There were 108 entries found with "music lists":
monday
Five things that intrigue me right now:
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) WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For $4.2 Million. You missed this breaking news over Thanksgiving.
3) The yearly Hood Internet dropped.
4) Pitchfork's Top Music Videos of 2011. Best year for the medium since the .90s? Sure, let's try out that idea.
5) Did You Read? This. Is. Amazing.
monday
While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?
Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.
Sigh.
But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.
With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?
So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:
[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]
30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)
29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.
27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)
26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."
25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)
24) Best of Wikipedia
...Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe...
(See also: Double Tongued.)
23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)
22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)
21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)
20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)
19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.
18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.
17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.
16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)
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.)
Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.
thursday
The 2009 List of Lists is progressing nicely. Some new things that have been added: Google's Zeitgeist, Yahoo's Year in Review, Pitchforks' Top Videos, and The Millions' Year in Reading. Please email me additions.
saturday
So yeah, the End of the Year List of Lists is happening again. [Except this year, I have no time to manage it, so please email me if you'd like to either a) manage it for a small stipend, or b) sponsor it.] It's just starting out, but a few things already added: NYT's 100 Notable Books, Amazon's Best Books, Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction, S/FJ's Best Songs and Albums, Metacritic's Best Music, and Wired's Pop Culture Moments. Be sure to email me if you have more lists.
tuesday
As 2009 encroaches, and "What are you doing for New Years Eve?" becomes the question you hear five times an hour, the list of 2008 lists is finally wrapping up. Here are some of the best recent additions: Merlin Mann's Top 10, The Copycat Effect's Top Ten Evil Clown Stories, NYT's Year in Pictures, PC Mag's 100 Favorite Blogs, Esquire's Best Bars, Fortune's 21 Dumbest Moments in Business, fourfour's 44+ Reasons To Love 2008, WSJ's Best And Worst Ads, Daily Beast's Top Ten Thinking Man's Sex Symbols, Wired's Vaporware Awards, Cracked's 12 Most Embarrassing Photos, This Recording's 13 Personalities That Mattered Most, DJ Earworm's Mashup of Billboard Top 25 Hits, and Howard Wolfson's favorite music (yep, that one).
friday
Some recent highlights from that list of lists things: Antville's Best Music Videos, Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums, Jezebel's 25 Most Annoying Elisabeth Hasselbeck Moments, AdFreak's Freakiest Ads, Smoking Gun's Mugshots of the Year, WATCH's 10 Worst Toys, Esquire's 10 Worst Members of Congress, The Onion's Year in Film, Time's People Who Mattered, The Big Picture's Year in Photographs, Yale Book of Quotations Most Notable Quotations, KEXP's Top Tens, and Regret The Error's Year in Media Errors and Corrections.
wednesday
Some of the lists recently added to the 2008 list of lists: Google's Zeitgeist, Pitchfork's 20 Worst Album Covers, Pantone's Color of the Year, Time's Top 10 Everything, New York Magazine's Year in Culture, Jonathan Yardley's Best Books, Christianity Today's Top News Stories, London Times' 100 Best Records, Salon's Book Awards, Sasha Frere-Jones' Best Of 2008, Mr. Skin's Top 20 Celebrity Nude Scenes, Global Language Monitor's Top Words of the Year, Roger Ebert's Best Films, ArtForum's Best of 2008, PetFinder's Most Popular Pet Names, and Candy Addict's Best Candy.
thursday
The yearly ginormous list of lists plods on this year. Thanks in advance for emailing me links. Some of the best lists added so far: Pitchfork's Top 40 Music Videos, Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year, Yahoo's Top Searches, Entertainment Weekly's 25 Entertainers of the Year, This Recording's Top 20 Albums, Paste's Top 50 Albums, Yahoo Movies' Top 10 Trailers, Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations, and NYT's 100 Notable Books.
monday
The best thing about wrapping up the year is that I can put the 2007 List of Lists behind me. (Note to self: never, never, never do this again, you goddamn fucking idiot.) Here are the best ones from the past week: Entertainment Weekly's Best of Everything, Idolator's Worst Album Cover, Neatorama's Year in Cats, Cool Hunting's Best of Transport, Radar's Year in Lies, Curbed's Top 10 Craziest Architectural Renderings, Cinematical's Ten Best Trailers, AdTunes' Top Ad Music, Mashable's Dumbest Startups, and Reality Blurred's Top Reality TV Whores.
thursday
The weekly recap of the best 2007 lists (as always, culled from the master List of Lists): Book Finder's Top 10 US Out of Print Books, Director File's Ten Best Music Videos, Time's Person of the Year, Sports Illustrated's Sports Pictures of the Year, The Onion A/V Club's Year in Film, Forbes' Top 25 Web Celebs, Antville's 500 Best Music Videos, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums, Neotera's Top Ten Stupid Criminals, Pop Candy's Top 100 People, Billboard's Year End Charts, and Baby Center's Top 10 Baby Names.
friday
Culled from the list of lists, here are the best 2007 lists of the past week: Radar's New Radicals, AOL's Top 10 Political Music Moments, Village Voice's Best Books, Ask.com's Top Searches, Art Forum's Best Music, Yahoo's Top Trends in Search, XLR8R's Best Albums, Drawn's Favourite Comics and Art Books, Sports Illustrated's Ten Best Trades, The Economist's Books of the Year, RealClearPolitics' Worst Election Mistakes, Mark Ronson's Albums of the Year, and of course my Top 25 Albums. Also of note: Goody Bag's rant about lists.
tuesday
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.
