanson? Lazy Sunday, what have you wrought?
Did you catch the first episode of Web Junk 20, the new show created by Viacom for VH1 after purchasing iFilm (VH1 link | iFIlm link). Why does it suck so much?
Think your a hot shot in forecasting the big events in 2006 culture? Take the USA Today quiz to make your predictions.
BOOKS
I've had several conversations with people who so greatly misinterpreted Gladwell's Blink that it seemed they never read it, but I never realized someone could write a whole book about his misinterpretation: Think.
Apologies for the navel-gazing nature of this post, but a lot has happened in my life lately, and since this is ostensibly a personal blog (hi Mom!), here are some notes on recent personal events:
+ At work, we recently launched this new little site: NBCOlympics.com. The winter games are in Torino, Italy in February.
+ Friends, family, and pretty much all of Minneapolis already knows this, but I've never officially announced it to the estranged readers of Fimoculous: After the Olympics, I will be moving to Seattle, where I took a new job at MSNBC.com. As you probably know, MSNBC.com is co-owned by NBC and Microsoft, so I'll be working on the Microsoft campus in a fun new capacity. I'll have more to say about it later, but in the meantime... Seattle, holla fo' me, yo.
+ I was hoping to make an exciting announcement on the future of MNspeak (my local citizen journalism site) by now, but we're still sorting that out. Soon....
+ I have an essay in the new book Digital Think from the New Media Institute.
+ Random quote in a Pioneer Press story about the effect blogging will have on the '06 political season: "I'm not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."
That's all for now. My '06 resolution: Make Fimoculous cool again.
Although I'll continue to add lists as they come in, it looks like List of Lists: 2005 is winding down. As a final punctuating coda to the year, here are my Top 20 Lists of 2005:
The teaser on the print edition of this NYT story was "Pamela Rogers Turner was 28; her lover, or victim, 13. Discuss." I've had about a dozen conversations recently about these cases.
So best. Amazon has put up a page for GNR's Chinese Democracy -- check out the release date. It seems optimistic that Axl will be dead by then. (Update: drat, it's already been removed. For those who missed it, the release date was listed as December 31, 2025.)
Someone did a parody of Jakob Nielsen's infamous 2000 column about Flash1996 column about frames and pretty much just supplanted "Ajax" for "Flash" "Frames" -- even the Slashdotters got tricked for a bit.
iTunes now sells more music than Tower Records, Sam Goody, and Borders (but it's still behind Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Amazon, etc.).
Who's gonna play Janis Joplin in that new biopic? Pink!
Here's a clip of Kanye on BET in which he talks about his Bush-hates-black-people remarks, plays a strange game of name-that-historical-quote, and introduces his new video for "Heard 'Em Say."
TV
Remember the guy who won a bjillion dollars on Press Your Luck? Here's the video from the episode.
For those of you who read this site via RSS, I've launched the 2005 List of Lists page. (Previously: 2004 | 2003 | 2001.) As usual, email me if I'm missing something.
DATING
Is it true that Match.com had its employees go on bogus dates just to keep people subscribed to the service? And do they post faux-profiles that present flirtatious intent? Yes, according to a lawsuit...
GalleyCat has an excellent first-hand account of last week's New York Public Library debate between Google and publishers groups. (Also in NYT.)
I didn't even realize that NYT gave Marjane Satrapi (the author of Persepolis) a blog which apparently illustrates her experience growing up in Iran. I say "apparently" because it's behind Time Select.
MUSIC
The only good thing about reissues is getting to read contemporary rock critics on classics. Pitchfork, somewhat surprisingly, rolls out a 10.0 for Springsteen's Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition.
Biz Week's interview with MTV's Jason Hirschhorn covers a lot of interesting ground, including Comedy Central's Motherload, MTV's Overdrive, and iFilm.
MEDIA
NY Mag's long look at Mike Lacey (New Times' exec editor) and the history of the Village Voice is the best piece so far on this whole alt-weekly skirmish.
ONLINE
WaPo does a conspiratorial Google rant, but it's also the first mention of Google's dream to make your DNA searchable. You read that right: "Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as 'Googling Your Genes'."
While being interviewed the other day, someone asked me about my political affiliations. After stammering for a bit, I said, "Do you know the phrase 'South Park Republican'? I suppose I'm a 'Daily Show Democrat'." You heard it here first.
TV
Metacritic.com (which you might remember was recently purchased by CNet) has added tv reviews. So far, Prison Break has been my favorite show of the year, while critics haveEverybody Hates Chris as the best.
So you're watching Lost, right? At first all this talk about the curse of The X-Files / Twin Peaks seemed a worthwhile concern, but season two has been great so far. So "4 8 15 16 23 42," right? The site 4815162342.com has been the best for gossip and theories, including one that concludes that the numbers are GPS coordinates. Damn, that's so... post-Google.
ONLINE
Back when my pal Andy launched Upcoming.org, I asked him what he'd do with all that money when Google bought him out. I was only wrong about one thing. Congrats, man.
Biz Weekprofiles Google hottie Marissa Mayer but doesn't mention that she's rumored to be Larry Page's girlfriend (which is revealed in a footnote of Battelle's The Search, which I'm just finishing up).
Gawker opened up to invite-only comments. I'll give you one if you sneak me into a Kate Moss bathroom party.
SaveMyAss.com: "a personal assistant that keeps your girlfriend or wife happy by sending her flowers on your behalf, on a regular but semi-random basis." Created by James Hong, a HOTorNOT founder.
The Million Dollar Homepage is cruising along. I can't decide which I hate more: the idea, or that I didn't come up with the idea.
This happened a while ago, but I'm finally getting around to reading CBSnews.com's new blog, Public Eye, which is supposed to bring transparency to CBS News. Oh, the magic of blogs.
MUSIC
Golden Fiddle reports that the new Gang of Four CD comes with an actual $1 bill inside. Ya gotta love that Marxist marketing.
Listen to a stream of Metric's new album, Live It Out, which comes out in a couple weeks. Or watch the video to the first single, "Monster Hospital." I've been hoping that Metric breaks through for a long time, and this might finally be that moment.
A lot of people are talking about Yahoo's recent forays into content, including hiring Kevin Sites (who some people know as an intrepid Iraq blogger, but I know as the guy who beat me for the Wired Rave Award -- I kid). Yahoo has already launched a promotional page, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, which hints at some of what he will be doing.
Google Earth used to discover Roman ruins. Up next: WMDs in Iraq.
MUSIC
It took a full month for the New York Times to retaliate Salon's heavy-metal-is-smarter-than-you-think feature with their own heavy-metal-is-smarter-than-you-think feature.
Please, someone else read the NYT Magcover story on Bono and tell me if it's worth it, cuz it's just going to lay untouched by my bed for a week otherwise.
PRODUCTS
A while ago, The Onion did a parody of the Gillette vs. Schick battle over blades on the razor. Then it became real.
The new Danny Bonaduce show coming to VH1 in September sounds like the best celeb reality tv breakdown ever. Although the details about binge drinking, vicodin, and steroids might be the most interesting to some, I'm most enamored with the story about how he married his wife, the co-star of the show: drunk, on their first date, because she wouldn't have sex with him unless they were married. Awesome.
The NYT Magcover story on Les Moonves is okay, but for its length, it left out several things, such as his tepid public relationship with Letterman (those are the only good episodes Letterman does anymore) and any crafting of how splitting up Viacom will affect CBS. For instance, look at something like Rock Star: INXS, which started on VH1 but eventually migrated over to CBS -- that kind of, er, synergy won't happen in a split-Viacom world.
If you still somehow don't have a TiVo, just follow Haughey's instructions on how to get paid to own one.
EW's Fall TV Preview is out. Unlike last year (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Veronica Mars), nothing looks great, except for maybe Martha Stewart's Apprentice.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Waxy.org says exactly what I think about the state of music videos online (and I've even thought about starting a business around this gripe). With Feist videos!
When News Corp announced it was buying MySpace for $580 million, there was some speculation that Murdoch would use the site as a backdoor to competing with Viacom's MTV. News Corp execs shrugged this off, saying they were just interested in audience, not in changing MySpace. Then comes NYT Styles (yes! NYT Styles!), which throws MySpace as its lead story this week, with a final line quoting co-founder Tom Anderson (the guy who is friends with everyone who joins MySpace by default): "It's kind of like, who cares about MTV anymore?" Also revealed: MySpace will be creating a new record label, which will work under a major label's supervision. So with one purchase, Murdoch managed to sneak in a way to compete in three industries (internet, cable tv, and music).
For the second time this summer, business coverage of MTV lands on the front page of NYT Sunday Arts. This time, it's basically a look at MTV's "multi-plat-fornication" efforts disguised as a profile of the network's president, Van Toffler. The focus is on MTV Overdrive, which I predicted a while back would quickly disappear, but last night's VMAs were an attempt to prove the "broadband video channel" (blech) is a real competitor. I suppose this is one prediction I wouldn't mind being wrong about.
TV
Iraq has adopted Western-style reality tv in many forms, including Materials and Labor (basically Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) and Iraq Star (basically American Idol).
The lead review in this week's NYTBR is Jay McInerney. He reviews a new novel that I've never heard of, but it's an interesting essay on first novels and the bildungsroman.
I don't know if these are new, but I recently found links to some funny Ze Frank featurettes (i.e., commercials) on my Amazon wishlist: "History" and "Use".
Score one for our pals at Rocketboom who got on CBS the other night. Chuck has the video.
Joss Whedon lovesVeronica Mars too. See, I told you.
Engadget has pics of TiVo's upcoming download service. Looks like the first partner will be IFC, which is awesome because they happen to not be part of my Time-Warner cable package.
I've been talking a lot again about trying to start a restaurant. I'm rather enamored by this idea to mix tv and dining, although it would play horribly in Minneapolis, which has the lowest tv-viewing rates per capita in the nation.
The Strangers with Candy movie appears to be no more, which is odd because Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris are pretty much at the top of their game right now.
MUSIC
Bjork's soundtrack to Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 comes out Aug. 23. There's also an import.
So Microsoft is back in the content game? Color me confused! Filter is apparently a blog network. After poking around at them for a bit, I can't even get into how horribly executed they are.
And I have no comment on that thing in Gawker, Current.TV, or Robert Novak.
Quirk ensemble indie film or trite remake of the genre, you decide.
An excellent list of good upcoming movies. (New ones by David Lynch, LaBute, Aronofsky, Tarantino, Linklater, etc.) Looks like 2006 will be a good year for film.
Alright hipsters, now's your chance to wrangle with your midwestern nightmare. I will be in New York City very soon -- July 15-19. Each day already has an event attached to it (HiFi on Friday, Siren Music Festival on Saturday, Eyebeam on Sunday, Chuck's book launch party on Monday), but if you drop me an email, we can probably find a place to meetup.
TV
So I'm watching the Daily Show yesterday and I'm instantly concentrating on the new set. I understand what they're trying to do -- move away from being a night time talk show set (think Johnny Carson) and be more of a conversation set (think Charlie Rose). That part doesn't bother me. But the graphics are just weird. Dana Stevens at Slate was freaked out.
Who cares that Paris and Nicole aren't on speaking terms -- they're still being forced to do a tv show together.
Today I downgraded my Netflix account to the two-movies-at-a-time option because I was using my three-movies option enough. But now, HackingNetflix discovers that Netflix' download service may be coming soon, which makes me wonder what the pricing would be.
I haven't watched much yet, but I'm immediately excited by some new machinima: This Spartan Life, which is a live talk show using the Halo engine. Future of the Book has a profile.
The trailer for Wedding Crashers lets up you upload a picture of yourself and become one of the characters. It's gimmicky, but it also has beginnings of a good idea.
Trailer to Shopgirl, based on a Steve Martin novella, also starring Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman. Funny, I didn't think of Lost in Translation until the font for the titles appeared.
Somehow Newsweek got ahold of the Cooper/Rove emails, and Isikoff says that Rove was the source but probably didn't knowingly reveal Plame's name. Dude, I've tried that excuse so many times, and she's never bought it....
On The Media has a decent piece (audio) starring Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's coverage of the London bombing.
The New York Observer redesigned their website, which needed it very badly.
ROOFTOPS
You know already these two things about me: 1) I hate New Yorkers who talk about their stupid rooftop parties (I even said so on Rocketboom), and 2) the Sunday NYT Styles section makes me reach for the revolver. Put those together and you get The High Life. That sound you hear is a growl.
Amazon.com is 10 years old. USA Today did an interview with Bezos, and NYT gave him a (mildly negative) full-length profile.
TV
Hooking Up, which is sort of reality-tv-meets-documentary look at online dating, premieres this Thursday on ABC. NYT has a quick interview with the director.
What did I do over the long weekend? I saw both War of the World and Star Wars: Episode Three, so that you don't have to. But mostly I waited for the "Karl Rove is the Valerie Plame leak" plot to develop -- but it hasn't even made it onto NYT yet. Please God, let it be Rove.
BLOGS
Someone should write a crazy-murderer-speech-algorithm that catches things like this blog, which was written by Joseph Duncan, who's being held for murder in Idaho. I have a ton more links over at MNspeak.
Reading NYT's piece on writers who are using blogs to help write books, it's immediately glaring how many of these books are exactly what my friends and I are reading right now (including Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You) and are looking forward to reading (including David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, and John Battelle's The Search.
In a wait rivaling Chinese Democracy, the release of the movie Prozac Nation is finally upon us today -- but it went straight to DVD.
MEDIA
Wired has most of its Remix issue online. It's my favorite issue in many months.
NYTreports on Romenesko's salary, a cool $169K/year.
MUSIC
NME has a bit about Franz Ferdinand's new album, due in September. And another bit about The Darkness' new album, due in October.
127 is a Iranian band that has been trying to play in the U.S. since at least SXSW, but hasn't gotten in yet. And they don't sound bad. Here's one profile from the Chi Trib about them.
Missy Elliot's new album, The Cookbook, comes out today.
The first couple months of college sucked. I was a pre-med student at a boring midwest state school who hung out with other boring pre-med kids from the midwest. It was like high school, except everyone wanted to be valedictorian. The best thing I could say about my doctor-to-be friends was that they were as exciting as organic chemistry.
One day, I accidentally walked into a dorm room where a couple slacker kids were on the floor playing Nintendo. Not even bothering to notice what game they were playing, I immediately focused on the poster hanging on the wall. It was a standard-issue Michael Jordan dunk shot -- the kind of poster that has no purpose other than to hang in a dorm room. Except the ingenious Nintendo players had taken a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, cut a 3 x 3 hole in the center, taped it over the poster so that the hole highlighted one player in the fuzzy background on the bench beneath Jordan's splayed legs, and scribbled "Detlef Schrempf" on the poster.
I instantly knew that these guys were going to be my friends.
And now, let's have Chuck give his version:
I met My Nemesis in November 1990. I walked into somebody's dorm room to play Nintendo, and he was sitting on the bed, holding an acoustic guitar on which he could play only one note -- the opening note of Tesla's "Love Song." He was wearing a denim jacket, and he had used a black Magic Marker to draw the symbol for anarchy on the back. It was just about the silliest thing I had ever seen. We immediately became friends.
The first story is how I remember meeting Chuck Klosterman; the second is how he tells it in his new book, Killing Yourself To Live, which officially comes out today.
I'm not here to tell you Chuck is lying about how we met. For his last book, I did a point-by-point response to what he wrote about us, and he almost seems to concede fuzzy historical remembrances this time around by subtitling the book "85% of a True Story." Actually, I might be completely wrong about what really happened. In fact, "what really happened" is probably a useless concept when discussing drunken Nintendo battles.
(But just for the record, let's get a parenthetical in here. I am resisting the temptation to tell you the 15 percent that is inaccurate in his telling of our times together -- which you can hear for yourself in this MP3 of him reading from that chapter. But again, that's not what I'm here to talk about, because, for the most part, it's "true" (especially when you put it in quotes), and whatever isn't true is better this way anyway.)
Here's where I should tell you about the book. KYTL is basically a travelogue disguised as a memoir. First devised as an article for Spin, the ostensible narrative is Chuck travelling around America and visiting the places that rock stars died -- but that's all subterfuge for reflecting on various relationships and friendships from the past (and that's all subterfuge for reflecting on life and death). When he comes to Minneapolis (in theory, to visit the place Bobby Stinson died), the book recounts how a group of music critics (plus me, "someone who probably should have been a music critic") go to the Kitty Cat Klub, drink too much, argue way too much, go back to my house, drink more, climb on the roof, and nearly kill ourselves. And yeah, there's some stuff about the fist-fights we had in college.
Now that's out of the way, so let's get back to what I wanted to say. Look at the two different stories at the top of this page -- now ask yourself this: Which story is better? In college, this was the kind of thing that Chuck and I would have argued about for a week -- not just whose story is better, but what percentage of other people would think each is better, and who told the story most economically, and which story was more historically true, and if historical accuracy even matters, and who would play the parts in the movie of this story, and what Kant thought "better" actually meant, and so on. It was completely nuts.
But it was also probably the most important time of my life. Even though there were several occasions where I literally wanted to strangle him, nowadays my emotions about Chuck are pretty simple: I think he's funny, and he only occasionally pisses me off. As for "what really happened," it's all a blur, some of it intentionally so. But I now know this: I learned more about friendship from him than anyone else in my life.
Little Lost Robot likes my "Send To Proof" button!
Whenever someone uses the word juvenile to describe some piece of cultural junk, I immediately want it. That said, I've never really understood the appeal of NewsBreakers.org, the pranksters behind the tv live-shot media stunts. However, NYTchooses to stack them next to Howard Stern and the Merry Pranksters. I guess if there were more of a point to what they do (like, say, The Guerilla Girls), I might be more sympathetic. Then again, saying that these pranks lack a point is, well, missing the point. I guess.
In college, Lawrence, Kan. was synonymous with William Burroughs (for me, anyway). Now, in my new media work world, it's forever associated with online news innovation. NYT looks at what The Lawrence Journal-World is in The Newspaper of the Future.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Billy Corgan has taken out an advert (pdf) to reunite Smashing Pumpkins on the very day that his new solo album came out. Billy, why didn't you just become a contestant on Rock Star?
This is sorta interesting... to synch up with the release of the Bewitched movie, the first season of the tv show has been released in both color and black and white.
I have been ignoring the debate about whether Google is a media company (such absolutist categorical thinking -- similar to "are bloggers journalists?" -- bores me), but here's NYT mentioning it in their "What's Online" column, which is clearly struggling at this point.
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.
Have you seen the essay question that has been added to the SATs? Being a kid today sucks: "A sense of happiness and fulfillment, not personal gain, is the best motivation and reward for one's achievements. Expecting a reward of wealth or recognition for achieving a goal can lead to disappointment and frustration. If we want to be happy in what we do in life, we should not seek achievement for the sake of winning wealth and fame. The personal satisfaction of a job well done is its own reward."
FILM
Did you hear that Johnny Depp tries to act like Michael Jackson all the way through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Seems to be true: a new trailer.
In Spin, Chuck dissects music genres. "IDM: This is an acronym for 'Intelligent Dance Music.' Really. No, really. I'm serious. This is what they call it. Really."
For unexplainable reasons, the Lost Remote thread about Lost (the tv show) goes ape shit with comments. Also, there are two viral websites related to the show: Oceanic Airlines (the airline in the show) and Drive Shaft (Charlie's band).
It's weird how I completely forgot that FuckedCompany.com (who were sorta important at one time) existed. The L.A. Times has a profile of its creator, who has a new dot-com venture.
It should be that time of the week to roll out the Times Styles section and ridicule the cover story. Except this week, the story happens to be something that I've been saying for a while: the joke is dead. There was a time when people told jokes all the time at parties, but now everything is situational humor and nuanced wit. I will even occasionally tell jokes at parties, wait for people not to laugh, and then launch my shtick about the death of the joke. Yeah, that's right, I use the concept of jokes to set up idea humor. So anyway, NYT Styles, I applaud you for not being one big joke again this week.
Richard Linklater to direct movie version of Fast Food Nation (that isn't Supersize Me).
New documentary on the history of women's wrestling: Lipstick & Dynamite trailer. (This would have been the perfect opportunity to finally have a female voice do the trailer.)
What would it look like if the Times started to blog? Like this. Not bad, really.
The trailer to David La Chapelle's Rize is finally out. If you've forgotten, this is the documentary about Krumping, which is basically clowns meet hip-hop.
NSFW
What's up with the recent trend of R-rated music videos? Here's one Louis XIV did with a few Suicide Girls.
Get paid to watch (and write about) The Daily Show.
If you missed it, here's the hilarious Daily Showspot about cable news and blogs. The "Inside The Blogs" show on CNN is a favorite laughing point for me at work every day.
Today's the big day: the season finale of Veronica Mars. Here's a new interview with the creator, Rob Thomas, which contains a question about the DVD release.
Some video involving Paris Hilton and Fat Boy Slim. I'm told this is a viral video to promote the release of Fat Boy Slim's new video. Which is the most hyper-real thing I've heard this month.
Apparently because they haven't put Gawker on the Business page yet (next up: Travel?), NYTchats up the Gawker gang. What's the scoop? Blogs are over-hyped. Yeah, tell that to Calacanis, who is being stalked.
Since there's no such thing as linking to an Esquire column, I'll point to Stereogum's large excerpt of Chuck's 21 CDs From the Past 3 Years. I think several of these are actually inspired by real people, and #10 is very likely me: "The Thrills, So Much for the City (2003): You will like this album if your apartment is actually a bar." And #1 couldn't be more perfect: "1. The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me (2004): You will like this album if you used to like AC/DC but now you just read a lot."
A new Chuck Palahniuk book, Haunted, is out today.
INTERACTIVE SHOES
Nike has a new towering presence in Times Square -- 22-story digital screen that you can control by calling a phone number build a personalized pair of shoes. A friend sent a picture.
Many of you have written to ask why I haven't said a word about Tina Fey's baby announcement. Yes, okay, I am a little upset that she didn't tell me first. Now that the humiliation is out there, let's check in with the scary & sexy nerds known as the blogosphere:
INTERNET/SEX
Nerve.com does Sex Advice From Bloggers. They never asked, but my answer to "What's the best way to get a blogger to go home with you?" would have been "tell him he looks hotter in real life than in that weird picture on the blog."
In Wired News, Regina Lynn take a look at HighJoy, a melding of dating, chat, and teledildonics.
Amazon.com is trying to clean up the way they look -- no more infinite tabs.
MEDIA
File under: New York Post is doomed. Google is developing an algorithm for determining quality in news.
Unless you're in the creepy parts of the blogosphere, you don't see people linking to The Nation much anymore. But there's a decent story on the challenges that Al Gore's new network, Current, faces.
TV
Did anyone see the last episode of Wonder Showzen? The theme was patience, and until half-way through the show, the joke was that everything was going to be drawn out to stupidity. It was as funny as tedious gets. Then the second half of the show was the entire first half of the show played in reverse. There hasn't been anything this weird on tv since Andy Kaufman.
Over on MNspeak, we've got news about the only two world-famous Minnesota Jews: Tom Friedman and Al Franken. (I know, I know, Dylan is sometimes Jewish too. But he doesn't write or call home anymore.)
You've certainly heard by now that the White Stripes released a new single exclusively on iTunes. No? Then here's the link.
The audio to the Lawrence Lessig / Jeff Tweedy conversation is finally available.
It looks like it finally launched: MTV's Overdrive, which is basically a video portal with videos/trailers/etc. My guess is it'll be gone by the end of the year.
Two new releases this week: Orson Wells' F for Fake and Charlton Heston's Soylent Green. There's also a new $21 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind / Lost in Translationvalue pack.
We've got a lot to talk about today, and I'm not not even going to link to Lohan's new blonde hair. Deep breath... ready, set, GO!:
TV
The TV season hasn't even come to the moment of finale spoilers and already ABC has scheduled the DVD releases of the first seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives.
TVCarnage.com. "Hundreds of hours of exceptionally bad TV lovingly fused together into hour plus, glorious cesspools of retardation." Amazing clips. NYTsays DVDs are available for free, but it looks like the link might be gone.
NewsBreakers.org. They break into local tv liveshots. Is it a sign of getting old that what once seemed funny is now lame? [via]
A look at the new TV Guide spin-off, Inside TV. Certainly no shocker: TV Guide's revenue's are plummeting.
The Gladwell-esque Opus Of The Summer is certain to be Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You (released next month). The ususal suspects are already excerpting it, including NYT Magazine (with a section about narrative tv) and Wired (not online yet).
GAMES
In Guess-the-Google you see 20 images from a one-word Google Images search, and you have to figure out what the word is. Deceptively difficult.
Rappers love to make liquids that you consume. Here's a sample of real hip-hop energy drinks: Lil Jon's Crunk!!!, Ice-T's Liquid Ice, Nelly's PimpJuice, and Russell Simmons' DefCon3. The new issue of Wired reviews them all (not online yet).
The Onion A/V Club wishlists "war" on TiVo and records the results. Lots of Nickelodeon, ABC Family, and VH1.
Video: Jon Stewart's appearance on Oprah. Why the hell Cameron Diaz is sitting there is the biggest mystery since... since... since they gave Jimmy Kimmel a tv show. (Sorry, I know I can do better than that.)
Many months ago, I was actually thinking the best localite to review the new Walker would be Peter Ritter. And there he is in CP today. He nicely conjures the Death Star, the Cheshire Cat, and an REI climbing wall to describe out new fave ediface. Hoorah, our first readable Walker review.
Today is either huge day in Fimoculous history, or it's a brief moment of crazed myopia. After avoiding it for 4+ years, I've finally added comments. The little link appears at the bottom of the posts -- and it will probably disappear the second I start getting comment spam. Be kind, young netizens. (Oh, and you probably noticed the Google Ads. I'm making about $.08/day on those, so they also might be short-lived.)
TV
I know some of you are having a hard time seeing Wonder Showzen, which MTV2 buries in the after-hours. So I've uploaded a video of the entire first episode. Download it now before my ISP (or Viacom) calls. Yeah, that was short-lived. Server slowed down to a near dead-stop. I'm sure you can find a Torrent out there.
A friend of mine worked on the market research for the new prescription bottle that Target is hoping will turn pharmaceuticals into destination shopping.
So best. Jimmy Kimmel is hiring for a "TV Watcher" who will watch the tube all day looking for the best clips for the show. If a blogger doesn't get the job, something's wrong.
In a little ditty about ending the whodunit on Veronica Mars, this story also says UPN has renewed the show for a second season.
FILM
Trailer to the new Gus Van San movie, Last Days, a fictional account of the demise of Kurt Cobain that includes appearances by Kim Gordon and Harmony Korine.
Interview with EW's long-time film critic Owen Gleiberman.
MUSIC VIDEOS
"The Sad Song", "created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects."
If you missed it, here's NYT's architecture review of the new Walker from Friday. Best part of the opening party? Most people will tell you open access to Bjork (or Kim Gordon, or Yoko Ono) in the Target tent was cool. I'll tell you that the blinking red LEDs were attrocious.
Google has released a video upload tool. As the FAQ says, you have to own the rights to the video, but you will be able to charge people to view it. This completely breaks open the doors for micropayments.
According to NYT, the Spy-ish Radar Magazine is making a comeback next month in the form of a website. Although the site has some interesting ideas (such as a 15-minutes-of-fame image uploader), I have a bigger question: will my subscription from two years ago finally be validated?
Yes, I realize it's a little silly to show up here at the beginning of every week to watch me get upset about the lead story on the NYT Styles section. But c'mon, the man date? Dear New York Media, why must you write trite trend pieces that cause the rest of us to consider molotov cocktailing Michael's?
NYT Mag's cover story, "Our Ratings, Ourselves", tells the suprisingly fascinating story of the Portable People Meter -- a device that records all the media you've consumed in a day for marketing purposes. Pioneered by Arbitron and implemented by Nielsen, the PPM, which is about the size of a pager, accomplishes this by having all media encoded with an audio watermark. A broad range of other topics covered in the long piece: personal media device consumption, the arcane life of Nielsen labs, the shift from active to passive measurement, cable box innnovations, and direct measurement of advertising success. Two related items:
CJR asks Can Nielsen Keep up with the Way America Watches? NPR's Bob Garfield foresees the Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.
MEDIA
Fun idea: ask four people -- Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show), Don Hewitt (founder of 60 Minutes), Mark Burnett (creator Survivor and The Apprentice), Al Primo (creator of Eyewitness News) -- how to reinvent CBS's evening news. The results are chaotic. (Reminds me of the time Wiredasked for Google redesigns, and the results were a mess.)
MUSIC VIDEOS
I pretty much never have to link to a music video again after looking at this page.
BitTorrent link for the newest Daft Punk video of "Human After All."
IDEAS
William Safire's critique of privacy is a good place to jump into understanding ChoicePoint and other nefarious data-collection agencies. Sample quote: "The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A... But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research."
Huh, did you know that City Pages owns a local adult website, TC Uncovered (nsfw). The meta keywords include "escorts" and "domination," and there's employment and personals sections. Naughty.
NY Observerhas more about the Huffington Report, with copious comments from Drudge.
And that story launched today's juicy announcement -- a new Denton blog, Sploid.com, a tabloid site in direct competition with Drudge. Editors include the inimitable Ken Layne.
Sure, Sploid made a splash today, but the real action is this new cupcake blog.
This is pretty neat: The Annotated New York Times. The site lists NYT stories with real-time reaction from the blogosphere. Curious if NYT Corp will frown on this.
Last time I saw Robin [blog], he wouldn't even whisper to me what the real name of INdTV would be. It officially launched today as Current TV. (C|Net story.) Looks exciting, even though The Post is being all playa-hatah about it.
If you like Hal Hartley, you might want to check out the DVD collection of his short films. Includes an obscure short with Adrienne Shelley and Parker Posey as roller-blading, lip-synching cupids. (Trailer.)
The best part about this Google piece in Newsweek is where Google claims they just "forgot" to put ads on Google News. Uh-huh.
REALITY ENTERTAINMENT
I fell for Best Week Ever's joke on Friday. In the recurring segment "Who's having the best week ever?" they name-checked Frantina Dulee. I was Googling her name 30 seconds into the segment, but by the end it was obvious she's, duh, not a real person.
The interesting proposition in this Chicago Tribune piece is that while sports has become increasingly scripted, entertainment has become increasingly competitive.
TrueDater.com is a date-rating service. That's right, people who frequent date sites are reviewed as though they were Amazon.com books. I feel so violated. [Via a Wired News column.]
In a review of The Hookup Handbook, NYT Styles tries to explain girls who aren't into relationships and aren't into casual sex either. I don't know where the hell these girls live (New York, you say? Never heard of it), but it sure is nice to have an article lying around that provides a definition of hookup.
It seems odd that NYTMag did a long Murakami profile without a news peg, but it's not bad at using otaku as a means to talk about Japan. (Previous profile in Wired.)
LOCAL
KSTP and Star-Tribunefell for an April Fool's gag claiming that a Three's Company remake was coming to St. Paul.
I would do anything to make NY Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers (which mentions the word "blog" 19 times -- hoorah!). Well, except move to New York.
This is the weirdest dot-com news we've seen in quite some time. Arianna Huffington is starting something called The Huffington Report, a culture and politics webzine that will have a group blog with a strange cast of characters: Larry David, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tina Brown, and more.
FILM
Thank god Courtney Love is back. She will be playing Linda Lovelace in a biopic.
SCIENCE
This New Scientist article was a fun read: 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense. Includes the placebo effect, dark matter, and cold fusion.
Slate reviews Make, which I have to confess I had a very hard time reading, and I'm probably the market demo.
LOCAL
To coincide with the smoking ban, City Pages did a printable guide to the only remaining smoker bars in the Twin Cities (all in St. Paul, of course).
Wow, that Strib story on punk rock glasses sure was fun, eh? I'm not going to say anything more than that because I see all the people in this story around Uptown, and I don't want any of them to punch me and break my non-retro glasses.
CP's music writing sure ain't slowing down with Missy Miss flying the coop. First off, Julianne Shepherd calls Beck's newest album his best ever. Whoa there, cowboy! And then there are Bridgette's and Lindsey's nice SXSW accounts, parts of which I got to see with them.
The America Spectatornames Jon Stewart's America the worst book of the year. Can't wait to read the rest of the conservative's four-month-old recap of 2004. Maybe the Spectator staff will finally reveal what they think about this whole Franz Ferdinand phenom!
Across the pond (did I just use that phrase? oh fuck it), the blogger Belle de Jour was a pretty big deal -- well, to pervs. The hidden identity of this supposed call-girl memoirist was even in the tabloids (yes! tabloids wrote about bloggers!). It seems she's been pegged as Lisa Hilton, a British author based in America. This was the blog that ostensibly revealed her identity. It's not really stated, but I think this means that the escapades were fiction. At least oursecret salacious journals were real (well, probably). Update: of course the bloggers had her pegged months ago.
I am almost certainly the only person who gets giddy to see Lizzy Spiers write about the Tina Brown and Ana Marie Cox quasi-feud via a Liz Smith column. Move along.
Guaranteed punchline headline for Weekend Update, Daily Show, and every late-night talk show: Rappers are being asked by McDonald's to name-drop big macs.
Closer came out on DVD today. Buy it for your girlfriend, and she'll always wonder how messed up you are.
If you watch the trailer to Bewitched, you'll get to see Nicole Kidman wiggle her nose, which is all you really wanted to see, so you can now skip the film.
Salon pepper-sprays and then pees onPoweR Girls, the Lizzie Grubman reality tv show that I simply can't stop watching. And since you're waiting through the day-pass over there, might as well read an interview with the creator of Veronica Mars.
So there's a name for those "enter the word to verify you're a human" things you see on consumer websites: Captcha, which stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." What I really hate about these is that some of them are completely unreadable.
I wish there were a way to scientifically prove or disprove the recent string of NYT arts trend stories (such as the one a couple months back that posited that SNL was more issue-oriented in the past). Sunday's lead music story is about the instant cover -- the proposition that musicians are covering more songs from their contemporaries than from previous generations. I feel obliged to come up with contrary examples (weren't Dylan and the Stones always covering each other?), but that seems to also be missing the points of these trend stories. I guess it's better than obsessing about band names like they do across the pond. Anyway, in addition to mentioning nearly every band recording music today, the story also name-drops Stereogum and Fluxblog.
Although my first reaction was "people still care about Gore Vidal?", CP's interview with him has been getting lots of blogosphere attention. Okay, I promise to read it this week.
Rocketboom included the secrets to my blogging technique in a post a couple days ago. (It's toward the end of the segment.) You crazy vloggers! See also: some video of Chuck and I drunkenly quizzing Amanda about her role on The Restaurant at a strange house straight outta the movie Slacker in Austin at SXSW.
Anil pays tribute to Suck.com. I've been telling anyone who would listen that Suck.com doesn't get the cred it deserves. Everyone fondly remembers Spy and Might and even Inside.com, but I honestly feel that the attitude expressed in Suck was more influential than all of them.
ONLINE
Having crashed hours after launching, OurMedia.org is back online. And another social media site launched today: NowPublic.com.
Wired News story about the Decemberists releasing their newest video via BitTorrent.
This could pass for parody: Beck intereview in Elle. Sample questions: "So do you cry at movies?" and "If tomorrow you became a woman, who would you be?"
POLITICS
Don't ask why I have a Maxim subscription (it was free, honest), but I also stumbled when I saw the Bush twins.
This Is Not Really A Review Of Soul Asylum's After The Flood. And While We're At It, Please Ignore Any Perceived Attempts To Compare A Natural Disaster To A Music Scene, Because That's Just Silly.
Even though we naturally resist reducing our lives to simple anecdotes, we all have had one momentous event happen to us that comes to completely summarize our life, typify our personality, or recapitulate the rest of our existence. You might try to deny this, but I'll call you a liar, because most of the time you are like me and resent that this event happened against your will.
My event was a flood, and then a fire.
You probably have a fleeting memory of the flood and fire that hit Grand Forks, ND, in 1997. Maybe you remember the famous picture of an apocalyptic downtown, or perhaps the "Come Hell And High Water" headline on the daily paper, or possibly President Bill Clinton coming to town and crying on live television (Monica notwithstanding, the only time that has ever happened).
For you, this is a scrap from the memory dustbin of natural disasters (although maybe a prominent one -- for two nights in a row, it was the lead story on all three networks' nightly news). For me, it completely changed my life in ways that I still feel I have no control of. Even as I type this, I'm resisting the urge to tell you the story -- I've told it so many times that it now seems like taking advantage of a community's tragedy. So let's modernize the story by reducing it to bullet points under the heading "Strange Things that Happened to Me Because of the Flood and Fire of 1997":
Near the geographical center of North America, a scary stat. The largest evacuation of an American city in the 20th century -- over 50,000 people -- was foisted upon this little town in the Midwest when a dike broke in the Spring of 1997 and flooded 90 percent of the town.
I was rescued from my apartment by the coast guard when a downtown building caught on fire in the middle of a flood. Firemen couldn't put out the fire because they couldn't get to it -- there was six feet of water in the street.
I watched my apartment burn down live on CNN. I was positioned about a half-mile away, so I could see the flames in real time, but I could also glance up at the tv that was beaming it to me from a helicopter that could be seen on the horizon.
Within hours, I was interviewed by Time, NPR, the New York Times, the Star-Tribune, and many of publications I've long forgotten. My story was resonant because I had stayed behind during the flood despite a city-wide decree of mandatory evacuation. There are now three books in print that contain parts of my narrative.
I won a Pulitzer prize. Actually, the Knight-Ridder-owned paper I worked at won the Pulitzer for community service, but I have a very nice certificate because the website that I managed was given "special notation" for using the internet in a unique way. (To this day, no other website has been mentioned in a Pulitzer award.) Even though the press burned down, they never missed an issue of the paper, which was printed out of the Pioneer Press plant.