wednesday
As we get close to wrapping up lists 2006 (650+ lists and counting), here are the best lists of the past week: 100 most annoying things from Retrocrush, best of the web from Art Fag City, the art of science gallery from Princeton, the year in reality tv from Reality Blurred, the year in culture from Slate.com, top 12 online media stories from Cyberjournalist, top ad music from AdTunes, top sex toys from Fleshbot, top 5 lists from Comic Book Resources, top science stories from Discover, the year in games from Wired News, top 10 sex stories from San Francisco Chronicle, personalities of the year from Gawker, and a deluge of top 10s from Time.
wednesday
Culled from the list of lists, it's time for the weekly list wrap: top 100 baby names for 2006 from Baby Center, top reality tv whores from Reality Blurred, top 100 wines from Wine Spectator, top 10 cryptozoology stories from Cryptozoo, worst vlogs from 10 Zen Monkeys, top 10 cited Wikipedia entries from Wikipedia, vaporware from Wired News, least essential albums from The Onion A/V Club, best of everything from IGN, 10 best unseen films from Film Threat, artists of the year from City Pages, dozen dumbest press releases from Collateral Damage, best albums from eMusic, entertainers of the year from Entertainment Weekly, 10 best celebrity trends from Best Week Ever, 99 most desirable women from AskMen.com, and buzzwords from the New York Times.
friday
Some of the best lists of the past few days: top 10 YouTube moments from AP, top 10 TV moments from TiVo, top 100 people from Pop Candy, top 50 albums from Rolling Stone, 25 worst album covers and 25 best music videos from Pitchfork, the year in corrections from Regret the Error, photos of the year from Time, favorite podcasts from iTunes, 9 most surprising business moves from Valleywag, best music from The Onion A/V Club, and 100 things we didn't know this time last year from BBC.
monday
Best of The Lists weekend round-up: words of the year from Merriam-Webster, banished words list from Lake Superior State University, book awards from Salon, video game awards from Spike TV, worst book covers from Ed Rants, top 10 books from Stephen King, best songs and albums from Sasha Frere Jones, year-end recap from Other Music, the year in catfights from Radar, librarians of the year from the New York Times, and of course the year in ideas from the New York Times Magazine.
friday
More '06 lists? M'kay: top 50 music videos from DoCopenhagen; top 5 movie posters from Sam's Myth; best nude scenes from Mr. Skin; the year in books from Slate.com; best books, music, film, and art from Art Forum; and of course a whole lot more.
sunday
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 random pieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.)
25. Ypulse
You can count the number of people making a living by blogging on a couple of hands, but be sure to add a digit for Anastasia. If you think you know what teenagers are talking about today, you may reconsider after reading this blog, which tracks everything that the kids (Generation Y) are into. (See also: Agenda Inc.)
24. Eyeteeth & Offcenter
Through some bad twist of misfortune, I never met the multi-talented Paul Schmelzer when I lived in Minneapolis. But I've been collecting all the marvellous little spores he leaves behind on various sites around the interweb, including these two. (See also: Greg.org.)
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.)
Thanks to Andy, Greg, Lock, Matt, Jim, Robin, Andrew, David, Ted, Matt, Karl, Andrew, and Chuck for their advice on this project.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
sunday
ONLINE
The best update of Hot Or Not of all time: Fuck Kill Marry.
The cure for illegal immigration? Webcams, of course.
TV
Typography brought down Dan Rather -- could it reveal the answers to Lost too?
NEWS
Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a plane! (But real.)
FILM
Remnick on Gore in the New Yorker.
Winona has reunited with director of Heathers for something called Sex and Death 101.
Apple on the use of Keynote in An Inconvenient Truth. A design firm actually helped him with the powerpoint.... er, keynote.
Trailer to another off-beat, quirky, indie comedy! Little Miss Sunshine, starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear.
T-SHIRTS
McSweeney's Lists: Comeback T-shirts, For "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts.
Boston Globe: On t-shirts and celebrity, aka art and copyright.
GAMES
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.
BOOKS
Slate's JPod review.
MUSIC
Bjork in Street Fighter.
SPORTS
Both Klosterman and Gladwell use Kevin Garnett as important instances of different quasi-economic principles.
tuesday
Ya know, I haven't seen the Al Gore movie yet, but how fucking awesome is it that a gigantic powerpoint has been getting raves? It give nerds hope.... too much hope. On with the links:
MUSIC
National Review's Conservative Top 50 Songs. Fuck you, classic rock.
I started watching this commercial for Beck's beer thinking it was a new Beck music video. Actually, is there any difference anymore?
Suicide Girls interview with Mike Patton, whose Peeping Tom came out this week.
ONLINE
The New Yorker revisits Jason and Meg. The original, from six years ago. Gawker's take.
TV
I wonder why Pinky and the Brain isn't on DVD.
Holy shit, there's a lot of bad reality tv coming to network this summer.
LISTS
Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Lure of Lists.
WORDS
Guardian Mag profile of Douglas Coupland, in which 1) he subtly disses Steven Berlin Johnson's game book, 2) we learn he has a movie called Everything's Gone Green coming out, and 3) he delivers his definition of irony.
FILM
Google has movie trailers now too.
monday
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).
The Joshua Schachter interviews is becoming the new Craig Newmark interview.
Very long yet surprisingly uninformative NYT story on Yahoo.
FILM
Via a WSJ story not online, weekend box office reports on Bubble are quite disappointing.
Veronica Mars is in a computer movie! Looks like it sucks though.