I received $2,000 from the heiress to the McDonald's fortune. Joan Kroc donated money to the city that was divvied up into $2,000 endowments to nearly every resident.
I did two different video reenactment shows. Late at night on the Discovery channel, you can still occasionally see me recreating my escape from the fiery inferno -- easily the funniest re-enacted tragedy ever put on television.
Soul Asylum played the prom. Of all the strange events that happened, this somehow seemed the most otherworldly.
"Hi, welcome to, uh, the prom," were the first words Dave Pirner gave the teenagers that night almost eight years ago. I remember his intonation perfectly -- it was the line that began my live review for the local alt-weekly at the time.
+++++++++++++++++
This is where this story should end, and I should be banned from talking about any of this ever again. But then (you didn't see this coming?), completely by accident, while dumpster diving the used bin at Cheapo Records in Minneapolis, I happened upon After The Flood: Live From The Grand Forks Prom, June 28, 1997, which I instantly assumed was an obscure bootleg. But apparently Capital released the show earlier this year as a live album. It seems no one really noticed -- including me, and probably you.
There's Pirner again, sounding even more bemused than before: "Hi, welcome to, uh, the prom," just before launching into Alice Cooper's "School's Out," which has never made a group of kids more happy than it did that night at the Grand Forks Air Force Base (the school gymnasium -- and most of the city -- was still in post-flood disrepair). You see, we kids in the hinterlands probably never experienced Soul Asylum quite like you wise city folk. Even though they were beginning their descent from fame by this time, in our minds Soul Asylum was still the band the Village Voice dubbed "the best live band in America." We all knew and repeated this phrase all the time, even though we had nothing to compare this to, other than a guess that they sounded better than the Bad Company show at the Civic Center.
Soul Asylum plays the prom? It seemed an inconceivable fairy tail -- like a story about losing everything you ever owned in a fire that couldn't be extinguished because of too much water.
+++++++++++++++++
Although people like to say that music is best when it evokes certain memories from your life, it's a completely different scenario when a musician is literally attempting to elicit a specific memory out of you. After The Flood is packed with these moments, which is why it's nearly impossible for me to tell you whether this is a good album or not. It's just too strangely historical and personal, at the same time. When the line about "drama queens" in the hit "Misery" is changed to "prom queens," I'm not sure whether to grin or grimace. And in "Black Gold," the lines "This flat land used to be a town" and "This place just makes me feel sad inside" are intoned with such heart-felt anguish that I want to find somebody to shove.
But here's what I'll concede: the album perfectly captures that time and place, both in Grand Forks and where alternative culture was at the moment -- coming off a exhilarating and infuriating high that probably never should have been.
And what would a prom be without covers? There were strange ones: "Tracks Of My Tears" (the Smokey Robinson song about a dealing with a breakup) and "I Know" (the 1995 Dionne Farris hit that you instantly know when you hear it). Throw in Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now," and Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" -- you've got yourself the strangest cover set the prom has ever seen. All of them are on the album.
+++++++++++++++++
Here's the weird thing: this is the only Soul Asylum record I own now. Before the flood, I had all of them. For reasons that seem vaguely unjust, every Replacements record eventually made it back in to the collection after the flood. So did all those little Husker Du's. And you can't live 'round here without the Prince oeuvre.
But Soul Asylum is left as a sad memory of commercialization gone bad -- a big sparkly burst of popularity followed by dismissal and anonymity. Would it be trite for me to say that last sentence is also a fair description of both the entire '90s alt-rock scene and my little college town? Perhaps. But I know two communities who synchronously lived through a burst of fame, and at least one wasn't so sad to see it go.
USA Todayreports 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.
New Line Cinema picked up Klosterman's new book (not out until July) for a potential film. I'm a "character" in the book again, and am demanding to be played by someone no less handsome than Giovanni Ribisi (which I'm sure means Steve Buscemi will be Rex Sorgatz). I'll do some kind of review of the book here in a couple months, but if you're curious, it's Chuck's modern-relationship-cum-dead-rock-star opus. (Previously: Rex Rock City.)
Pedro's house in Napoleon Dynamite is up for sale.
Everyone's talking about Old Boy (trailer), which won Cannes this year.
Finally a Joss Whedon comeback? He will direct the next Wonder Woman movie. Radosh predicts the lead.
Woody Allen interviewed in... SuicideGirls.com? Huh.
ONLINE/TECH
Yahoo bought Flickr. A great move for Yahoo, which is kicking Google's ass in the user-generated content arena.
And Ask Jeeves is being bought by Barry Diller.... for $1.9 billion. Jeesh, Jeeves.
Somebody please stop Christine Rosen from publishing this story again. First in The New Atlantis, she wrote about how cell phones and TiVos are ruining our lives. Now she's done it again in a NYT Mag essay.
Agence France Presse is suing Google News. Although I'm sure this will quickly get settled out of court, this raises an interesting spectre around Google News, which makes no money because there are no ads -- and this almost gaurantees it never will.
The upcoming Microsoft typefaces for the next version of Windows.
SHOES
Pimp my shoe! NYT Mag story on shoe customizers who will turn a pair of Nikes into $500 collector's items.
Firefox advert or Franz Ferdinand video? You decide.
Everyone who wasn't talking about Flickr/Yahoo rumors at SXSW Interactive last week was talking about the Tivo/Comcast deal. Here's a good follow-up interview with the CEO of Comcast, which clears up some of the questions. [Via LostRemote.]
GAMES
For those who don't think Vice City is gritty enough, here's a preview to the new 50 Cent game, Bulletproof.
They love us! Both Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times wrote about our new museum expansion this week. In Newsweek, The Walker is called "probably the leading American venue for cutting-edge artists (both visual and performing)." Description: "The tour de force of their building is the silvery five-story cube, with its daredevil cantilevered corner hovering over the entrance -- anchored by hidden tons of steel and concrete -- and the whole shebang wrapped in shimmering aluminum-mesh panels that look as light and luscious as crumpled silk." In NYT, The Walker is dubbed "a place that prefers artful provocation to blockbuster entertainment, privileges the obscure and experimental over the tried-and-true, and cultivates a willful insouciance about the forces that govern most big museum establishment." And many arty lavishes are dished on our fair city.
It's sad that the problems that The Varsity Theater is having sound like something out of Kafka. The only good (if selfish) news is that the TC ElectroPunk Show might be rescheduled to a date that I'm in town.
I will be in Austin for SXSW the next 10 days. I have a platinum pass, so I'll be at all three segments: film, interactive, and music. The plan is to blog about all of them -- we'll see how much time there actually is. Update: There's just so many people to see, so much to absorb, so much to drink... I'll never be able to keep this site updated over the next week. Later.
TV
PVRblog has the video of Bruce Willis on The Daily Show talking about how much he loves TiVo. Interesting sidenote: Bruce was acting very strange on this episode -- talking about how he hadn't even changed clothes from the night before, full of innuendo. Then yesterday the NY Post does a gossip blurb about him possibly hooking up with Lindsay Lohan. Connect the dots?
Audio of Daily Show's Stephen Colbert on NPR's Fresh Air.
MUSIC
Looks like Spin is planning a redesign of the website. Here's the current site; here's a new site. (This isn't leaked information -- Spin sent out an email that [accidentally?] has the URL in it.)
FILM
Yowza. Tarantino might direct the next Friday the 13th movie.
Trailer to Herbie Fully Loaded, starring Lindsay Lohan.
WORDS
Another Eggers interview, this time in Salon. Topics include the start of 826 Valencia, the animosity directed at the McSweeney's crowd, and the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are with Spike Jonze. It's really pretty good.
I was going to tell you that MSNBC was ahead of everyone else in their blog reportage -- especially with things like the web-only Hardball Blogcast. But then Wonkette reminded me of the "The Blog Report" on CNN. Funny ha-ha.
WatchingAmerica.com is a real-time collection of links to news stories about the United States by media organizations outside the United States. When necessary, they are translated into English.
North Dakota pops up in this Marketwatch interview with the CEO of Sportingbet, an online casino. It speculates that the casino might move to North Dakota if the legislature legalizes (and the public accepts) online gambling.
In Dot-Con Job, the Seattle Times dissects the lies behind InfoSpace.com, which PaidContent.org calls "perhaps the most amazing piece of business journalism to come out in years."
MEDIA
Hot girl is the face of democracy in the middle east -- at least on American magazines.
ONLINE
About.com CEO on why NYT spent $410 million to buy the company.
WASAW (Writers And Artists Snack At Work) is a good spot for junk food reviews. The delish Take 5 (9.3 rating) just showed up at the vending machine at work.
I'm not sure what to make of Blogologue, "a live web browsing sketch comedy multi-media stage experience" (in other words, a play) at the Bryant Lake Bowl.
Looks like there are two geek conferences coming to Minneapolis in June: Podcasting World (for Podcasters) and Flashbelt (for Flash developers). And of course there's CONvergence in July.
CP has a bit of breaking news about the Star Tribune hiring a conservative columnist.
Oooo, music critic fight! (or the closest we come to it), in which The Rake takes issue with Dylan Hicks' review of Kings of Leon in City Pages. And Reimenschneider's name is evoked for some reason or another.
In the 5+ years that I've been doing this site, I've never run advertising or asked for donations. I'm not quitting my day job or anything that ambitious, but if you feel like dropping me a few dollars of appreciation, you can do so through PayPal or Amazon. That's the beginning and end of this pledge drive.
MUSIC
Oh boy, you simply gotta hear Usher's new single, "Dot Com". "Oh, I love the way you dirty type. Oh, I need your back space in my life.... Oh baby, if you log on, I'll make you dot com... I can't wait to give you megabytes. I got all the memory you need." I would call this a hoax if it weren't on AOL. This is so bad it's post-bad.
Long NYT Magprofile of Beck, which is somewhat boring until half-way through when he starts talking about Scientology and his posse -- he's married to Marissa Ribisi (Giovanni's sister) and hangs with Adam Goldberg and Christina Ricci (who contributed a Japanese-inflected line on the song "Hell Yes").
Axl is the cover story of the Sunday NYT Arts section.
ONLINE
Fred Durst suesGawker . (And I can't even think of anything snarky to say. Well, except maybe a pun about having a Limp Bizkit.) See previously: Felix Salmon thought Gawker jumped the shark.
Exactly 48 hours ago, I was having a beer with Chuck Olsen and he told me about Plum TV (a new tv network for rich people), and I thought, "This would be a good story to pitch to the New York Times." Then the Sunday paper showed up.
Profile of the Korean animation studio that produces The Simpson's.
We've got a local girl on the next America's Next Top Supermodel. ("Favorite movie: Snatch. Favorite TV Show: Poker Championship." Grrrowl.) Anyone know her?
Over the weekend, I did a segment about online viral marketing on public radio's Weekend America. Here's the audio file (mp3 - 6.3mb).
Although most of us sentient beings think of advertising as predominantly evil (or, if forgiving, necessarily evil), an interesting contradiction arises out of viral marketing -- it's both detestable and fascinating at the same time. In that sense, viral marketing introduces complex issues about how we relate to media, how we want to believe in fantasy, and how we still cling to the notion of authenticity. Sometimes it's strangely addicting (Subservient Chicken), and other times it's like watching your parents dance to Outcast (Raging Cow).
As a compendium to the radio show, below are links to some online viral marketing campaigns. (If they aren't hyper-linked, that means the site no longer exists.) It's a long list, so skim it as you see fit:
Chicken Fight -- Burger King
http://www.chickenfight.com
Trying to follow-up the buzz behind Subservient Chicken, this was a game with a boxing bout between two chickens. It was pretty dumb.
Pimp My Burger -- Burger King http://www.pimpmyburger.com
A recent take-off of MTV's Pimp My Ride. Long but mildly entertaining.
Angus Diet -- Burger King
http://www.angusdiet.com
Another BK one. A fake inspirational speaker and personal interventionalist espouses the benefits of eating beef.
The Beast -- A.I. Artificial Intelligence http://www.cloudmakers.org
The Beast is the respected grandfather of the movement. The story: Evan Chan is murdered in the fictional world of the movie A.I. Clues are available on the internet on approximately 30 interlinked websites (disguised as universities, businesses, personal homepages, etc.). Over 7,000 people combine their knowledge to figure out the murder mystery.
I Love Bees -- Halo 2 http://www.ilovebees.com
Perhaps the most ambitious example of a new medium called "alternate-reality gaming" (which includes The Beast, above). Participants go to a website to learn what pay phones will be called that week (to make it even more geeky, they're listed by GPS coordinates). When they answer the phone, a message is given with a clue. Back on the website, you enter the answer to a question and then hear a 30-second clip of new material. Sometimes when you pick up the phone, you talk to with a live person, and what you say can be incorporated into the online game. The final episode, which had a War of the Worlds feel, was timed to the launch of the videogame. Millions of people came to the site.
MSN Found -- Microsoft/MSN http://www.msnfound.com
MSN Found has six fake online personalities in their mid-20s (with profiles more stereotypical than MTV's The Real World) write blogs and post video clips. The blogs contain words ("hypnodragon" and "define vertigious") that are intended to drive you to use MSN Search for clues. The hook is that you're supposed to get interested in the personalities, and then use MSN's new search product to find out more about these people. Strangely, the site doesn't use Microsoft's own blogging software, Spaces.
The 2-Headed Dog -- MTV2
http://www.the2headeddog.com
This came about because of MTV2's new branding strategy to compete with the upcoming music video station, Fuse. The site (now defunct) didn't contain much more than strange visuals of two-headed dogs, but it made you scratch your head if you stumbled across it before the station redesign. MTV hired people to spread the word on message boards, which caused a backlash.
The Lincoln Fry Blog -- McDonald's http://lincolnfry.typepad.com/blog/ http://lincolnfry.yahoo.com
A Super Bowl commercial about a couple who discovers a McDonald's french fry that looked like Abe Lincoln triggers this escapade. A fake blog chronicles the couple's adventures. After the ad ran, McDonald's decided to sell the fry online, where an online casino (GoldenPalace.com) paid $75,100 for it. So it's like buying someone else's viral marketing scheme to create your own.
Counter Counterfeit Commission -- BMW Mini http://www.counterfeitmini.org
This somewhat clever campaign is a fake "detect a fake Mini" site, which contains photos on detecting a fake Mini and a $20 documentary DVD on the Mini counterfeit underworld.
Elite Designers Against Ikea -- Ikea http://www.elitedesigners.org
Another fakie. Elite designers are against Ikea because their stuff is so cheap. I mean, inexpensive.
HalloweenM3 -- Mazda
http://halloweenm3.blogspot.com
This short-lived experiment from Mazda had a fake blogger talking about the new Mazda M3. The internet community generally disliked this disingenuous attempt. (NOTE: I somehow misidentified this site's name on the radio show. I called it "Raging Cow," which is below.)
Raging Cow -- Dr. Pepper http://blog.ragingcow.com
Dr. Pepper enlisted six blogging teens to promote the product Raging Cow, a new milk-based drink. The strange thing is that the bloggers aren't paid, yet they enjoy talking about the product -- a clear precursor to the persuaders.
Find The Message -- GM Onstar http://www.findthemessage.com
17 different words plus the URL FindTheMessage.com are placed on billboards around the country. The goal is to put all the words together to figure out a message. Pieced together from L.A. to New York, it turned out to be "This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways," which advertised GM's OnStar navigation product. A prize was to be given to whoever figured it out first, but someone cracked open the site's flash file, and revealed the phrase before actual terrestrial sleuths could figure it out.
Pump Up The Movie -- Best Buy / Nokia http://www.pumpupthemovie.com
It too me a while to realize that this was a fake movie site which includes a "toss the cheerleader" game. (Created by Space150.com.)
Fight Big Overcoat -- Transglobal Vacations
http://www.fightbigovercoat.org
Another one involving billboards.
Rubber Burner & Super Greg -- Lee Jeans
http://www.rubberburner.com
http://www.supergreg.com
These long-gone fake homepages of out-of-touch losers were modeled on Mahir, the dancing Turkish hipster from 1999. Fallon was behind the project. (Sidenote: This one was first brought out into the open by Kottke on Metafilter, which seems like a million years ago.)
Who Ordered Room Service -- Not Bryan Adams http://www.whoorderedroomservice.com
And now there's even parody viral marketing campaigns. At first this looked like a viral campaign by Bryan Adams for his new album, Room Service. Except he had nothing to do with it.
Sasha Frere-Jones on ringtones in The New Yorker. Contains surprisingly detailed info about the development of polyphonic ringtone and true tone, and some good-to-quote-at-parties information about such topics as the most popular genre (hip-hop -- 56%). My personal ringtone right now is the theme to Cops -- "Bad boys, bad boys, what'chya gonna do?" It's instantly recognizable. My last ringtone was the theme to Six Feet Under, which was also surprisingly recognized by anyone in their 30s.
A strange mashup of The Beatles' Revolver, which includes tracks with Beck, Madonna, Portishead, Coldplay, Genesis, Hendrix, Deeelite, The Who, The Cure, The Monkees, and Goldfrapp. This is what the kids call "good."
Alright, who photoshopped all the real media celebs into the FishbowlNY Launch Party pics? Ariel Kaminer, Ira Silverberg, John Homans, David Carr, Maer Roshan, and whoever-the-fuck else? When the hell did launching a website make you famous enough to dine at Michael's?
Almost a year-and-a-half ago, I did a post about what Friendster can do to keep its users, and perhaps develop a subscription model. Sixteen months later, some of those features are finally starting to show up. Yesterday, they added a subscription-based blogging tool powered by Typepad. (It kinda sucks.)
The past five days have involved sleeping in a different city every night, in this order: San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toledo, Ithaca, and New York City. I have only one piece of advice from this experience: don't attempt to drive a Uhaul into Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel. Just trust me on this. But I'm home and safe, and here is where we left off:
Copyright issues are preventing shows like WKRP in Cincinnati from showing up on DVD.
CELEBRITY
In what must be a first, Halle Berry picks up her Razzie in person. (Update: A reader writes in to say that Tom Green showed up for his Freddy Got Fingered Razie.)
Wired mag profiles Yahoo as the UnGoogle. It's a good comparison the strengths of each company.
GADGETS
You'd expect a T-Mobile backlish with the newest Paris Hilton scandal, but the exact opposite happened.
MEDIA
Now Michael Wolff (through a proxy) has told Felix Salmon to take down the speech text. Now it's on Cryptome, therefore guaranteeing its legacy and creating even more controversy. Silly Wolff.
Profile of the Vice empire, which is now multi-million dollars strong.
Slate.com has started a column called Today's Blogs, similar to the Today's Papers concept. Dumb thing: no permanent index page to link to or bookmark.
New blog: Purseuing, "a blog obsessively covering purses, bags, totes, clutches, and just about anything else you can carry on your shoulder." (See previously: Wrist Fashion.)
LOCAL
Did you see the detailed piece that Pitchfork did on The Current? Good stuff, including some speculation that the model could spread.
A day of mixed emotions for me today as I fly back to Minneapolis to say goodbye to my roommate and favorite person in the world. (If you live up north, I hope to see you at the going-away party, which has four of the best local bands performing: Melodious Owl, Friends Like These, Thunder in the Valley, and Revolver Modele.) Melissa is leaving The Cities to work at Spin, where she'll join the rest of the Minnesota Music Mafia. Her final column is a big wet kiss for the Minneapolis music scene. I'll miss ya, kid. I expect drunken phone calls from Brooklyn rooftops.
Blogging might be light for a while, as this week marks the beginning of Rex's Pre-Spring World Tour. Over the next month, I'll be in San Fran (Feb. 21-23), NYC (Feb. 25-27), and Austin (March 12-20). Holler if you wanna hang.
TV
How convenient! The Parent's Television Council keeps a gallery of what it considers the "Worst Clips Of The Week." In other words, the best tv of the week.
In a story ready-made for every site in the Denton network, Paris Hilton's phone was hacked, revealing naughty cam pics of her making out with Nicole Lenz and a gigantic address book of celebs, including Anna Kournikova, Vin Diesel, Victoria Gotti, Stephen King, Usher, Ashlee Simpson, Lindsey Lohan, Avril Lavigne, Lil John, Seth Green, Eminem, Russell Simmons, Christina Aguilera, Nicole Richie, Pat O'Brien, Fred Durst, and countless other strange aliases. Don't bother calling though -- no one's answering.
BLOGS
The video to the Charlie Rose special that featured bloggers.
The godfather of blogging, Justin Hall, stops updating his site and SF Chronwrites about it. Includes mentions of other bloggers who have quit, including Andrew Sullivan, Peter Merholz, and William Gibson.
In addition to new instant messenger features, Friendster has added discussions, which have Craiglist-ish qualities. But ya gotta wonder: does anyone even notice or care anymore?
Beatallica (the Beatles-Metallica mashup) has been issued a cease-and-desist from Sony.
Ryan Adams has either lost his mind, or he's working a marketing angle in which you're supposed to think he has. His site now is just a big ball of worms -- literally. A couple of the worms make noise if you click them. A small area in the lower-right has a hidden link to a crazy recorded phone conversation between him and his label, which is probably staged.
GAMES
NYT Circuits hangs out with the designers and developers of America's Army while they are in turn hanging out with the U.S. military.
Of all the features to make available in video games, it's actually surprising that it took so long to add pizza delivery.
It's about time that the art world got its own reality tv show. Artstar is an unscripted television series about trying to make it big in the New York art world
I wonder if I should post the copy of the Michael Wolff speech that he demanded be removed from I Want Media. Does this remind anyone of, oh, say, Eason Jordan? And isn't he smart enough to realize that now everyone will seek out this speech? Or might he actually know that, hoping dumb bloggers like me give him more attention for a couple days? Oh, whatever, who cares, here it is. And that's the weird thing -- it's pretty good.
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.
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.
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.
Hanging out in Roger Ebert's four-and-a-half-story Chicago town house.
PUBLISHING
NYTprofiles the site InsideHigherEd.com, "the first significant competition in higher education publishing since the intellectual-if-gossipy Lingua Franca folded." The site was started by two Chronicle of Higher Education alums.
At Salon.com, Laura Miller profiles H.P. Lovecraft, "America's greatest bad writer."
MEDIA
Rolling Stoneprofiles the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is more to the right than Fox News.
In an otherwise unessential read, the first paragraph of this NYT story reveals that Armstrong Williams' partner in the Graham Williams Group was Stedman Graham -- yes, Oprah's boyfriend.
Jeff Jarvis was on Reliable Sources this weekend, talking Eason Jordon and Jeff Gannon. Here's the video.
Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me has a new film tv show in development in which a group of mothers drink what the average college senior drinks over the course of a month. Gawker has the casting call.
ManiaTV, a streaming tv network with music videos. I watched during the Grammy's and it wasn't bad.
It seems Pazz & Jop comes out later every year. Everyone knew Kayne would win, but Brian Wilson and Loretta Lynn coming in next was a surprise. Plus Green Day and U2 in the top 10 makes this the most conservative P&J that I can remember. The ballots.
Friendster added a chatting service (one-to-one chat, like IM). I have no idea if this will save the company, but I suddenly have a bunch of friends using it.
IPOD
Sirius is trying (and failing) to hook up with the iPod.
GAMES
Alex Garland (28 Days Later) is pegged to do the movie version of Halo 2. Ridley Scott was rumored before. [via greg.org]
A Yahoo Slideshow for a Lucien Freud painting (it's of a pregnant Kate Moss).
MEDIA
After its first profitable quarter ever, Dave Talbot is leaving Salon.
Paris Hilton is on the cover of Playboy, but her publicist says, "I don't even know where they got that photo." Is this a first for Playboy -- throwing a celeb on the cover without having pictures inside? The cover story -- "25 Sexiest Celebrites" -- seems like a shift toward a Maxim audience.
LOCAL
CityPages.com redesigned. What do I think? Well, let's just say I think they're under-playing what people want from a site like this: daily content. Too much "cover story think" for the wrong medium. Editor's note.
Someone slow them down. Just launched: Google Maps.
Kottke noticed that Google switched their Dictionary.com link to an Answers.com link. (How does he always noticed things like this before anyone else?)
Wanna buy an internet company? About.com is for sale. Bidders include: Google, Yahoo, NYT, and AOL.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
CNN just reported that Marcia Cross is a lesbian. She will come out in The Advocate, and apparently her character (Bree Van De Camp) will come out on the show.
Waxy's annual investigation into the Oscar-nominated films leaked onto the internet.
Wired News reviews the documentary 24 Hours on Craiglist (trailer), which chronicles the outcome of more than 80 craigslist postings from a single day.
Even though my friends chuckle when I say it, I don't think of myself as a gadget person. "Rex, you carry around your email in your pocket everywhere you go," they say. "And you move music videos from your TiVo onto a cell phone just so you can show them to people at parties."
Okay, maybe that's a little nerdy. But I don't identify with morereputablegadgeteers because I only believe in technology that makes my life better. I have a simple set of criteria for a gadget to make it into my world: if it makes my life more complex, slow, or tedious, I don't want it; if it creates new, quick experiences, I do.
With that in mind, here's an average day in my life, with digital devices being the organizing principle.
The best thing about my Treo is that I need fewer devices because of it. In addition to no longer tinkering with an alarm clock, there's no longer a home phone. And, for a long time, I didn't have a digital camera either. (The Treo's cam is pretty sucky, so I eventually bought a Sony Cybershot.) Some people think that forcing gadgets into a swiss army knife device will ruin them, but I actually long for the day that I can get a phone with a bottle opener.
Saving me the messy tedium of moving coffee grinds from grinder to maker is almost enough to make this device worth its money. Additional cool features: the timer, a filter-less setup, and the R2D2 look.
I sit down at my home computer and am instantly controlling my work desktop.
I'm not sure how I lived before GoToMyPC. Through some kind of miracle in engineering, I'm allowed to remotely take over my work PC. If someone were sitting in my office while I do this, they would see my mouse moving around and emails being typed. I could turn on iTunes for them, and play the new Daft Punk single.
I usually spend an hour answering email from home with GoToMyPC. This allows me to avoid early morning traffic while still being "in the office."
At home, I drive a Sony Vaio with a dual-monitor setup. At work, it's just one monitor, but I consume so much media through other screens, including a couple TVs that play CNN/MSNBC/FOX all day.
Here are the applications that are usually running on my work PC all day: AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Homesite, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Sony Vegas Video, and Apple iTunes.
My razor scooter is probably the most stereotypical dot-com thing I own. I mostly use it to speed back and forth between the coffee machine and my office.
This is where I tell you that I listen to Sirius radio on the way home from work.
But I don't. It would make sense -- Alexis bought me Sirius for Christmas, but I haven't used it yet. It seems impossible to somehow fit this into my bulging media diet. Instead, my half-hour commute home is usually the only time where I attentively listen to music on CD. Oh yeah, I drive a Mustang, which is one of America's last remaining attempts at good automotive engineering.
Time to catch up on the radio programming I missed today.
Part of the reason I'm not using Sirius is this little gadget. RadioShark is basically TiVo for radio. You tell it to record programs at a given time, and it will create audio files (WMVs) that you play on your PC or transport to other devices. In conjuncture with the iPod/iTrip, you can record programs and play them back in your car. I use it to record Marketplace, On The Media, and Future Tense. In the future, this device will hopefully evolve with more advanced futures like those on TiVo, such as keyword recording and recommendations.
Some people use their iPod everywhere they go, but I only use it for two things: jogging and parties. I happen to still love the compact disc, and enjoy the presence of my thousand-disc music collection.
I quickly fly through last night's Daily Show. I tend to watch most of the monologue, skip the middle skit segment (unless it's "This Week In God"), and then watch my favorite part -- the interview -- closely.
Putting the plasma TV / TiVo combination in my bedroom has completely changed social aspects of my house. Previously, the focal point of the house was the living room; now, people hang out in my bedroom. This has been immensely advantageous to certain parts of my life.
I'm traveling this weekend, so I move a couple episodes of Veronica Mars onto my Toshiba laptop for later viewing.
TiVo once commandeered my bedroom, but now with the TiVoToGo software, it's a portable genius. Beyond allowing me to play recorded TV all around the house (on TVs and computers), it also functions as a webserver, so I can remotely access what's recorded on it. The potential is just starting to reveal itself.
I load up the PMC with the latest Beck, Atmosphere, and M.I.A. videos.
For the most part, this is still a device waiting for a use. The concept is basically "iPod Video," but I haven't really figured out how to fit this kind of viewing into my life. Right now, I load it up with music videos, and then take it to parties, where I pass it around for people to watch and talk about. This is very fun, but it hasn't exactly justified the $500 price tag yet.
I've moved full-length movies onto it (and television programming from TiVoToGo), but it doesn't quite feel right watching long programming on it.
Google has added the "Local" tab to its homepage. I'm a heavy user of Google Local, so it's great to see it up front. (Who wants to bet on Video, Print, or Scholar being the next to move to prime time?)
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?
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.
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.
The Sunday Times Arts section chooses video filesharing as its cover story. While pondering recent developments in media control -- including MythTV (basically a homemade DVR) and Videora (basically a mix of RSS and BitTorrent) -- the article takes the now-common tone of "tv executives don't want their industry to be the next Napster." But, as usual, there's little substance on what they might be doing about it. (And not even a passing note on Google Video or Blinkx.) It also mentions EFF's Television Digital Liberation Front, a protest against the upcoming broadcast flag mandate.
So you always wanted to get into the news business? Now's your chance: Al Jazeera is up for sale.
ONLINE
Elizabeth Spiers' Fishbowl NY is supposed to launch today. NYT exaggerated in calling it a "face-off" between it and Gawker. UPDATE: It launched along with other new MediaBistro sites, including Fishbowl LA, Fishbowl DC, and Unbeige. UPDATE UPDATE: Denton has launched two new ones too: Gridskipper ("urban travel") and Lifehacker (tech tips).
iPod Stories (dot-com). Wired News has the story on the man behind it. He likes the word technotranscendent. Good line: "The iPod is no longer just an instrument or a tool, but a part of myself. It's a body extension. It's part of my memory, and if I lose this stuff, I lose part of my identity."
NYT Styles puts blogging moms on the cover with a profile of Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com. And the San Francisco Chronicleprofiles Anastasia Goodstein of YPulse and a recent INdTV hire.
FILM
Have you heard who's set to direct Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections? Robert Zemeckis.
In a somewhat strange case, some people think Clint Eastwood is a bigot for his Oscar-nominated Million Dollar Baby. Roger Ebert isn't one of them.
MUSIC
M.I.A. seems to be the most hyped artist of the moment. Her new album isn't even out until next month, yet she's appearing on music blogs everywhere. NYT had her do a playlist this week.
Wanna hear a track from the upcoming FisherSpooner? Sure ya do.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Another new Beck video: "E Pro". (This one's directed by Shynola, not the one that I pointed to the other day.) It rocks.
There's a lot of talk in the game industry about introducing more narrative into games. Clive Thompson at Slate.com argues the exact opposite. Excerpt: When a game has a story that "ends" after 40 hours of play, you have to throw it away -- and go spend another $50 on the next title. That's movie-industry logic, not game logic. Chess doesn't "end." Neither do hockey, bridge, football, Go, playing with dolls, or even Tetris.
Some details on Katamari Damacy 2. (I highly recommend playing the first one while very wasted.)
Ever wonder what Newt Gingrich has been up to? Really, you do? Well, WaPo has a long profile for you.
LOCAL
Everyone and their daughter was at the Melodious Owl / Olympic Hopefuls / Faux Jean show on Saturday. The queue outside could have you waiting in the cold for up to an hour, but I was lucky enough to have friends sneak in the back. I guess that's what happen when there's nothing going on in January and the Stribputs you on the cover.
NYT looks at the age-discrimination suit going on over at Best Buy. Interesting tidbit: the average age of its 5,000 employees is 29.
What is the only state that has never had a tv series located in it? North Dakota.
Think of an object. 20Q.net can usually figure it out in less than 20 questions.
Remember Friendster? Apparently, the site is finally planning to offer new products, though what they are is still unclear. MySpace is already several times bigger than Friendster.
Howard Kurtz had Ana Marie Cox and Andrew Sullivan on Reliable Sources yesterday. Here's the transcript.
MARKETING
Alright, someone's gotta start a backlash on this viral marketing stuff. For instance, this one appears to be MTV2, this one appears to be TransGlobal Vacations, and this one appears to be GM. I think all of them involve billboards too. Stop it, before you hurt someone!
Lisa Rein has the Daily Show Inauguration Speech video. (This "Freedom vs. Liberty" comparison came up everywhere last week, from SNL to the New York Times to NPR.)
New on Flowtv.org: interview with Jason Reich, a Daily Show writer.
Simon Reynold tries to explain why dance music is dying. Even dance music subculture fans will like to see Black Strobe, DJ/Rupture, LCD Soundsystem, Mu, Tiefschwarz, Teamshadetek, and Kiki name-checked in The Times. If you're into that kinda thing, the ILM thread.
If you haven't heard it, you probably should hear Nina Gordon's version of "Straight Outta Compton" (mp3). Refresher: Nina Gordon was in Veruca Salt.
ILM debates "Southern Man" (Neil Young) vs. "Sweet Home Alabama" (Lynard Skynard).
FILM
Low Culture on Crispin Glover's new project, What Is It? "The film features a cast consisting largely of actors with Down Syndrome, a snail with the voice of Fairuza Balk, and legendary publisher Adam Parfrey playing 'Jealous Minstrel'." Crispin has either lost it, or he's deeply inspired by Prince Harry.
I'm slightly embarrassed to just now find out that local boy Rob Davis is the person behind the NYT Firefox advert. (Discovered this via a Wired mag cover story, not online yet.) Rob was also the creator of BushBoy.com (CP story), Deanie Babies, and Butter Palm. More so than any one else in this city, Rob needs a blog.
Proving I have no idea what demographic reads this site, here are products purchased in the past three months on Amazon.com in which this site served up the referral:
Somebody claims to have created a program that will remove DRM from Windows Media files. If true, this could be catastrophic for Microsoft.Bah, nevermind. But it makes you wonder what happens when this actually does occur.
TV
You're not hallucinating. Networks have been tagging an extra minute to their schedules to deceive TiVos (though they deny that's why). See also in the L.A. Times: Looking for New Ways to Make Viewers Pay, which hypothesizes the future of DVRs becoming a pay-model for the networks.
Timelists those in the running for Dan Rather's job: Katie Couric, Ted Koppel, John Roberts, Scott Pelley, Mika Brzezinski, and Anderson Cooper. Katie is gonna get it, but I'm cheering for Anderson.
I'm probably the only person you know who TiVos Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. CommonDreams.org has an editorial critiquing the CNN show.
Good close-ups of the new Treo. I still haven't decided if it's worth $500+ to upgrade. The only benefits that affect me are the increased screen quality and the better camera.
IDEAS
Random thought: do you think we'll start hearing the word blink all the time now? I imagine in the blink of an eye being resurrected just like tipping point was. Damn you, Gladwell!
I've never heard of this collective of video directors: Colonel Blimp. You'll find videos from The Chemical Brothers, The Streets, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Spiritualized, New Order, Dizee Rascal, Bjork, and Basement Jaxx. Good stuff.
MEDIA
It's interesting that I haven't found a single reason to link to Slate.com since the buy-out by the Washington Post. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it certainly looks like dullville over there lately.
NYTstory on upcoming sit-coms set in Iraq, including Spirit of America, "a Fox sitcom about the creation of a Western-style television network in contemporary Baghdad." Oh boy.
McDonald's Israel has done a parody advert [video] of the Pulp Fiction scene about burgers. (I wonder if Tarantino approved this.)
The Age of Egocasting. This is a long essay tracking personal choice in media from the remote control to "egocasting." Unfortunately, it ends with one of those doomsday, Postman-esque scenarios envisioned back in the Republic.com days. (That type of argument should be totally debunked by now. TiVo and other personalization devices cause me to experience more media options, not less.)
Blinkx.tv has essentially come out of nowhere to capture a segment of the future that Google should really own: video search. They've signed up BBC, ITV, Sky and Fox.
As expected, Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, is getting a lot of attention. If you have any interest in keeping up with Gladwell, here's the NYTBR review, the Salon review, and a Metafilter thread.
The whole blogging/disclosure/activism debate has so many tentacles to it now that I won't bother linking to everything. Instead, if you care, here's a post that does.
Alexis says that a Metropark is coming to the Mall of America. Good or bad? You decide: "Metropark is a new breed of lifestyle retailer inspired by the fusion of fashion, music, and art. We stand for seduction, life after midnight, and the constant pursuit of desire." Well, I guess we'll just see about that....
Pitchfork redesigned. I don't know why this is considered better -- it looks more busy and harder to digest. But there oodles of new ads, so that's probably why they redesigned.
Jay-Zeezer, a mashup of Jay-Z and Weezer. Prediction: after a certain point, the phrase "interesting in theory" takes over this entire genre, and no one ever listens to a mash-up again because everyone just imagines what it will sound like.
Creative Commons and Wired have launched CC Mixter, "where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
You probably saw the interview where Bill Gates calls the Creative Commons advocates communists, and now Gizmodo asks him to clarify. (There's the funny point at the end where they disagree on agreeing.)
WaPointroduces new vlogging software called Vlog It. Looks interesting. (Sidenote: have we already reached a consensus to call it vlogging?)
New site: Mappr. Uses Flickr API to map out recently uploaded photos.
DESIGN
VillageVoice.com has redesigned. I like the colors, but not the double-horizontal subnav. It's unfortunate that the blog component got bumped over to the far-left rail.
TV
You watch Arrested Development, right? Of course you do, but did you know that Portia de Rossi is shacking with Ellen DeGeneres right now? Of course you did, but did you know that Will Arnett is married to Amy Poehler? Of course you did. Nevermind then.
Because of the timely intersection of three things -- new year's prognostications, last week's CES, and the ascendency of vlogging -- everyone is talking about The Future of Television. It's impossible to link to all the buzz-buzzing right now, but here are a couple: Buzzmachine has a post on how to explode your tv in four easy steps and The Long Tail has one about distribution models. And there's Steven Johnson reflecting on what he wrote in Emergence. As always, LostRemote has a constant flow or related links.
Diablo Cody writes aboutProject Runway, my current fave show. I love it when Heidi Klum pushes the losers off the stage with an Auf Wiedersehen that has twice the gravitas of Trump's You're Fired.
C|Net interviews Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, a founder of Wikipedia who is behind WikiNews.
Long look at the business of the New York Times from Business Week. (The section about NYTimes.com potentially becoming a pay site got dot-comers all worked up the past few days.)
TV
Varietycomes down on 60 Minutes for its soft profile on Google.
More details on the MTV wireless deal, which could put clips from The Daily Show and Best Week Ever on cell phones.
Yet another profile of BitTorrent, this time from the Seattle Times.
MUSIC
Sasha wrote about mash-ups for The New Yorker. I don't know about the genesis of the piece, but it reads like something that was edited into blandness.
The Guardianprofiles Dolly Parton, including notes on "why God likes gays."
Yipe, the entire run of the Sub Pop Singles Club (minus one record) is on sale on eBay. Bid is currently $4500.
FILM
You've probably heard that Richard Linklater is directing an animated version of Phillip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, and Ain't It Cool News has some pics. (BTW, when was the last time you saw anyone link to Ain't It Cool News?)
And the award for washed-up cast of the year goes to... Alone in the Dark, starring Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff.
LOCAL
Apparently Ron Jeremy is appearing at the Triple Rock January 15. It's a little unclear what this even actually is, but I'll try to find out for you.
Stribprofiles the novel writing program, NaNoWriMo. (BTW, is anyone else annoyed with the way StarTribune.com now breaks every story into two pages? For some reason it never bothered me when NYTimes.com did it, but this does.)
I'm closing the doors on Lists 2004 with over 550 links and nary a word of rhapsodizing from me. See ya next year.
GOOGLE
A rumor is floating around that Google might buy Flickr.
60 Minutes did a long profile of Google, which, if you're like me and read every word about the search company, will tell you nothing new, but it was still nicely packaged. (Includes interview with John Battelle.)
A more serious analysis than 60 Minutes can muster, Technology Review's "What's Next for Google" cover story makes the strong argument that Google needs to open itself up with more web services.
TV
In what might be the first serious media critique of Tina Fey, the Sunday NYT goes after SNL's writing in "The All Too Ready for Prime Time Players". The article's premise -- that SNL has shied away from "dangerous or inventive" satire in favor of "teenage bimbette du jour" fair -- starts off okay, but ends a bit weary. What's missing from this criticism is a recognition of how pop culture has increasingly infused everything over the 25 years, so celebrity culture would obviously become a topic for SNL. Anyway, more importantly, Whatevs.org (which I'm proud to have included in my Blogs of the Year) was quoted in the story. (Historical reminder: Dave Itzkoff, the author of the article, is the former editor of Maxim.)
Whenever I get a chance, I tell people how the writers and producers of The Golden Girls have gone on to great success elsewhere -- in particular, with Desperate Housewives and Arrested Development. Apparently The Times noticed too. (Another note: Itzkoff also wrote this one.)
I missed linking to it over the holidays, so let's put up Wired's BitTorrent story now. If you work in TV media, you should read it. (In the meantime, Suprnova went down, but a successor to BitTorrent, Exeem, which includes decentralized indexing, was released.)
Anonymous CableNewser readers (half of whom are probably cable news network employees with Fox News ringtones) make their 2005 predictions.
As something of a follow-up to the fantastic Control Room (which, by the way, Chuck Olsen gave his Artist of the Year award to), Al Arabiya (the main competition to Al Jazeera) lands on the cover of Times Mag this week. See also: Wired's similar story from July.
Dan Gillmor (who recently left the Mercury News to start his own citizen journalism business) has a new blog: Grassroots Journalism.
I saw our girl Randi Kaye reading the news for the first time on CNN today. It also looks like she'll also be on the unbrazenly-titled CNN Saturday Morning.
The rogue taxidermy just keeps on rolling. Creative Electric lands in The Times today. Dave has added more pics and a storefront to the Creative Electric website. (The closing party for the Mark Mothersbaugh show is Jan. 15.)
My pal John Lamb, who writes a column for the Fargo Forum, is doing a column where his readers vote on what his New Year's Resolution should be.
PaidContent.org asked people for 2005 digital media predictions, which caused me to write this futuristic sentence:
"We all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star."
The responses are here, and what I wrote is below:
What's the most important development in digital media and entertainment that actually will occur in 2005?
1) Content will continue to unbundle itself.
I have no idea what night The Apprentice airs -- I'm not even sure which network it's on. All I know is that every Friday night this past year, my friends would gather around the TiVo and lovingly poke fun at Donald Trump's hair. Whether it was iTunes or RSS or TiVo, this was the digital media lesson of '04: content has no natural brand identity. Marketers try to force "brand" on it while journalists try to force "narrative" on it, but content will continue to shed these mucky add-ons and proceed toward its natural state: pure information.
2) The line between communication and publishing will continue to be less distinct.
In the world of nano-publishing, traditional concepts like communication (one-to-one) and publishing (one-to-many) become blurry propositions. All signs point to this breakdown of public and private: websites that aggregate and organize personal content into social threads (Flickr, Bloglines, del.icio.us), private moments becoming major entertainment experiences (reality TV, celeb sex tapes), communication technologies that make online relations both more personal and more anonymous at the same time (VoIP, LiveJournal), personal media devices creating global news events (Abu Ghraib prisoner photos taken with a cell phone, tsunami video recorded on handhelds bought at Best Buy), and the rise of blogger personalities who review digital media devices next to their dating problems (ahem). What does this mean for digital media? It means the content stars of 2005 will come from the least likely places. And we all have the regrettable responsibility to act like some weird hybrid of embedded reporter and reality TV star.
3) Media will continue to be manipulated.
This might have been the biggest lesson I learned from working on NBC's website for the summer Olympics this past year: media manipulation is the message. One single piece of video, for instance, could be use for infinite purposes: online streaming, still photos, audio slideshows, images distributed to cell phones, interactive Flash apps, redistribution to TiVos, repackaging as highlight reels... the list goes on and on. In digital entertainment, some of the most exciting events this year were media manipulations: Danger Mouse's Gray Album (which was Entertainment Weekly's album of the year), Strangerhood (machinima of The Sims characters), and MTV's Video Mods (video games plus rock stars). In 2005, media hybrids will become so normative you'll hardly even think to call them that.
What one thing that would make a difference in digital media or entertainment would you most want to see happen in 2005?
Interoperability among digital music standards.
At least one media outlet uses BitTorrent as a distribution model.
At least one major company adapts Creative Commons instead of the increasingly archaic copyright laws now in places.
Microsoft puts an RSS reader in Outlook or IE.
TV Industry predictions?
CNN won't lose Tucker.
Someone will buy TiVo, but it won't be Apple.
Two or three citizen journalist sites will launch. Critical praise will be high; growth will be slow at first, but pick up by the end of the year.
Apple won't make a video iPod. Portable Media Devices will struggle, but not die.
Video search will surprise everyone and be a big success early in 2005.
Michael Powell will torture a few more people, then retire.
Netflix will either merge with TiVo, or be bought by Blockbuster.
Great Future Tense interview (RealAudio) with Matt Thompson about EPIC, a vision of a personlized media source that aggregates newspapers, blogs, and social networks.
Business Week on vlogs here and here. I think we'll see scads of new video bloggers in 2005, and maybe even a celebrity or two arise out of the movement. There's now also Vloggercon 2005.
NYT tries to grapple with the age-old newspaper look at MLA by getting all meta about it: Eggheads' Naughty Word Games. Fave paper titles this year: "t.A.T.u. You! The Global Politics of Faux Lesbian Pop" and "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'."
Count me (and apparently many others in the media) among those who had no idea Susan Sontag was shacking with Annie Leibovitz for many years.
MUSIC
My pals Ross [Pioneer Press] and Melissa [City Pages] did a great episode of MPR's Midmorning (RealAudio) where they discuss their favorite albums of the year.
Holy retromania. At least a hundred new "Of The Year" lists showed up over Christmas break. They are all still collected right here, but below are some highlists:
Chris Anderson is turning his much-lauded Wired story "The Long Tail" into a book, with an accompanying blog.
NYT Styles writes about the blog Anonymous Lawyer, yet another fictional blog, but this time with a twist: everyone knows it's fiction, and no one seems to care. I guess that makes it sorta like lawyer fan-fic. Eww.
It's simply gross how much Best Of ephemera I've consumed in the past month. But I'll give one best Best Award to Best Year Ever, VH1's show that gave its yearly award to "Some Dude". It matches nicely with the assessment of others that 2004 was the year of the little people.
Before anyone tries to talk you into uttering senseless historical inanities, let's just clear this up: 2004 was not "The Year of the Blog." This was not the year of Howard Dean's bold online campaign, nor was it the year of dismantling Trent Lott. It wasn't even the year of the Paris Hilton tape. That was all last year, and while we have plenty to celebrate about '04, it's best to approach the past 365 days wearing a new look: maturity. In other words, this was the year blogs grew up.
Don't mistake that assessment as a suggestion that blogs are slipping into a rheumatic slumber. To be sure, it was a good year, one in which we (may I use the royal first person?) booted a tiresome TV anchor, sparred with the FCC, pre-reported Ken Jennings' demise, and discovered an entire radical music movement. Excellent work, and that's not even counting the intrepid analysis of Tara Reid's nipple.
But this was a landmark year for independent publishers not so much because of Lewinsky-size scoops, but because the internet came into its own as a medium for experiencing news events. Think about it -- look how many events didn't necessarily happen first online, but seemed to exist because of the blogosphere. The moments that best defined culture in '04 -- the best political debate (Jon Stewart pouncing on Crossfire), the best sex media scandal (Bill O'Reilly raping a falafel), the best TV moment (Janet exposing a Super Bowl nipple), and the best music video (Ashlee Simpson lip synching on SNL) -- were all probably delivered to you via blogger keystrokes. These media events all somehow felt, if you will, "internety" -- somewhat like how Jon Stewart's Daily Show has that intangible quality that makes it feel like television's version of a blog.
In other words, 2004 was the year we became the medium that mattered.
Last year, while giving the numero uno slot to Howard Dean's Blog For America, I wrote a now-embarrassing blurb which said, "When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function." Mm-hm. In an attempt to correct that gaffe and atone for the mistakes of the past year (and to prove that blogs are more than a collection of celeb up-skirt shots), here are the Best Blogs of 2004:
1)Buzz Machine. It's almost a shame that Jeff Jarvis' blog had to become the most important read of the year. After Janet's nipple kicked off the revised culture wars in January, the tension seemed to build all year, right up to a foreboding red-blue November. All along the way, Jarvis was there warning us of what was coming. When the FCC started tossing around fines faster than Howard Stern's tongue can move, Jarvis (who was the creator of Entertainment Weekly and now heads Condé Nast's internet strategy) became suspicious of some claims and filed a Freedom of Information Act request (actual reporting! bloggers beware!), which revealed the number of complaints had been greatly exaggerated. One show (FOX's Married by America) turned out to have received considerably less than the 159 complaints that the FCC reported. "Considerably less," as in three. An indefatigable Jarvis went on to critique other FCC mistakes, all of which seemed like a prescient glimpse into the news that Howard Stern would move to Sirius radio. Deriding Michael Powell as the "National Nanny," Jarvis slipped onto the talk show circuit, regularly appearing on the cable news networks to denounce the direction American media control was headed. For being a spokesman against cultural censorship (and for helping spread the word into Iran and Iraq), Buzz Machine is my blog of the year.
2)Wonkette. Dear Wonkette, I am responding to your personal on Craigslist seeking a "submissive Jim McGreevey swallower willing to do an 'Anderson Cooper 360' on my puckered red-state ass." It took forever to write that faux-sentence, and it's not even funny. Wonkette could have spit out a better one faster than you can say "Joe Lockhart is drunk again." By the end of the year, our little foul-mouthed Dorothy-Parker-resurrect was appearing on Tina Brown's show, being invited to online news conventions, and getting handed a quarter-mill book advance -- yet Ana Marie Cox never shied from her role as Media Deprofessionalizer in Chief. For frisking the DC wonks, Wonkette is the #2 blog of the year.
3)DailyKos. Whereas Wonkette is one person's personality spread like mayo over the entire political scene, DailyKos is more like the perfect sandwich -- a whole community that is greater than the sum of its parts. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga didn't actually uncover too many political stories this year -- but he created a community that did. Just some of the little political stories created by DailyKos readers: 1) A famous Bush print ad containing additional military personnel Photoshopped into the background was discovered by DailyKos users, which led to a Bush administration apology. 2) During the vice-presidential debate, Dick Cheney claimed that he had never met his rival, John Edwards, but a DailyKos participant found TV footage to the contrary, which was eventually aired on cable news networks to much embarrassment to Cheney. 3) A boycott of Sinclair advertisers to protest the airing of an anti-Kerry documentary caused the broadcasting group's stock to tank, and forced the company to adjust the broadcast. Along the way, DailyKos also raised a half-million dollars for Democratic political candidates. For foreseeing how political campaigns will be run in the future, DailyKos is the #3 blog of the year.
4)Waxy.org. Waxy proves that in the blogosphere, discovery trumps invention any day. Way back in February, Andy Baio posted the first links to DJ/Producer Danger Mouse's notorious Gray Album, which consisted completely of music sampled from Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Of course the cease-and-desist letters showed up immediately, but it was too late -- mirror sites popped up everywhere, Gray Tuesday was launched, and the word "mash-up" suddenly entered the lexicon of the Newsweek-reading crowd. Last year, Waxy.org discovered the Star Wars kid; this year his link to NickNolteDiary.comtriggered a debate about the relationship of celebrity and blogging. Waxy for President! For forcing the nation to confront its archaic copyright laws, Waxy.org is the #4 blog of the year.
5)Power Line. Who the hell saw this one coming? Who could have predicted that a cadre of right-wing bloggers out in Apple Valley, MN, would drastically change the course of media history? It was so simple: download and analyze the documents that CBSNews.com posted to support the 60 Minutes piece on George Bush's military record. That little act (along with some assistance from other blogger sleuths such as LGF) changed Dan Rather's life forever, and landed Power Line Time's first Blog of the Year award. For showing that truth in reporting matters more than any political ethos, Power Line is the #5 blog of the year.
6)BoingBoing. The subtitle, "A Directory of Wonderful Things," pretty much sums up BoingBoing's run of hits in '04. From Jack Chick tracts to rogue taxidermists, Japanese fetish objects to "I fucked Alec Baldwin in the ass" stickers, Asimov to Zelda -- BoingBoing collected every piece of esoterica you missed. Cory Doctorow, who toils by day as a Creative Commons activist and science fiction author, also somehow got invited to Microsoft HQ to talk about Digital Rights Management -- perhaps the best (and, given the audience, most difficult to imagine) speech of the year. For reminding us the best parts of the internet are still uncommercial weird shit, BoingBoing is the #6 blog of the year.
7)Plain Layne. C'mon, admit it, you like being fooled. For three years, Plain Layne was the online girl you wanted to know. Sexy, smart, irreverent, and willing to talk about expensive dildos and cheap wine, Layne Johnson told you all the naughty details -- in e-mail, on AIM, or on her website. When she turned out to be the fictional work of Odin Soli, a thirty-something dot-commer with a penis, the investigative effort (chronicled here) became the real story. In hindsight, the salacious details should probably have tipped off more people, but, as everything from The Passion of Christ to the Red Sox showed in 2004, people really want to believe in myths. Plain Layne pre-dated a number of conspicuous fake celeb blogs in 2004, a trend which included Quentin Tarantino, Nick Nolte, Bill Clinton, Julian Casablancas, and Adam Nagourney. For two reasons -- forcing us to think again about online identity and accidentally personifying the investigative power of digital communities -- the defunct Plain Layne is the #7 blog of the year.
8)Metafilter. Grandpa Metafilter, you know I would never let you fall out of the Top 10. I wish your participants had done some of the same unique investigative work we found on places like DailyKos and Power Line this year (your community is certainly smarter than theirs), but you were always there with the context that made the story resonate. For staying above the fray, Metafilter is the #8 blog of the year.
9)Gawker. Frankly, I think Gawker Stalker is dull. I don't really care that you saw James Lipton at a train stop. But I do care about that Condé Nast cafeteria! If blogs could have clipped teaser critic quotes like movies, I'd give Jessica Coen this one: "Best media snark this side of Vincent Gallo's cock! Two thumbs up [the Olsen Twins]!!" For redefining NSFW in 2004, Gawker is the #9 blog of the year.
10)I Want Media and Romenesko. Sure, it's cheap to give them a tie, but they're inextricably linked. For finding the needles in that big fat media haystack, I Want Media and Romenesko are the #10 blogs of the year.
11)Kottke.org. Lucid, informed, reasoned, simple but never simplistic -- these are the qualities that make a good blogger, and Jason Kottke personifies all of them. Kottke's big scoop this year was reporting Ken Jennings' Jeopardy loss before anyone else, and he managed to do it in a completely internet-centric way (you had to highlight the text in your browser to see the spoiler). For keeping the bar high, Kottke.org is the #11 blog of the year.
12)Lost Remote. When Lost Remote held a tagline contest a couple months ago, one of the winners was "The future of media is stuck between the cushions of your couch." For chronicling in real time the shift of power to the user, Lost Remote is the #12 blogger of the year.
13)Whatevs. Uncle Grambo used to speak his own language, but now everyone else speaks it. The blogosphere is littered with good pop culture sites (Amy's Robot, Golden Fiddle, Lindsayism, Stereogum, Zulkey, Information Leafblower, Witz.org, Defamer and The Superficial -- to name just a few), but Whatevs won the most snark hearts by talking in some sort of futuristic jive-speak, inventing names for celebs like Brit Brit and The Thighmaster and Gawky Bird and M. Daytime Shamalamadingdong. This dude from Detroit probably doesn't even know that half the NYC mag publishing world is combing his site for lingo to steal. Whatevs. For grokking the epithet, Whatevs is the #13 blog of the year.
14)Engadget. In the mock-battle between Calacanis and Denton, I'm cheering for the guy who thinks less is more. But Peter Rojas at Engadget out-scooped his former digs, Gizmodo, on nearly every gadgety moment this year. For making us want more, Engadget is the #14 blog of the year.
15)PaidContent. Every morning, after the inbox got its cleansing and the Cocoa Puffs were finished, PaidContent.org was the first site that I visited. A bit of a misnomer, PaidContent actually covers everything you might call "digital media." For scouring a wide range of topics between business and technology, PaidContent is the #15 blog of the year.
16)Drudge Report. What did Drudge do this year? The only thing I really remember was hitting refresh constantly on election night (damn those exit polls!). For just being Drudge, Drudge Report is the #16 blog of the year.
17)Low Culture. As far as dichotomies go, "grave" and "shallow" pretty much cover all the ground. For eschewing the happy medium, Low Culture is the #17 blog of the year.
18)Largehearted Boy. I hear this MP3 Blog thing is quite the fad! A lot of press went to Fluxblog this year, but Largehearted Boy was the most comprehensive independent music blogger out there. For pre-dating podcasting, Largehearted Boy is the #18 blog of the year.
19)Bookslut. Choosing a favorite book blog is hard work (GalleyCat is the most recent addition to biblio blogs), but Bookslut seemed the most rapaciously slutty of them all. For reminding me to read more, Bookslut is the #19 blog of the year.
20)The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork. For defying the category blog, The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork are the #20 blogs of the year.
21)Blogumentary. For creating the first great celluloid (well, digi video) document of the blogosphere, Blogumentary is the #22 blog of the year.
22)I Love Music. For being the largest collection of music nerds ever assembled, ILM is the #22 blog of the year.
23)Best Week Ever. For finally doing a tv-blog combo, Best Week Ever is the #23 blog of the year.
24)Green Cine. For obsessing about every possible film-related link on the internet, Green Cine is the #24 blog of the year.
25)Dan Gillmor's eJournal. For publishing the book that defined citizen journalism in 2004, Dan Gillmor's eJournal is the #25 blog of the year.
26)Slashdot. Do I gotta? The discussions on Slashdot are as bulimic as an Olsen Twin -- lots to intake, lots of purging, a gross and skinny final product. You probably had a better chance getting juicy tech commentary on places like SearchEngineWatch and Many-To-Many and John Battelle. Nonetheless, the hatahs at Slashdot also seemed to reliably provide context to tech news events. For making you wish you could run more of your life from a command prompt, Slashdot is the #26 blog of the year.
Yipe. Tucker Carlson is quitting CNN and moving to MSNBC. (Note: The blog TVNewser gets the scoop first.)
Poynter.org has a New Media Timeline (from 1969 to 2004) that would have been much better if there were a single-page version that you could print.
ONLINE
NYT Mag on blogs, privacy, sex, journalism, and identity: Your Blog or Mine? The thesis: "In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them." Perhaps I'm too blithe about this topic, but I rather enjoy a world where everyone is a walking reality tv show.
Here's a story idea for one of you cute little intrepid journalists out there: What ever happened to Apple girl Ellen Feiss? Actually, you could do a whole series of former internet celebs, including Mahir and the Star Wars kid.
Days after donations to Mozilla fund a two-page ad in the Times, the biz section raves about Firefox.
LOCAL
Dave has posted the Maxim "story" on the Rogue Taxidermists show at Creative Electric.
The news all my friends were talking about this weekend: MPR is launching a new music radio station. Looks like it has all the potential in the world... or it could completely suck. Not sure what to make of this: "Our staff will be hanging out in clubs, searching the Internet, reading the music magazines and streaming music from around the globe to find the best music for you." They've also started a blog.
Art Forum Diary, which Greg.org describes as "an art world reality TV show, where the magazine's editors and contributors compete for the Walter Benjamin-inspired title of Greatest Flaneur." Yum!
This was supposed to be the year that our past saved us from ourselves. But at least far as popular music is concerned, that wasn't true, as new releases from the Beastie Boys, Courtney Love, REM, Prince, Bjork, and U2 all turned out as noble attempts at pretending not to be boring.
But then, just as the failure of the legacy acts opened the door for newcomers such as Nellie McKay and Arcade Fire, a couple unexpected true legacies came from out of nowhere to surprise us: Loretta Lynn and Brian Wilson. Who saw that coming?
As I saw it, here are the best albums of 2004:
1) The Streets, A Grand Don't Come For Free -- When I was upset about another relationship breakup, when I was getting ready for a party, when I was choosing an album for my alarm clock to wake me up to in the morning -- it was always The Streets on the stereo. Beyond its versatility, it was also completely indescribable. By default, it's called hip-hop, but it seems more like some kind of ancient syncopated storytelling. That's right, Mike Skinner is our Homer. And the craziest part was when people would ask for a description of the album: toward the end of explaining the Pulp Fiction-ish structuring narrative, I had to pause and say, "I can't say any more without ruining how it ends." That's the sign of a good album.
2) Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand -- Idea for us to make millions in Hollywood: let's make a movie set in the summer of '04, and play "Take Me Out" during the party scene. Millions, I tell you! The way I see it, "Take Me Out" starts like a good Strokes (or Beatles?) ditty and segues perfectly into a great White Stripes (or Stones?) romp. Before you can even realize it, you're singing "I know I won't be leaving here... with you" to every girl at the party. And you won't be leaving with her, because she's having too much fun dancing. This was the album for people who wanted to forget in three-and-a-half-minute increments that GW has already taken us through two wars.
3) TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes -- Just when you thought every possible option for fusion was gone (country electronica? check. indie hip-hop? check. a capella dance? check.), a few dudes in Brooklyn came up with what is essentially doo-wop punk. Yet it sounds nothing like that, as this fusion is probably the most unique sound of the decade so far.
4) DFA, Compilation #2 -- At first, this album -- which sounds approximately like "dancing to a plane crash" -- seemed impenetrably "too New York" for me to "get." In fact, every time I described it to someone, I threw around scare-quotes just like that last frightening sentence. And then somewhere around track five on the second disc, it hit me: this sounds like Minneapolis in 1985, when punk (Husker Du, The Replacements) and funk (Prince, Morris Day) were banging heads with each other. Suddenly, it felt like home.
5) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose -- Out of the gate, this album was criticized as a forced mash-up. Which of course it is, and that's what it's so gorgeous.
6) Dizzee Rascal, Showtime -- There's something about Dizzee Rascal that reminds me of playing Tetris. Must. Fit. Blocks. In. Holes.
7) Wilco, A Ghost Is Born -- Though immensely frustrating at times, the brilliance of Jeff Tweedy shines through in spurts and whistles and grunts.
8) The Walkmen, Bows and Arrows -- The Walkmen are sort of the Built To Spill of 2004. We always need an indie rock band that turns the guitar fuzz louder than the vox.
9) PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her -- It's probably her second-weakest album, but PJ still makes the most shamefully annihilating recordings of anyone alive.
10) "Rockism" -- Even though Michaelangelo insisted that the debate is at least three years old, 2004 was the year that rockism went, well, mainstream. Kelefa Sanneh's critique of the goofy word led me into more conversations than any album this year, and because of that, it was better than all those boring old-timer albums. I still think it's a straw man concept, but hey, it was nice arguing with all of you about it. For at least a half-second, it actually tricked me into thinking music criticism still matters.
22 runner-ups:
Arcade Fire, Funeral;
Bloc Party, Bloc Party;
The Hold Stready, Almost Killed Me;
Interpol, Antics;
Air, Talkie Walkie;
The Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat;
Morrissey, You Are The Quarry;
Nellie McKay, Get Away From Me;
Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News;
Bjork, Medulla;
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse;
Madvillian, Madvillainy;
Big & Rich, Horses of a Different Color;
Pavement, Crooked Rain Reissue;
Tom Waits, Real Gone;
Le Tigre, This Island;
The Killers, Hot Fuss;
The Thrills, Let's Bottle Bohemia;
Bjork, Medulla;
Har Mar Superstar, Handler;
Clinic, Winchester Cathedral;
Eminem, Encore.
A.O. Scott foresees a new trend: Moicumentary, the documentary as confessional.
TIVO
Great interview with the leader of TiVo User Experience.
TV
If you happened to catch the live footage on CNN of the presentation that the Michigan authorities gave to the press last Wednesday, then you'll want to read the Indy Star story, which explicates the layered multimedia format used to present the charges filed against five Indiana Pacers and seven fans. It's like a VH1 special, "Behind the PowerPoint."
Another good Consumed column by Rob Walker, this time mixing Takashi Murakami, Louis Vuitton, sampling, high fashion, artistic expression, and copyright.
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.
eBay has launched eBay Pulse, which includes information such as "Most Popular Searches" and "Largest Stores" and "Highest Priced Items." Sorta like Google Zeitgeist.
MUSIC
Michael Moore directed a new video for Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Watch it.
Spin has an excerpt of Chuck's U2 piece on the site. I like the approach -- taking on the simple question, "Is Bono for real, or is this guy full of shit?"
NY Observer somewhat strangely does a profile of Pitchformedia.com. Despite the idiotic NY-centric egoism (Chicago, Pitchfork's home, is described as "far-flung"), it's a good profile of Schreiber (a Minneapolis native) and company. Tidbits: relaunch planned early next year, three people are on the payroll, and reviews only pay around $20.
A lot of us in the office have been talking about CNN's promo Your Command. Wonkette calls it "Subservient Anchor."
Decent piece about the future of television where it's speculated that the real potential loser or winner in the next generation will be the affiliates.
Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson did a 8-minute faux-documentary imagining online media in the year 2014. EPIC is a cool look at the future of personalized and robotic news. (MetaFilter thread takes some jabs at it.)
The 2005 SXSW Conference has been announced. (Music: March 16-20; Film: March 11-19; Interactive: March 11-15.) Price to attend all: $650. Ouch, that's almost $200 more than last year.
Border's launched a viral personalized web gift-finder, GiftMixer 3000, which bases choice on five personality criteria: Romantic, Adventurous, Brainy, Imaginative and Funny.
The Pistons/Pacers brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica.
MUSIC
Trapped in car for 8+ hours this weekend, I listened to the new Gwen Stefani album three times. It sucks, but I bet Kelefa Sanneh would try to convince me it's awesome. (Conclusion also reached in the car: Kelefa's anti-rockism screed reminds me of girls in high school who tried to convince me on the greatness of Richard Marx.)
FOOD
My high school girlfriend is the pastry chef at Django in Midtown Manhattan. New York Daily News asked her to do something cool with cranberries, so she did.
LOCAL
Okay, it's gonna take a second to get to the "LOCAL" angle of this one, but hang on.... Do you remember the rumor from last week that the Bush twins showed up at a downtown Manhattan restaurant and were told they couldn't get a table -- and that the restaurant would be booked for four more years. Har! For reasons that are a bit mystifying, NYT Styles profiles the restaurant's founder, Taavo Somer. If he looks familiar (he does to me), it turns out he was an architect in Minneapolis a few years ago. (He's also the guy behind the "Morally Bankrupt," "Emotionally Unavailable," and "Until Somebody Better Comes Along" t-shirts you may have seen.) In the profile, Somer cites the now-defunct Loring Cafe as his inspiration for the restaurant, Freeman's. "[The Loring] was a bohemian hangout where you had older people, young people, Eurotrash, everything. They had food, drinks and even a ballet company. It was the circus freak show of life." Over two-and-a-half years ago, I described the Loring as "the place in which all the not-quite-ethnic-yet-ethnic hotties converged." Let the Loring nostalgia commence.
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.
Amy's Robot collects all the goodies from U2's performance on SNL this week, including Amy Pohler acting like a little girl when Bono dry humps her. And no, that wasn't a skit.
The last couple Frontline episodes -- the one on Wal-Mart and the one on marketing -- have been excellent. Next up: credit cards.
In a pretty blatant ripoff of Supersize Me (which was a pretty blatant ripoff of me and my dumb friends in college), some guy is drinking nothing but Pepsi Holiday Spice for 45 days and blogging about it.
I might be the only person in my peer group who reads every single word they can find about the potential merging of Sears and Kmart. There's something about the way it changes my perception of demographics. Anyway, NYT Biz has a roundup with a bunch of interesting stats, including how this might affect Target and the evolution of "big box" shopping.
PUBLISHING
Customized mag publishing is nothing new, but I've never heard of a magazine creating a special cover for an individual retailer. According to Rex Blog (no relation), Lucky did this for WalMart.
TECH
Google sets up an office right next to Microsoft and The Seattle Times runs a funny interview asking why they would do such a thing.
ART
If you live in NYC, MoMA reopened this week. If not, you saved yourself $20 by just reading about it.
DAILY SHOW
Zulkey interviews Ben Karlin, the guy who has held the two coolest writing jobs of my generation.
As if there were any doubt that Rolling Stone should just be shot and put out of its geriatric misery, here's their 500 Greatest Songs. Good sign this list will suck: only six of the songs in the top 50 have come out in my lifetime. And I'm in my 30s, kids.
Do you remember how after the election, the first round of analysis said that the primary reason Kerry lost was the gay marriage initiatives? That was quickly debunked, and right after that, a second round of analysis stated the issue more broadly (and ominously): Cultural Issues. Topics like Janet Jackson's nipple and The Passion of the Christ were used to bolster this argument. But as someone who grew up in North Dakota can tell you, I'm not sure anyone in the heartland is any more offended by Janet Jackson's breast than they are by hockey fights. Which is why I like how this NYT map shows how things are more complex than you think. If I had more time, I'd be writing an essay right now about how the heartland isn't where the problem lies -- it's those goddamn suburbs and exurbs. As a friend recently observed, all of our fucked up friends aren't from the city or the country -- they're from the ugly place in between.
LOCAL
Anyone else worried the new Walker is starting to look like bubble wrap? I live next door, and every time I drive by, I want to go pop its little bubbles.
Every year, I put together a massive collection of Best Of lists. (Previously: 2003 and 2001 -- okay, almost every year). A few of you have emailed me recently to ask if I'll be doing it this year again -- and of course I will be. Today is officially the start of the season, as NYT Circuits published their Top 10 Games of the Year and Rolling Stone has The Year's Best DVDs. Let the lists begin...
ONLINE
Seen this one yet? A website outta Texas that lets you do target practice online: Live-shot.com. Gotta love those red states.
High Tensionlooks like another mediocre horror movie, but ya gotta love the song playing in the trailer -- Sonic Youth doing The Carpenter's "Superstar," which is one of the best covers of all time.
Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avery sues Microsoft over a video game about yoga. (Only Microsoft would steal the worst game idea ever.) And he has a blog chronicling his lawsuit.
PUBLISHING
Whoa, talk about future-dating a story. Frank Rich's Sunday column is already online with a dateline of November 21.
A couple weeks ago, I talked about the troubles I had with Kelefa Sanneh's critique of rockism in the Times. This week, Matthew Wilder writes his own excellent response in City Pages. This whole thing is a great conversation that reminds me of the good parts of '90s rock crit. (And nice work to Missy Miss Roommate for pushing this kind of work into the paper.) See also: ILM Thread.
You saw the Times story this weekend about dating the blogosphere? To save you the trouble, here's the author's blog, the guy's blog, and the other girl's blog. It's all kinda dumb in soap opera way, yet accurate in pinpointing some new nuances that blogging introduces to dating. (I've got a story or two to tell you too. Someday.)
I'll be outta town the next few days, attending the ONA Conference, which I might also blog. If you live in L.A. and want to throw back drinks with me, let me know.
Bret Michaels (yes, of Poison) has a country album out with a song that's in Country's Top 40.
What should we do with this trend where a musician puts together a mixed tape of their favorites songs? Should this be a saleable product? I own ones by Tricky and Morrissey. The other day, I noticed one of the dorks (I say that affectionately) from Grandaddy has one too. Lots of samples on the neat website.
Ed Schultz has a book out. Who's he? He's an increasingly-famous former-conservative-turned-progressive talk show host outta Fargo. I was interviewed on his show a few times back in the college days.
When I saw the news that Postal Service was going to become a spokesperson for their namesake, of course I jumped up and down exclaiming, "Brilliant! All government agencies should do this!" 50 Cent could promote the Treasury Department, AC/DC and Midnight Oil could could snag the Energy dudes, Men at Work gets Labor, Tool could sure help out the Agriculture Department, TV on the Radio could assist Michael Powell at the FCC, and the Defense Department would have a line around the block: Megadeth, B-52s, Slipknot, Massive Attack, and about a half the bands on the Warp Tour. This could go on forever, so let's just end with this one: that fucker from Bush could promote that fucker in the White House.
TV
My readers are always asking, "Rex, what's the best show on tv?" And when I tell them I like Tina Brown's show, I never hear from them again. But seriously, the best new show this season isn't Lost, isn't Desperate Housewives, isn't Real World 15 -- it's Veronica Mars on UPN. Last night's episode used the school election concept to completely spoof our silly little electoral process, all while making reference to The Smoking Gun and using Photoshop to solve crime. Finally, something to replace Buffy.
FILM
Tarantino's next film will be entirely in Mandarin.
Trailer to Alexander. And trailer to the new Almodovar, Bad Education.
TITILLATING POP
This is so random, but whatever: preview pic of Lindsey Lohan in Herbie: Fully Loaded.
Many pics of Avril Lavign dressed up in a Hooter's outfit.
MUSIC
Entertainment Weekly this week shipped a separate music rag, Listen To This, which previously had been a bound insert. Best part: Otto The Bus Driver's (from The Simpson's) "Gotta Have" list in the back. Worst part: Endless stock photos, and a 12-page gift guide.
Perusing the blogosphere at this moment, it appears far fewer people are making a big deal out of the Eminem lip-synching performance on SNL (Lisa Rein doesn't even mention it as she posts the video) as were the Ashlee Simpson debacle last week. The cultural critics are likely already at work with reasons why.
In the mean time, this week Kelefa Sanneh deconstructs rockism, which he defines like this:
A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.
It's a seductive duality that Kelefa has set up. But I see all this differently: rock critics today (at least the ones that have risen in the last five-to-ten years, including the ones who are friends) are completely anti-rockist. In this new age of uber-populist music writers (have you read Blender lately?), we are actually witnessing the exact opposite of rockism: it's immensely uncool to diss Avril Lavigne and Usher (or Liz Phair) for being pop. But it's way cool to devise reasons why Britney is important. It's the anti-'90s right now: I can't not like something that's popular. So I spend hours listening to crap I don't really like, but which I am told is very popular, so I should try to figure out why. Seriously, Kelefa, the only rockists left are at Rolling Stone.
More:
I'm not sure why there's no link to ILM (I Love Music) in the story, but it's here. Here's the post with that community responding.
Several hundred people didn't even get my Halloween costume. Oh well. Here's me and the roomies about to go out. (From left to right, that's a Spam Filter [Rex], the Kill Bill Bride [Melissa], and Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA [Marissa].)
ONLINE
What are they teaching these kids at j-school? I cannot believe that Wonkette visits Columbia Journalism School, but not one of these budding journalists asks about the visible tattoos on her arm. Transcript with pics. (See also: WaPochat transcript with Ana Marie. And during her appearance on Tina Brown's show again tonight, it occurred to me why I like her so much: she talks in the same fast-and-reckless way I do. I'm serious.)
NYT Sunday Styles has a story on XXXchurch.com, the "#1 Christian porn site," which has computer applications that try to dissuade you from viewing online porn. There was also apparently a documentary made about them too.