Filmmaker interview with Linklater on A Scanner Darkly. Res has one too, but it's not online.
COMEDY
Decent NYT Styles story on the rise of the alternative comedy scene.
ADVERTISING
Alright, PETA has gone too far.
CONSUMPTION
Gillette Fusion is out. Five! Fucking! Blades! My Mach3 is totally Atari 2600 now.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Huh, the Gondry-directed video for Kanye's "Heard 'Em Say" came out after all.
Trent Rezor pre-NIN is very Flock of Seagulls.
LISTS
Oh yeah, the lists of lists aggregation machine.
monday
Apologies for the navel-gazing nature of this post, but a lot has happened in my life lately, and since this is ostensibly a personal blog (hi Mom!), here are some notes on recent personal events:
+ At work, we recently launched this new little site: NBCOlympics.com. The winter games are in Torino, Italy in February.
+ Friends, family, and pretty much all of Minneapolis already knows this, but I've never officially announced it to the estranged readers of Fimoculous: After the Olympics, I will be moving to Seattle, where I took a new job at MSNBC.com. As you probably know, MSNBC.com is co-owned by NBC and Microsoft, so I'll be working on the Microsoft campus in a fun new capacity. I'll have more to say about it later, but in the meantime... Seattle, holla fo' me, yo.
+ I was hoping to make an exciting announcement on the future of MNspeak (my local citizen journalism site) by now, but we're still sorting that out. Soon....
+ The annual list of lists got some press attention again this year. A sampling: NY Times mention (text), WCCO story (video), WAMC interview (audio), Rocketboom mention (video), Rex Blog interview (text).
+ For City Pages' annual "Artists Of The Year", I wrote about Arianna Huffington (second entry).
+ I have an essay in the new book Digital Think from the New Media Institute.
+ Random quote in a Pioneer Press story about the effect blogging will have on the '06 political season: "I'm not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."
That's all for now. My '06 resolution: Make Fimoculous cool again.
tuesday
Although I'll continue to add lists as they come in, it looks like List of Lists: 2005 is winding down. As a final punctuating coda to the year, here are my Top 20 Lists of 2005:
1) Mug Shots Of The Year from The Smoking Gun
2) Top 100 People from USA Today's Pop Candy
3) The Year In Ideas from New York Times Magazine
4) 100 Most Annoying Things from Retro Crush
5) The Best Links from Kottke.org
6) Top Viral Videos from iFilm
7) Top 20 Public Domain Files from Public Domain Torrents
8) Year In Review from Week In Review
9) 100 Most Annoying People from Am I Annoying
10) The Year In Swag from The Onion A/V Club
11) Top 50 Music Videos from DoCopenhagen
12) The Year In Corrections from Regret The Error
13) Top 10 Baby Names from Babycenter
14) 10 Sexiest Geeks from Wired News
15) Best Cast & Dogs from Dogster / Catster
16) Words of the Year from Merriam-Webster's
17) Banished Words from Lake Superior State University
18) Google Zeitgeist from Google
19) 10 Grossest Things We Saw On TV from Entertainment Weekly
20) Top Cryptozoology Stories from Loren Coleman
thursday
MUSIC
So best. Amazon has put up a page for GNR's Chinese Democracy -- check out the release date. It seems optimistic that Axl will be dead by then. (Update: drat, it's already been removed. For those who missed it, the release date was listed as December 31, 2025.)
New Fiona Apple video.
TV
Lost + wikis = Lostpedia
WEALTH
Everyone keeps emailing me Forbes' list of the 15 Wealthiest Fictional Characters to add to the list of lists, but it's not a "of the year" list.
CHRISTMAS
Sarah Silverman: "Give The Jew Girl Toys" (video).
FRIGGIN WEIRD
Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot. And I thought North Dakota was nuts.
Eminem is getting back together with his ex-wife. This guy is so Axl it's sick.
ONLINE
So yeah, CNN.com launched Pipeline, their subscription broadband multi-stream portal. I haven't even looked at it yet.
Google's 10 Golden Rules.
DESIGN
Someone did a parody of Jakob Nielsen's infamous 2000 column about Flash 1996 column about frames and pretty much just supplanted "Ajax" for "Flash" "Frames" -- even the Slashdotters got tricked for a bit.
Uh-oh, lookie what's changed: Macromedia.com.
BLOGGING
Kottke: do you keep a secret site?
The Gawker kids launched another: Consumerist.
43 songs about the blogosphere.
monday
The annual list of lists has started to take off. Rex (no relation) at RexBlog did an interview with me about list-making.
I have some big personal announcements to make soon, but first a small one: I have an essay in this new book from the American Press Institute.
Okay, some links:
MUSIC
Everyone I know wants to talk about Camille Paglia on Madonna in Salon. Seriously.
Remember The Strokes? Here's the new video for "Juicebox," the first single off their next album. It, like, rocks in that, like, MTV way, right?
DATING
Rexie's dreams really do come true: Poddater.
TV
Whoa, Veronica Mars this week, right? See the alternative ending. Double whoa!
See the new TiVo features?
ONLINE
Rocketboom: IE or Firefox? Good.
That's a whole lotta words that SF Weekly gave to Craig Newmark.
The debate at the New York Public Library between publishers and Google is now online (mp3).
Google has started a new blog for Google Base. Hopefully it will tell me what the hell to do with Google Base.
BLOGS
Panopticist: Gawker as purchased by NYT.
Holy nobody-cares-but-everybody-cares: Calacanis and Jarvis are cat-fighting.
FILM
Long Ebert profile in Chicago magazine.
sunday
For those of you who read this site via RSS, I've launched the 2005 List of Lists page. (Previously: 2004 | 2003 | 2001.) As usual, email me if I'm missing something.
DATING
Is it true that Match.com had its employees go on bogus dates just to keep people subscribed to the service? And do they post faux-profiles that present flirtatious intent? Yes, according to a lawsuit...
New York Magazine has six sex columnists compare notes.
BOOKS
Not sure what this rebranding is about, but print.google.com has become books.google.com.
GalleyCat has an excellent first-hand account of last week's New York Public Library debate between Google and publishers groups. (Also in NYT.)
I didn't even realize that NYT gave Marjane Satrapi (the author of Persepolis) a blog which apparently illustrates her experience growing up in Iran. I say "apparently" because it's behind Time Select.
MUSIC
The only good thing about reissues is getting to read contemporary rock critics on classics. Pitchfork, somewhat surprisingly, rolls out a 10.0 for Springsteen's Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition.
CELEBRITY
Google Maps + Celebrity Addresses = Celebrity-Maps.com
PHILOSOPHY
Deborah Solomon calls up Jean Baudrillard for an interview in the Sunday Times Mag. Peculiar answers.
TV
Did you hear about this supposed reality show where contestants will be tricked into believing they're in outer space!? (via)
FILM
The trailer to some crazy ass shit that Tarantino produced.
wednesday
Don't ask. Really, just don't ask.
DVD
You saw that Errol Morris' First Person and DVD Collection came out yesterday, right? Delish.
BLOGS
Forbes: Best of the Web, The Blog Edition.
Lockhart (Curbed, Gawker) has a strange video profile where you see him blog. And Elizabeth Spiers (Mediabistro) has a profile of her own.
ONLINE
I'm not unbeaten at AimFight, but I've got a pretty good record. (Username: ibsrex)
How Craigslist has changed New York.
OJR is trying to do a Wiki story on video journalists.
MUSIC VIDEOS
NIN's "Only".
ADVERTISING
Yeah, another Burger King minisite. This one is a faux metal band named Coq Roq.
FILM
The reason you've seen Natalie Portman bald: V for Vendetta trailer.
DATING
Whoa, this NYT story says that 58 percent of people have dated someone at work.
tuesday
What did I do over the long weekend? I saw both War of the World and Star Wars: Episode Three, so that you don't have to. But mostly I waited for the "Karl Rove is the Valerie Plame leak" plot to develop -- but it hasn't even made it onto NYT yet. Please God, let it be Rove.
BLOGS
Someone should write a crazy-murderer-speech-algorithm that catches things like this blog, which was written by Joseph Duncan, who's being held for murder in Idaho. I have a ton more links over at MNspeak.
Reading NYT's piece on writers who are using blogs to help write books, it's immediately glaring how many of these books are exactly what my friends and I are reading right now (including Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You) and are looking forward to reading (including David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, and John Battelle's The Search.
Tony Pierce lists the 100 Greatest American Men of All Time.
FILM
In a wait rivaling Chinese Democracy, the release of the movie Prozac Nation is finally upon us today -- but it went straight to DVD.
MEDIA
Wired has most of its Remix issue online. It's my favorite issue in many months.
NYT reports on Romenesko's salary, a cool $169K/year.
MUSIC
NME has a bit about Franz Ferdinand's new album, due in September. And another bit about The Darkness' new album, due in October.
127 is a Iranian band that has been trying to play in the U.S. since at least SXSW, but hasn't gotten in yet. And they don't sound bad. Here's one profile from the Chi Trib about them.
Missy Elliot's new album, The Cookbook, comes out today.
CELEBRITY
Finally, it took Tom Cruise to get the brilliance of Brooke Shields onto the NYT Op/Ed pages.
BOOKS
Suicide Girls interviews Rick Moody.
DESIGN
158-image slideshow from IDEA / Business Week's annual designs awards.
SHOES
Casa Camper is a Barcelona hotel designed by Camper shoes. Yeah, I don't get it either.
ART
Decent NYT story on wetware (aka bioart).
sunday
TV
The stupid TiVo auto-recorded the final episode of the Capital Gang this weekend, and it made me wonder if political shows have always been this dull.
MUSIC
NYT Mag profiles Nic Harcourt, "the star maker of the semipopular," of KCRW radio.
Nike rips off Minor Threat. And Hot Topic is selling John Coltrane t-shirts.
BOOKS
Why someone isn't translating these Saddam Hussein novels into English is a complete mystery to me.
The world's most popular authors (according to Google Adsense).
Apparently NYTRB couldn't avoid reviewing The Washingtonienne and finally caved in.
ART
The Salvador Dalí Museum (which is right next to the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg) is moving, thanks to Jeb Bush.
McSweeney's: Things Not Overheard At A Conceptual-Art Gallerying Opening.
MISC. WORK THINGS
Little Lost Robot likes my "Send To Proof" button!
Whenever someone uses the word juvenile to describe some piece of cultural junk, I immediately want it. That said, I've never really understood the appeal of NewsBreakers.org, the pranksters behind the tv live-shot media stunts. However, NYT chooses to stack them next to Howard Stern and the Merry Pranksters. I guess if there were more of a point to what they do (like, say, The Guerilla Girls), I might be more sympathetic. Then again, saying that these pranks lack a point is, well, missing the point. I guess.
In college, Lawrence, Kan. was synonymous with William Burroughs (for me, anyway). Now, in my new media work world, it's forever associated with online news innovation. NYT looks at what The Lawrence Journal-World is in The Newspaper of the Future.
sunday
ONLINE MEDIA
The L.A. Times has pulled down Wikitorial (announced here and touted and denounced in many places).