I was wondering if I was the only one who thought the Donald Trump voice-overs in The Apprentice board room were totally screwed up. MSNBC reports others have noticed.
WORDS
Steven Johnson announces his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, with a working subtitle right now of "Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter." Looks good.
Rather than merely endorse a candidate, Slate.com has everyone on staff endorse a candidate, right down to the Wine Writer and Software Development Engineer.
Just a few blocks from my house, on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin, there's a new billboard that says something like "Your election homepage: MPR.org" Could this be the first time we've ever seen a media dot-com exclusively advertised in our fair city?
In the Times Mag this week, the cover story (about faith in the workplace) opens with a story from the Riverview Community Bank in Otsega, MN.
I'm not sure why, but Alex Ross posted his piece about Radiohead from 2001 that ran in the New Yorker. And I'm not sure why I'm telling you either, other than it's sorta memorable. (Another flashback: Thom Yorke and Howard Zinn hang.)
Did anyone else notice the city has been lighter ever since the Wilco show? I didn't even go, but I feel like everyone's walking around in some sort of happy-stoned-haze.
Jim Walsh follows up on last week's story about the PiPress reporters suspended for going to a Springsteen concert with unprinted letters to the editor. (Update: PiPressresponds.)
Sorry I've been gone for a few days. It was a busy week on the homefront. Interpol played a good show on Tuesday; I spoke at the MIMA Summit on Wednesday; the single best design-cum-politics eventanywhere was on Thursday. Leaving aside my personal life speaking only about local events, this has been the best Fall. Every day has something cool going on. Bite me, New Yawkers.
Reason collects answers to the question "Who's Getting Your Vote?" from a diverse set of people including John Perry Barlow, Drew Carey, Nat Hentoff, Penn Jillette, P.J. O'Rourke, Camille Paglia, Louis Rossetto, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Shafer, R.U. Sirius, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, Matt Welch, and Robert Anton Wilson. Some surprising answers.
Results of the Nerve.com sexual/political poll, which answers such important questions as "There are two spots left in your hot tub: Do you invite the Bush twins or the Kerry daughters?"
TV
Mark Cuban's Benefactor was quietly cancelled (thank. fucking. god.). But Trump, who wrote Cuban a letter, ain't letting it disappear so easily.
Three more music director videos are coming. The first directors were Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. The second set will be Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn.
A certain Klosterman fellow sorta reviews the new Wilco album in City Pages. (Wherein you learn Chuck and Jeffy Tweedy both like -- ugh -- Jet. Right, right, I don't like Jet because I'm a hipster.)
Now, this is rock 'n roll! A one-week cruise with Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon: RR Holiday Escape.
Pitchfork gives the new Le Tigre a 3.3 and EW dissed the "I'm So Excited" cover this week. This really disapoints me.
I looked everywhere in the Sunday Times for something about the Jon Stewart / Crossfire battle. It took them five days to finally get to it, though.
SCIENCE
One of those things you only know about me if you know me offline: I have no sense of smell. (It's a long tragi-comic story, but I lost it in an accident about six years ago.) I just noticed the Times Mag has a column by a woman who lost her smell, and the process by which she regained it. Looks like I have a winter project ahead of me.
It's Melissa's fault that I've been watching America's Top Model, but I just found out that Nicole is from... Minot, ND. Impossibly, her bio lists herself as "former punk rocker." The kids who knew her (of which I am not one) are talking about her here.
Can you imagine writing this next sentence in 1994? Billy Corgan will be reading at The Loft today. (I wonder if I can get him to say "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.")
If you live in Northeast (or visit that hidden NE Grumpy's), you've probably met Tom Taylor, the Green party candidate for that district's state house rep. CP profiles him.
Ever wonder why all your friends are leaving Uptown for Northeast. For reasons like this.
If you missed it, a few Pioneer Press reporters were suspended for going to a Springsteen concert. Weird.
After three episodes, I still haven't decided if Desperate Housewives is a lame suburbanization of Sex and the City or a campy send up from the John Waters set. Anyway, it's crazy to hear the show is losing advertisers because of controversial content. (Best line from tonight's episode: "Rex cries after he ejaculates." I kid you not.) See also, in Variety: Get me some housewives, dammit!
This could be good: Flow, a Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture.
MUSIC
Dude, this is rad. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as performed by GW Bush. Someone has sampled speeches so that he sings virtually every lyric from the U2 hit.
Massive Inc., "the world's first video game advertising network."
DERRIDA
Post-Derrida, The Timesdrives the nail into the coffin of theory. I've been out of academia too long to be able to adequately respond, but here is my problem with this euology: it misses how Big-T Theory has really resituated itself as small-t theory, which is a conquest in its own right. In other words, didn't theory really just win the cultural war?
Various writers (from Richard Dawkins to JG Ballard to AS Byatt) respond to Derrida's death in The Guardian.
LOCAL
Looks like the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists have their own website. The Creative Electric show is pretty amazing.
Quote of the year: "I hear rumors on the Internets..." -G.W.B. C'mon now, 48% of you want this guy to be president again?
WORDS
He changed it all. Jacques Derrida (Wikipedia) died Friday. The obit that landed on the front page of the Times this morning is good at describing the cultural shift that Derrida created (or documented), but it obsesses on defining deconstruction. Google News has more, and if you know French, you might try Le Monde's obit. Look for heavy eulogizing from the remnants of old guard of academia this week.
DATING / SEX
My pal Melissa has a theory that the best way for a boy to get a girl to like him is to have it known that other girls like him. I don't like when she talks like this, because I fear it will reveal too much strategy. Anyway, the best thing in NYT Styles this week is the piece about Wingwomen.com, a site where a guy hires a girl to act as their social liason to other desirable girls.
What I like about Brendan Koerner's weekly Sunday Times column "The Goods" is not so much how he introduces us to the marketing of a unique product every week (althought that's good too), but more than that, I like how he bolsters his picks by quoting obscure industry dot-coms. This week, you could be cruising along reading the analysis of cheese pizza when it throws out at you the industry site PizzaMarketplace.com. It can hardly be surprising to find out there's a pizza industry publication, yet that it's so accessible is one the great things about the internet.
On NPR, Xeni Jardin talks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone about Team America. They're also in Newsweek. In related news, Sean Penn sends an angry memo to the boys.
My email pal Jeff Gralnick pens a travel essay about his climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
LOCAL
More from Riemenschneider on the First Ave. debacle. Here's the TCPunk message board debating the issues.
A Strib roundup of three different Minnesota women who have recently had some reality tv fame, including Jamie Foss, who is pretty much a parody of every reality tv start alive.
I wish I had gone to Web 2.0. There is so much commentary out there about it right now, but here are two things: MP3 of Lessig's Free Culture presentation and MP3 of the media panel with CNet, NYTimes.com, Tivo, etc.
It's so sad that someone had to come along and make Trump look smart. Mark Cuban is such a moron, as proven with his interview with OJR. I think Jarvis said it best: "I understand why the world pays attention to Paris Hilton. I don't understand why the world pays attention to Mark Cuban." In other news, EWreports that ABC screwed up and revealed the winner of The Benefactor.
Jen, "an online magazine for (Mormon) teens and adults."
MEDIA
Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather on Fresh Air.
SORTA LOCAL
Whooooaaaaa. First Avenue has been served an eviction summons.
Bookslut says that Dylan Hicks' story "Why Is Slot A Mortal Sin" is "one of the best book-related pieces I've read in a long time" and calls City Pages "America's best alternative newsweekly."
Usually when the editor is writing for the magazine, it's a bad sign. But Chris Anderson writes an amazing piece on digital economics called The Long Tail for this month's Wired. (Rare case where Slashdot thread might be okay reading. UPDATE: maybe not.)
Excellent news for people who use Treo with Exchange (which is about 1% of you but 100% of me, and I win).
FILM
Not sure what to make of this one. Veep-candidate John Edwards is hosting Turner Classic Movies' showing of Dr. Strangelove tomorrow night.
The MPAA wants to giveTeam America an NC-17 rating because of a puppet sex scene. Someone please help me craft a pun with the word marionette.
DRINK
Best idea since beer itself: Budweiser Introduces Caffeinated Beer. Dammit, it's sweet though. And ginseng? Don't you understand I'm drink to forget?
Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs "Y Control" video, directed by Karen O.'s new paramour, Spike Jonze. (So far, MTV isn't playing this. Write your Senator!) See also: Tell Me What Rockers to Swallow, an upcoming Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs DVD.
LOCAL
Got too drunk the other night at the 400 Bar watching Connor Oberst (who I really don't like), waiting for Bruce Springsteen to play. Yeah, there was a rumor The Boss was gonna make a suprise visit. He didn't, and I had to listen to Connor wail all night.
Anyone else notice they're building a Design Withing Reach in that old Elements spot in Uptown? I like DWR's work, but if the catalogue is any indication, the price of this shit ain't within reach. This could be a great opportunity for Uptown, or it could be the final sign of yuppification. I'm voting the latter right now.
Stribsays there are three local bloggers blogging about the Twins.
Alfred Kinsey: Liberator or Pervert? Includes many luridly details (he self-circumcised himself a year before he died) and a back-story of controversy (Dr. Laura Schlessinger and others tried to put an ad in Variety denouncing the film) surrounding the new Kinsey biopic.
I missed this one. Jessi Klein of "Best Week Ever" (one of the best pop culture shows on tv) blogged the debate for CNN.com. And so did Douchbag Novak, which was quite possibly the worst blog ever.
PUBLISHING
So the "new" NY Times Book Review came out this week. Its new-ness is questionable, but there is the okay review of Web Sites for People Who Read, which includes some of my current fave blogs such as Bookslut and Maud Newton.
Speaking of new, I believe The Guide is part of the Sunday Times Arts section's attempt to stay ahead of New York and the weeklies. (The rest of the section is full of font changes this week, but I can't find anything else significantly different.) Choire Sicha is the byline, so it's not full of mainstream crap. It's the first thing I've seen in a while that made me want to live in NYC.
Nerve.com: Michaelangelo Matos interviews John Leland, author of the new book Hip: the History. Looks like the book will be good.
Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions ended last week with a Double Jeopardy category called "Blogs." The question to the $2000 answer was Margaret Cho. Other questions included Lawrence Lessig and Howard Dean.
Wired News playing catchup on Video Mods. (One important thing I didn't point out about the new Sims 2: it has the ability to record your gameplay into a video file. This has extraoridinary viral opportunity, such as allowing one to potentially create their own Video Mods. See next entry.)
The same people who made Red Vs. Blue, a machinima series using the Halo rendering engine, have recently started to release The Strangerhood, a new machinima using the Sims 2 engine. [via Slashdot]
Smart CEO Alert! PaidContent is doing a series called Context Next, featuring guest blogs by leading industry thinkers. Jeremy Allaire's grabbed my interest, but Don Katz (CEO of Audible.com) has been the hidden diamond. Speaking tech execs, I saw Mark Cuban tell Howard Stern last week that he once slept with seven women at once. Take that Trump! (I feel pure midwestern guilt for saying this, but I like the cheesy gold-laced Trump more than the awwww-shucks Cuban. I have an entire essay in me about these two, but it's basically the dichotomy between camp and faux-earnestness.)
This week, Subterranean on MTV2 was all about the 2004 Shortlist Music Prize. Good stuff by TV on the Radio, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets, Wilco, Nellie McKay, Air, and more.
Times Magprofiles Nonesuch records, home of Wilco, Steve Reich, Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, The Magnetic Fields, and Kronos Quartet.
Does anyone read Art Forum anymore? New issue on Pop After Pop might be the first I buy in several years.
Tokion Magazine's Creativity Now conference looks like it would've been fun. Speakers included an eclectic cast like Brian Eno, Kim Gordon, Christopher Doyle, and Joe Trippi.
LOCAL
Yes, I'm glad we talked at Sound Unseen this weekend. You'll be at the rest of the events this week, right? Good. I'll see you there.
Chuck is finishing up work on Blogumentary. I can't wait to see the final film, which seems like an impossible task to complete given the unstable nature of its topic.
Next month's Wiredwill come bundled with a CD with 16 songs that can be freely copied, distributed, and remixed by other artists. It will include Beastie Boys, Le Tigre, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, Paul Westerberg, Cornelius, Matmos, and others.
Last week, intrepid Waxy posted The Kleptones' A Night at the Hip-Hopera, a mashup of Queen and early rappers like Grandmaster Flash. You might have guessed it would get the same controversial attention as Danger Mouse's "Grey Album," and you might be right.
Chuck Statler is pretty much the father of the modern rock video. He has worked with Devo, Prince, The Cars, Styx, Graham Parker, Stan Ridgway, and Elvis Costello. He lives in Minneapolis, and there's a retrospective of his work coming up at Sound Unseen. CPprofiles him.
Grandpa Coleman gets all grumpy about blogs this week. "Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world."
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (oh wait!). So instead of getting pedantic, let's look at the gaming landscape by pointing out new phenomena in digital entertainment, with a focus on how gaming is influencing all media. This isn't necessarily a cohesive essay with a single objective, but I hope it's more than another "Synergy of The Matrix" piece. Let's just call this a Scrappy Collection of Thoughts About Various Gaming Trends that have been of recent fascination to me:
VIDEO MODS
I won't try to convince you that the mashup of a teen-goth BloodRayne 2 video game and a teen-goth Evanescence music video belongs in the canon of required cultural material for our time. In other words, don't sigh if your TiVo missed Video Mods, a new series on MTV2 in which video game characters and landscapes are used to create music videos. I guess the worst thing that one could say about Video Mods is that Viacom is blatantly ripping off Machinima to attract video game advertising to television.
Even if that's true, it's also much more.
But first: a part of me wants to tell you that the convergence of these mediums is the perfect metaphor for the current state of the music industry. This cynical critique would go something like this: little pac men (consumers) run around a contested maze (Virgin Records) gobbling up indistinguishable dots (songs/albums) and ghosts (musicians). It's a sociological Flatland out there, in which demographics are empty ciphers with unlimited purchasing power -- the same goddamn person buys (or downloads) Outkast, Evanescence, and Creed. À la carte pop culture icons are sculpted with the same care that goes into creating Sims characters -- complete with readymade identities that become obsolete faster than you can blurt "Friendster." Identity is the currency of the music industry, and it's a free market economy of Pokemon cards: I'll trade you a "Britney Reinvented #24" for a "Cleaned Up Christina #9." Virtual video game characters taking over the role of musician is nothing more than the next step in the MilliVanilling of the music industry.
But, like I said, I don't really buy that mojo. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in cynically looking at pop culture icons, but I think it ultimately misses a key point in understanding the attraction of Video Mods. For evidence, take a look at The Sims 2 video mod of the Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom."
The Sims is the top dog of this medium so far. Not only is it the highest-selling series of all time, but it has come to represent a watershed creative moment in the industry. So why, one might ask, would "Stacy's Mom" score the grand prize of The Sims mod?
I honestly have no idea. But I think you'll see a clue by looking at the storyline behind "Stacy's Mom." You might say the Fountains of Wayne song is just a MILF romp imagined by a horny adolescent. But in reality, it's not even that -- it's actually sung by thirty-somethings who are themselves projecting a tweener dream. Basically, it's a wish fulfillment nostalgia fantasy from guys old enough to be Stacy's Dad.
So now, what is The Sims? That's more complex, but one could say it is an interactive world where players bring to life characters outside their normal demographic makeup. In other words, it's a giant role-playing fantasy.
Starting to see a trend here? Let's move on....
PLAYBOY
In the age of Suicide Girls, it's amazing that Playboy is still around. And it's amazing that I bother to mention the publication in a video game rant. But even as I say this, I realize that for the first time in my life, I bought an issue of Playboy last month, simply because the magazine has done a remarkable job of staying relevant in a digital age. For instance, the Google guys interview and the Washingtonienne spread reminded me that the magazine could still be relevant.
Or maybe these are just the last gasps of breath of a dying Boomer ideology. I'd entertain that argument too.
Anyway, when Playboy announced they would be doing a photo spread of characters from video games, you could instantly picture a digital historian somewhere writing this event into a timeline of important virtual character events (chronologically right after reality TV and right before the holodeck). Hackers modding Lara Croft into a pinup is one thing, but the mainstream culture industry getting sly with virtual sexuality says a lot more about where we are. This single layout might actually become the best indicator of the mainstreaming of a number of (previously) fringe activities and concepts: virtual sexuality, video game culture, user-modified content, reality blurring. And a new video game, Playboy: The Mansion, a Sims-like romp through Hef's mansion, will take this even further.
WAR GAMING
Forget sex, war is where it's at.
A lot has been said recently about the relationship between the industrial war complex and video games (such as in articles in The New York Times and Wired). When the Army created the game America's Army to recruit soldiers, it seemed that Ender's Game truly was going to happen. I'm working on an article for publication about this theme, so let's breeze past this topic for the moment.
SIMS 2
Every night over the last week, I've sat in a room with a computer and TV, playing the recently-released The Sims 2 and watching late night talk shows. Something important changed last night: I turned off the TV and started watching the show that my Sim character was watching on his television.
I don't think I can even articulate how hyper-real this is.
REALITY GAMING
The spurt of ironic glee about Flash Mobs last summer was more than a hipster punchline. It illustrated how gaming was leaking from the pores of society. The products of this spillage have included Big Urban Game (Minneapolis) and PacManhattan (NYC). And the glut of competition-based reality shows (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor, etc.) are all just extreme versions of reality gaming. (One could also argue that these Reality Games are a sort of tame suburban version of more serious planned events like the Seattle WTO Protests. That's for a different essay though.)
THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION
Anyone who has played even five minutes of Zelda will find PBS's new two-hour special The Video Game Revolution a bit tedious. I suppose it serves a valid purpose -- to provide a historical framework of popular video games. Too bad it's as engaging as a two-hour Pong match.
But what interests me is what this documentary represents in this moment in time. It seems we have reached a period in gaming where we can reflect on the past equipped with the gear found in the toolbelt of historical analysis: summary, bricolage, and nostalgia. The Video Game Revolution implicitly declares video games as a real object of pop culture study. Of course, this should not be surprising given the rise of academic programs designed to study gaming. Something about this evolution reminds me of 1990s-era Camille Paglia promoting the notion that universities should start rock music programs. I have mixed feelings about whether turning an academic eye to rock really does anything for musicians or fans or society, but I do worry an accidental effect of academizing a discipline in the past couple decades: studying it is synonymous with taming it. (I know many people in academia who are studying game and play, and they all get sour-faced when I suggest this possibility.)
WATCHING TV AT WORK
Many companies have planned events on Fridays that provides employees a break from work. But what our workplace does is truly unique. The idea started innocently: let's use our in-house online video streaming technology to deliver a movie to employees on Friday.
Thus was born The Friday Matinee.
Here's how it works: every Wednesday, an email goes out to a dist list of programmers, designers, engineers, and editors. It contains a list of movies, and the community votes on which one it will watch. On Friday at 2:00, the intranet streaming servers are fired up and the 'play' button is pushed on the DVD player. This is where it gets interesting.
If you walk around through the darkened cubicles at this time, you will see dozens of programmers donning headphones and staring at their computer monitors. They are simultaneously performing a number of tasks: writing code, watching The Friday Matinee, and IM-ing their colleagues about both. In other words, people are working, being entertained, and communicating all at the same time. There's something about this collapse of mediums and lifestyles that suggests a complicated future of media and entertainment.
CONCLUDING
This last example has nothing explicitly to do with gaming, but it illustrates something that's happening in our times: people are hacking mediums together for their own purposes. The provocative questions are just starting to come out: what happens if you mix film with instant messenger? what would a music/game hybrid look like? how could role-playing influence traditional one-way entertainment?
In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, Googling girls on my cellphone at bars, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible.
The blogosphere likely won't shut up about the Times Mag story featuring Wonkette for quite some time.
Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart seem to be competing for Ubiquitous Fake Journalist of the Year. 60 Minutes today saw Mike Wallace do a long profile of O'Reilly; Time did 10 Questions for Jon Stewart. Rolling Stone did an O'Reilly profile; Annenberg released a survey that indicates Daily Show viewers are more politically aware. Slate did How To Beat Bill O'Reilly; CBS MarketWatch suggests Jon Stewart should moderate a presidential debate. And on and on... or you can just see them head-to-head.
ONLINE PUBLISHING
I'm not sure why more people didn't point to Jim Romenesko's cool new blog Starbucks Gossip when it launched last month. The Times this week picks up on the "Should You Tip Your Barista?" thread.
Gawker's Russ Smith interview is surprisingly full of good observations about alt-weeklies, meta-media moguls, and a dead counter-culture press. See also: a short interview with Esquire's sex columnist (and Daily Showcorrespondent), Stacey Grenrock Woods.
Last year around this time, I was talking about how Wired magazine has nicely reinvented itself. I've been less happy with the mag this year, but WiredNews.com (the website) has made some excellent editorial decisions lately. Two new columns, Sex Drive and Media Hack, have been required digerati reading. The most recent Sex Drive talks about The Sinulator, a vibrator which connects to a USB port and can be controlled remotely.
Malcolm Gladwell put his awesome analysis of ketchup (I kid you not) online. Previously printed in the New Yorker.
The Times follows up Slate.com's analysis of vodka (I love this series from Slate) with a look at Cîroc, the vodka that was "disqualified" from the Slate contest because of "trying to pass itself off as a vodka."
Elle Macpherson has a new line of lingerie called Intimates. The ads, airing in Australia and the UK and featuring a knife-fighting supermodel, are causing quite a controversy. Yeah, I know, you wanna see them.
Good Bruce Mau interview. (Deborah Solomon seems to have become America's best interviewer.)
FILM
When I saw a trailer link for White Noise, the movie, I freaked out and called everyone I know. Or at least I started to. Then I saw "Genre: Paranormal thriller," and thought you motherfuckers ruined my favorite book! Turns out, this movie is unrelated to the book. But there was a rumor a year ago that DeLillo's White Noise would be a movie. Anyone have the scoop? (IMDB has Barry Sonnenfeld as the director of a 2005 release.)
From the Wong Kar-Wai profile in the Times Mag: "The kind of person who might once have proclaimed Jules and Jim or Wings of Desire his or her favorite movie now rates Wong Kar-wai at the top of the list." Which stings a bit, cuz I used to call Wings of Desire my favorite movie, and now I usually say Chungking Express.
This is the year Le Tigre is gonna hit the mainstream. Stop it, I'm serious. There's an exciting profile in the new Spin and the word is finally out about Kathleen Hanna's relationship with a Beastie Boy. And Stereogum has an MP3 of Le Tigre's cover of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited," which is gonna beat the Jazzercise knickers off Britney's "My Perogative." Best. Song. Of. 2004.
U2's new single, "Vertigo," from the forthcoming album is available here. (Good song.)
Last year, Business 2.0 infamously gave its "Hottest Technology" award to social networking software (Friendster, MySpace, Tribe.net, Orkut, etc.). This year, it goes to VoIP (Subscription Link). Runner-ups include Satellite Radio, Open-Source Databases, and Concept Mapping.
While in Fargo a few weeks ago, I got in a conversation with someone who was contributing to the creation of 100 North Dakota Books, a list of -- you guessed it -- 100 notable NoDak books. The person was trying to keep Chuck Klosterman off the list. Didn't happen.
If you missed it, RatherGate can be attributed to a local blogger, Powerlineblog.com, which is part of the Northern Alliance collective. Strib has a story.
Daily Jon Stewart link (plus another t-shirt I need).
Everyone I know will make fun of me for this, but I'm gonna come out and say it: I like Tina Brown's CNBC show. You probably think I mean that ironically or something. But seriously, I really think Topic [A] can be brilliant in a way that, say, Charlie Rose can't be. Anyway, her most recent Post column is perfect example of great and preposterous at the time.
LOCAL (YET NOT)
American Public Media (that crazy new name for what used to be MPR Productions) has a new program called Pop Vultures starring our very own Kate Sullivan. Peter did a CP story about it.
Earlier this week, the Strib had a story about a local dot-com called Freeze.com. They somehow make millions of dollars giving away screensavers. (The "somehow" is that you have to agree to being spammed to get the screensaver. So much for Minnesota Nice.)
Woot.com is brilliant. Every day, one (and only one) piece of gadgetry goes up for sale. The price is slashed low because of a set volume that will be sold. The gadget only stays available until supplies run out. It's a little like Amazon's Gold Box... (Nerdy Tidbit To Impress Friends: "Woot" is an elision of the Dungeons and Dragons phrase "Wow, Loot!")
My biggest gripe about Amazon.com is the lack of benefits given to high-volume users. I order probably $100 of stuff per week off Amazon.com (yes, I even get food and soap and razor blades delivered to me), but I get no special discounts for my repeat visiting. This week, however, after Amazon beefed up its A9.com search engine, the company started offering something called ?/2%. This crazy little gimmick gets you one-half Pi percent (1.57%) off everything if you're a A9.com user. This is somehow both crazy and cool at the same time.
Non-surprise of the day: Google is working on their own web browser.
It looks like the first single from the new Fatboy Slim album is called "Slash Dot Slash." That sounds sorta, well, ya know, internety. Here's a video.
Does anyone really care if Nellie McKaye is fibbing about her age?
Margo Jefferson is the new "avant-garde critic" at the Times.
I try to keep away from linking to Frank Rich columns (mostly because they're already such obvious talking points), but this week's has a lot of my friends talking.
Bryce Zabel, a former chairman and CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, does another one of those End of Television as We Know it stories.
MUSIC
Could the B-52's have their career revived a cover of "Paperback Writer" in a Buick advert?
RogerEbert.com launches. To include every review since 1967.
CELEBRITY
Have you been watching The Surreal Life on VH1? Brigitte Nielsen and Flavor Flav are hooking up. Though impossible, I wish the last sentence could have been written in 1990.
Edward Furlong: lobster activist or drunk? You decide.
TECH
This could be interesting to those of you into Flash development and/or online communication models: Central and AOL Instant Messaging. Central hasn't exactly taken off, but it still has potential.
LOCAL
Minnesota mysteriously finds itself on the Sunday Times Week In Review page.
The PiPressredesign has been an odd big topic of conversation lately. Poynter has an overview.
The Timesreviews a new book from Jon Stewart & The Daily Show gang.
There's a new tv magazine out called Glued. I haven't seen it yet, but Jossip interviews the editor.
And there's a new magazine coming out from... O'Reilly? Well, they've certainly been expanding into new areas. The title is Make, and the tagline is "Technology On Your Time." Due out next year.
FONTGATE
I was watching the new Slacker DVD last night when I noticed that the typewriter that gets thrown over the bridge is an IBM Selectric. Anyway, they're up for sale now on eBay. Also, a site dedicated exclusively to it.
FILM
Paris Hilton to star in -- get this -- The Great Gatzby. Actually, Paris as Daisy Buchanan is kinda brilliant. I bet they tried to get Gwyneth first though.
Johnny Ramone has died. Questionable legacy: "Johnny Ramone was surrounded at his death by friends, including Pearl Jam rocker Eddie Vedder, singer Rob Zombie and others. Other friends who gathered at his Los Angeles home included Lisa Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo and Talia Shire."
The grumpy pants at Pitchfork give the new Har Mar Superstar a 1.9.
Nike shows restraint in not touching the Chuck Taylor All-Stars brand, wherein you hear Kurt Cobain was wearing Cons when he committed suicide. Rah, go Nike.
SCIENCE = LIFESTYLE
Slate: Inhalable alcohol? Finally, science is really producing products I can relate to.
Research from Nature: Your name increases your sex appeal. (Includes research performed via HotOrNot.com.) Hello, my name is Rex....
MEDIA
It was interesting to watch the Sunday morning news shows cover a couple stories that orgininated in the blogosphere. Both LittleGreenFootballs.com's analysis of typograpy (somewhat debunked by DailyKos) and Kottke.org's breaking the news that Ken Jennings lost in Jeopardy were both treated as "a website reported" on numerous instances. Even Reliable Sources glossed over the identity of those sites.
CELEBRITY
The best point in the Times Magstory on Trump is probably the point about him being a mysterious populist. False consciousness, indeed.
Amy's Robot has an MP3 of Dave Eggers interview on Conan last week.
Ana Marie Cox reviews the new Kristin Gore novel for the Times Book Review. We learn that Gore had writing gigs at SNL and Futurama. Which is impressive, but I saw her on Letterman last week, and she came off ditzy and clueless to irony or nuance. Ms. Cox delivers zingers though: "God knows, an astringent romantic satire is long overdue in a town where work is foreplay and the vibrating object in a couple's bed could easily be a two-way pager."
Locus: a bunch of sci-fi writers (Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton) in a roundtable about the future.
TECH
Huh, it looks like Yahoo is going into consumer electronics. Sounds to me like a bad move.
MUSIC
R.E.M. has an audio stream of the first single from their next album, Around The Sun: "Leaving New York".
ONLINE
NYhotties.com: "I'm a twenty-something New York escort. I love Prada, Seven jeans, and Jimmy Choos." I really gotta make up an identity and cash in with a book deal.
Apparently the PiPressis making some big structural changes, including something called "Speed Read" and a daily A&E section. By the way, my old friend Ross Raihala is the new music writer there. You can see his work popping up here.
Gizmodo reviews MSNtv, bascially the next generation of WebTV.
Years ago, I edited a newsstand magazine that basically reviewed websites. That genre of publishing sounds a billion years old now, but don't tell the Times Art section, which reviews music websites.
CNet has a follow-up story about the uphill battles a Netflix/TiVo partnership will face.
When I first saw the new BlackBerry, the keyboard totally confused me. Circuits finally explains the mentality behind this unique (and my guess is, ultimately flawed) 20-key keyboard.
Group investigative typography? The controversy that LittleGreenFootballs.com and PowerLine.com launched over the 60 Minutes piece (I won't try to explain it -- just go look) is fascinating group-think research even if it seems that most of the people sleuthing this together are complete morons.
FILM
New trailer to the Wes Anderson / Bill Murry flick, The Life Aquatic.
If you were at Mark Mallman's crazy 52.4-hour show last weekend, you witnessed one of those little pieces of Twin Cities rock history that will be recounted as often as Prince at First Ave. and Lifter Puller at the Triple Rock. David de Young has a review.
Letterman is having a contest in which you can submit an answer for Top Ten Signs You're In Love With Your iPod.
Since getting TiVo, I've been constantly thinking about cancelling my Netflix account. Now there's the surprising news that they will be working together, and I'll be able to download movie via Netflix to my TiVo. (PVRblog is abuzz with conversation.) See also: L.A. Timesessay on the the ways the DVR is changing society.
FILM
Guardian profile of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, the guy who has spent 16 years living in an airport and is the inspiration for the new Spielberg flick, Terminal.
MEDIA
Anderson Cooper receiving dating advice from Puffy.
Someone should make a list of the tropes from the Daily Show that have trickled into mainstream media thinking. This Timesgraphic showing the words Republican and Democratic convention speakers use feels like a less funny version of when John Stewart loops the tape on speakers who repeat the same words repeatedly in a speech.
GAMING
From last week's Circuits, a profile of Peter Molyneux, the creator of Black and White, who has a new god game called Fable coming out this month.
Jennifer 8. Lee ends a Timesstory about a Rock, Paper, Scissors tourney with phone numbers flirtatiously exchanged. (Zoinks, check out the strategies of RPS.)
Microsoft launched their Music Store (in beta) yesterday. Nothing about it jumps out as unique. The TV and MOVIES tabs are intriguing, but basically worthless for content. And you need Passport to buy. Blech. However, gotta love team picture. (More review: Times | Mossberg | CNET.)
Much more interesting to us little people, Apple iTunes launched an affiliate program. My thinking on this one: this will not directly affect sales. Instead, you will see an indirect effect when blogs start linking to these songs. This will sell a handful of songs, but more importantly it will require users to use iTunes to play music. In the long run, I think this leverages iTunes as the de fact music player.
Paul Ford invokes Hannah Arendt with The Banality of Google. (By the way, his site was also an influence in organizing this one.)
I'm sure I'm lending to the degeneration of our civilization, but let's go down skanking out, eh? The Paris Hilton Collection on Amazon. Paris Hilton's Heart: $35.
POLITICS
Transcript from last night's Michael Moore and John McCain appearances on Letterman.
TECH
Engadget got their hands on one of the new Portable Media Centers, and wrote the quintessential review. I haven't decided if I'll get one yet.
EVENTS
Is anyone in the world paying attention to Burning Man this year? Only two days left and I completely forgot about it.
Text of the Bush Twins speech from the RNC last night. And I quote: "But, contrary to what you might read in the papers, our parents are actually kind of cool. They do know the difference between mono and Bono. When we tell them we're going to see Outkast, they know it's a band and not a bunch of misfits. And if we really beg them, they'll even shake it like a Polaroid picture." You couldn't make this shit up if you tried. And woe, woe, woe, I'm so confused: who is the Mono character and are you telling me Dubya listens to The Misfits?
Dang, whattup with fast food commercials getting edgy/fetishistic? Here's a Carl's Junior Advert (large wmv file) of a girl sticking her fist in her mouth.
ONLINE
I have purchased exactly one issue of Playboy in my entire life -- last month's issue with the Google guys interview. But this month might be my second, with Washingtonienne making an appearance. (Here's the safe-for-work interview link and here's an archived version of her blog and here's Wonkette's entire coverage.)
This is pretty cool. MoreGoogle seemlessly adds thumbnails to your Google searches.
Those dummies at Friendster fired one of their blogger employees for what appears to be trivial reasons.
FILM
NumberSlate and PeerFlix, two peer-to-peer DVD sharing companies. Interesting, but I suspect they go nowhere.
I missed this one: Sofia Coppola's next movie will be a biopic of Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst.
WORDS
Voice: A legendary editor at Harvard University Press asks, What good are books?
I never read Arthur Phillips' Prague, but I think nearly every one of my friends did. And I never really knew that much about him until a silly Entertainment Weeklypiece (about his new book, The Egyptologist) told me he was a five-time Jeopardy champ. Other facts: born in Minneapolis, was a child actor, a failed entrepreneur, and jazz musician.
MUSIC
AC/DShe: all-girl AC/DC cover band. Mandonna: all-male Madonna cover band.
It's not even 24 hours later, and I'm already sick-to-death of talking about the VMAs. But I'll say this: "MIAMI, WE LOVE YOU!" The fuck? No we don't. Miami sucks. It sucks so bad that Matt Drudge and Anne Coulter moved there. MIAMI, WE LIKE YOU ABOUT AS MUCH AS WE LIKE HOUSTON!
Of course the new Bjork officially went on sale today. It's her most challenging album so far. Listen | Buy.
Bruce Sterling did a fashion photo series called Milan or Tehran?, which I guess is trying to say something about globalism, but I don't know what (hot chicks in scarfs are universal, perhaps?).
I was interviewed by the NY Times a few weeks ago because of a article I wrote about the defunt scandal known as Plain Layne. The Times angle was mostly about fake celebrity bloggers. The whole topic came up again last week when the Quentin Tarantino blog surfaced, and then quickly sank. The next day, a secret weblog from Julian Casablancas' girlfriend rose, and then also died (screengrabs). It makes you wonder how much of a nano-celebrity you could be and have a fake blog made in your honor. ("No, I'm really Craig Kilborn's cousin!")
FILM
Somewhere in my mind is a top ten list of events that I'm sad not to have talked about here over the past six months, and Vincent Gallo is definitely not on it. The controversy seems to be wrapping up today with Roger Ebert telling "the whole truth" about Vince.
New movie trailer alert!:
Silver City. John Sayles political parody starring Chris Cooper.
Finding Neverland. Looks like Tim Burton meets Merchant & Ivory (ergo, bad) with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
Closer. Another entry in the hot genre of the moment -- let's call it the "romantic deceit thriller" (see also: We Don't Live Here Anymore). Starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen, but really starring cool Suzanne Vega and Damien Rice songs.
Somewhat funny parody of the director's commentary concept: Britney Spears on SNL. (Speaking of which, the new video of Britney covering "My Prerogative" reportedly cost $7.2 million "to market and promote" a "happening, rather than just a video." Apparently, she's taking cue from Axl and getting faux-married to her quasi-celeb mate in the video.)
Does anyone else suspect the only reason the MTV Video Awards were in Miami tonight was because the Republicans took over NYC? Best moment? I guess when Nick "Newlywed" Lachey and Paris "Simple World" Hilton appeared on the stage at the same time, and suddenly you had a vision of reality tv worlds colliding like a nuclear reaction. Yeah, boring awards this year. Blame the FCC.
Has anyone else been watching Maureen Dowd blah-blahing her new book on the talk show circuit? I'm not sure what it is, but something about her reminds me of Sofia Coppola -- demure but cunning, cute in a you-can't-be-seriously-be-that-coy kinda way.
When Halo 2 finally comes out, will anyone think that ILoveBees.com was a viral success? Well, since Subservient Chicken did so well, who knows.
Speaking of... the same ad firm that did those BK ads tried to recently get Paris Hilton to become a BK spokesperson in a David LaChappelle spot (featuring her own music!). It didn't work out, but Paris Hilton is trying to trademark her own logo (a tiara).
Everyone's fave sexy local blogger, PussyRanch has hung up her blogging tassles and closed the ranch. She's a little oblique about what she'll actually be doing now, but her recent work at City Pages has been quite good (check out the piece on the new Gotti ("one tough biscotti") reality tv show).
Last week, The Times did a story about online fantasy leagues, which gave major mentions to Best Buy and Fanball (two local companies). This week, the Strib basically does the same story.
There goes the neighborhood. Strib gives a major feature to Psycho Suzi's.
Cool or uncool? Hot or not? Sen. Norm Coleman's wife, Laurie, has given the Post approval to post sexy lingerie pics of her.
I officially apologize to the 2,325 of you who I tried to convince to go to SXSW this year. I can't go. Just not enough time (like you can't tell by the lack of updates here). Don't hate me, cuz I still luv you.
WORDS
ILM thread: Summarise a Novel in 25 Words. Anyone else notice that ILM is sorta like MetaFilter circa 2000? Yes, I mean it's good.
We always knew Orson Scott Card was a conservative, but we never really cared. I mean, some of my best friends are... anyway, now he's writing nasty editorials on this blog. Mel Gibson, on the other hand... well, he's just a fascist.
It's well known that journalists are pilfering bloggers 24-7, but particular funny case is the blogger Brian Storms writing a parody about an Amazon.com that the Chicago Tribunepicked up by accident (correction).
About a dozen people emailed me to say that Tina Fey made the cover of Bust this month. Am I that transparent? How about if I told you I voted for Nader last time around? Ouch, that hurt, stop throwing things.
ONLINE
I have deep misgivings about linking to this. I really hope none of you think your blog should be a book. Yes, even you.
A blog about a magazine? Why yes, here's one about Entertainment Weekly.
Wildly popular in South Korea, OhMyNews.com now has an English edition.
RELATIONSHIPS
ImaginaryGirlfriends.com. "You can soon receive personalized love letters by mail, e-mail, photos, special gifts, even phone messages or online chat from your new Imaginary Girlfriend. We won't tell anyone that it's not real!" Gawd, this is gonna simplify things for me.
Perhaps the greatest movie of all time, Blow-Upcame out on DVD this week. (If you've been to my house, you've drank Wet Rexxxies under the ostentatiously red poster.) So did The Tibetan Book of the Dead narrated by Leonard Cohen (!?), but I really have no idea how good that is.
You think that fat dead Atkins guy lost 21 grams when he died? Ba-dum-dum. On with the show:
WORDS
The American Library Association site is selling posters of celebs holding books. Way too many to name, but just a few: Weird Al (Stephen Hawking), Julia Stiles (David Sedaris) Bill Gates (Hemingway), and Britney (Harry Potter). Oh hell, Christina Ricci, put downThe Fountainhead before you hurt someone!
ONLINE
Jenny's Phone Number [867-5309] up for sale on eBay. Current price: $200,100. Yipe.
Designer extraordinaire, Joshua Davis, was asked by Wired to redesign Google. Here are some snapshots of what he came up with for an upcoming issue. Meanwhile, he might be on Queer Eye.
U.S. State Department ditches Courier in favor of Times. Which means they'll adopt Verdana in 20 years.
TV
I kept hearing the Super Bowl streaker had a website written on his body, but could never find which one. Finally, a photo. Stupid gambling site which brags about it here.
Steven Johnson's post about Howard Dean's demise is one of those little succinct moments in the blogosphere where the right opinion is heard and the words echo in a way as important as a NYT op-ed. Or maybe that's the problem? Shirky has one too.
WORDS
Chuck interviewed at Gothamist. Best line of many: "I think the bars should stay open later, and I think there should be more people blogging about the media. Oh, and people should be generally crazier." (See previously, killing small people with Chuck.)
ONLINE
Brooke says Broken Saints is being turned into a DVD.
MUSIC
Li'l G n' R: First Ever Guns 'n Roses Kids Tribute Band. I hear Michael Jackson wants to play with Slash again. Rim-shot!
Gothamist reports on the casting to the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, which includes Martin Freeman from The Office, Zooey Deschenal, and Mos Def. In other news, NBC is gonna try to adaptThe Office. Ahem, no comment.
Amy's Robot has audio of Thomas Pynchon's "appearance" on The Simpson's last night.
POLITICS
Totally old news, but gotta catch up from last week: Wonkette is to DC politics as Gawker is to NYC media. Ana Marie Cox is the editor, so it should be a good.
Google enters social software scene with Orkut and MyYahoo adds an RSS aggregator.
The guy who pretty much invented Winamp, Shoutcast, and Gnutella oddly chooses Rolling Stone to finally accept an interview. (Update: It looks like he just quit AOL.)
I rather like that trailer for the Stepford Wives remake and the Battle of Algiers re-release showed up the same day. (If it plays in your market, run-don't-walk to Battle of Algiers. It's one of my top 10 favorites of all time.)
Vote for the Top 10 films of 2003 on Film Comment and enter a contest for $200 in Criterion DVDs.
Huh, that's what she looks like. The Today Showinterviews Emily Nussbaum after her NYTstory on kid bloggers.
TV/POLITICS
Bush In 30 Seconds winner announced. Drudge has quotes from the awards show (which -- gush, gush -- included Julia Stiles). The plan is to air the spot during the Super Bowl.
Chuck spots that Poststory accusing Howard Dean staffers of being lame, and provides video proving the contrary.
FOOD
Crazy shit: Jay "Bright Lights, Big City" McInerney is apparently a contender for the open NYT food critic position that William Grimes left behind. Good shit: The Kicker imagines what his first column would be like.
TECH
Those new Smart Watches are available on Amazon. See also: MSN Direct. I'd buy one if two things changed: 1) I could use AIM instead of MSN Messnger and 2) I could get email instead of my calendar.
WORDS/IDEAS
If you've ever felt out of the loop on academic talk (especially since Lingua Franca bit the dust [and the freelance staffers got sued]), you'll want to follow this thread. Taking off from the Times story (and New Left Review article) of Franco Moretti's modest proposal to make literary scholarship more mathematical, Ftrain pens Tufte vs. Bloom. More to come, I'm sure...
MUSIC
Go buy whatever is left of Grand Royal. Current Bid: $0.
Great, as if Kurt & Courtney weren't enough, the theories are already flying that Elliott Smith's girlfriend killed him. Details on why.
Had a strange sensation today paging through The New Yorker. I came across the Howard Dean article and briefly thought to myself, "This is pretty long; I should print it for later." Of course, I was holding the magazine in my nimble fingers. Then, quickly realizing my folly, I thought, "Maybe I can rip the pages out for later." Mind-boggling, isn't it?... how spoiled we've become.
ONLINE
Emily Nussbaum chases around some high school Live Journalers for the Times Mag: My So-Called Blog.
For the price of about $1 per CD, RipDigital will turn your entire CD library into MP3 files.
We deserve our own wretched fate. Silly Saddam as Outkast animation.
WORDS
What is the single worst piece of punctuation? Some might say the exclamation point, but according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the colon is the enemy.
Gotta love those Hilton sisters. Oops, I mean Olsen twins. Dangit, I really meant Bush twins. Speaking of which, I hear the Olsen twins are going to NYU this year. Wouldn't love to take this class with them?
New to the dating service scene, SocialGrid utilizes Google, grid computing, P2P, and file-sharing to help you hook up. Haven't tried it yet...
New blog: Lingerie101, the guide for men. "Each week lingerie101 posts an article on one certain kind of lingerie, so you know the difference between a teddy and a cami."
Discovered by Slashdot, Photoshop has a special feature that detects if an image is American currency.
Surrounded by the cute girls in my posse, I turned into a skanky aloof hipster (note the shifty eyes and cell phone/pda in my pocket). Hey Pete, what night was that, anyway?
WORDS
During that Timesinterview the other day, I said a ridiculous number of brilliant things about list-making as an attempt to make sense of a fragmented world. And then Louis Menand stole all my ideas and wrote them in The New Yorker. Yep.
The Speech Accent Archive consists of audio files of 295 people reading the exact same 69 words. So? Well, they all speak with different accents. So? Shut up, it's cool.
Looks like Umberto Eco has a new book. The Guardian says it's "inaccessible for its semiotic jargon and graphs," which is a good sign he's back in form.
POLITICS
The 15 finalists in MoveOn.org's Bush In 30 Seconds contest have been announced. Some funny ones, some reactionary ones. Judges for the finals include: Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho and Gus Van Sant.
Ziff-Davis is going to launch a new tech magazine: Sync. Doomed to suck.
Somewhat interesting that The Guardianreprinted Osama bin Laden's comments in its "Comments and Analysis" section of the paper. (Also interesting that I didn't actually read all of Osama's words, but I read the entire mediocre MeFi thread.)
MUSIC
Ryan Adams leaves a goofy-attempt-at-being-nasty message (mp3) on Jim DeRogatis' (Chicago Sun-Times music columnist) voicemail.
And the winner for most unique use of my Best Of The Year lists goes to: RocketJump, who took all the music lists, shoved them into a mathematical formula, and came up with a uber-list. Also cool: All-Consuming's 100 Most Frequently Mentioned Books By Blogs. I'm glad this is all over.
TV
Watching SNL the other night, I witnessed the "Atkin's Diet Safe" Subway commercial for the first time. At first, I wasn't sure if it was an SNL parody commercial, but it was real, and the Times says there are more to come.
Emily Nussbaum in the Times and Tom Shales in the Post on the final episodes of Sex and the City. Shales includes this tidbit: "Sometime during the year, HBO began imprinting each preview cassette sent out for review with the critic's initials in one corner of the screen, allegedly as an anti-piracy measure."
This one is a bit crazy. Universal Music (i.e., GE; i.e., NBC) is teaming up with DirecTV (i.e., NewsCorp; i.e., FOX), Vivid Entertainment Group (i.e., porn), and Shady Records (i.e., Eminem's label) to launch a music channel featuring porn videos.
MUSIC
Casey Kasem is leaving American Top 40. Tidbits about CK: he is the voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo; his wife, Jean, was Loretta Tortelli on Cheers; he is vegan; he is of Lebanese decent; he will be replaced by the host of Amerian Idol; and he didn't know that Snuggles tape was leaked until 10 years after it happened.
Courtney Love has a "15 day trial version" (?!) of her new single, Mono," available on her site.
Recommended: this James Poniewozik essay, where Time shockingly gave him 3,000 words of space to talk about decline of mass culture and the ascendency of niche marketing. Full of somewhat obscure cultural reference points that prove his point.
It's more difficult to make a "best of" list for weblogs than for any other cultural catagory. Blogs are inherently meta -- they span the entire range of contemporary human existence and thought. Nonetheless, defiant in the face of cacophany,
here's my annual list of 30+ Best Blogs of 2003:
1)Blog For America -- I admit, I only occassionally checked in on Howard Dean's blog this year, but this thing simply changed politics, the media, and America in general like nothing since Drudge. When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function. Finally, a future to look forward to.
2)Metafilter -- The abridged four-year history of MeFi: first it was great, then good, then dull, then good again, then kinda sucky, surprisingly reactionary, suddenly progressive, good again, but just falling short of great, then bad for a while, but whoa that was a good month. And that one post was so good! And I want to throttle the guy who posted this thing again! If it happened in 2003... well, let's be honest, it did not happen first on Metafilter. But this is where it entered the market of ideas -- inflated or deflated on the rigorous balance sheet of comments calculus and trackback trig. And the franchise expanded this year with ask.metafilter.com, which is just plain awesome.
3)ABC's The Note -- This is the only item on this list that treacherously stretches the definition of blog, but I've gotta believe that this ridiculously popular beltway online journal is determining the stories that get told, the events that get attention, and the shape of democracy. Plus, it's one of the main reasons Trent Lott isn't pestering us anymore.
4)Buzz Machine -- Question: Is it odd that the founder of Entertainment Weekly is now America's biggest proponent of Iranian bloggers? Answer: Nope. Jeff's commentary on everything from Iraq to Howard Stern has been crucial reading this year. And one day someone will write a decent Persian translator that allows me to read all those Iranians.
6)Lessig Blog -- You read Lessig to remind yourself of all the issues you've guiltily not been paying attention to: internet security, digital rights, everything in the Creative Commons, etc. Lessig (who guest-starred on the blogs for Howard Dean and John Kerry this year) is there because you aren't.
7)Smart Mobs -- The most important industry-ish books I read this year were Salam Pax's The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, Steven Johnson's Emergence, William J Mitchell's Me++, Michael Wolff's Autumn of the Moguls, David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and Howard Rheingold Smart Mobs. The website for the latter was constantly attuned to Big Ideas -- where we're headed and how to avoid a collision-course with destruction.
8)Gawker -- It's probably not fair that Nick Denton has three sites on the list this year. Nah, scratch that, it's totally fair. It's too early to tell whether he's milking the meme or inventing a mini-publishing revolution, but he's doing something that all the rest of us are watching with a tinch of envy.
9)The Diary of Samuel Pepys -- The idea is simple: publish an entry from the renowned 17th-century London diarist every day. The outcome is infectious. If they make a website into a movie, it should be this one.
10)Daily Green Cine -- Oh, you like film? How quaint. These guys really like film. This offshoot of Netflix-competitor GreenCine is a master of its genre.
11)Anil Dash & Kottke.org -- They've become our avuncular stylists, haven't they? Similiar forms: Anil has the sideblog on the left with the occasional essay on the right. This year, Kottke experimented (unsuccessfully, I'd argue) with placing the remaindered links inside the blog. They helped invent the blog and they continue to redefine its potential. And they'd smirk at being described like that.
12)Book Slut, Maud Newton, Language Hat -- All those Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith and Elizabeth Wurtzel links? I probably found them at one of these places.
13)Low Culture -- This dual-columned blog -- baby blue (shallow) and soft orange (grave) -- seemed to just appear out of nowhere this year. This was the rookie of the year.
14)Amy's Robot -- Want snarky celebrity news before celebrities even know it happened? Check.
15)Romenesko and I Want Media & PaidContent.org -- I'd rather cut my toes off and feed them to the rabid offspring of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly than imagine a world where this triumverate didn't arrive in my inbox every morning. I Want Media had juicy interviews and links, Paid Content was a feast of daily tech/content news, and Romenesko could be #1 any given year but that would be tiresome.
16)Gothamist & Lockhart Steele & NewYorish.com & The Morning News -- For quality of writing and diversity of links, these four NYC blogs deserve as much attention as Gawker, but they just happened to not get picked in the mini-publishing corporate draft. Which in some ways makes them more important.
17)Lost Remote -- The cool thing about Lost Remote is that it's a well-defined industry blog (succinctly, the future of tv) that always transcends its genre.
18)Babelogue -- I'm surprised this experiment hasn't gotten more attention. The local Voice-owned indie weekly boldly launched a staff weblog this year that mixed unique voices in the community. It's like a local blog central for anyone in the Twin Cites -- let's call it My Own Private Gawker.
19)Large-Hearted Boy & Catherine's Pita & S/FJ & Useful Noise & I Love Music & Neuma & Rocktober -- It's a bit unfair to group these diverse music-themed blogs under one heading, but these were the places where I discovered new bands, found off-beat MP3s, heard smart conversation, and truly missed writing and playing music.
20)Greg.org -- The Sofia interview and the Cremaster coverage alone made Greg de rigueur reading.
21)Blogumentary -- C'mon Chuck, finish the movie already!
22)LucJam & AdRants -- With reportage on everything from Paris to hip-hop brand success, Lucian somehow made marketing an undirty word in 2003. And AdRants made sure that advertising stayed dirty.
23)Magnetbox -- This local peronsal fave always makes my recommendation list because of shared interests: the interplay of technology and music distribution, online economies, social software applications, and generally rad stuff.
24)Waxy.org -- It felt like 1999 again when everyone was passing around links to goofy movies (except everyone had broadband at home this time). The Star Wars Kid movie had all the characteristcs needed to be labelled a phenom -- intrigue, parody, backlash, Times reportage, and free iPods.
25)J.D.'s New Media Musings & E-Media Tidbits -- The media is the message. These two blogs continued to preach the story that online news is changing the way we consume information.
26)Arts Journal -- Culture links galore. Leans a bit toward the high-brow, but since everyone in America is now middle-brow, that shouldn't matter.
27)The Map Room -- I love niche publishing, especially when it's a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I'd probably pay for this.
28)Press Think -- No way in hell I could find the time to read all the words that spilled out of Jay Rosen's blog pad this year, but when you get an NYU j-school prof talking this much, there's usually something to hear.
30)Fleshbot -- Paris was the internet event of the year (followed closely by Friendster and Howard Dean), and you can attribute much of it to Fleshbot. Can't say I was into the Kariwanz Fetish Gallery or the Supreme Hentai, but nothing mainstreamed sex this year like the Paris video, which was chronicled here on the site's first week of existence.
There are days that I think this little cultural petri dish known as blogging has become a cesspool. But then I look over this list and realize it's a radically robust machine that we've created. And it's cool knowing that next year will be full of more surprises that I can't wait to link to.
Stumbled across the old Roland Barthes essay on The New Citroen (1957), which I haven't read in nearly a decade, but am stunned at how crisp it sounds. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." How come no one wrote about the Mini like this?
For a little bit of flashback fun, read this PC Worldstory from two years ago that predicts what last year was supposed to bring. 1-GHz PDAs? Fuel cells for portables? Voice portals? Uh, yeah. At least they got the flat screens right.
For those who have been sleeping the last week, a merger catchup: Comcast bought TechTV | FedEx bought Kinko's | News Corp bought DirecTV | Rex bought a $150 coffee pot that grinds the beans and makes the coffee with a timer.
Kottke says he will read a magazine every week for a year. All the freaks come out to tell him which ones to try.
Anyone know about this Trend Agenda thing coming to town? Okay, let me rephrase that: Anyone know how I can get in without forking out $350? "Trend Agenda is for those who want to help shape the future -- the curious and courageous. Philosophers, leaders, innovators and mavericks." Hell, they should pay me to go.
Just as its size doubled over the weekend, the Year in Review page is about to close shop. More personal faves have arrived: Salon's annual tech review, onslaughts from the Sunday Times and Entertainment Weekly, the big Voice film list, etc.
POLITICS
Those Howard Dean Internet stories just keep coming. Here's Wired's.
Wash Post: Japan's Empire of Cool. A1 story on the the country's culture industry. Na-duh.
FILM
Buried in this story about Tony Kushner is the news that Dave Eggers is working with Spike Jonze to adapt Where The Wild Things Are.
Trailer to new Lars von Trier movie: Dogville. In other von Trier news that completely freaks me out, his brilliant mini-series Kingdom Hospital has been adapted by Stephen King and will air on ABC. (See also: Lars von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson chit-chatting.)
Wooly Boys, "the first major motion picture set and filmed in North Dakota" (which is not true many times over), opens next month. It stars Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson.
That which can heretoforth be referred to simply as THE LIST has grown significantly over the weekend. That's where the action is. And then there are these:
I spend vastly too much money on Taschen books, which predictably end up sitting around on coffee tables. The L.A. Weekly has a good profile of the book publisher.
Amazon Wishlist of ridiculously expensive stuff. Yes, please add that $283,500.00 necklace to my shopping cart. (Customer review: "The sacrifices I have made just to be able to afford this, selling my house, my car, and my children, all made up for it in the end.")
Heard a bit of Matt Groening on Fresh Air the other night. Apparently he edited this year's De Capo Best Music Writing anthology, but I didn't hear Terry Gross ask about it.
Gory pics of the singer Jack White beat up last week.
The Year in Review link collection has blossomed in the last couple days. Some of my favorites: Merriam-Webster.com's "Words of the Year," Space.com's "Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003," USA Today's "Best-Selling Books of 2003", Pitchfork's "Top 50 Singles," AOL's "Most Searched Words," The Guardian's "The Year's Best Music DVDs," and NYT Mag's "Year in Ideas." Those and hundreds more inside.
I always have the company party post-party so that everyone talks about the stupid drunk thing so-and-so did at my house last year. This seemingly infallible strategy implodes when you get more drunk than anyone else at your own party.
Yo, USA Today linked to my Year In Review list today. There's a bunch of new stuff in there... Rolling Stone, The Onion, and the Best Wines of 2003!
TECH
Hypothesize about the fetishizing of technology all you want, but this information superhighway is a two-way street: Steve Jobs interviewed in Rolling Stone; David Byrne interviewed in Wired.
FILM
Totally weird. Girl with a Pearl Earring -- yes, the Vermeer painting -- has been adapted into a movie (Timesreview). Just the other day I linked to the phenomenally cool (and totally unrelated to the movie) Girl With a Pearl Earring website. Question for my art historian friends: Is this the first time a painting has been adapted into a movie?
I haven't been to SonicYouth.com for a while. Check out the wicked complex MP3 page.
ONLINE
Hm, Variety added another blog: The Porning Report, "coverage of the porn industry's move to mainstream." To bookmark or not to bookmark, that is the question.
Rolling Stonesays: "Amazon.com removed the customer advice area from the page for Jackson's Number Ones greatest hits album page and several other Jackson albums after unnamed users made recommendations that included books on identifying child molesters, a baby gift set titled 'Thank Heaven for Little Boys' and the latest Captain Underpants books..."
Can you believe there was a time when one program was viewed in 60% of households? From 1983, an episode of M*A*S*H holds the record as the top network telecast of all time. Here are the top 10, according to Nielsen.
Fortune has the first deep-analysis backlash story on Google. Interspersed among the stories of internecine conflict are these numbers: 1,000 people apply for jobs at Google every day, 30% of Google workers are contractors, 150,000 advertisers have signed up for Adwords, 5% of Google is owned by Yahoo, and an IPO would probably value the company at $20 billion.
Painful to watch, some guy who reads every word of the NY Times is almost 1.5 years behind. See also: Lizzy is doing a funny "Letters to the New Yorker" series at The Kicker.
Clinton releases list of his favorite books. Some oddities: "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker; "Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell; "Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr; and "Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Peter Scholtes noticed that Har Mar Superstar and Karen O were in town the same day, so he had them interview each other. Golden. Karen: "I'm electronically mailing with Beck, and I told him that I was going to be out there recording with you, and he didn't write me back after that." Har Mar: "I saw him three days ago at a festival and he asked me to record with him, so maybe I'm totally cock-blocking you."
CP and The Onion review the Spike Jones DVD retrospectives.
My fave part of this RZA interview is where he claims to love Bob Hope. But this is good too: "Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, man, this nigga knew all my shit."
This site is up to about 3,500 visitors per day. Who are all you people? Please wipe your feet before entering. Linkage:
POP
This month's Wired has a gadget section with this quote from Paris Hilton (who the NYTimessaid "looks like what you'd get if you crossed Uma Thurman, a borzoi and Robert Plant circa 1972") printed long before last week's tape scandal: "I can't live without my cell phone. It's the one with the big round dial, and it has a video camera on it." The mind reels with the potential sequels...
Variety.com has started a blog, Outside The Box, about swag -- promotional items for music, film, tv, etc. releases.
Norman Mailer's 25-year-old son, who has no journalism experience other than writing one piece for Black Book, is the new executive editor of High Times. Profile.
Cool. The Cameos of Alfred Hitchcock. (That is, the cameos in his own films. I've always wondered where he appears in Rope, and now I finally know.)
The author of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophyanalyzes Tarantino. (Via Greencine.)
I'll call Body Song a cross between Koyaanisqatsi and Kronos Quartet. Cool site by Channel 4, cool music by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.
"Why can't I preorder a DVD and receive it the day the film is released in theaters? Or buy it on my way out of the theater if I liked what I saw? One thing I learned from the Mavs is that you can watch the game on TV, but you'll still go to the game, because it's a different experience." -- Mark Cuban (the guy who sold Broadcast.com for billions and bought the Dallas Mavericks and -- more importantly -- Landmark Theatres), Wired, December 2003
Okay, the Paris Hilton update. Pamela Anderson gives it a thumbs up; Howard Stern, a thumbs down. In a twist of fate, Rick Salomon is suing. ESPN gives office viewing tips. Larry Flynt apparently wants to get in the action: he has pics of the Barbi Twins getting nasty with each other. (Up next: Olsen twins! Bush sisters!) And Lizzy says there's another tape floating around involving a threesome (with Simon Rex!).
Sorry, you're gonna hafta find another Christmas gift, cuz I've already found the Paris Hilton video online. That embarrassing moment her cell phone rings could be the most important cinematic scene of 2003. But hey, enough cinema verite, let's see what else is going on:
This is already old news, but I'm trying to be cultivate my old media roots. Wallop is Microsoft's attempt to get into the social software industry from the Social Computing Group. Wired News story.
Har Mar Superstar is everywhere lately. And now he will be in vodka ads. (The article also suggests he's moving from Ibiza to L.A. to record.)
Back in Fargo, I was quasi-fortunate enough to be acquainted with a half-crazy guy named Modern Man. (His real name was Leland, which he had legally changed to "Modern Man." All things considered, not a bad move.) His art and personality (seldom differentiated) was basically a combustible mix of Dali and Warhol, and now he has a website, Museum of Modern's Art. (Modern, you're such a card.) I'm really not recommending the site to you, but the handful of you who know him will be intrigued. (Via Todd.)
I finally read The Rake's profile of the restaurant scene, and I think I actually recommend it. This line got my mind working: "According to the National Restaurant Association, we rank fourth in terms of per capita dining, and in recent years have been as high as number three."
Wurtzel is totally bummed about Prozac Nation (the film).
I was just thinking I wanted to spend my Sunday reading a Spielberg profile in the NYT Mag. Okay, no I wasn't. Good, at least there's an R.E.M. profile. Okay, no solace there either.
So I've been watching the stupid string theory special on Nova. Stupid because it's obviously made for sixth graders. How many different ways can you say that a "theory of everything" will require a coalescence of quantum theory and general relativity? Apparently, according to this show, many dozen tedious ways, and then many dozen more with animated graphics. Anyway, if you were disapointed like me, here's a slightly better interview with Brian Greene.
I predict: soon, the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" will be replaced by "the best thing since caffeinated milk." Hyper Cow! And a launch party.
Vice Fund is a mutual fund specializing in tobacco, gaming, alcohol, and defence.
ONLINE
Fleshbot, the newest blog launch from Nick Denton, goes live this week. Kinja (aka Lafayette Project), "a blog of all blogs," has a 2004 dateline. And there are rumors about a D.C.-based politics blog and a L.A.-based entertainment blog. (See also: New York's Blog Players.)
Finally, some decent analysis on Friendster's numbers.
The apperance of a big color ad for Playboy in last week's City Pages (it's probably making the rounds in other Village Voice Media rags too) is enough to start me type-type-typing some sort of important essay about Hef's ir/relevance. Oh, of course, Slate did.
For no apparent reason, Camille Paglia is interviewed in Salon, where, for no apparent reason, she rips on blogs. My guess is she's picking up on an idea that Drudge gave her.
Huh, Utne still gives out their Independent Press Awards. A million years ago, this was a big deal. Or maybe I'm just old.
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.
People seemed to really like the AOL Man costume. Not as good as my femme fatale entourage, who went as the Kill Bill characters, but sufficiently geeky.
This NYT article about how cell phones have created a new world of "soft time" is pretty much written for me.
Misbehaving.net, a blog about women and technology, is getting a lot of attention.
I don't really have a great reason for linking to this, but The Hindustan Times has a slideshow of Miss Afghanistan. Progress? (See also: Washington Post's multimedia extravaganza, Return to Afghanistan.)
On The Media interviews Matthew Carter (audio), the person behind the new New York Timesfont change announced last week. (It was a good episode. Bob Garfield blasts Bill O'Reilly and Mickey Kaus considers blogging vs. editing.)
It's the end of an era. Plain Layne says goodbye. Like a swimming pool in a cornfield, This is how I'll remember her.
Google has a new feature whereby you enter the word "define" before the search term and it will try to provide a definition of the word. Example: define motherfucker.
Someone should do a study about the disproportionate number of rappers who make the New York Times business section. This week, it's Outkast for pimping pitbulls.
It's been a while since I could say this, but The Voice's music section this week is all about stuff I like. Matos does The Rapture and Basement Jaxx, and there are Decembrist and Shins reviews. Christgau gives Bjork and Rancid both an A-. Plus, there's this odd thing about MP3Pro.
Calling The Strokes neocons might be a tad much, but I enjoy the thesis of this Joe Hagan piece in Newsweek.
For Halloween, I was gonna dress up in a yellow jump suit and call myself "AOL Man!" But now my costume is fucked, because everyone will think I'm Uma from Kill Bill. Today's links:
So have you seen that new MTV's Spankin' New magazine on the newsstands? Surprise, surprise, like its namesake, it has nothing to do with music. (Story.)
As GreenCine says, "If you read only one article, review, blurb or gum wrapper on Kill Bill, make it this interview with Quentin Tarantino." It answers all those "that's a reference to what?" questions. Amazing.
Anthony Lane's New Yorkerreview and The Chronicle's critique of Sylvia (trailer). (The same issue of the New Yorker has an excellent Don DeLillo essay on ephemeral filmic memory and a very long Tarantino profile.)
I have to admit that the first time I read this Wired story about antisleep drugs, I went looking online for Provigil to see if I could order it. (Could not without a perscription.)
I'd rather be at ArtFutura right now. But I'm not, so let's check the jive:
ADVERTISING
Wow, how's this for cross-over marketing? OuchTheWebsite.com is created by Tylenol "to showcase those individuals who face pain in order to create something positive." I stumbled across it via a weird 3D magazine-advert pasted inside of the new Fader (which should tell you they're going for an hipster audience). Is Tylenol the next PBR? Perhaps they could even cross-market?
POLITICS
Did you see that Wesley Clark's campaign manager quit because "supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign advisers."
Looks like Palm Pictures put up a website to showcase it's big new DVD music video series with Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry: Director's Label.
I bet Belle and Sebastian are elated to see the headline of their Times review this week.
Buried in this good story about the historical and future pricing of music is a note that says iTunes will be available for PC this week. See also: New iPod TV Spot with Black Eyed Peas.
I don't know about you, but I'm kinda excited about the 33 1/3 book series.
Well, finally. Pitchfork reviews The Darkness. Surprisingly unsurprising surprise: they like it.
TECH/INTERNET
Times story on Urban Challenge makes it sound more like a cross between a Flash Mob and Death Race 2000 than "one part Amazing Races, one part Where's Waldo." The stories about collective intelligence via mobile technology are acceptably interesting. And there's also a morsel hidden in there: a quote from the drummer of Slaughter (who is also, fittingly enough, part of the Blue Man Group).
I've been known to talk about the merging of "online" and "real world" landscapes (you have to fill me with a fair amount of Guinness first), and I wish I had gone so far as William J. Mitchell and write a book (review) about it. His claim: the "trial separation" of bits and atoms -- the elementary units of information and matter -- is over. It sounds a little bit like Smart Mobs (which I just finished and recommend) with more emphasis reifying landscape.
iCube.us seems to be an American company that delivers the latest Japanese gadgets, such as this baby Vaio.
FILM
Random idea for someone else who isn't me to do: a community blog that maps all the meta-filmic references in Kill Bill. There way too much for one person to know.
I finally dived into the stack of magazines sitting by the computer this weekend, and at the top of the list was the new Rain Taxi. I can't overstate how much I recommend the Jonathan Franzen interview. It's not online, so go get it.
Did you see the Guthrie will be involved in bringing Shakespeare to soldiers? Barding the Bases.
I've been playing with BookLog's Gender Genie. It uses an algorithm from Moshe Koppel and Shlomo Argamon to predict the gender of a piece of writing. The last few blog entries have been very male. Try it out with your favorite literary passages and song lyrics.
Which is funnier? The trailer to the Stephen Glass biopic or the trailer to Tupac Shakur biopic? Answer: neither, cuz their titles are funnier: Shattered Glass and Resurrection, respectively.
Now on Friendster: Robert Smith. This is getting boring, isn't it?
TV
I think BMW stole the idea for this ad (video link) from The X-Files. See Advertising Age's TV Spots of the Week for more.
INTERNET
Google has added a cookie to high-usage searchers that shows how many searches you've performed in a day. It's apparently only 1% of users, but I see it!
Friendster really took off when Wired News did a story about the site. One has to wonder about the fate of Tribe.net after this rave.
LOCAL
Fox's reality show Full Life Make Over is in town: Casting Call. I really could use some plastic surgery.
I'm so pleased with myself. I made a t-shirt today that reads "REM KOOLHAAS IS MY DELIRIOUS BITCH." Maybe I'll make a bunch to sell online -- perhaps a whole line of them, like "MATTHEW BARNEY MASTERED MY CREAM" and "SPIKE JONZE CAN SUCK MY VIDEO." Ideas welcome.
TV
K Street is better than you've heard. The Times has an article on how it's affecting political and social dymanics in D.C. And Newsweek has an interview with James Carville.
This is oddly cool. MTV International played the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse to create 16 30-second tv spots that are surprisingly unique. Exquisitemtv.com collects them all, with maps that show how each progressed around the globe.
Here in Minneapolis, we got to see a crazy reinacarnation of Tron with a live soundtrack performed by electronic musicians using Game Boys and other digital devices. The genre of 8-bit music isn't totally new, but it seems to be catching some steam. Even MSNBC.com is writing about it (the audio interactive halfway down the page is pretty cool).
In addition to the previously mentioned Hilton sisters and Olsen twins, I should point out the importance of the Bush sisters. Barbara and Jenna are on Friendster (okay, they're fakester accounts). (Possible update on Friendster/Google: Friendster said no.)
My PDA/phone has two background desktop themes that I regularly shift between depending on my mood: The Olsen Twins and the Hilton Sisters. Same situation with my IM buddy icon. I like to think of them as the devil and the angel sitting on my opposing shoulders. Or maybe they're just the ying and the yang. Anyway, The Gaurdian profiles the angels and isn't afraid to love them. For the sake of equal time, I demand they also love the Hiltons.
LIFESTYLE
Technology meets Sex meets Politics. Thank you Howard Dean for making it all happen.
Everyone seems to be backlashing the new breed of "cool magazines" we've recently seen. I dunno, I'd rather be reading Mass Appeal, The Fader, Tokion, Anthem, WYWS, and sometimes even Vice than whatever else that fucking newsstand throws at me. (Which isn't to say that The Antic Muse's critique shouldn't be shoved down all their throats so they understand their relevance.)
A long time ago, I had an idea to start a lit publication similar to Words Without Borders.
MUSIC
I have written recently about DJs taking over the restaurant scene in town, and it's good to see that New York is, er, finally catching up to this trend.
NeoMedia got a little attention today for an application that ties together ISBN codes and Amazon. There are a number of similar devices out there, including the infamous CueCat and the iPilot. And IBM is working on a smart shopping cart that alerts you to deals.
Has anyone ever heard statistics on people who sleep less living longer? Or not living longer? I'd really like to know what I'm doing to myself in the long run. Okay, let's kick it:
FILM
EW's Kill Bill cover story this week contains a parenthetical quote from Tarantino about Memento: "Good movie! But there's a hole, okay? And it's this! How, okay, does he remember... his own fuckin' condition?" This is why Tarantino still matters.
A 2000-copy limited edition of the soundtrack to Lost in Translation packaged with a 48-page book of photos taken by Sofia is supposed to come out soon.
FASHION
Alright girls, no more wearing my jeans. (That sounds frivolous, but it has been a problem in the past. Lori, I want my pants back.)
HISTORY
100 Documents That Shaped America. I guess that's vaguely interesting, but frankly I'm more intrigued by the big "sponsored by HP" logo and "HP + Starbucks" ads.
WORDS
[Insert joke here.] Danielle Steel to open art gallery for lesser-knowns.
Moby: "i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive."
The estate of photographer/videographer Guy Bourdin is suing Madonna for ripping off his visual ideas. There's a side-by-side comparison. Here's a fan site talking about the homage.
The Voicereviews Chuck. I kinda like this line: "As someone who's shared a few drinks with Chuck at informal rock-critic gatherings (real hoo-has, those), I can tell you this is exactly how he holds court and conversation. He's great fun, but obdurate and occasionally too noisy." Dude, the secret is to scream louder than him.
Interfacing media, democracy, and social software into one important cluster, two big recent publication in my industry that everyone should care about: New Directions for News' We Media | Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy. I spent my weekend devouring these.
Steven Johnson took the small idea of the web generating strategies to campaigning and called them mob spots. In praxis, he crated an ad for Clark's campaign.
I'm finally back, now with a brain chock full of simmering ideas. I met Ray Suarez, drank with Lost Remote, heard the people behind DeanForAmerica, and blabbed alot about the democracy in the age of participatory journalism. Not a bad week.
Looks like things are really heating up in the social software arena. Let's start there:
TECH
Guess who's on the cover of Spin this month. Well, sure Dave Fucking Matthews, but guess who else. Yep, everyone's favorte post-networking device, Friendster. Pst, there are rumors that Google wants to buy Friendster.
Andy has launched Upcoming.org, which I very lightly helped beta test. This wonderful little application allows you to create personal and city calendars of events (here's the Twin Cities and here's me, user #11 of what will be two million in six months). It's everything I like about social software: collaborative, bigger than the sum of it's parts, and real-world-reinforcing. Think of it as Meetup meets Friendster meets Craiglist. Plus if you ever want to know where I am at night, now you know where to go.
Macromedia has launched Central, another product I not-very-rigorously beta tested.
L.A. Timesstory on the web-savvy Howard Dean campaign. Hearing the people behind the online campaign speak was the best part of my trip to D.C.
Microsoft and Google are both playing with location-based searching. With Google's Search By Location, you enter a search term and a location, and it gives you a map with results. (Luckily I'm not found when you search my zip code for "fucker".) And with Microsoft's World Wide Media Exchange, photos are indexed by location.
In D.C. right now, typing and posting this on my pda phone. I'm in front of Michael Jordan's new restaurant, which I'm afraid to say gave me more of a thrill than the Jefferson Memorial I just passed.
I was talking to mom the other day about her new lap top. She said she has been downloading music onto it. Of course, that intrigued me, so I asked what software she was using. "Kazaa," she said, totally non-chalantly, followed by a complaint that she can't find everything she wants. I told her about iTunes, but said you have to pay a buck per song. "A dollar?! That's a little expensive, isn't it?" That's moms for ya. The NY Times Mag has an essay on file-sharing.