MSN is hiring bloggers.
In the past, you needed a RealOne subscription to watch video on CNN.com. Starting today, you no longer do.
MSNBC.com teases its redesign.
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.
MUSIC VIDS
Forget those wannabes, here's the real deal: Nancy Sinatra's "The Boots Were Made For Walking" (1966).
TECH
Microsoft is developing a BitTorrent alternative.
I have no idea why everyone is surprised that Google is developing a PayPal rival. The second that Google Video was announced, it was an obvious step (and Google Print will likely be next).
YouTube. It appears to be Flickr for video... and I think it's new. At the same time, Vimeo has moved out of beta.
SHOES & TEES
Custom M.I.A. Reeboks.
Gimme.
WORDS
Dave Eggers issues a "small correction" on Neal Pollack's strange essay in NYTBR.
AUDIO
Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speach.
Sexy podcasts.
MUSIC
The Onion A.V. Club presents this mixlist of highlights from moments when gaming and music collide.
tuesday
WORDS
Awesome: List of fictional curse words.
Common Errors in English.
McSweeney's: Pickup Lines: The First Drafts.
Random House: Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers Contest.
ONLINE
Best CNN.com homepage ever.
Best TV promo ever.
First indication [?] of who's behind Blogebrity.
I haven't been following Podcasting on this site, but I found it odd that TV Guide is now podcasting.
MUSIC
That immensely annoying frog song is at the top of the British charts.
Kaleefa Sanneh sings the praises of the new White Stripes.
New releases today: A Bjork remix and covers album, a new Oasis (which is getting a surprising amount of attention), and a new Smog.
New Yorker: The Record Effect.
In Spin, Chuck dissects music genres. "IDM: This is an acronym for 'Intelligent Dance Music.' Really. No, really. I'm serious. This is what they call it. Really."
Nerve.com: Sex Advice from Accordion Players.
TV
The first and second seasons of Moonlighting came out on DVD today.
TVsquad interviews Kendra from The Apprentice, who will be heading down to Palm Beach to oversee construction of a new Trump mansion, and according to this Palm Beach Post story, taking a salary cut.
FILM
New Wallace & Gromit trailer.
A lucious six-flick Steve McQueen box set came out today. Makes me want to watch Bullitt right now.
Oliver Stone Arrested on Drug, DUI Charges.
MEDIA
Are you reading NYT's series on Class? Here's a fun interactive graphic showing how much class you have.
Kurt Andersen thinks Radar looks just a wee bit like another magazine from the '80s.
BOOKS
Bookforum: Pynchon From A to V.
NYT Styles this week looks at the glut of sex-themed books, which I won't say a thing about because I know at least two girls writing these.
I don't know if anyone is reading Umberto Eco's new book, but here's a profile of him in the Telegraph.
Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat.
sunday
LIFE
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.
Merriam-Webster: Top 10 Favorite Words Not in the Dictionary.
MEDIA
Who says the flash-in-the-pan media doesn't follow-up on stories after they've faded as talking points? WaPo has a long story on the hacker behind Paris Hilton's Sidekick scam.
I found an issue of Radar today (not supposed to be available for a couple days), and you know what? It's actually pretty good.
ONLINE
My dear internet, you have jumped the shark. Blogebrity.
NYT on Rocketboom's search for a weather person.
MUSIC
David Cross: Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews.
MIDI GNR: SelfSimilarGNR.com. Sounds a bit like Axl done by Kraftwerk.
NYT: Neil Diamond hanging with Rick Rubin.
New Basement Jaxx video: "U Don't Know Me."
FILM
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.)
Film Critic: The All-Time Top 100 Voices in the Movies.
NYT: For $1 You, Too, Can Be an Executive Producer. Profiles the attempts of MovieForTheMasses.org and IBI Films to micro-fund movie projects.
New Greg Araki: Mysterious Skin trailer.
WORDS
The meta-ness of Brett Easton Ellis.
LOCAL
Over on MNspeak, the Rogue Taxidermy cabal have a new website, Chuck was on the O.C., Flashmobs revisited, and Bob Mould releases new songs.
thursday
TV
The Onion A/V Club wishlists "war" on TiVo and records the results. Lots of Nickelodeon, ABC Family, and VH1.
Video: Jon Stewart's appearance on Oprah. Why the hell Cameron Diaz is sitting there is the biggest mystery since... since... since they gave Jimmy Kimmel a tv show. (Sorry, I know I can do better than that.)
Video of Ann Coulter getting freaky on FOX.
FILM
Here we are in 2005, and who could have guessed the words "the new film by Rob Zombie" would appear?
Those Taschen books are always so tempting, aren't they? Erotic Cinema. [Amazon link.]
ONLINE
You knew it was big news when you saw the 40-point hyperbolic headline on Drudge: GOOGLE KNOWS WHAT YOU SEARCHED LAST NIGHT.
WORDS
Village Voice hangs out with the famous lit bloggers.
MEDIA
It's been a while since we've seen a Romenesko profile.
MUSIC
Slate recounts the Fiona Apple fiasco, addressing the obvious Wilco comparisons.
LOCAL
Many months ago, I was actually thinking the best localite to review the new Walker would be Peter Ritter. And there he is in CP today. He nicely conjures the Death Star, the Cheshire Cat, and an REI climbing wall to describe out new fave ediface. Hoorah, our first readable Walker review.
tuesday
MEDIA
This is pretty neat: The Annotated New York Times. The site lists NYT stories with real-time reaction from the blogosphere. Curious if NYT Corp will frown on this.
Last time I saw Robin [blog], he wouldn't even whisper to me what the real name of INdTV would be. It officially launched today as Current TV. (C|Net story.) Looks exciting, even though The Post is being all playa-hatah about it.
MUSIC
McSweeney's: Implausible Claims Made By Vanilla Ice In His 1990 No. 1 Hit "Ice Ice Baby." "My style's like a chemical spill."
Tuesday is new-release day, but there's not much. Hot Hot Heat has a new album (Elevator) and so does Fisherspooner (Odyssey).
ONLINE
Google Maps has added Keyhole data, so you can now see satellite pics too.
FILM
Stereogum is all over this Pretty In Pink sequel.
New on DVD today: The Corporation and Sideways.
If you like Hal Hartley, you might want to check out the DVD collection of his short films. Includes an obscure short with Adrienne Shelley and Parker Posey as roller-blading, lip-synching cupids. (Trailer.)
TV
FOX is creating a reality tv cable channel.
If you feel like dropping $160, The Complete First Four Seasons of The West Wing came out on DVD today.
PEOPLE
Xeni lives in L.A.? Huh.
LOCAL
The Strib likes The Rake this week.
monday
FILM
New Line Cinema picked up Klosterman's new book (not out until July) for a potential film. I'm a "character" in the book again, and am demanding to be played by someone no less handsome than Giovanni Ribisi (which I'm sure means Steve Buscemi will be Rex Sorgatz). I'll do some kind of review of the book here in a couple months, but if you're curious, it's Chuck's modern-relationship-cum-dead-rock-star opus. (Previously: Rex Rock City.)
Pedro's house in Napoleon Dynamite is up for sale.
Everyone's talking about Old Boy (trailer), which won Cannes this year.
War of the Worlds trailer. Starring Tom Cruise; directed by Steven Speilberg.
Finally a Joss Whedon comeback? He will direct the next Wonder Woman movie. Radosh predicts the lead.
Woody Allen interviewed in... SuicideGirls.com? Huh.
ONLINE/TECH
Yahoo bought Flickr. A great move for Yahoo, which is kicking Google's ass in the user-generated content arena.
And Ask Jeeves is being bought by Barry Diller.... for $1.9 billion. Jeesh, Jeeves.
Somebody please stop Christine Rosen from publishing this story again. First in The New Atlantis, she wrote about how cell phones and TiVos are ruining our lives. Now she's done it again in a NYT Mag essay.
Agence France Presse is suing Google News. Although I'm sure this will quickly get settled out of court, this raises an interesting spectre around Google News, which makes no money because there are no ads -- and this almost gaurantees it never will.
The upcoming Microsoft typefaces for the next version of Windows.
SHOES
Pimp my shoe! NYT Mag story on shoe customizers who will turn a pair of Nikes into $500 collector's items.
Adidas' computerized sneaker.
Converse's "Spin The Bottle" commercial.
Reebok's controversial 50 Cent spot.
TV
Someone is aggregating all the Daily Show video links on one page. Sweet.
The video of the Lessig on West Wing episode.
Firefox advert or Franz Ferdinand video? You decide.
Everyone who wasn't talking about Flickr/Yahoo rumors at SXSW Interactive last week was talking about the Tivo/Comcast deal. Here's a good follow-up interview with the CEO of Comcast, which clears up some of the questions. [Via LostRemote.]
GAMES
For those who don't think Vice City is gritty enough, here's a preview to the new 50 Cent game, Bulletproof.
MUSIC
Tom Waits lists his top 20 albums.
Pitchfork gives the new Moby album a 2.4.
SXSW
Why can't it be SXSW every day? Here's a small selection of people that I had the great pleasure of speaking with for somewhere between 5 minutes and 8 hours in Austin last week: Malcolm Gladwell (author: Blink, Tipping Point), Chuck Olsen (blogger & filmmaker: Blogumentary), Rex Hammock (blogger: Rex Blog), Rob Davis (marketing maverick: Mozilla Foundation), Tara Hacker (blogger: HumminaHummina.com), John Vars and Ted Rheingold (web guys: Dogster), David Hudson (blogger: Green Cine Daily), Andrew Krukoff (blogger: Krucoff.com), Amanda Congdon & Andrew Barron (videobloggers: Rocketboom), Michaelangelo Matos (writer: The Seattle Weekly), Molly Steenson (blogger: Girl Wonder), Chuck Klosterman (author: lots of stuff), Lockhart Steele (editor: Gawker Media), Jason Kottke (blogger: Kottke.org), Jake Dobkin (publisher: Gothamist), Jason Calacanis (founder: Weblogs Inc.), Ricky Engelberg (digital guy: Nike), Ross Raihala (writer: Pioneer Press), Melissa Maerz (editor: Spin), Jennifer Maerz (editor: The Stranger), Matthew Haughey (web community guru: Metafilter & PVR Blog), Lindsey Thomas (editor: City Pages), Craig Finn (rocker: The Hold Steady), Bridgette Reinsmoen (editor: City Pages), Dave Campbell (publicist: 2024 Records), Alex Pappademas (editor: Spin), Anna Lee (fashionista: Voltage), Keith Harris (writer: freelance writer), and that one coke dealer. And how come no one told me Tony Pierce was in the house? Here are a few pics.