Michael Stipe must be watching The Daily Show. R.E.M.'s newest is a spoof on tv news: MorningTeam.com.
WORDS
Good one. Word Pirates. "Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours."
Because I am a misanthropic elitist, I usually skip all the stuff everyone is passing around on the internal email lists, so I didn't read Lost Remote's Things Viewers Never, Ever Say (and Part II) until just now. It is pretty funny. And accurate.
LOCAL
Let the backlash commense. Grain Belt Premium made Rolling Stone's "Hot List" (not online, stupid fools) for "Hot Retro Beer." No backlash for this local pick though: Aesthetic Apparatus also made the list.
Due to a change in upper management that puts old media back into its rightful birthplace, this weblog will officially be dropping "AOL" from its name.
FILM
Still no trailer to link to, but Demonlover is making my friends giddy with anticipation.
It's been ages since The Times actually turned me onto something new. (That's the curse of being the Paper of Record: you're comprehensive and historical, but never really fresh and unique.) But today, it turned me onto ThisIsBroken.com. Good stuff.
I've heard people shortening the name of our fair city's new favorite club to "The Rock." This will not do. It should, of course, be "The Triple." As in, "After the Triple, everyone went back to Rex's house again. That guy never sleeps." Do everything you can to make me right.
Crazy blog idea that I just made up for anyone who wants to try it: drunkallthetime.com. Only blog while drunk. I'm totally not projecting right now. Let's check the links:
MUSIC
The Darkness is going to be huge in about 2.5 seconds. Watch them here first: RAM | WMV.
I was perusing the books lying on the floor at a prominent rock critic's house tonight and chuckled at seeing Lester Bangs sitting there. Anyway, The Onion this week: History of Rock Written by the Losers. (Oh shush, my dear, you know I'm not insinuating.)
FILM
Filmmaker Mag: Sophia Coppola's Top Ten Movies. It's buried, so here they are: All That Jazz, Badlands, Darling, GoodFellas, The Heartbreak Kid, Lolita, The Piano, Rumblefish, Safe, Tootsie. And dude, you've totally gotta see this Chemical Brothers video she starred in. BTW, the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation is utterly befuddling in its beauty. (Thanks Amy's Robot.)
GreenCine announced a downloadable movies service.
Howard Rheingold on how cell phones have accelerated urban culture. (Funny how I can hear some of my friends asking "and this is a good thing?" while I read this.)
FASHION
Fashion? Yeah, I know. But at least a few of you will click when I say the words Anna Wintour interview in WSJ. (And even if it's only three of you, I'm pretty sure you're a female who will accost me at the next Candace Bushnell reading, so it's worth it.)
I'm so classy: Celebrity Tongues. I don't care what you say, I still vote for Winona.
LOCAL
Those little things that makes my city livable: Sound Unseen and Central Standard start this weekend. Unfortunately, I'm in DC this weekend.
It was a landslide. The City PagesBest New Band (aka "Picked To Click") is out. If you look down far enough, you'll see my votes here. I wrote two blurbs summarizing the scene too. Here they are:
Dancing To DJs As Mies van der Rohe
I'm not sure if this is a "DJ as furniture" syndrome, but my favorite spots to meet friends this year all had quasi-celeb DJs spinning: Wednesday night at the Imperial Room, Sunday night at Fuji-ya (half-price sushi!), Solera all week, and Kitty Cat Klub on some whack schedule. If I called these places "My Own Personal Cheers," you'd smirk like you would at trucker hats and flash mobs, but these were the post-show locales where the music community debated Riemenschneider's importance and Westerberg's quirkiness and First Ave.'s longevity and whatevva else made the music scene buzz, buzz, buzz. More of that, please, with the spicy salmon roll, double wasabi.
Triple Rock Social Club
Despite flaunting itself as an ergonomic dirty bomb -- the slanted & enchanted bar that causes pints of perfectly drinkable Summit to slip onto the unremissive pavement; the shockingly Chipotle-esque interior that makes you hunger extra guac; the always-packed, culture-clash micro-hallway between bar and club; a parking dilemma more infuriating than witnessing Block E developers slap a Hard Rock Cafe across the street from a downtown music club landmark -- Triple Rock has nonetheless been the Twin Cities glee factory of the past year. I heard the phrase "Did you see the show...?" ten-times more this year because of this off-Dinkytown venue, and that forgives any anti-Feng Shui you can throw at this music scene.
This is not the place you go to find out about Johnny Cash or John Ritter (or Leni Riefenstahl or Waren Zevon) dying. However, it is the play you go to find MP3s of Johnny Cash singing the theme to Three's Company. The stars have aligned.
I'll give you five dollars if you can tell me the origin of two words: mullet and comfort food. Both seem like they've been there forever, but I'm convinced they're both coined in the past decade.
Just one more day of this. Salam Pax has a site to promote his new book. You can download chapter one. And there's a crazy promo that looks like a bad MTV commercial.
I swear, every party I've attended over the last two weeks (which, mom I swear to you, is no more than a dozen) has seen conversations veer toward the Sophia Coppola questions. "Seen that crazy White Stripes / Kate Moss video?" "Wasn't that Times Magprofile trashy?" "Will Bill Murray be any good in her new movie?" And now she's in Time, so soon housewives in the burbs will be having the same conversations at the same types of parties. Well, minus the dancing midgets.
Will Ferrell and Chloe Sevigny to star in the next Woody Allen flick.
TV/LANGUAGE
Watching Queer Eye For the Straight Guy tonight, it occurred to me that one of these guys will eventually break out into a sitcom or a reality tv show or something. Suddenly, I began use the word "Timberlake" as a verb. "Which queer guy will be the first to Timberlake his way out of the group and into a game show host slot?" Pass it on.
Courtney Love is on Friendster. Unlike most celeb Friendster accounts, this one is very likely real. In other news, Friendster recently received a cool million in venture capital money. Investors include heavies from Yahoo, PayPal, Amazon, and Net
Sergey of Google and Rael of Google Hackswere on NPR's Science Friday. (Happy Birthday, Google.)
Amy's Robot says that DeLillo's White Noise has been made into a screenplay. I'm foaming and frothing.
FILM
Elevator Moods features short movies shot from the point of view of an elevator security camera. I am oddly enthralled.
The Pentagon is screening one of my favorite movies. It seems they have a different agenda.
This Is Not a Love Song, supposedly the first feature-length film released online, debuted (or at least tried to debut) this weekend.
MEDIA
The cover of this month's Wired is "Superproducers" (not online yet), a profile of Timbaland, The Neptunes, Dan the Automator -- in other words, those I envy. Although I enjoyed the blurbs (it was hardly and "cover story"), I've gotta ask if this isn't a bit of demographic searching on the part of Wired. I guess if they're going to move further into lifestyle/culture reporting, this is an okay place to start. Maybe.
The first linkable thing from Rolling Stone in months: Behind the Lines. Beck, Michael Stipe, Steve Malkmus, Liz Phair and others reveal the origins of famous lyrics. It's okay.
The ultimate internet ouroboros: I just saw a pop-up ad for a pop-up blocker. Lots o' links today:
LIFESTYLE
Need some perspective? The Global Rich List will tell you where your salary ranks you in the world. Even if you're making $15,000/year, you're still in the top 10 percent.
Apparently, Urban Outfitters was founded in Philly. Here's a story about the founders.
MEDIA
Not just another poor excuse to link to the Britney-Madonna kiss, check out the caption: "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution apologized Monday to readers for running a photo of the kiss on its front page the day after the awards."
There's a rumor that the MSNBC Jesse Ventura show has been completely scrapped.
PTT (Push-To-Talk) sounds like a big step conference calling, but this guy compares it to IM.
MUSIC
All Tomorrow's Parties in L.A. (curated by Matt Groening) has been rescheduled. Line-up includes some faves: Har Mar Superstar, Mission of Burma, The Shins, Danielson Famile, Elliot Smith, Cat Bower, Built to Spill.
Emmanuelle has some dish about Beck being in an upcoming movie. In other Beck news, the man-boy is going back to the studio to record with the a dream-come-true production triumvirate of the Dust Brothers, Dan the Automator, and Timbaland.
I haven't even told you about seeing my experience seeing Liz Phair perform for a few hundred Target employees last week. Some other time... but here she is answering questions submitted by fans.
The perfect site for the perfect city: MplsHappyHour.com. Includes hundreds of bar listings, divided into categories (Downtown, Uptown, Nordeast, etc.) and even subcategory (Cedar, Dinkytown, Stadium Village, etc.). It's still a work in progress, but this could the ultimate site to bring up on your web-accessible pda or cell phone when your scurrying around a neighborhood looking for cheap drinks. It will even include maps.
Trailer round-up: Human Stain (Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise) | My Life Without Me (Sarah Polley, Amanda Plummer, Deborah Harry) | Duplex (Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore) | Somethings's Gotta Give (Dianne Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Keanu Reeves).
One year ago today, I wrote about the connection between Al-Qaeda and Isaac Asimov.
MUSIC
Greil Marcus quoting (#9) Sarah Vowell on the NYC blackout: "I went for a walk in the dark last night for a little, marveling at the stars. Walked past people on a stoop blaring 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on a boombox and everyone was giddy, singing along: 'With the lights off, it's less dangerous, here we are now, entertain us.'"
LOCAL
Missy Miss Maerz talks about the night all of us screamed ateachother at the Kitty Cat Klub about Liz Phair (and, uh, just about everything else in the world, including whether Smog is morning music or evening music, the value of Robert Christgau, and, I think, whether jumping off my roof is wise). Absolutely fascinating detail you're just dying to hear: I broke my thumb that night. And I didn't even punch Chuck this time.
Dara finally reviews Solera, which in my top three right now.
New York Observer: "What I Skipped This Summer." I frequently have moments where I have to say, "Even though I will be dumber for not paying attention to this, I don't have the time to follow this cultural meme." My misses include: the O.J. Simpson trial (Kato who?), blockbuster network reality tv (Survivor), media-inflated murders (Laci Peterson), and reinvented teenyboppers (Justin and Christina). On second though, I might actually be much smarter because of this.
The Believer has launched Snarkwatch, "a place to record enthusiasms, mystifications, as well as disgruntled reactions to 'critical activity'." Sounds like my nemesis. The Antic Muse riffs on it.
Of course, nothing released in the last five years, which really goes to show both what I miss about music and where I worry Magnet is headed. (See also: PopMatter's 100 Best Songs from 1977 to 2003).
The Strib has this new thing called Pick Six in which two local scenesters each pick three cool things in the local music scene. My pal Catherine was in this week's.
Jim Walsh's first column (well, first in a decade) at City Pages. It really is a quintessential "Minneapolis Music Criticism" piece -- full of personal experience and pathos. This line is supernaturally Twin Cities-ish: "I still believe in writing that talks about the conflicts and conquests of the heart." Looking forward to this one....
The Rakeon Flash Mobs. Good line: "This particular secret society was so easy to get into, though, that we're wondering now how many journalists are dying to get off the Minneapolis Mob's listserv. This was punishment enough for infiltrating the group: Our inbox was flooded with the social theories of every johnny-come-lately mobster who wanted to argue that Minneapolis is just as cool as San Francisco or New York."
Those crazies at Nerve.com are having an amateur photo contest: sexiest photo of someone reading The Wall Street Journal. I so want to enter.
It can't be a good sign that Paul Krassner's new column in the New York Press is better than Stephen King's new column in Entertainment Weekly (no link). Actually, no, that is a good sign.
I clicked on a banner ad! Something on the Wired Newsletter said "Technology Is Changing Sex" and clicking on it brough me to TechTV's Wired For Sex program page.
Fimoculous.com: a vast collection of unfair and imbalanced links.
MUSIC/VIDEO
A few weeks ago, I noted here that Matthew Barney was releasing the Cremaster Cycle on DVD. Greg Allen from Greg.org quickly dropped me a note to say that it was not the Cremaster Cycle -- is was excerpt oddities like Barney scaling the Guggenheim. I protested: "But the site says so!" Now, Greg has penned an article in the Sunday Times about Barney and the search for DVD-quality video art, which pretty much clears it up: I'll never own the Cremaster Cycle DVD.
Re: yesterday's Coldplay video link, Waxy pointed out that Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" as a better example of a time-twisting video narrative.
Perhaps our three greatest music video directors -- Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry (who directed the Cibo Matto video above) -- are interviewed. They have DVD retrospectives coming out on Palm Pictures. (Bjork is of course the connecting factor between the three.)
6 MB movie file of The Daily Show on the Al Franken vs. Fox scandal.
Long Times Magarticle on CNN's transition from Connie Chung to Paula Zahn, which oddly ends without a conclusion (kinda like that MSNBC Jesse Ventura show that still hasn't happened).
The online store for Footprints Architecture Collection appears to be working now. They were getting press in Metropolis and a couple other places a few months ago for designing shoes "inspired" by architecture. (Neat as that might sound, I get alergic reactions thinking about spending $250 on shoes.)
SF Weekly has a wonderful analysis of faux-frienster accounts on Friendster.com. In many ways, it's the oldest argument in the book about online communities, but in the age of commercialism and fixed identity, it hasn't gone noticed the last few years. (There's also a Slashdot discussion.) In addition to the issue of identity blurring, there's also this: "Real users often add fakesters to their friend lists like 'charms on a charm bracelet,' as one user put it, to show other people what type of things they're into. So if you're a lefty politico, you might befriend the fakester Noam Chomsky; if you're a hedonistic partyer, you might befriend Nitrous."
Curcuits appraises the state of Internet2 at the university level.
WORDS
I caught up on my reading about the reactionary literary group ULA this weekend. The Believer and Black Book both had profiles (neither online).
MUSIC
Remember when music video were intrepid and unique? Okay me neither, but it seems odd that Coldplay's gimmick to film the video for "The Scientist" in reverse is the best thing we have going for edginess in music video culture right now.
MINI_motion are "urban nomad" product creating be the Mini Cooper people.
LOCAL
I think I've seen the proprietor of Buy-Me-A-Beer.com around town. I'm not sure if the guy is actually getting drinks via the site (which you can buy him in three convenient ways: in person, sending money, or shipment), but if he is, I feel jipped.
Okay Stribreview of culinary Lyn-Lake. Dara's savory Azia review is also mouthwatering. (Tip: Sunday night after 9:00, Fuji Ya has half-priced sushi and drinks. And hipsters galore.)
A couple raves for Chuck's new book: Onion A.V. and Denver Post. Entertainment Weekly is also giving high praise. Chuck was in town Monday and drank me under the table. I'm still suffering.
TV
Convergence gone wrong? The NY Daily Newsslams the new Smoking Gun show on Court TV.
I've been caught saying recently that City Pages should be doing a better job of critiquing the dailies. But I'm eating my words lately, cuz there's another good metamedia article on the PiPress this week.
A long time ago, I wrote a screenplay about a guy who slowly goes mad because of the innocuous mood music he hears everywhere he goes. It was my Doestovskian fable of the industrialization of culture (hey, didn't everyone write one of those?). Title: Face The Mazak. Apparently, muzak theory, which seemed to reach its zenith in the late-80s, is coming back, according to this article about Activaire (Metropolisarticle), who does music for big-scale boutiques (Prada). Recommended reading for the "spatial music" set.
I have never, ever, ever had this much fun reading Amazon.com reviews. Henry Raddick is a must-read, if for no other reason he has discovered actual titles like Taxidermy, a Complete Manual and Handbook of Meat Product Technology and Andrew Lloyd Webber Arranged for the Harp and Plastic Surgery - Penis Enhancement Surgery and... I could go on for a while.
According to this article, Derrida and Habermas have co-written an article that is "an unmistakable endorsement of modernist Enlightenment principles." I'm a little suspicious. Here's an interview I haven't gotten to yet.
LOCAL
My pal Melissa, CP's music editor and now official "coup grrrl," lands another big fish. Getting Greil Marcus as a columnist was a whopper, and now Jim Walsh is bailing on the Pioneer Press to write a column for the alt-weekly (as he did a decade ago). You might have gotten the email he was sending around asking for Oct. 25 to be come the official Paul and Sheila Wellston World Music Day. Peter is tracking all the other movements in the Minneapolis music-media mafia.
Chuck Klosterman and I met our first year of college, and we quickly developed the most dysfunctional friendship I've ever had. At the college newspaper, he was the sports columnist and I was the music columnist. At times, I hated him more than any girlfriend I've ever had. That's saying something.
His new book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, comes out later this month. One essay, which is also printed in the September issue of Spin, uses the tempestuous summer we lived together (1992) as a set up for a larger topic.
Here are the first few paragraphs, reprinted without permission from anyone, but it's my life so sue me. I've added some "footnotes" -- commentaries over the top of his analysis of the summer of '92. Watch out, kids, it's gory:
Even before Eric Nies came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.
I wasn't doing anything of consequence that summer, but -- at least retrospectively -- nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. [Note 0.] I suppose I was going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus "geography library," which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day. [Note 1.] But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, [Note 2.] which maybe have been a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. [Note 3.] He slept during the afternoon and often subsisted on raw hot dogs. [Note 4.] I think his girlfriend probably paid the rent for both of us. [Note 5.]
Now this dude who ate the hot dogs -- he was an excellent roommate. [Note 6.] He didn't care about anything remotely practical. [Note 7.] When two people live together, there's typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship. There's always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there's always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, me and the hot-dog eater both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. [Note 8.] We would choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available. We would vomit out the windows -- and this was a basement apartment.
Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.
We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. [Note 9.] We'd argue about H. Ross Perot's chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we'd argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. [Note 10.] We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. [Note 11.] We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N' Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot-dog-gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular argument extended for all of July). [Note 12.] Mostly we argued about which of us was a better at arguing and particularly about who had won the previous argument. [Note 13.]
Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer's debut of MTV's The Real World... [Note 14.]
0.This was the summer we discovered the movie "Slacker," which I still say is the single biggest cultural event of my life. It changed everything for me to realize one could make a movie about doing nothing that is this crazy and good.
1.My job that summer was mowing lawns on campus. But I got in big trouble for flirting with the University President's teenage daughter, who was always out frolicking on the grass like a Midwest Lolita.
2.The title of my book was, believe it or not, actually much worse: "Bits of Eternity." However, I later wrote Chuck a letter from Alaska joking that I should ride "The Real World" wave and call it "Bits of Reality." (I also like to think, with gritting teeth, that it was a precursor to Reality Bites [1994].) The novel, by the way, was wretched, and it was thankfully destroyed in a fire in 1997. I would describe it as a mix between Danielle Steele and Jack Kerouac. I was reading Hermann Hesse at the time, if that's any indication.
3.I was also reading Freud at the time, but there was no Oedipus complex.
4.Either this hot dot thing is a literary device or I should be more fat. What makes it double-weird is that I'm vegetarian now.
5.Lora was kind and giving and beautiful, but not that giving. Also of note here: she lived with us. That makes three of us in a very small one-bedroom. Chuck slept on the couch and always liked listening to us doing it at night. He doesn't think I know this.
7.Very true! Sub-footnote: This will be painful to admit, but this was the summer I took to wearing a Malcolm X baseball cap. The 12-year-old neighbor kid chastised me because his mom (a psychology prof) said that Malcolm X was a racist. I almost capped that whitey.
8.It is mind-bogglingly surreal to see the boring Busch beer-drenched life you lived a decade ago retold in "Spin" magazine.
9.This is painfully true. I can remember almost every word of every fight of many of the things listed next. And I was right every damn time.
10.I was convinced there should be more Jewish NBA stars. Or any? I still believe there's a conspiracy.
11.This water one was a big deal. Water has no flavor. Period.
12.This truly was a vicious one. But my point was that he had skipped all the "philosophical" chapters. In retrospect, this is a monstrously hilarious accusation.
13.I would invite friends over to listen to us argue, and then force them to judge who the winner was. I remember our friend Lefty saying "well Rex, Chuck sometimes makes better points than you." I almost clocked him.
14.That's all just a set up to what follows: a thoughtful essay about watching "The Real World." It's a good book, go buy it.
Madonna trying to sell the Gap. Two dying brands, I say.
ART
This is a couple weeks old, but I just discovered it. Post art critic Blake Gopnik hosts a tour of "Gyroscope." Interesting because it's unique for a newspaper reporter to do video and for it's odd MTV-ish rapid editnig.... and because it's an interesting topic.
LOCAL
The Timescontinues its strange fascination with North Dakota, which has the highest proportion of people over 85 in the country. I like this graph: "These North Dakotans may be biological artifacts, the recipes for their health beyond bottling or replication by baby-boom office dwellers in big cities and suburbs. Clean air; going slow; patience; a low-cost, low-stress economy for all but active younger farmers; decades of heavy lifting outdoors; keeping an eye out for one another; long stable marriages; an absence of sharp differences in income and wealth all may contribute, people here speculate."
50 Cent is starting his own fashion line. I knew the bullet hole look would come back in.
Somewhat annoying Times piece about how Williamsburg has lost its cool.
LOCAL
I didn't make it to the new club opening this weekend on Block E. I still haven't been to Cosmos either, so maybe next weekend is a Block E weekend, dreadful as that sounds.
The new flash mob is set for Wednesday. If you want an invite, email me.
Times piece on one of my favorite topics: Stadium Architecture. I didn't even know that Peter Eisenman was designing a new Arizona Cardinals stadium (Gizmodo thinks it looks like a cell phone). There's an audio slideshow too. (I have long wanted to do a multimedia piece on the history of the American sports stadium.)
TV
Roseanne Barr is returning to tv with a new reality show, The Real Roseanne Show.
MUSIC
Kinda weird Chicago Tribune piece: Indie Record Stores Surviving. Contains heavy mentions of Amoeba in San Francisco, which has been packed every time I've been there (three times in two years).
FILM
The trailer to the new Bruce Campbell movie, Bubba H-Tep, looks sufficiently funny. The new Crichton historical sci-fi, Timeline, might also be okay.
POLITICS
Crazy, Michael Huffington might run as the GOP candidate for California governer. His ex, Arianna, might run for the Democratic slot.
From MIT Labs: "The Corporate Fallout Detector reads barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a noise similar to a gieger counter of varying intensity based on the social or environmental record of the company that produces the product"
Res has a review of the Michael Yonkers album on Sub Pop.
It's always interesting to see your city portrayed by the media. The newest Word (a British music/arts mag) has a profile Grandaddy that is set here (they opened for Pete Yorn at the State a few months ago). Here's the description of our fair city:
Minneapolis is an unusual place. Downtown is a network of shops and office blocks all joined by covered walkways on the first floor of each building. People with jobs walk from office to bank to shop without ever going out onto the planet's surface; meanwhile the streets are fool of poor people, lunatics and drunks. As if in compensations, Bose speakers mounted on lamp posts pipe Motown in the cold air. Bizarrest of all, there is the status of Mary Tyler Moore, whose 1960s sitcom was set here and whose most famous image -- Moore throwing her hat into the air -- is commemorated in bronze. As drunks sway to "Dancing in the Dark," Mary's statue waves stiffly at the sky, looking like a woman with jaw cancer catching a cowpat.
I saw Candace Bushnell read last week and haven't had time to write it up how annoying she was. But I have never, ever been to an event with so many hot, young, sex-driven single women in my life. Anyway, Gawker says Bushnell now claims she coined the word "metrosexual."
With Google Alert, you sign up to get a daily email of a particular search term from Google. The first time, it sends you 50 results, but every time thereafter it only sends items you haven't already seen.
On a scale of one to ten, I give today's links a 9.5. Get at it:
FILM
I heard this as a rumor first, but I guess it's really true. Tarantino's Kill Bill came into Miramax so long that they're cutting it into two movies. Double the Uma.
The L.A. Timesdisses UC Santa Barbara's film school for being contemporary.
U.S. Newsinterviews Harry Knowles. Boring. (Why do I link to articles that I call "boring"? Cuz boring is the new black!)
Kiarostami is doing theater. Sounds radical and experimental.
INTERNET
Brooke has launched the final episode to Broken Saints. Great work, man, you're a superhero.
How many people emailed you Google's relations to the WMD 404 Page this week? I'm around a dozen. I linked to it three months ago, but none of my friends apparently noticed. Anyway, The Guardian has a story about the story of the page.
I'm not sure why I bother with Slashdot threads anymore. This one about NYtimes vs. Google made me go insane. When did geeks become morons? Was it always like this? (Don't read it. Stupid is not the new black.)
The Sex Pistols want to play Baghdad. A few dozen punchlines come to mind here, but I'm resisting.
Judas Priest reuniting with Rob Halford. (On the right of that page are video links to "Breaking The Law" and "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." Rock out in your cubicle right now.)
Funny A.V. Clubinterview with Sir Mix-A-Lot. Includes crazy details, including the long-forgotten Metal Church song, the doubly-long-forgotten The Presidents Of The United States Of America song, and questions like "You were one of the first popular entertainers to talk about asses in a sexual way, whereas that happens all the time now. Do you feel validated by the current focus on asses?"
Alex Ross writes a lot about Pop Conference 2003 in The New Yorker, but I don't think he says anything. Or is that rock criticism?
I'm happy that The Washington PostprofiledPunk Planet.
Greil on Liz Phair in CP: "it's like watching Barbies fucking."
I'm not sure why I'm linking to it, but here's the entire script to A Hard Day's Night.
WORDS
If for some reason you care, Traci Lords has a book coming out. Here's an interview and a book tour.
Eggers is the Samuel Richardson of today. (Applause if that reference makes any sense to you, and a million kudos if you actually read Clarissa.) He keeps "expanding" his last novel, now with additional downloadable chapters.
All posts today have -- in one way or another -- a local angle, but that doesn't mean you foreigners will be out of place.
Covert weekend gossip item #1: BMW Films (which was masterminded by the mostly-Minneapolis-based Fallon) is considering branching the franchise into other arenas such as comic books.
Covert weekend gossip item #2: Elimidate is filming six episodes here this summer. Settings include Chino, Solera, Ground Zero...
It's a great week for authors in this city. On Tuesday, we have Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) reading and Douglas Coupland (Generation X) reading, and Friday we have Zadie Smith (White Teeth) reading and Candace Bushnell (Sex in the City) reading.
I have this new theory about the thrill of blogging: the strangest aspect is when the blog crosses over into your personal life in concrete, physical ways. Like as I was leaving Chino Latino on Thursday, I waved at Peter Scholtes hustling into the Uptown Theater with a girl on his arm. And in a blurb on his site about Winged Migration, he makes passing reference to "making out through most of the movie." And now I've connected the dots, and know something you don't -- the identity of the girl. Silly internet.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazettelooks at the Minneapolis theater scene, quoting a line that I always hear but could never verify: "More theaters per capita than anywhere outside New York."
My workplace gets mentioned in this Pioneer Press story about St. Paul Venture Capital: "Another Twin Cities firm backed by St. Paul Venture, Internet Broadcasting Systems, is flourishing. The company, now profitable, has 231 employees including 133 at its home office in Eagan."
The Blur show at First Ave last night was excellent. At first I was a little worried about Damon's, er, sobriety, but he pulled through just fine.
I sat down and read an entire issue of Radar this weekend, surprised at how much I enjoyed it -- sort of a cross between Brill's Content and Entertainment Weekly and New York Daily News. I recommend Michael Savage's homoerotic past, the "Die, Hipster, Die" tirade, and Emily Nussbaum's analysis of IM and human interaction.
It seems the "Film" category gets the most "holy shit, I didn't know that was happening" links. Like, there is a new film based on Joyce's Ulysses recently completed? Holy shit, I didn't know that was happening. There's even a trailer.
If this linkblog had a sideblog (does that make any sense? could this be a new form?), it would point to Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which is only for people interested in the theory of online communities, but is highly recommended for those people.
MUSIC
Will you hate me if I link to that "Britney not a virgin" story? Okay, good.
As always, Onion A/V breaks the mold and interviews Evan Dando. Good questions, boring answers.
LOCAL
Blogumentary has a collection of Duluth/Minneapolis links today.
I tracked down an invite to the flash mob, but now that the Strib is talking about it, who knows how this could turn out. But I also saw a discussion about it on alt.law-enforcement, which maybe puts the thrill back in it.
And somewhere in between, Mona Lisa Smile trailer, with three women who dominate about 90% of my personal fantasies: Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal (plus some chump named Julia Roberts as their teacher).
MEDIA
Even if you're not a fan, the Tour de France map/app from NYTimes/AFP is cool.
Finally, some good news. The Guardianis coming to America. Oh, and Michael Savage was fired.
WORDS
Someone asked me the other day about my favorite writers, and I stumbled through saying Ron Rosenbaum was my favorite columnist, but only when he does culture instead of politics. His latest dissects the origin of the word dude. In other linguist notes, Geoff Nunberg discusses slippery slope (audio).
MUSIC
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and others are spurning Apple's iTunes, some because it contributes to "the demise of the album format." I like how people think they can stop change.
The comments that Anil generated with his atomic elements of a blog post are really good. A lot of what's said informs my thinking about this blog, which a) has been experimenting categories and b) implicitly posits the "day" as the atomic element rather than the "post."
This story in the Times about multitaskers makes me feel all icky inside. I don't care how many studies tell me having three monitors, two phones, and one PDA is less productive -- go ahead, believe those LIES while you eat my hyperkinetic mental tread.
LOCAL
Yikes! Wired News has a story about moblogs, with this line: "In Minneapolis, a mob is planning to gather at an as-yet-undisclosed location on July 22 at 6:25 p.m., according to the group's organizer, who asked to remain anonymous." Discussion group.
On the newstand rack this weekend, I noticed that Aesthetic Apparatus (more info) has landed features in HOW and ReadyMade. Rumor is they're starting their own magazine too. Good job, fellas.
Okay Guardianarticle on picture messaging. Contains a link to Celebs At Starbucks, a photoblog outta L.A. Also: Waxy has this idea to do a community celeb-photo/mob-blog, which is fine if you like in Cali or Gawker country. But out here in fly-over territory, I can only make so many jokes about Josh Hartnett, Prince, and Garrison Keiler (now wouldn't that be a party). So I'm still pondering the local scenester site, for which I have lots of ideas but feel unable to keep it updated myself. So if you're a localite interested in the concept, drop me a note, and try to talk me into it.
Cool new girl stuff at Threadless. If I met that girl at Triple Rock...
I bought some Donald J Pliner shoes today. Did I just land on the set of Sex in the City?
TV
The Times Mag has an okay story about the rise and fall of baby names, but I point it out for this line: "Still, the effect is not as direct as it may seem. Buffy, despite a fanatic cult devotion to the vampire slayer, has not breached the Top 1,000 (although Willow has been climbing modestly since 1998)."
No time to blog today. Someone just told me the International Foosball Championships are being held at the downtown Hilton Hyatt. Must practice.
Okay, maybe just a little:
MUSIC
If you missed it, Liz Phair's Letter to the Editor to the Times in response to her getting torched is really... something. I don't think anyone has tracked back Liz's reference yet, but I think she probably Googled Meghan O'Rourke like I did and found this article in Slate. Make sense? I didn't think so.
So yeah, the new Spin.com... it looks almost bloggish, doesn't it? A calendar, comments, light graphics. It's even written in PHP. How... indie?
What rock critics have been waiting for: Christgau's Radiohead review in The Voice.
The hell? Eros is new "erotic ensemble drama" directed by three of my faves -- Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, and Michelangelo Antonioni -- starring Robert Downey Jr. Out next year, apparently.
MEDIA
MediaLife Mag picks some really bad stuff for their list of Best of the Best. We'll let you by with Marketplace just cuz no one else would think of it, but c'mon, fucking Blender?
FoxNews tried to shut down AgitProperties.com for their "Faux News" merchandise. I wonder if my Faux News t-shirt (ordered through Disinfo.com) is a collectors item?
"I used to hate the Internet. I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."
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):
I just had that unnerving six-degrees moment on Friendster where you realize that a bunch of people you know actually know each other. But absolutely shouldn't. This is all wrong. I blame it all on Har-Mar, who has listed 123 friends. Freak.
Gibson writes about Orwell on his 100th birthday in a Times op-ed piece. A quote: "Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society."
I don't get many gifts through this site, so I like to give shout-outs when it happens. When Patricia noticed that I wanted a subscription to Brutus, she said she'd try to send me some from Japan. Today I got a wonderful stack of Japanese magz including Mono, Studio Voice, and a bunch o' Brutus. I'm the happiest white boy in the midwest right now.
ARCHITECTURE
Times article on the new Prada Tokyo, designed by Herzog + Meuron, the same dudes doing the new Walker going up in my neighborhood. (Sidenote: I love how architects use the + sign instead of the & sign. I am going to co-opt this as often as possible.)
MUSIC
Disinfo writes a bit about the Radiohead/1984 connections. In other news, Terry Eagleton has a George Orwell profile in LRB. (Sidenote: Eagleton must be releasing a book of intellectual profiles soon, right?)
Pic of Liz Phair doing her Britney pose, with hilarious caption. (Sidenote: it's interesting how most critics slammed the new Liz Phair album except Entertainment Weekly and Chuck in Spin. I almost think there could be a re-reading of the album as nouveau-pastiche irony by the end of the year. Or not.)
File under beyond post-modern: Two Japanese girls covering t.A.T.u. songs.
I saw an early-draft screening of Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary on Sunday. I was a little disapointed that more locals didn't show up at the screening, but I also think he's got a cult success waiting to happen.
INTERNET
Wired News runs an interview with the guy behind HomestarRunner. Entertainment Weekly also just came out with their IT-List issue (subscription link), and he was named IT Web Cartoonist.
The Ethicist (yes, that guy from the Times Mag) was on All Things Considered talking about the ethics of stumbling across a friend's "private" blog. I wish ethics was always this no-brainer.
I'm feelin' categorical, so I'm sticking with the link categories for a while. Shakin up the faculties. Down with Kant, ya dig.
INTERNET/POLITICS
There goes the neighborhood. Ann Coulter: blogger. CoulterGeist, indeed.
Back-to-back stories about Orin Hatch's website that have nothing to do with each other. Wired News (who else?) calls him a software pirate, and Salon.com (who else?) calls him a pornographer. I guess someone should fry his PC.
WORDS
WhichBooks.net provides a unique way to choose a book. Play with the little sliders on the left.
ARCHITECTURE
Photo essay by Hugh Pearman on Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
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.
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.)
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.
Slate.com has a risqué slideshow documenting how the lap-dance ruined the strip-tease, based upon the book Lapdancer. (I hope Slate isn't becoming Salon.)
Amusing: a collection of MP3s of every song ever played on The Gilmore Girls. Actually, not a bad set.
Both Terry Gross and The Onion A.V. Club have interviewed Colin Quinn this week for his new show, Tough Crowd on Comedy Central. He's good; too bad the show sucks. Get some decent guests, Colin.
FILM:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxybeing made into a movie.
Trailer to yet another edgy, punky English Australian film: Garage Days.
This week, Dara approaches local cuisine from the angle of the businessman versus the chef. If I'm not mistaken, it's a small meta-critique to the Strib recently focussing on the culinary big picture (I'm thinking of that "two-star city" criticism from a few weeks ago).
Reuters: Prostitute Diary Tops Iran Web Hit. Besides being a horrible headline, it's interesting that the tone of the article is to chastise the Iranian government, but it doesn't provide a URL for the blog.
Wired was the comeback kid last year, scoring a number of good issues when it seemed like it was a magazine carcass. Newer issues are slipping a bit, with such things as The Wired 40, from the newest issue. Meanwhile, if you're wondering "hey, what current magazine will everyone look back on nostalgically?", the answer is Res. The new issue is excellent. (See also: Chicago Tribune's crappy list of the 50 Best Magazines. Neither Wired nor Res are even listed, Metropolis comes in at #45; Spin is listed under "Mags gone bad"; and just to prove their twisted middlebrow snobbiness, FHM made the list but not Maxim.)
The Timespans Hillary's book. Also, The New York Observerasked novelists to critique the book.
Oh wow. The story about the 28-year-old Japanese woman wandering around Fargo supposedly looking for the money from Fargo (the movie) never really spread outside of the upper-Midwest. But now London's Guardian picked it up and made a big deal about it. The author was even going to make a movie about her.
NY Timespiece on MusicMavericks.org, produced by MPR. Also, Katherine Lanpher interviewed (audio) a Village Voice critic about the show on MPR's Midmorning today.
Local restaurant advertising controversy hits the daily. "Happy Hour: Cheaper Than A Bangkok Brothel."
I've been doing a lot of thinking about Apple iTunes killing album-oriented music. But BBC News has a story with leaked statistics that show half of the songs sold on iTunes are full albums. So maybe not.
Onion A.V. Clubinterviews Steve Malkmus. He's a little more culturally introspective than usual; he hints that he might be heading downhill musically and even even suggests that you could attribute Pavement's success to good press connections at Matador.
The Webby Awards were announced this weekend. The world yawned.
Did you miss the t.A.T.u. performance on MTV last week? If so, go see it on MTV.com.
I've been lightly thinking about creating a Gawker for the Twin Cities (see rant below). But I don't think I could maintain it solo. Anyway, Gaper's Block is a new Gawker-ish blog for Chicago.
Weird, crazy small world. So Peter Maas goes to Iraq to cover the war for the NY Times Mag. While there, he hears about this Salam Pax guy. When he gets back, he realizes Salam Pax was his interpreter. Crazy. (Nick Denton adds more tidbits.)
Also in Slate, this week Sasha Frere-Jones and Gerald Marzorati are going head to head. They start off talking about Radiohead.
I asked Melissa one of my better music questions a few days ago: What song would you want played at your funeral? (My answer: "Sweet and Tender Hooligan," The Smiths.) Here's her death-defying indie rock response.
I'm home! How was it, you ask? Mostly good. San Diego is a beautiful city I didn't expect to like. I also had lunch with the new president of TiVo which was really weird. I'm still fast-forwarding.
I saw The Shape of Things last night. I was bored through the first half, but it picks up in the end with an surprising conclusion. Here are Ebert's review and Slate.com's review. I'm pretty sure I hated it, but I'd actually recommend it as a date movie because there's a lot to talk about.
I'm at the E&P Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference in San Diego for the rest of the week. It looks like a great itinerary. Time permitting, I'll try blogging some of it.
Last night was a big night. Third-to-last Buffy at 7:00 (war metaphors galore!). Matthew Barney dialogue @ The Walker at 8:00 (brilliant and inarticulate!). And The Rapture @ First Ave at 10:00 (war metaphors, brilliant, and articulate!). Best night of the year.
I was on the road this weekend, driving north toward the Iron Range of Minnesota, when I decided to call my friend Peter on the cell. The phone started angrily beeping at me, and I quickly hung up. Tried again. More maniacal beeping. On the third try, I realized the nature of the beeping: it was a busy signal. A fucking busy signal? Such things still exist? When was the last time I heard one of those? A decade? Naw, couldn't be that long ago, but it sounded as antiquated as "Pac-Man Fever." But this brings up an important question: Should there be a museum for non-music sounds -- the beeps and blurps of post-industriality?
During the long drive, I read the New Yorker's Slavoj Zizek profile, but now I see they didn't put it online. So I guess I have to tell you to go to the newsstands and read it. Driving 90 mph and reading the profile at the same time made me say this sentence to myself: Camille Paglia is the Slavoj Zizek that America doesn't have the balls to produce. Ouch, bad me.
Still on the road, Zizek expunged, I picked up the Sunday edition of the Star Tribune, which had a huge full-page advert for the Star Tribune Electronic Edition. The Star Tribune was a pioneer in the online news world, but I'm a little suspicious of this endeavor. And I quote: "The eEdition of the Star Tribune has the exact same stories, headlines, and advertising as the Metro Edition of the Star Tribune, in the same familiar format that you are used to." You have to pay a bunch of money and download a huge application called the NewsStand Reader to get it. See ya.
Third William Gibson post in as many days. He talks to The Guardian about blogging (a sidebar from this profile).
I like the idea of Friendster.com, but I didn't become addicted like some people. It has become so popular that I could probably auction my sub-5000 user-id number. Okay, maybe not.
I am also one of those people who thinks the keyboard reached its apotheosis in around 1990 with the IBM 101-key keyboard. All it needs is a color remake (gosh, beige was futuristic at one time), and I'd buy one instantly.
Pynchon writes (!) a piece on Orwell (!) for The Guardian (!).
Big news in sorta-local-but-really-national magazine publishing: Utnerevamps (in which Cursor.org's Mike Tronnes is quoted). Big news in sorta-local-but-really-national indie rock: Low's Zak Sally has left the band (natch, because the story is broken by a journalist-blogger writing for his employer's weblog community).
Blockbuster is going head-to-head with Netflix in the online rental game. And if you've been under a rock for the last 24 hours, Apple launched iTunes. (But check out the new ads -- everyone knew this guy and this girl in college.)
Is this new? The new Blur album isn't out until May 6, but if you pre-order it on Amazon.com you get a free audio stream of the album right away. Here are more albums with audio stream access if you buy first. This is seemingly a good idea since it convinced me to order the album that I probably wouldn't have purchased online. (BTW, new cool live Blur video here.)
After William Gibson gave a local reading a couple months ago, I told you he would eventually stop updating his blog. This off-hand comment is now a Wired story months later.
New Ann Coulter book coming out June 24: Treason. Boy oh boy, I can't wait.
Punk Planet continues to push the topical boundries with a literary issue (available online for purchase only). In other lit news, a new David Foster Wallace profile in the L.A. Times.
June Panic started his tour here yesterday with a bunch of my college friends. In other music news, the White Stripes played Conan all damn week. And Playboy has a Sexiest Babe Of Indie Rock poll. Keep on rockin, geezers.
"The fact that dealing marijuana and controlled substances is illegal does not exempt it from taxation. Therefore drug dealers are required by law to purchase drug tax stamps." In Kansas.
It's no New York here, but I had another celebrity siting yesterday: Garrison Keillor outside the Lagoon Theater. He was wearing Birkestocks with outrageous red socks underneath. I think I've completely expired my Minnesota celebrities. (Well, except for Prince, of course.) See ya at the Josh Hartnett Meetup!
My pal Andy likes to read ESPN.com at work. But I don't yell at him for being a slacker, because he's pretty crafty. For instance, he's a little angry that ESPN.com wants him to pay for some of its online content -- what is this, cable? Here, for instance, is a story (headline: "Top 5 Overrated NFL Prospects") that he wanted to see, which he clicked on from the homepage: http://insider.espn.go.com/insider/benefits?redir=Finsider&id=1538808
That doesn't work -- it asks him to register. And pay. But he grabbed the content id from that URL and tagged it on a story that does work, to come up with this URL: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfldraft/columnist?id=1538808 That's the story he wanted to read. That Andy. Now he knows the top 5 overrated NFL prospects.
In other online hackery news, almost exactly a year ago, we had a laugh when Matt @ Metafiler discovered the 12-page Reagan obit newspaper insert that was readily available at the Scripps-Howard site. Today, someone at Fark.com found CNN.com's Reagan obit, plus Cheney, Fidel, Mandela, Bob Hope, and Nelson Mandela -- all dead. Of course it's gone now, but The Smoking Gun got screengrabs.
I think this is new. The Amazon.com homepage has a box for "Web Search" that searches Google, but returns results in the Amazon environment.
According to this Time article, Uday Hussein's email address is (was?) udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com.
Was I the only confused one to recently see the Mars Blackmon / Michael Jordan commercial? Looks like Nike is re-releasing the series (video).
Slate's really on the ball with a piece on those fake Puma ads from three millenia ago. However, the news about the demise of the Partisan Review is new (and concisely written).
Three new Liz Phair songs from her forthcoming self-titled album on her site.
Decks of those Iraqi playing cards are actually pretty cheap on eBay. The mousepad is nice too. And the poster -- wow, this war has simply been one fun game, hasn't it?
Brooke has launched the second-to-last episode (#23) of Broken Saints. He says #24 is out in June.
City Pages has launched Babelogue, which I'll hereby declare the first alt-press blogging community. I like it, but some things confuse me: Is the front page a collection of posts or a blog itself? What kind of relationship does CP have to those "Freelance Webloggers"? Why doesn't Melissa Maerz post more? Since they've surprisingly landed Greil Marcus as a writer again, can they get him to do a blog?
The Times thinks Six Feet Under has jumped the shark. I've only see the first season (on DVD), and I'll say the show is both very brilliant and pompously irritating -- just like American Beauty. The most telling moment was the last episode, where one character has the gall to ask "Why do people have to die?" And, get this -- there's an answer. A serious answer, not a joke answer. When Nate replies "To make life more important," that's when this show jumped the shark.
Did you see the story today about the Department of Defense making a deck of playing cards of "Wanted Iraqi Leaders" which are being distributed around Iraq? I made a slideshow of all 55 cards for work. The Eight of Spades will, of course, be the collector item du jour, but I suspect the Five of Hearts will be the gem for the "true fan" of despotism.
Despite (or because of) how much damn media I've been forced to consume in the past month, I have become a late-comer fan of The Daily Show. Salon's Laura Miller has a new piece on Jon Stewart.
I haven't heard this kind of crazy talk since AOL-TimeWarner. Apple might buy Universal Music, the biggest record label in the world. Ya know, I always knew that Apple wanted to be like Sony.
Two completely random predictions: 1) SNL this weekend has a bit on Saddam and Osama hanging out at a frat on the University of Wisconsin campus and 2) The U.S. invades Iran within three years. (We have troops on their west border and east border -- Iraq and Afghanistan. It's only a matter of time. I say this as someone who didn't think that Bush would be stupid enough to invade Iraq.)
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.)
Gaytona.com, for gay NASCAR fans. (By the way, Google has zero matches for the phrase "Vegan Republican". This seems somehow relevant.)
I saw Kiaromstami's Ten last night. Amazing. In many ways, the female inverse of his Cannes-winng film, Taste of Cherry. Already the best film of the year.
In Minot (yes, North Dakota), Clear Channel owns all six commercial radio stations. "Among the six stations, Clear Channel now has only one full-time news employee, who is often heard reading statewide and national wire service dispatches," reports the New York Times in this story.
Questions for Iraqi pop star Ismail Hussain. Includes great detail about Uday Hussein's debauchery. In other news, Osama bin Laden's niece, Waffa, is having a difficult time kick-starting her pop music career.
Suzanne Vega is hosting "American Mavericks," a 13-part MPR series that "features the iconoclastic, tradition-breaking composers who shaped the development of American music-from Charles Ives, Henry Brant, Harry Partch, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and more." Episode 1, which which sets up the definition for "music maverick," includes music by John Cage, Charles Ives, and Steve Reich. The website includes a huge listening room, a huge collection of Harry Partch's instruments, an interactive Rhythmicon, and a Charles Ives blender. Good stuff so far.
Word on the street is that the Radiohead album you've been downloading was actually planted by the record label, and the "official" album has only been given to a few journalists. Also, the label is flooding file-sharing apps with noise. UPDATE: Radiohead says the tracks were stolen, and doesn't blame the kids.
There seems to be a flood of Minnesota news in the blogosphere today. Kuro5hin is talking about Owatonna's Somali Dilemma. Wired News has a story on a Minnesota kid who's making and selling a low-cost, upgradeable Mac called the iBox. And from a New Republic review of a new Kruschev bio: When Hubert Humphrey was dispatched to Moscow to divine the Soviet leader's intentions--good luck!--Khrushchev inquired about the senator's hometown and, hearing the answer, approached a wall-sized map, circled Minneapolis, and said he would spare that city when the rockets started flying.
New York Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. Includes easy ones like Carson Daly, Martha Stewart, Naomi Campbell, and Ann Coulter and lesser-thought-of's like Jonathan Franzen, Jeff Koons, Tina Brown, and John Negroponte.
It didn't occur to me right away, but I think I've been blogging for work lately. I'm occupying most of my day with keeping this Military Action Map and this Baghdad Map updated. I gather information from wire reports and present it in blurb style in reverse-chronological order -- how bloggy.
Wow, everyone is talking about Where Is Raed? lately. Paul Boutin even sends out the sysadmin brigade on him. Dudes, I talked to him three months ago; he's legit.
I didn't buy the Sony V-1 like I said I would. I got the Toshiba M10 instead. I was in a hurry to get a Centrino, and it was the only one available in town. C|Net gave it a good review in their Centrino roundup though. I also thought about the Tablet PC (good PC Mag roundup) but decided it wasn't practical for my needs.
So far, the Dune miniseries is alright. But maybe the mammoth online campaign got to me. A few times it reminded my of the defunct Firefly. Then it hit me: how great would it have been if Josh Whedon directed it? Bigger than the David Lynch movie coup, I'd say.
Good Salon.com story on just how crazy Kim Jong-Il is. In 1978, he kidnapped his favorite South Korean director and his movie-star wife to do a Godzilla knockoff.
Article about Netflix Queue obsession: You Are What You Queue. I just got a membership a week ago, and my queue is already at 28 films and growing. The queue truly is brilliant -- a more manifest version of the Amazon Wishlist. My only recommendation to Netflix would be to add more editorial voice. The lame pages for '70s Cinema and Indie's Greatest Hits are dry and static. Which brings up another idea to steal from Amazon -- user-created lists.
Did you miss an episode of The Young and the Restless? For two bucks, you can download it from SoapCity.com, a new site from Sony that offers this service for a couple soap operas. I suspect this business will actually take off.
The blog nation's version of breaking news: Google has purchased Blogger. Buzzmachine and Anil and BoingBoing have opinions. Running conjecture on Mefi. In other news AudBlog allows you to update your blog via phone.
Clear Channel Concerts plans to record concerts and sell them on CD to you as you walk out of the arena. Any chance Clear Channel surfs ShouldExist?
You deserve $20. Fill out this music settlement form if you purched a CD from 1995 to 2000. Defendants, who are distributing $67,375,000 because they "conspired to illegally raise the prices of prerecorded music products by implementing minimum advertised price policies," include Capitol, Virgin, Warner Bros, Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, Universal, Bertelsmann, Sony, Tower Records, Musicland and BMG.
Guardian Quiz: Model, Writer, Whatever. "Which supermodel wrote a novel about a supermodel?"
Fascinating story on how Carson Daly's voice is cut up and put into a database of sound which is then recomposed into a radio program ("Carson Daly Most Requested") that is broadcast to 140 radio stations -- 11 of them as a "local" program.
Conservative rag National Reviewtears into Derrida, the film and the man. "He is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States."
Only locals will get this one, but I have to post it anyway: Boycott Chino Latino Online Petition. People are still apparently angry about the "Happy Hour: Cheaper than a Bangkok Brothel" billboards around town.
Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect at Macromedia) joins Jeremy Allaire (Chief Technology Officer) with his own blog.
BigChampagne.com measures what music people are downloading on the internet.
Real.com used to just produce a crappy piece of streaming video software (and, don't worry, they still do that), but they're also now taking a shot at producing their own content. The Next, directed by Kevin Kerslake (who did a few Sonic Youth and Nirvana vids), is a music show webcast every two weeks. Blackalicious is currently available, with upcoming shows from Beth Orton and Peter Yorn.
Sundance Online Film Festival winners announced. Brooke wrote to say that Broken Saints won yet another award. Brooke, I'm counting the hours till I can buy the DVD at Best Buy. Just don't get high on smack and shoot yourself when it happens, 'kay?
Finally, Res has put up the Spike Jonze videography player. (I forgot how good that Dinosaur Jr. song is, but, christ, Velocity Girl certainly don't get better with age, do they?)
A trailer to a new documentary starring the woman who was Hitler's secretary right up until the final days: Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary. After years of silence, she tells all.
Dang, the new Strokes album is already done? LastPlaneToJakarta.com somehow got ahold of it. Me? Jealous?
I'm utterly shocked that I didn't make CJR's Ten Young Editors To Watch list. (Not that I'm really an editor any more.)
According to The Observer, the new lit wonder to watch is James Frey.
Someone at the office today came around with Buffy Season Four on DVD. Those who know their shit know there's no such thing yet. Not in America, anyway. But, yes, you can get it in England. He even bought an all-region DVD player just to play it. I've been out-geeked.
Have fun, kids: The Fake CNN.com News Generator. (Update: looks like it got removed after a few journalists fell for a fake Olsen Twins story today.)
Stuck in a snowy traffic jam yesterday, I was thinking "What ever happened to LiquidAudio?" Perhaps this shows too much about what rattles around in my consciousness, but, yes, I really was wondering what happened to dot-com music company which has been inconsequential since the mid-90s. Oddly enough, I get home and see the Times reporting that Wal-Mart (!?) has bought some of Liquid Audio. Unbelievable.
The first words out of Nick Nolte's mouth in the trailer to the new Neil Jordan movie, The Good Thief, are "I've hit rock bottom. I have to change my ways." Coincidence?
Maxim is in trouble for depicting Gandhi getting the shit kicked out of him in a cartoon.
Interesting interview with Amazon's eDocs Director, Curtis Kopf, who off-handedly predicts that Amazon.com might one day sell subscriptions to websites or email newsletters.
Garry Kasparov played his first public game against a computer in close to six years, and I didn't see any press about it. Chessbase.com has the play-by-play of him pummelling Deep Junior.
Raise your eyebrows fellow file-sharing music fans: Echo.com.
Thank god, I don't have to scrounge around in Usenet postings to figure out how to copy a DVD with my PC. DVD X Copy allows you to copy DVDs, which, I think, is a first for a software product.
On a random day here last year, you could find me saying "The Onion proper gets all the poppy press and gloppy glee, but from a pop-culture criticism point of view, The A.V. Club might honestly be the best alt-culture publication out there." The Rake is the first I've seen to also take notice.
Michael Kelly gets un-radical. "The left in America has for a long time now resembled not so much a political movement as a contest to see how many schismatics could dance on the head of a pin, a conversation that has gone from being national to factional to simply eccentric. At some point, progressive politics reached a state where freeing Mumia was considered critical and electing a Democratic president was considered optional."
Trailer: View From The Top: new crummy-looking comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Applegate.
There's a rumor that the new Massive Attack album is out there for download on this crazy little internet somewhere. I won't say where, but I gotta point you to the hard-to-find Todd Haynes Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story MPEGs. Illegal-Art.org has other amazing vids and audio.
All the Britney gossip you could need in four simple paragraphs: she's hanging out with Vin Diesel, she's recording with Fred Durst, and she gets mobbed at the deli. Ahem, what is wrong with the state of music journalism?
There.com. For those still waiting for The Sims Online
Created by Kevin Spacey, Trigger Street allows independent filmmakers and screenwriters to upload movies and screenplays that get reviewed and critiqued by the others in the community. There's a festival going on right now which is judged by Mike Myers, Annette Bening, and Bono. The registration process is torturous, but inside are some hidden finds.
Yah! Season Three of Buffy on DVD came out today. (UPDATE: Now wait one darn minute. Just 60 seconds ago it said "Available January 3," and now it says January 7. I even have a receipt saying it has been sent to me. I feel a tantrum of evil-Willow proportion coming on.)
Is everyone else watching VH1's I Love The '80s? I honestly hated the '80s, and I'm totally surprised how much I love this series.
Nick Denton has posted an opportunity for what must be somebody's dream job: erotic blogger. I can't imagine looking through those resumes. Maybe someone at MyMasturbation.com will apply.
Matt of Metafilter has launched the site he's been talking about for years: Ticketstubs. The idea is that the material residue of an event is the stub, which coincides with a memory, both of which you can share on the site.
The Nation asks Boots Riley of The Coup, Tom Morello of Rage, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney to talk about the tradition of protest music.
Schlotzsky's joins the wi-fi masses by adding free wireless.
I've been trying to convince people to stop capitalizing internet for a while. Pleased to see M.I.T. is on my side.
Metropolis has finally posted their Fiction Issue. The idea is that writers create narratives around pieces of architecture. Includes stories by Kurt Andersen, Bruce Sterling, and Rick Moody.
I just took a look at last year's blog resolutions and it appears as though I did absolutely none of them in 2002. Except, perhaps, for "less talk, more rock."
You want dot.com fall-out, I'll give you dot.com fall-out. The company Christmas party this year is in a bowling alley. Wait, maybe that's cool dot-com chic? Hook it up:
After seeing Personal Velocity last weekend, I truly hope it provides the opportunity to re-appropriate the term "chick flick" and turn it into riot grrl cinema. Go see it.
You've probably seen Slate.com's Saddameter, but I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. (But I do think the percentage is a little high.)
Oh, you didn't get me anything for Chistmas? Why, yes, I'd love the Beckett on Film DVD set. Gimme.
The Spin Year in Music issue just arrived. Here are their Top 40 Albums:
The White Stripes, White Blood Cells
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Beck, Sea Change
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Eminem, The Eminem Show
Weezer, Maladroit
Missy Elliot, Under Construction
Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
N.E.R.D., In Search Of...
The Hives, Veni Vidi Vicious
Felix Da Housecat, Kittenz and Thee Glitz
Sleater-Kinney, One Beat
Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse
Bruce Springsteen, The Rising
Tori Amoz, Scarlet's Walk
The Roots, Phrenology
The Streets, Original Pirate Material
Scarface, The Fix
DJ Shadow, The Private Press
Bright Eyes, Lifted or the Story Is In The Soil, Keey Your Ear to the Ground
Foo Fighters, One By One
Sigur Ros, ()
Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera
Pulp, We Love Life
Red Hot Chili Peppers, By The Way
Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
El-P, Fantastic Damage
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Moby, 18
The Soudtrack of our Lives, Behind the Music
RJD2, Deadringer
Interpol, Turn of the Bright Lights
Ryan Adams, Demolition
Audioslave, Audioslave
Various Artists, MTV Road Rules: Don't Make Me Pull This Thing Over Vol. 1
Steve Earle, Jerusalem
Cody Chesnutt, The Headphone Masterpiece
Spoon, Kill the Moonlight
Super Furry Animals, Rings Around the World
2 Many DJs, As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
Surprises? None, really. They've ditched the perenial "Top 10 Albums You Never Heard," which seems an important shift in philosophy (depending on how you want to interpret it, the underground music scene is either inconsequential, bad, or unconsumable). I'm surprised at the vigor with which they hang on to The White Stripes. I think Spin needs The White Stripes to survive more than The White Stripes do.
I spent part of Day Off #1 reading and re-reading the full text of Bin Laden's "Letter To America." It's a marvelous work of propaganda and counter-propaganda. While it does (almost regrettably) contain moments of truth, by the time I was done with it I was convinced that Osama had mastered the technique of appropriating the occasional liberal-democratic philosophy to propel his own twisted agenda.
David Eggers is a dick, according to David Sedaris. You have to jump to the second page to get this quote: "Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass... He's a horrible person... but he's a really good writer."
I've linked to all the other ones, so what why stop now? The newest from BMWfilms.com, staring Gary Oldman and James Brown with a guest appearance by Marilyn Manson: Beat The Devil.
SomaFM appears to be back. (For those who missed it, new digital radio legislation nearly killed it and many other internet radio stations a couple months ago.)
The New Yorker has a piece on the overlooked composer Arvo Pärt.
In a conversation about blogging last night, Chuck said this: I think the pseudo-compliment "You should have a blog" is the new "You should try to get on the 'Real World'." This seems incredibly accurate.
I'm not sure what is the weirdest thing about the new Johnny Cash album -- the Nine Inch Nails cover, the "Bridge Over Troubled Water" duet with Fiona Apple, "Desperado" (fucking "Desperado"!), hearing Nick Cave sing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," or the "Personal Jesus" cover with John Frusciante on guitar. I'll go for the latter, and even give you an MP3.
Edwin Schlossberg got tonsofpress this year in design and mainstream publications. I've become interested in his work with Reuters in Times Square, especially this "News Index" idea that will rate the news day on a scale of 1 to 10. There's an essay in me somewhere that compares it with Asymptote's 3-D New York Stock Exchange.
I really want to be a gamer, but I'm not. I read everything I can about about The Sims -- and look forward to the online version next month. I get giddy at the new Xbox Live, and I made a special trip downtown to see the new GameWorks here. Yet I haven't played an actual game in four years. Are there others like me?
For the agitprop designers and anti-globalization crew, feast on spectacle of NikeLab.com. Zowie! Contains design work by RGA, eboy, uncontrol, nosleep.
Waxy has some stellar doomsday MP3s. Can you resist something called "The Invocation For Judgement Against And Destruction of Rock Music"?
I come from a family of bankers, so some of my most vivid childhood memories are centered on financial activities in the bank -- watching the check-sorting machine, learning to count change before anyone in second grade, investigating the secret compartments of the vault. So photographer Arthur Levine's collection of photographs for Chase Manhattan Bank is like trip down financial memory lane.
The "new" Rolling Stone might surprise us yet. The most recent cover is The Simpson's, and there's even a link to the 1990 Bart cover story which as a midwestern high-schooler I recall reading in a B. Dalton checkout lane.
Lots of smack for the minions today. In triplicate. Feast:
MOVIES:
Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh. My. God. Kyra Sedgwick & Parker Posey & Fairuza Balik in the same movie?
Nerve interviews Brett Easton Ellis on the movie version of Rules of Attraction. "One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It's like Kubrick directing a college film."
I thought about going to PopTech this year, but didn't. WiredNews reviews it.
MUSIC:
Nick Hornby, the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, picks his 10 record tracks he could not imagine living without. It includes Teenage Fanclub, Springsteen, and Prince's "Sexy MF."
120 Minutes (Sundays on MTV2) played the new "You Know You're Right" Nirvana video last night. It was a boring montage of Kurt photos, but I think they were being cheeky by following it up with an old Vines video. Oh yeah, The Guardian somehow scored the rights to print the Cobain Diaries. Lots of stuff there.
It's "likely" that I become a millionaire. How about you?
I was looking around a few nights ago for a good subscription online video source. I like my new Vaio so much I thought about watching whole movies on it. Intertainer seemed to be the placed to go. Well, good thing I didn't subscribe.
NY Times Review of Booksdisses the new Umberto Eco novel.
Radio K is one of the crowned jewels of Twin Cities music -- esteemed next to the Replacements and that purple guy. For as long as they've been on the dial, there has been the rumor that there was an FM signal on the way. And it looks like there finally will be. Well, sorta.
When testing a new online application on various devices, I commonly make the joke at work "yeah, but does it work on my fucking refrigerator?" Looking at the refrigerator of the future, I guess it won't be a joke in too much longer. ("You expect me to user-test that?")
I'm not sure why Slate.com thinks celebrating Miles Davis' late period is unique (everyone except Stanley Crouch has been doing that for a half-decade), but they do. Still, I doubt I'll fork out $250 for the 20-CD box set.
Ball State has a theatrical production about Lizzy Borden in which you vote for the outcome with a wireless e-book given to you when you enter. You also use it to research background of the play during the play.
Facets, the best VHS/DVD source in the world, has redesigned their website. It needed it.
I've finished setting up the wireless network (Wi-Fi) at home, so if you live in the Kenwood area of Minneapolis, you can probably score some from free broadband from me.
You know how people complain that the internet is really turning into stupid flash animations and real content is disapearing? This is what they're talking about.
I picked up a copy of Res magazine for the first time in forever, and was pleased to see that it's really transformed itself in the last year or two. The camera geekfest that was Res has been turned into a "Film, Music, Art, Design, Culture" rag. Profiles of Godfrey Reggio and Chris Cunningham and the music video player are worthwhile dips into digi-film culture.
I was going to say that I didn't have any good links today, but then I found the Top 40 Conservative Pop Songs. The Beatles' Revolution is #2, and Skynard doesn't show up until #29.
Which nicely leads into the National Reviewgiving a shout-out to prog rock. Who says the culture wars are dead?
New trailer: Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson).
Probably the best example of blogs as an effective medium for journalism (a phrase I've been known to cringe at) is In Search Of Al Queda, from PBS's Frontline. It's halfway into a two-month journey through the Near East. Currently, they're in Pakistan.
Fortune: 40 Richest People Under 40. Eight of the top 10 are internet/software people, and the other two are sports-related. (Master P and P. Diddy are the first entertainers on the list, at 11 and 12.)
Chuck has a long Billy Joel profile in the NY Times Mag. In college, Chuck used to try to convince me that Billy Joel was brilliant. This was hard for me to handle.
The Shortlist Organization is a yearly prize created to "expose and illuminate the most creative and adventurous albums of the year." The ten finalists have just been announced: Aphex Twin's Drukqs, The Avalanches' Since I Left You, Bjork's Vespertine, Cee-Lo's Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, DJ Shadow's The Private Press, Doves' Last Broadcast, The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Hives' Veni Vidi Vicious, N*E*R*D's In Search Of..., and Zero 7's Simple Things. (Here was the longlist.)
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.
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.
A few months ago, I was at a conference with Sue Johnson from 360degrees.org / PictureProjects. She was just getting started on a new project, an online audio 9/11 memorial for NPR. We had a nice chat about online audio/visual techniques, and her project is now available: The Sonic Memorial Project. The Sonic Browser is probably the most innovative part.
More 9/11: Walter Kirn reviews all those books you've seen, and makes sure to slam Baudrillard and Harlan Ellison along the way.
I really don't talk about The Onion A.V. Club enough. The Onion proper gets all the poppy press and gloppy glee, but from a pop-culture criticism point of view, The A.V. Club might honestly be the best alt-culture publication out there (oftentimes better than Village Voice, Spin, and City Pages.) Just a sample: this week The A.V. Club reviews commentary tracks on DVDs.
Hard-to-find Tarkovsky diploma film: The Steamroller and the Violin. It's 43 minutes long, and some consider it Tarkovsky's greatest work (and, unquestionably, his shortest). It occurs to me that it would be cool to create a DVD titled The Senior Thesis Projects Of The Great Directors. Get the first works from Scorsese, Lynch, Wilder, Spielberg, Greenaway, Allen, Kiarostami, Kar-Wai and whoever else all on one DVD set.
I wonder who thought up the action-adventure sci-fi flick based the idea that apocalypse is eminent because the earth's core has stopped rotating: The Core, starring Hillary Swank. And I thought the wayward asteroid was a stretch.
According to the Sun Times in New Zealand (you can figure out how valid that makes it), Britney Loves Lesbian Porn. (I'm a little embarrassed to link to that, but I'm telling myself it's really an investigation into tabloid journalism and not another damn Britney link.)
Gay Robots? (Includes HAL, C3PO, Rosie, KITT, and Data.)
Life of Numbers is an amazing synthesis of symbolic logic, mathematical design, and interactive technology. It maps the popularity of all integers between zero and one million. "The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies." If you dig it, dive into the other works at Turbulence.org.
The other day, I was searching for an ACLU logo. Believe it or not, I don't think there is one, but I did stumble across a funny flash animation from Working Assets, about privacy in a post-9/11 era. Although I'm politically aligned with them, the animation (with sweeping strings and frowning statues) seems a little heavy-handed.
Shazam is so cool. If you live in the UK, hit "2580" on your cell phone, play 15 seconds of music into the phone, and Shazamm will SMS you back the name of the song and the artist behind it. Amazing, methinks.
Somewhere along the way, I missed that the London Review of Books has redesigned its website. It looks very bloggy. (LRB is the best book periodical out there right now, but I've shamefully let my subscription die out.)
For Buffy fans: Faith (Eliza Dushku) is returning. Because Sarah Michelle Gellar may be ending her tenure as the slayer this season, the return of Faith has interesting consequences. The season starts Sept. 24 (spoiler). In other news, here's some gossip on Joss Whedon's new show, Firefly. The Firefly site not only has spoilers, but there's even a blog. (It just occurred to me that Whedon now has a show on three networks: Buffy on UPN, Angel on WB, and Firefly on FOX.) I've watched a dozen episodes of Buffy in the last 3 days, finishing the second season on DVD. Now I've tuned in Radio Buffy Live.
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.
If I were still a music writer, I'd be typing away right now about the Moby and Eminen head-to-head on the Music Video Awards last night. Point one: is it just me or is Eminem the Axl of today? Point two: Remember Courtney Love and Axl Rose fighting at the MTV Video Awards a decade ago? In this parrallel universe that makes Moby.... well, I dunno, but Axl sure wouldn't have wigged at a puppet like Eminem did. Of all the evening's participants who could have fought (Puffy and J-Lo; Britney and Justin; Carson and Jennifer; Mary-Kate and Ashley), I'm glad we saw the Eminem-Moby match. Or was that Eminem and the puppet?
Layne has a killer assessment of American Psycho today. The trajectory of my relationship to Ellis is the opposite. I first found his book perfectly representative of the 80s, and then later I sadly realized that it was perfectly representative of the 80s.
Have a special song that you're absolutely certain contains hidden knowledge which only you are privy to? Then go to SongMeanings.net and spill the truth. Picking out some groups randomly, here's Beck, Wilco, Sonic Youth. The place is full of meaningless comments, but also some great one's such as a post about Nirvana's "About A Girl" where one person postulates the song is... about a girl.
I never would've thought the first entirely Flash news website would be a newspaper, much less the Washington Post. If you bother to register for the trial offer, you'll see that it gives you access to the entire paper as it was designed in print. Like, even the ads. In itself, that's been done before, but it was always as a PDF. This one's entirely in Flash. The naysayers will simply say "replicating your old media product isn't what the internet is about." However, this thing does work remarkably well.
Much of Jimmy Fallon's new album is available at MTV. I'd describe it as the worst Beck album ever -- which is still better than the best possible Adam Sandler album.
Email google@capeclear.com with words in the subject line that you want Google to search and it will instantly email you back with search results.
You know that feeling you get when you discover your favorite unknown band suddently turns out to be famous? That's the way I felt when the Tina Fey fan sites started appearing, and that's now the way I feel about Ellen Feiss. There are even T-Shirts.
NY Times Magazineinterviews Jesse Ventura, and is the first to discover why he's not running again: the pay sucks (the last question).
The French, they have a word for everything, even if you have to spell it backwards. Verlan is a popular slang in which standard French spellings or syllables are reversed or recombined, or both.
To accompany this week's Food Issue of the New Yorker, the website has dragged out some classic food articles, including Lillian Ross' 1945 piece on the first frozen dinners, Rex Lardner's 1950 ode to flipping pancakes, and Nora Ephron's 1997 tribute to the doughnut.
There's a scene in High Fidelity (the movie) in which John Cusack's character is in bed with his girlfriend, who will later hook up the guy who lives upstairs. The girlfriend is seen reading Love Thy Neighbor, a book by Peter Maass who has a blog where today he explains how his book ended up in the movie.
I don't know how it happened, but over the weekend I ended up researching upcoming movies. Let's call it the Fimoculous Movie Preview:
AUGUST:
Prediction: Natascha McElhone will be the new It-girl. She stars in a movie I'm destined to love-hate in that B-way: Fear Dot Com (here's the trailer). Best line: "Can you promise me one thing? That you won't visit that site."
The Trials of Henry Kissinger, a rendition of the Christopher Hitchens book. Certainly constroversial enough to land Hitchens a permanent slot on cable news talk shows through the winter.
Les Âmes Fortes. I dunno, but it's got Laetitia Casta and John Malkovich.
OCTOBER:
Frida Kahlo will be played by Salma Hayek in Frida. Sweet mono-brow.
Naqoyqatsi completes the amazing trilogy which included Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Directed by Godfrey Reggio with score by Phillip Glass. From the site: Naqoyqatsi depicts the ubiquity of technology in our world. It explores how everything from the media, politics, religion, and warfare to food, weather, sports, and medicine is situated in this "new nature".
In an odd match, Tom Tykwer, the guy who directed Run Lola Run, is taking on a Krzysztof Kieslowski screenplay, Heaven (a Guardianreview). I can't think of two more different temperaments.
Round II of BMWFilms shorts hits the street. John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off), Tony Scott (Spy Game, Enemy of the State, Top Gun) and Joe Carnahan (Walk Among the Tombstones, NARC) are the three directors this time around.
NOVEMBER:
Atom Egoyan returns with a film celebrating his Armenian heritage, Ararat.
Hitchcockian claustrophobia times ten, Phone Booth will take place entirely within and around a single New York City phone booth.
Eminem has been getting rave reviews for his upcoming movie, 8 Mile. The site has a couple trailers that could be music videos (what's the difference?).
In Film Threat, Steven Soderbergh described Solaris as "a combination of 2001 and Last Tango in Paris." Gulp. Features more of that It-girl Natascha McElhone.
When did I become a technophile? I'm thinking about buying a ReplayTV 4500 just cuz I can hook it up to the internet (anything with a internet connection = good). But becuz I can hook it up to the internet, not only can I program it remotely, but I can go to PlanetReplay and download episodes of Sex and the City from other ReplayTV users. So there. I'm not a technophile -- it's really still about cultcha. Or, well, sex.
Before you click, just think to yourself, "What would Adam Sandler's website look like?" Okay, now click.
Salon does its homework and collects some astoundingly bad domain names that were forged at the height of dot-com-stupidity. But of course the question is: how much longer until Salon.com joins 'em?
Pure geek: the new WC3 specs for XHTML 2.0 are out. As you were...
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an interactive software artwork which allows its users to breed and explore the abstract and evocative forms of personalized "nonsense alphabets" - coherent sets of abstract, glyphlike forms which might resemble the plausible writing systems of alien civilizations or unfamiliar human societies.
Looks like Spin has handed over its website to Yahoo. Here's Chuck's piece from last month about Morrissey-lovers. This month, Chuck practically is the magazine, with about 20 pages of his musings about heavy metal.
It's Like a Movie, but It's Not. This is one of the most culturally-aware pieces I've ever read in the Times. Here's a paragraph about "the illusion of entertainment":
In mathematics there is something called a derivative an expression that stands for another set of expressions. The illusion of entertainment is a kind of cultural derivative. You watch most television sitcoms and, just by the rhythm of the banter and the laugh track, you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the jokes are funny or not. Sitcom writers call this "likeajoke" because it has the form of a joke without the content. Or you go to a big commercial movie, and just by experiencing the rapid cutting and thumping music you know how you are supposed to respond, whether the action engages you or not.
The Times has a story about the Center for Strategic and International Studies study that invokes Buffy. In other Buffy news, did you know that Anthony Stewart Head (the guy who plays Giles) has an electronic album out? It's #12 on the Amazon.com Electonica Best-Sellers list.
The news that MSNBC.com is discontinuing its discussion boards and replacing them with blogs is a big deal in my industry. If you care about that kind of thing, you might care about the pressure MSNBC is getting to change to be more like MSN.
Steven Soderberg gets Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, and David Hyde Pierce to star in his new film, Full Frontal (that website has been getting good reviews in places like Entertainment Weekly), and he doesn't even show their faces in the trailer.
New Ftrain.com: August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web. It's the imagined future of a business magazine published in 2009. I think it's seriously possible that terms like "semantic web" and "RDF" will catch on simply because of this piece of fiction. Stay tuned.
Cool collection of politically-charged 3D/graph art/music: Pleix. I recommend Plaid: Itsu and Beauty Kit.
Times Magprofiles a movie trailer director. Additionally, the guy who created Napster is interviewed, with some good questions like "Do you ever buy music?"
Once a publishing heir apparent, Ziff-Davis might file for bankruptcy.
Part of the miraculously uninspired Block E expansion in downtown Minneapolis will be a Le Meridien Art + Tech hotel. If you're the kind of person who is wowie-zowied by plasma screens, backlit photos, and personalized linen, then this is the place for you. If you're more into public simulated entertainment, Block E will also house GameWorks, an entertainment plex built by Sega. Ho-hum.