LOCAL
They love us! Both Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times wrote about our new museum expansion this week. In Newsweek, The Walker is called "probably the leading American venue for cutting-edge artists (both visual and performing)." Description: "The tour de force of their building is the silvery five-story cube, with its daredevil cantilevered corner hovering over the entrance -- anchored by hidden tons of steel and concrete -- and the whole shebang wrapped in shimmering aluminum-mesh panels that look as light and luscious as crumpled silk." In NYT, The Walker is dubbed "a place that prefers artful provocation to blockbuster entertainment, privileges the obscure and experimental over the tried-and-true, and cultivates a willful insouciance about the forces that govern most big museum establishment." And many arty lavishes are dished on our fair city.
It's sad that the problems that The Varsity Theater is having sound like something out of Kafka. The only good (if selfish) news is that the TC ElectroPunk Show might be rescheduled to a date that I'm in town.
friday
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?
Spike Jonze directs a commercial for Adidas. Music by Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O.
The 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs.
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.
New Woody Allen comedy: Melinda and Melinda trailer. Looks better than most recent films from the Woodster.
Website for the Wallace & Gromit movie, coming to theaters later this year.
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.
New Yorker on Bukowski.
Convicted killer reviews book about himself on Amazon.com.
BLOGS
If you don't have access to daytime cable tv, you might not know that Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has pretty much taken over MSNBC during the day. Here's a video of him running down news on the blogosphere.
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.
NYT Arts does strange back-to-back blogger profiles of Rosi O'Donnell (blog) and Will Wheaton (blog).
MEDIA
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.
CJR: The Case for Comics Journalism.
Slate takes a crack at the ol' 'who is a journalist?' conundrum.
DESIGN
The nominees for the 2005 Flash Film Festival are out. There's a ton of good stuff in there.
LOCAL
I hope you're noticing that Diablo Cody is doing excellent work at CP. Her analysis of Conan O'Brien this week is spot-on.
Twin Cities Pinball Database.
Made it over to Varsity Theater yet? Peter has a good historical story, which includes info about the genesis of the word Dinkytown.
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.
Even more anti-Star-Tribune blogging: Anti-Strib.
Greg debates our similarities with Canadians. He's so dead.
Dan Rather retires, and what do the kids in the local right-wing blogosphere (who helped oust him) do? Party!
friday
POLITICS
Another design contest from MoveOn.org: BushIn30Years.com.
DRINK
Adjectives Rarely Used By Wine Tasters.
MUSIC
Sasha Frere-Jones on ringtones in The New Yorker. Contains surprisingly detailed info about the development of polyphonic ringtone and true tone, and some good-to-quote-at-parties information about such topics as the most popular genre (hip-hop -- 56%). My personal ringtone right now is the theme to Cops -- "Bad boys, bad boys, what'chya gonna do?" It's instantly recognizable. My last ringtone was the theme to Six Feet Under, which was also surprisingly recognized by anyone in their 30s.
A strange mashup of The Beatles' Revolver, which includes tracks with Beck, Madonna, Portishead, Coldplay, Genesis, Hendrix, Deeelite, The Who, The Cure, The Monkees, and Goldfrapp. This is what the kids call "good."
Beck is debuting five new songs on The O.C.
Dizzee Rascal arrested (cops found pepper spray and weed).
Rafat at PaidContent.org has started a blog with Billboard on the economics of digital music.
FILM
You've been hearing me complain about movie trailers getting their own releases, and now we have an example of a trailer to a trailer. Madness.
Just noticed the Illegal-Art.org is selling a DVD-R that contains a bunch of good stuff, including that banned Todd Haynes / Karen Carpenter video.
The SXSW Film site has trailers to most of the films. Here are some that jumped out at me: Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic | Childstar | Palindromes.
DESIGN
Amazingly cool visual representation (using Flash) of Coltrane's "Giant Steps."
Google Image Search Montage Maker. Fun.
TV
Lawrence Lessig on CSPAN's Digital Future Series (that link has an archive).
The "I Hate Arrested Development" Contest.
I wonder how many other people (besides me) googled "4 8 15 16 23 42" after this week's episode of Lost. Yep, nothing.
VH1's Best Week Ever has completely revved up their website. Includes lots of video and a new blog.
BLOGGERS
Video to last night's Daily Show segment on bloggers-as-journalists that featured Jay Rosen.
As a run-up to her keynote at SXSW, Wonkette interviewed in the Austin Chronicle.
Kottke interviewed in Newsweek.
MEDIA
Alright, who photoshopped all the real media celebs into the FishbowlNY Launch Party pics? Ariel Kaminer, Ira Silverberg, John Homans, David Carr, Maer Roshan, and whoever-the-fuck else? When the hell did launching a website make you famous enough to dine at Michael's?
Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism.
ONLINE
The guy behind GroupHug.us has written a book. Boston Globe interview.
Almost a year-and-a-half ago, I did a post about what Friendster can do to keep its users, and perhaps develop a subscription model. Sixteen months later, some of those features are finally starting to show up. Yesterday, they added a subscription-based blogging tool powered by Typepad. (It kinda sucks.)
MARKETING
Dunkin Donuts is trying to go middlebrow.
LOCAL
Best news since they tore down the plexiglass: First Ave redesigned their website.
Cool! Amusement rides as transportation!
New Patriot is delving into video blogging by interviewing a candidate for Minneapolis Library Board.
Club 331 quietly opened in Northeast this week.
monday
FOUND ONLINE
Found on Amazon.com: JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. ($20K. Read the reviews.)
Found on Wikipedia: Twoallbeefpattiesspecialsauce
lettucecheesepicklesonionsona
sesameseedbun.