Funniest thing I've read all week: Rush loves Apple, but feels they're having financial problems because of their politics.
Typorganism has created numerous interesting alt-application but Good News / Bad News is my favorite. On the left appears headlines and pictures from CNN, and on the right appears headlines and pictures contributed by users. The juxtaposition creates a dynamic commentary on news composition.
Wow, a gigantic collection of genuine unknown band photos. Compelling in a I-Have-No-Idea-Why sense. The commentary is funny too.
Does anyone remember Plunderphonic? It was a Negativelandish project from cut-and-paste musician John Oswald that sampled Metallica, Dolly Parton, Elvis and everyone else. Of course he got sued, and the CD was recalled, but it's now entirely available as MP3s or a jukebox
Wired News profiles Dack's cell phone movies. Dack is a Minneapolis designer considered one of the people on the forefront of the blogging and design communities. Dack.com made a radical change after 9/11 to become a politically-centered blog. None of this is chronicled in the Wired story, even though it's probably more interesting.
I first saw Kronos Quartet live a decade ago, at their experimental peak, when the whacked out Purple Haze covers and avant-pop Elvis take-offs were part of their crazy classical repertoire. Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud was one of the first "rock stars" I had a crush on (not counting Joan Jett, of course). So I was naturally excited to see they have scheduled three shows (1, 2, 3) in Minneapolis in the coming year. And I was naturally disappointed to see the Slate.com absolutely slagged them today.
I talk the talk about my new phone, but I don't have a Vertu. You can apparently only buy one "by appointment," and they're in the 5-figure dollar range.
In local news, City Pages publisher Mark Bartel has canned editor Tom Finkel. The reason? "I wanted the editorial to take more chances, to be edgier." That sounds both good and bad. Either CP will become more investigative and irreverent, or it will become more tabloidish. [In other local media news, music critic Jim Walsh has left the Pioneer Press to study at Stanford on a Knight Fellowship.]
Did you know there is an American Psycho 2 staring Shatner? Now you do. Of course, it never hit theaters and is straight-to-video. Available on DVD this week, to the demented.
It's good to know that a book that slams Amazon.com is available on Amazon.com.
Versimilitude, man. Bravo TV in the U.K. has a new program called The World's Deadliest Gangs. The website tries to fake you into thinking you're chatting with a thug from L.A.
Speaking of Dakota, those kids at Agricouture have a new issue out, packed with good stuff.
There was a time when I thought Mission to Burma's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" might be the best song of all time. For whatever reason, I haven't cared about their reunion, but Salon.com has a good look back.
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.
Lizzy Borden -- not the one who axed mom or even the bad metal musicians -- is one bad lady. Her tasteless ultraviolent films, however, are just post-feminist enough for Salon.com to find a reason to profile her. Although I tend to enjoy reading about anything extreme (but just reading, cuz I'm a prude at heart), I really don't know what the point of all this is.
I'm not sure if I find the next item admirable or equally creepy, but it's a mighty fine collection of WomenHandsOnHips. Hundreds of pictures of famous women with... hands on their hips. If it weren't for the internet, would anyone ever gather such an important collection? And what does it all mean? Who cares! There's Sophia Loren in that pose. And, look, Jodie Foster! You mean there are only four of Charlize and Kirsten? But just look at all the others. The site creator reports: "I like strong and confident, but feminine and sensual women, and a woman with her hands on her hips somehow displays all those qualities perfectly."
Did you catch Ann Coulter and Katie Couric bickering on MSNBC? Good stuff. Watch it.
I know, I know, I diss Maxim for being sexist, but then I link to things like this. Let's call it the paradox of the guilty liberal male.
If you live in Europe, I'm told you know T-Babe. She's apparently a virtual recording artist with a few hits. The site says: "She is multi-lingual speaking English, Italian, and German and is currently working on her Spanish and Japanese -- so if you have any hints on improving her fluency in either of these, please let her know." Uhhhhh-huh, that was a neat shtick in 1992.
Similarly, the new Pacino movie is from the creators of The Truman Show, and it shows. S1mone is another virtual chick who dudes pass off as real.
The Iconophile, on the other hand, is just a dude collecting "lesser, harder-to-find goddesses and saints of the celebrity pantheon." But no Tina Fey or Juliette Binoche.
Zowie. Porn Music Radio (totally safe for work, unless your boss don't like the funk).
A couple years ago, I once had an idea for a convergence tv show called Quick Decisions. You would watch brief scenarios of ethical situations on television, and then go to the web to vote on what you would do in that situation. Maxim, of all places, has something similar.
I think the world is either going through a great epistemological hiccup, or something's screwed up at MIT, but six of the top ten hottest sites right now at Blogdex are in Persian. Or Farsi, if you prefer. (This could easily change by the time you see this. But it doesn't matter, cuz at this hour, the times they are a'changin.)
Minority Report was good, not great. It will fall some near the bottom of the "Top 10 Movies of 2002" list. It could have been great if Spielberg could figure out how to end a movie. I really don't understand his problem -- at the end of A.I. he self-destructed with at least five different places where it seemed like a good place finish. But he keeps sprawling, unable to tie all the piecees together in the end. He's a walking shaggy dog story. The best part: the ads. The problem is that this kind of advertising saturation is fine for a dystopian future in which personalization will kill us all. But I don't really want it to be a trend.
BuddyHead.com is full of musical oddities like Vincent Gallo interviewing himself (which was supposed to appear in the defunct Beastie Boys mag Grand Royal) and insane Fred Durst and Slayer interviews. The music reviews use an "Axl Rose" rating system. In what be the coolest prank of the decade, the proprietors also once stole three Fred Durst baseball caps and sold them on eBay, with proceeds going to a rape counseling organization.
Back when I was part of the microcosm known as "rock critic culture" (yes, Virginia, there is a such a scary thing) I wanted to write about the typology of rock critics. Someone (actually, Nate Patrin, who apparently lives here, though I don't know him) finally has. Your Guide to Spotting the North American Rock Critic includes the categories Keeper Of The Canon, Indie Thug, Pop Thug, The Zeitgest Obsessive, The Intellectual, Gonzo, The Diarist, The Creative Writer, The Sociopolitical Major, The Harmless Shill. [I was the ones in bold.]
Would You Have Invested in Microsoft in 1978, when these were the 11 employees at the software giant?
New magazines coming to a newsstand near you: In Touch, The American Conservative, Justice, American Curves, Chic Simple, Living Room, Budget Living, Common Good, and Style 24-7.
Anil Dash has a little ditty about the differences between white people and black people in movie theaters. It's a little essentialist, but otherwise on-target.
Death by EverQuest? It reads like parody. "Scattered around him, police reports say, were dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers, dozens of empty pizza boxes and chicken bones thrown haphazardly to the floor.... The only signs of what had been on his mind were a few scribbled names and terms related to EverQuest, the online virtual reality game he'd been playing for well over a year. Based on those and other clues, Liz Woolley suspects her son killed himself after being jilted online."
Quiz time. Which of these magazine titles is an actual "Maxim clone," due to hit newsstands soon? Razor, Stun, Controversy, Swung, King, or Smooth. Answer: all of them. The world just got a little dumber.
New issue of XLR8R (the hip-hop issue) is out, with Blackalicious on the cover.
Porno-Graphics are odd little flash parodies of online pornography (don't worry, it's rated PG, and a little funny).
Interesting navigation scheme: Anke Bauer. You navigate by shooting objects in the cross-hairs. (Anke Bauer is a German illustrator.)
I'm gonna feel guilt about this for a while, but I just laid down $650 for a phone. Okay the new Nokia is more than just a phone -- it's a PDA, a phone, an email client, an SMS client, a game port, a flash application, and some other things. Yet, still probably not worth 650 frog skins. A review.
And of course, the Friday fun game: Pee In The Urinal (you have to sit through an animation to get to the game).
Conduits are always barriers, are they not? Those people you need to get you somewhere else always try to block you from getting there. This is the big game.
Napster is dead. Up next on the block: Audiogalaxy. Oh yeah, Kazaa is officially dead now too.
Cannes updated: Polanski wins, Paul Thomas Anderson ties for Best Director, Special Anniversary prize goes to Michael Moore. (Collection of links here.)
I've got something like a hundred cable channels, and for some reason not one of them is the Sundance channel. But if you have it, I hope you're watching this. (A review.)
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....
It was only a matter of time before music videos became interchangeable with malls. If videos weren't already disguised attempts at style-driven consumption (pft, of course they are), a brand new form of music video e-commerce is just around the corner. First, check out a Flash music video from no one smaller than the New York Times Magazine: Alanis Morissette. Notice how you navigate through a slideshow of Alanis dressed up in various consumer objects from Saks, Yves Saint Laurent, and Harley-Davidson while she chimes "Precious Illusions." (Isn't that ironic. Don't you think?) It's like "PopUp Video" with the information you really want to know: where can I buy that? If this friendly elision of commerce and music is a little disconcerting (though, let's be honest, how can it be anymore?), a new technology from VideoClix moves it up another notch. VideoClix basically makes QuickTime files clickable. The outcome of this technology goes straight to e-commerce: Macy Gray, as a clickable mall.
Since we're on the topic, I have no interest in joining the Moby hype machine. (Moby's last album, Play, was the product pusher par excellence, with all 18 tracks being licensed for a film or a TV show or a commercial or a trailer or all of the above.) But Mobyblips are an interesting footnote. Moby is designing little Flash animations each day leading up the release of the new album on Tuesday. I guess I'll also point out the video. And, yes, I want to buy everything in it.
What the hell? My favorite musician is having a baby with my favorite filmmaker? When did this happen? The New Yorker slips in the Bjork / Matthew Barney tryst in this piece about Cremaster 3.
There's a lot of buzz about the Apathy MP3s on the web (Apathy is the band of the kid accused of those pipe bomb attacks). When I downloaded them yesterday, I had the whole office rocking out like it was 1995. Parts of "Conformity" were on MSNBC today. You think a radio hit is in the future?
My adorable little niece loves Blue's Clues. Now Mr. Blue is making an album with The Flaming Lips. I knew me and that kid would find something in common to talk about soon.
There's a Britney Spears video game coming out for PlayStation. A photo of Britney's Dance Beat. Players audition to be backup singers in Britney's virtual concert tour by maneuvering one of six characters through a series of practices and auditions to perfect their dance moves.
Psst, psst. I think Tina Fey reads this blog. No, no, I'm so serious. I have evidence. Hi, Tina! Write some time, okay?
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....
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....
I walked through the skyway today with Jakob Nielsen.
This week, I've been attending parts of CHI2002, the big annual geekfest for people interested in computer-human interaction -- MIT types who watch Battle Bots for fun. I would never make it a destination conference, but it happens to be in Minneapolis this year. Today, I saw David Birn, who proved himself as the most optimistic SF writer alive with his presentation about how security and freedom aren't to be judged on the same continuum. Just because Kevin Costner makes your book into a movie is no reason to be so damn sanguine.
But that's not the exciting part of my day. Because:
I walked. Through the skyway. With Jakob Nielsen.
For those who aren't geeks, Nielsen basically invented the profession of "Usability Expert." Among other things, he's the reason Google looks the way it does. Some people love him, some think he's an absolute ass, but I just think he walks funny. Because I've been writing a lot about cities, and because I was in the skyway (I still can't get over this), I chatted him up about what he thinks about Minneapolis. This was an excuse to try to steer him toward a conversation about city design -- to see if he had any interest in the topic.
He didn't understand the connection.
I persisted: You know, navigation, information highway. Virtual and real spaces.
I apparently wasn't speaking his language. He eventually got to the Hilton and fled.
More scintillating updates from CHI2002 here through the week, including my first experience of Stelarc, who performs Thursday.
Ever wonder what happened to Mark Leyner? One second, he's hanging with Letterman; the next, he's in the dustbin of gastroenterological history. Looks like now he's doing an audio fiction piece on Audible.com called WireTap (link on the right). This serialized radio theater features the wiretap conversations between a painkiller-addicted 19-year-old living in the penthouse of the Princeton Hilton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Yes, very Leyner.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the potential of this medium. WireTap uses some techniques that make the online audio theater experience slightly more unique -- sound collage, wire-tap effects, stilted voice characterizations -- but lacks the same moment of engagement that leaves much online literature/art empty. To put it another way, here's the big question: what could online audio (whether documentary or theater) do that "This American Life" can't?
Certainly, if someone hasn't done it already, there could be interesting models for interactivity with audio. We've all seen the music mixing board apps, which are fun when first encountered, but usually sit as unvisited bookmarks because they do nothing with narrative. I've been wondering: how can we take this cut-and-paste mentality and apply it to online audio narrative in ways that don't seem as dull as a Burroughs cut-up. (Don't argue with me. Those were dull.)
I'm still mulling this over, but I have a few ideas. I'll test them out here soon.
(Traditional narrative radio forms aren't to be overlooked. Subway Series 2002 from WNYC, for instance, is something I look forward to.)
I've been talking to friends about the recent ascendency of Wired. No, seriously, the magazine has gotten better in the dot-com slump. I guess the Times thinks so too, based upon this profile of the new editor. In other mag news, Jann Wenner is runningRolling Stone again, and there might not be a MTV Magazine after all.
San Fran is the internet. I'm home, but I'm tired. And I'm full of ideas, some of which have to do with remaking Fimoculous. Maybe this weekend. Oh damn, the International Film Fest started this week too. Well, I think I'll be absent from here for a while.
Now the big-guns are being rolled out. Intellectual superstar Emily Nussbaum pens the most recent paean to Buffy in Slate.
GigPosters.com is dedicated to "the art of gig posters, flyers, and handbills showcases the aspiration of the music as well as the talent of many artists who see little to no profit for creating gig posters."
If you had control of a few large media websites, what would you do for April Fool's? I couldn't think of anything either...
I've been saying for while that the greatest influence on shoe design in the last 10 years has been the automobile. I'm serious. Just as SUVs came into vogue, shoes were growing running boards. People usually laugh at me when I expound this theory, but now I have proof: a shoe that mimics a Ferrari. If that tickles you, check out Adidas KOBETWO at Kicksology.
I saw Panic Room last night, and the most I can say is that Jodie Foster is amazing. The movie is obsessed with its stylized self, in both the good and bad ways. The website is a good indication of what I mean. Not only is the "script to scene" component craft-obsessed (story boards, conceptual designs, digital storyboards, finished scene), but the wardrobe auction is too much. I'd pretty much do anything for that tank top though.
In contrast, there's the arty and episodic obliqueness of the Donnie Darko website.
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.
Jesus H. Christ. Can you believe that 5 out of the top 10 richest people in the world made it because of Wal-Mart? Check it out. That's the most depressing thing I've seen in weeks.
A few months ago, I went to the Experience Music Project in Seattle for a conference party. Not a tech conference -- rather, a journalism conference. So the people were older but the food was better. Anyway, EMP has a Pop Music Studies Conference coming up that looks somewhat interesting. Does hundreds of music critics in one room sound like a good time to you?
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'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?
Why did I ever start this project?! And it's March already. And it's still freezing. Can it get any worse? Well, I guess I could complain about my job and get fired.
I should count all the stories the mainstream press is writing about blogging. It's crazy. The Strib has theirs now. MinnesotaThinkTanker Todd and Cursor's Mike get quoted. I, of course, do not. I love how the angle for all these mainstream press articles about blogging is "is it a fad?" It's like they're trained to think most tech-journalism inventions are here-today-gone-tomorrow.
I've never talked here about my days as an editor at FATE. It was a truly crazy and sad experience. This piece from Salon about digging through the "slush pile" (publisher's term for the stack of unsolicited manuscripts) really makes me remember those days. And -- trust me -- this Salon story is much more tame than my FATE slush pile.
And, finally, Rake Magazine is out. It's a new Twin Cities magazine by some former alt-press big-shots. I'm sure I'll be talking more about it here soon.
I'm so tired. I'm building my first Flash-ColdFusion hybrid application. Despite what they say, these products are not a perfect match. However, I've decided that Fimoculous 2.0 will be a Flash-CF concoction once I master this.
Andrew Sullivan, who I admitedly don't read or link to enough, has a Blogger Manifesto which makes the case for blogging as a form of journlism. Oh, this is mainstream now? Well, time to find another hobby, I guess.
MGM has become the first of the seven big studios to offer films to consumers via download: CinemaNow. Some are free (Leprechaun, with Jennifer Aniston), and some are pay-per-view (Romance, by Catherine Breillat).
A new tech mag, Dig-It, is supposed to be "the Rolling Stone of tech." Translation: sucks. But wait: rumor is that the whole thing is a hoax. Stay tuned
The Pentagon plans to fake news? Nothing new here, move along...
The Village Voice talks to Arthur C. Clarke, David Byrne, and various architects about skyscrapers.
More proof that the gaming industry is pushing the medium (or mediums, since it's so multi-platform) harder than anyone else. Samurai Romanesque is a weather-affected, multiplayer, java-based i-Mode game.
The New Yorker writes about North Dakotans? This must be a first. It contains an interview with Great Plains billionaire Doug Burgam, some sad stats about the population (the state has 40,000 less people than it did in 1930), a tour of the "Marketplace of Ideas," and general ruminations about the "North" in North Dakota.
You want proof that everyone's got a blog? The freaking FBI has one.
I wanna go to Noise Pop so bad. But I also wanna go to All Tomorrow Parties. When did Cali become an indie rock capital?
For some reason, Slate.com sees something profound it the 39th resurgence of Surrealism. Isn't this story written every two years? Cool slideshow though.
I haven't yet decided if I'll officially sign up at Netflix, but I like this page of DVD Easter Eggs.
Sure, there's no word for it in English, but do They Have A Word For It? I like the Russian word razbliuto, "feeling for ex-love," and the Bantu word mbuki-mvuki, "to undress to dance." What's that Steve Martin line...? "The French, they have a word for everything."
Why don't you send twatcaller an AIM and see what s/he says. (And if you're of the programmer persuasion, how to make AIM bots.)
The newest issue of Tin House (on newsstands now) is completely dedicated to music. I haven't read much of it yet, but Andrew Hultkrans on the Beach Boys looks good.
ActiveBuddy now has a web-based interface: SmarterChild. For those of you new the game, you can hold a conversation with a virtual entity who is suprisingly life-like. Or at least I think so, cuz I have no life.
Diesel, get your pants on, cuz the Karzai Collection could be the next big thing.
Weekly World News being funny; ha, ha, funny: shuts down website.
My biggest criticism of Slate.com is that it has never had anything to do with the internet. The comfortable mix of the New Republic's style and the New Yorker's grace only uses the internet as a distribution model -- not as a medium. To my knowledge, there has never been anything on Slate.com that really takes advantage of what the internet can do better than a magazine. That's why I'm glad to see Slate.com has recently posted two pieces that take advantage of what the internet does best: interactivity and data. In the category of interactivity, The Enron Blame Game. In the category of data, The 2001 Slate 60.
Last night, I somehow ended up watching Lou Reed on Bravo's new show, Musicians, followed up by watching Kid Rock on Howard Stern. Would you hate me if I said I was more entertained by Kid Rock?
Sorry, I'm back. John, Ross, and Chuck got me too drunk. Oh, an update? One just hated Vanilla Sky, one just turned 30, and one just lived with Ozzy for two days. And there was Lora, the ex who's now a doctor that looks like a supermodel flapper. (Chuck will have to send me pics so that I can prove this.)
More Googlish fun: Googlewhacking is a game by which bloggers try to come up with two-word combinations that force Google to only return one page -- yours. This thread at MeFi has people whacking the hell out of Google.
Bravo is starting a new series based on "Inside the Actors Studio," which features musicians instead of actors. Lou Reed is the first guest in February. The host is David Wild, of Rolling Stone.
Am I the only one who has wondered how the U.S. has a military base at the tip of Cuba? Sure, I remember Jack Nicholson screaming at me about Guantánamo Bay in A Few Good Men, but I don't recall anyone saying how exactly we got the base. Encyclopedia.com tells me that it was leased to the U.S. in 1903 by a treaty that was renewed in 1934. Both countries need to consent to revoke the treaty.
Hypermodernism: "We believe in bypassing the distribution system, subverting modern infrastructures for benefit of cultural advance free from capitalist control."
Chuck has a funny column predicting music in 2002. "I predict Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson will have a baby, which will be legally named 'I Am the Baby of Kid Rock.' In a related story, Tommy Lee will begin dating Britney Spears." (p.s. Chuck says he's taking three months off to work on his second book.)
Religious dildos. (What, you thought I was joking? At least you are not going to hell for linking to the Diving Nun.)
A writer at the Dallas Observercalls Ashleigh Banfield "Tina Fey-ish." Hey, that's my line! The rest of the story talks about her days in the local Dallas market.
If you could redesign anything, what would it be? I'd start with a few cities, jump to handful of airports, scrap most cars, and clean up with about 80 percent of the web. Another idea: redesign the alphabet.
I've been doing some research into fearful waters the last few days: online advertising. No, not for Fimoculous. Rather, I've been given the task to investigating what types of "rich media" adverts my company's websites will consider. What's a "rich media" advert? Well, here's an example to start you off with: Budweiser meets Comedy Central. That's the idea in its most offensive form -- drowning your content in beer. If you care about this concept, DoubleClick and EyeBlaster have some good galleries. It's odd for a curmudgeonly journalist to say this, but I find some of these ads fascinating. The multimedia programmer in me sees these occasionally pushing the boundaries of what a web page can do, unlike anything else out there. (C/Net Builder has a good primer on the topic too.)
Numerous bon mots (the "clip-hop" of Matmos, the "over-ness" of the Strokes, the "white-gal-Eminem" of Pink) in Salon.com's Year in Music. And City Pages' Artists of the Year kicks off with a great DeLillo excerpt. The links are added to the... yup, Year in Review page.
NPR's "On The Media" had two good pieces about Egyptian film this week: America in Egypt (on America's image in Egyptian pop culture) and Terrorist Actor (on Egyptian actor Sayed Badreya who has played many terrorists in Hollywood films).
I knew that I would regret making my Best Music of 2001 list before the year ended. And not only did I uncover an album to add to the list, but I want to plop it at the very top. Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By is a concept piece from Dan The Automator (Handsome Boy Modeling School) with vocals from Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) and Jennifer Charles (Elysian Fields). It's Serge Gainsbourg for the hip-hop set. It's Barry White for turntablists. It's the trip-hop album Beck could never make. Well, whatever it is, I listened to it for 8 of the 14 hours I had to drive this Christmas vacation. 75Ark lets you listen to the entire album.
I've been quietly rooting for Melissa Maerz, the new music editor at City Pages, but she hasn't always filled the shoes of her predecessors Will Hermes, Peter Scholtes and Jon Dolan. This week, however, her cover story on Matthew St-Germain was pretty darn good. St-Germain is the founder of the local noise label Freedom From, whose most famous group, Reynolds, is an Argentinean outfit whose frontman has Down's syndrome and the rest of the band thinks he's a saint. Although the article somewhat overstates the ambiguity of St-Germain (he's less a charlatan and more careerist), it's still a good read about the underground music scene (and how Thurston Moore of course has something to do with it).
More news in the Nirvana and Courtney battle. Courtney has somehow convinced Cobain's mom to say that her son "despised" Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. The remaining members of Nirvana have been battling with Courtney over an unreleased Nirvana track, "You Know You're Right." I finally decided I wanted to hear it. Here are two MP3s: "You Know You're Right" (a live Nirvana version) and "You Know You're Right" (a live Hole-unplugged version). It doesn't seem like much to be fighting over.
The funny thing about content management systems is that they create weirdness where you can never expect it. Like, putting the date of a story in the URL doesn't seem like a bad idea, right? Well, it is if you're writing an obit. Look at this Dick Schapp obit. He died today, but by looking at the URL you can see he had his obit written into the content management system on Oct. 19.
I'm not sure if it was spam, but I received a weird email today that asked to look at Reflektions.com, "'invasion of privacy' featuring backwards navigation." They've turned the "disable back button" trick into an art form, or something.
Yahoo.com has launched its music portal: Launch.com.
Remember back when The Onion did its post-9/11 issue? Adbusters now has the 9/11 Scrapbook, which raises the stakes.
Well, Plastic.com has resurrected. I thought something cool would happen to it in the intermission. Guess not. Instead, Carl seems to have spent all this time writing a manifesto (when did he start writing like Dave Eggers?).
I don't even know what to say about this: Omniglot. I fear I could get lost for days in this Borgesian "Guide to Writing Systems."
Local Stuff:
If ya ain't from around here, ya won't get this, and even if ya are, ya still probably won't: DuffysJukebox.com. (That's Duffy's in downtown Fargo for all of ya thinking that it has something to do with duh big city.)
Ali goes nowhere, slowly. The movie starts with his first Joe Frasier fight and ends with the "Rumble in the Jungle" fight. In between, there's a mish-mash of music video montages and oblique historizing. For being the most talked about athlete of all time, Ali came out dull in Ali.
Everyone's blabbing about how Google has opened up the archive on 20 years of Usenet postings. But no one's doing anything cool with it, like, say, diggin up the posts from American Taliban John Walker, aka Abdul Hamid, aka John Philip Walker Lindh. Circa 1997, he was apparently very interested in Kool Keith, drum machines, and Malcolm X. He was as wrapped up in soc.religion.islam as rec.music.hip-hop. Here he is selling his Marvel Comic Cards. Here he is asking about Islam's forbiddance of music. Here is his finding Vivaldi samples on Dr. Octagon albums.
Alright already, stop nagging. My Top 20 Albums Of 2001:
Winter's here, but you wouldn't know it by the non-existent snow in Minneapolis. (I don't even wear a coat to work yet.) Anyway, I made this Winter Poetry application today. If I were really good, you'd be able to save your poems and send them to friends, but, well, that would take days and days of work, which I ain't got right now.
Saddam Hussein is publishing his secondromance novel. The first one doesn't appear to have been translated into English. Now, wouldn't this be the ultimate career-starter for a budding Arabic-English translator?
This is the craziest story I've read in a long time. A 28-year-old Japanese woman mysteriously dies trying to find Fargo. (This may be the first and last time I get to link to the Bismarck Tribune.)
In college, we devised our own rules for Scrabble, in which we gave points for words that were completely made up but should probably be words anyway. That reminds me of A Dictionary of Words, a blog where people post fake, imaginary, and invented words and definitions.
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."
Pft. According to this, last week's Buffy sex scene was trimmed because it was too explicit. WTF? That was the most sexually explicit piece of tv since.... since... since Buffy and Angel did it. (Tidbit: the author of this story was previously an intern at the place I work.)
Bloggus Caesari is a diary-blog written from the point of view of Caesar. It's funny, but I wish there was more insight on what Ceaser thought of RuPaul's new blog. (Tip from Helen's Loom.)
Designers know the grid for the web-safe color palate like chemists know the periodic table of elements. This version of it is much more fun though.
And here I was thinking Survivor III: Africa perpetuates insidious stereotypes about the "Dark Continent." Nope, it turns out it's perpetuating the stupid American stereotype.
Salon.com is offering some of its pay-content for free this week, in the hopes of getting you to subscribe. (A Barney Frank interview? Sign me up!)
Kid Dakota is a local musician who occasionally plays with my friends (genre: shoe-staring emo slow-core folk; boy, I'd hate it if someone called me that). Anyway, he has a new website.
Also of local note, everyone's been squawking about the Twins being potentially contracted from baseball. Frankly, I don't really care, but I do find it funny that City Pages is running a Pick Carl Pohlad's Epitaph contest. The running favorite tombstone script for the Twins owner is "If they build it, they have to come."
p.s. C'mon the new background gif isn't that bad, is it?
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.
Arianna Huffington writes about the Women of Afghanistan: "'The Northern Alliance is nothing more than just the Taliban without beards,' says RAWA's Mansoor. 'They are dogs of the same field.'"
Jonathan Dube has gathered a nice collection of links in Online Storytelling Forms. I recently did a short presentation to some design students in which I talked about some of the applications mentioned here. It began like this: "The first thing I have to say is that I'm not a designer. In fact, I don't like most designers. I like communicators. I like people who make digital objects that get people talking."
In the newest issue of WIRED, Gillian Anderson (i.e., Scully) reviews Mogwai's Rock Action, perhaps my favorite album this year. She writes: "This album is one of those musical experiences where if you happened to get into a car accident while listening to it, it would be OK. Here you are, driving, the wind is whipping, the sun is shining (or not), and oops! But you've got the music, and it's got you, cradled in a blissful semiconscious state, through the rhythm strobe of emergency vehicles, the muffled shuffle above and around, and closer... closer... and the spirit ascended to Heaven. Are you with me? Then you'll love this album. Part Low, part instrumental Radiohead, mostly themselves, it's all good." That's not exactly a spectacular review, but knowing Gillian and I share musical tastes pleases me in some spectral way.
I was just telling someone that it seemed odd that Suzanne Vega disappeared. The Onion A.V. Club ushers her back in. (Sidenote: A.V. Club is doing giant interstitial adverts now.)
After 40 years, Esquire drops Dubious issue. (Tidbit: Dave Eggers edited this one year; I don't remember if he went credited.)
When I was in college, the best concert I organized was a punk rock Michael Jackson tribute. June Panic did a unforgettable rendition of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," the bad boy's best song. That's just a set up to tell you that Michaelangelo Matos talks about "Don't Stop" in today's Mix Project.
Oprah be damned. Jonathan Franzen won the National Book Award.
I. Am. So. There.All Tomorrow's Parties LA 2002 (March 15-17) has Aphex Twin, Sonic Youth, Boredoms, Cat Power, Sleater-Kinney, Wilco, Malkmus, Stereolab, Unwound, and more. (Three days = $100.) Here's quite a find: a downloadable video of Sonic Youth's entire set at last year's event. (This year, they're the curators.)
The big day is Friday. Iron Chef USA launches. It has an official site now. It tells you who will be the four Iron Chefs, the first two challengers, the three announcers, the four celebrity judges, and of course the dish on Shatner. This unofficial page has some spoiler info. (Shout out to Barb for the link. [That was just an excuse to link to her new funny picture.]) My friends are debating whether this will be good. It could be another great Shatner moment (he sorta is karaoke incarnate), or it could be Hollywood Squares with food.
Meg of Megnut.com recently did a presentation on Weblogs as Peer-to-Peer Journalism at the O'Reilly P2P & Web Services Conference. What, you missed it? She put the notes online. (I like that the subtitle is Subverting Traditional Media. In good deconstructive twisting, saying it and striking it out is important.)
"If Don DeLillo was right in saying that Mick Jagger's lips represented the anus of a culture, then what part of our society is the face of Michael Jackson? Because the truth is, there's not really much face left in Michael Jackson's face. But fossils of it remain all over pop culture." For more, check out Salon.com's piece on Michael, The Face.
BBC.com has redesigned. Interestingly, the site takes on a look similar to International Herald-Tribune (which would get my vote for best overall media website from a design and usability standpoint). The navigation strategy, however, is straight outta the portal play book. (The Guardiandiscusses.) In other BBC news, the company is launching a controversial online news service soon.
A decade ago, I discovered what would become the world wide web via Gopher. And, somehow, I didn't realize until now that it was a homegrown product. The Strib has a good article with the University of Minnesota inventors. (See also: The Gopher Manifesto.)
Already, e-tailers are pulling out the bells and whistles for holiday shopping. ("Gee-whiz features such as gift-finders, interactive pants-sizers and customer-service instant messaging are some of the ways e-tailers are hoping they might turn virtual window shoppers into paying customers.") Correlationally, here's the argument against 3D online shopping.
I have my feelers out there to find out more about this tidbit from the latest Ansible:
China Miéville has the inside story: "My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term Al-Qaeda seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers of translated sf, is Asimov's Foundation, the title of which is translated as "Al-Qaeda." Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
Michaelangelo Matos, whose work I've followed in City Pages and Seattle Weekly, has a new online project: The Mix Project. For a year, he'll choose one song per day to write 500 words about. He admits there's nothing terribly unique about this idea, but his mixedtapes are probably better (or at least more evocative) than most.
ArtForum asked smarties to recommend books in the post-WTC world. (Homi K. Bhabha picks Wittgenstein; Avital Ronell, Derrida and Rilke; Andrew Ross, the WPA Guide to New York City.)
Witty twist on "porn star name game" over at McSweeney's. "Take your middle name as your first name. Take your mother's maiden name as your last name. That's your Romance Novelist name."
Journalists are funny. (I think I can say that since I still sorta am one.) Poynter has a forum called "Songs for Writers" where people talk about music to write to. I never knew my colleagues were so tasteless.
I think all websites should be as helpful as Hummus.com.
I should really make a separate page for "comments from writers and public intellectuals about Islam/Taliban/WTC/terrorism/anthrax." But I won't. Instead, here's another: Salman Rushdie in the Times. I also stumbled across Bruce Sterling's 9-11 Speculative Outcomes over at SciFi.com.
My Michael Kinsley adoration continues. His piece in today's Post, TV News Killing Our Precious Verbs, making quite an impact. Whose fault is it? Rupert Murdoch's, of course.
Billy Corgan has a new band: Zwan. Why am I telling you? I have no idea. But I did get the new Fugazi in the mail today, which I'll tell you about soon.
To coincide with their print redesign (engineered by the Village Voice), CityPages.com has redesigned. General grades: Navigation: thumbs up; Design: thumbs down.
Another dead dot-com: Mr. Showbiz. (It was a pioneer of sorts one too.)
Next week's Buffy is going to be so damn good that it gets eight extra minutes.
Geek notes: Google has expanded its search functionality to include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF results.
I'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.
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 Yorkersays it too.])
I have no link for this item, because I fear I may be alone. And I really hate to ask the question. Okay, I'll just ask it: Is Rumsfeld funny? I watch these daily Pentagon briefings, and I regularly find myself laughing. Before 9-11, he was on my list of "Most Detestable Humans." I'm uneasy about admitting that his humor is a rare bright spot in my dreary news-filled day.
Speaking of judgements of humor, I guess because people can't stop throwing plaudits at The Onion, it was time for a contrary voice: Peeling the Onion. The reviewer, however, seems to purposefully ingnore the more poignant headlines.
Cool link of the day: Bizarre life of Dan Rather. "Everything seems to happen to Dan Rather. In his career he's been punched, mugged, threatened with a shotgun, tear gassed, even accused (by a communist newspaper in Afghanistan) of stoning people."
The New York Post is flipping off its readers this morning.
Hm, I missed this one from a week ago: Umberto Eco on the roots of the conflict. Interesting historical perspective-making, but missing a concrete thesis. Not that I have one, though.
Douglas Coupland (version 164.4.0.3). "When writing his new book, All Families Are Psychotic, Coupland fell out with his publishers who felt the book -- a bizarre tale of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, disease and drugs -- would be too uncommercial." (Tidbit: He's publishing a book in Japanese which will be distributed via cell phones.)
And one more author note: John le Carré weighs in on it all.
FilePile.org has been around for quite a while, but it's recently redesigned, so that gives me an excuse to link to it. Should I explain it? Okay, I'll try. It's a community of users who upload files in one of four media types (audio, video, stills, text). That's it. But that doesn't sound interesting, does it? The quality is all in the randomness in what you'll find.
JohnColtrane.com is quite a pleasure. Includes a music section with fifteen great songs.
There's a good Bjork video interview over at Insound. She describes how the original title of her new album, which she calls a "love affair of the home," was Domestica. Insound, which is an essential bookmark for music fans, also has videos from Tortoise, Danielson Famile, and a whole lot more stuff you didn't see on the MTV Music Video Awards.
I wish someone would write an alternative history to the internet, one in which the propelling force of the dialectic had more to do with gimmicks than communication. With that in mind, the Turret-a-Phone turns swearing into an interactive art form.
The Onion A.V. Club has a long interview with Josh Whedon. (Buffy and Lost and the new Iron Chef will be the only tv I watch this fall.) In addition, The Onion proper continues with more impeccable headlines: God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back To All His Niggaz.
Good article about whether image search engines are a form of digital copyright infringement. Ditto.com is being sued for theirs, and one must wonder if the same will happen to the venerated Google.
This is purely geek-talk, but the new WC3 standards for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) were quietly released a couple days ago. Some predict that this could eventually overthrow Flash -- SVG is non-proprietary, SVG is cross-platform, SVG is a language. Personally, I think Flash has way too much history for this to ever happen, but this is something to watch.
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.
Apropos of my Media Prophecy, here's a round-up of good magazine articles I've found lately (all discovered in the print edition first):
I should have read DaveHickey by now. This piece in The New Yorker, wherein Hickey's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy is called possibly "the most influential works of art theory and appreciation published in the last decade," is a testament to significant art that still occurs on the fringe. (It makes me want to visit New Mexico, which must be a first.) [The link will probably disappear soon, as the NewYorker.com doesn't archive their issues online.]
Film Comment has two good stories (not online): a comprehensive review of A.I. and a double-historical analysis of the porn movie and Hollywood as myth-maker comrades.
The Wire has a transcript (not online) of Jaques Attali speaking at a Net.Music conference in London last May, where he talks about potential models of distribution for music in the future. (His website, which I'll write about in a future post about academician websites, is one of the coolest examples of a professor reaching out to people through a popular medium.) His book Noise has influenced my thinking about music and economics more than anything I've ever read. At the conference he says: "Music is a metaphor for the management of violence. When people listen to music, they listen to the fact that socity is possible: because we can manage violence." (There's also a Radiohead cover story that's worth reading.)
And, finally, NewScientist.com, which is a must-read for anyone who has even a passing interest in science and technology, has redesigned.
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?
The cover story on the new issue of Wired is 
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This year? I'm going as a Spam Filter. My nerd is bigger than yours.
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 (
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