Found on McSweeney's: Necrophiliac Pickup Lines.
MUSIC
Someone mixed that Nina Gordon cover of "Straight Outta Compton" with video from NWA.
NYT: We Hate the 80's. The premise is GenX-ers aren't buying the nostalgia machine. I wonder.
New Gorillaz. Excellent.
WaPo: the future music format is no format.
FILM
A mobile film festival: Mobicine.com.
New film from Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur Miller): The Ballad of Jack and Rose.
Hanging out in Roger Ebert's four-and-a-half-story Chicago town house.
PUBLISHING
NYT profiles the site InsideHigherEd.com, "the first significant competition in higher education publishing since the intellectual-if-gossipy Lingua Franca folded." The site was started by two Chronicle of Higher Education alums.
Nerve.com: My Unrequited Love For A McSweeney's Writer.
At Salon.com, Laura Miller profiles H.P. Lovecraft, "America's greatest bad writer."
MEDIA
Rolling Stone profiles the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is more to the right than Fox News.
In an otherwise unessential read, the first paragraph of this NYT story reveals that Armstrong Williams' partner in the Graham Williams Group was Stedman Graham -- yes, Oprah's boyfriend.
Jeff Jarvis was on Reliable Sources this weekend, talking Eason Jordon and Jeff Gannon. Here's the video.
NYT: Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters.
FUNNY DOGS
NYT Mag: Questions For Triumph The Insult Comic Dog.
TV
Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me has a new film tv show in development in which a group of mothers drink what the average college senior drinks over the course of a month. Gawker has the casting call.
ManiaTV, a streaming tv network with music videos. I watched during the Grammy's and it wasn't bad.
NYT: The History Of Girls Kissing On TV. (I thought the first was Roseanne -- turns out, it was L.A. Law.)
B&C looks at the insurance costs inside Fear Factor and others. Includes a list of all the lawsuits filed against reality tv shows.
DESIGN
Cool interface for looking at baby name popularity.
Authenticity: A User's Guide.
NETFLIX
Ever wondered what a Netflix distribution center was like? Okay.
LOCAL
Did you know that Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson are hanging out in the Iron Range?
Chalk up another quasi-win for Minnesota bloggers. Captain's Quarters was one of the leading blogs behind Eason Jordon's ouster.
thursday
LOCAL
Chuck has a post about yesterday's Blogumentary screening.
IDEAS
Since everyone else is interviewing Malcolm Gladwell, why not ESPN. Probably the best conversation that I've ever read about the Super Bowl.
MEDIA
Buy Might magazines through the 826 Valencia site.
Strange yet cool Flash thing at BBC: Onelife. You feed your little dancing boy some booze, coke, weed, E, shrooms, or speed -- and then you watch him dance. Pro-drug or anti-drug?
ONLINE
The Absolute Bottom 50 Blogs. #50: MyBlogAboutHowLameIThinkBlogsAre.com
Ikea chat bot.
I've been complaining for a while that Amazon doesn't offer special deals to heavy users of the site -- people who spend, say, a thousand bucks a year there (who you lookin at?). A small step is Amazon Prime, which gives a year of free two-day shipping for $79. (But if this takes away free shipping for the $25+ orders, I'm gonna be pissed off.)
Oh goodie. MSN is launching a gigantic ad campaign for its new search engine. And if you're into that kind of thing, MSN redesigned their homepage -- and it's even using strict XHTML.
In Business 2.0, a profile of eBay's global expansion. Almost half of its business is now from outside the U.S.
BLOGS
Yahoo Japan launched blogs, so you can probably expect it in the U.S. soon.
The Associated Press is starting a blog called Bad Language.
In addition to the all the new blogs, MediaBistro changed their entire front page into a blog.
Wonkette has hung up the typewriter while she finishes her novel. Choire Sicha fills in.
TV
Martha Stewart has been hired by Donald Trump.
Wired's profile of Comedy Central.
MUSIC
For you music journalists who will be interviewing Beck when his new album comes out this spring: The Secret Life of Beck Hansen - A Guide for the Professional Journalist. Who will be the first to get him to talk about Scientology?
The new Index (the one with the real Yoshimi on the cover) has a one-page blurb on Kim Gordon, but the picture of her is priceless.
Coachella lineup announced. Surprisingly '90s.
Audio-Video Mashup of Monkees' "I'm a Believer" and Beatles' "Paperback Writer."
iPoditude.com: The iPod Blog.
The Flickr Song.
Pitchfork: The Top 100 Singles: 2000-04.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Kinda cool 360-degree video. The music is by a band called Two Lone Swordsmen.
Death Cab For Cutie's "Title & Registration".
FILM
"The first film to be made from a Don DeLillo script, Game 6, had its premiere at Sundance a couple of weeks ago." More info.
Michael Tortorello reviews the documentary Game Over, which recounts the 1997 Deep Blue versus Gary Kasparov match.
Flashback: trailer to Godard's Maculin, Féminine.
Another maybe-interesting documentary: Inside Deep Throat.
MARKETING/BIZ
Top brands of 2004. 1) Apple 2) Google 3) Ikea 4) Starbucks 5) Al Jazeera.
Business 2.0's 101 Dumbest Moments and The Smart List.
DESIGN
MediaBistro interviews the legendary Roger Black.
LOCAL
CityPages.com is doing a redesign, and here's a screenshot of what it will look like. Hm, looks busy.
Yo, yo, guess who's blogging. Your mayor (and it's not fake -- PiPress article).
I think I'm on Jim Walsh's side on our new radio station. "Predictably, and sadly, within hours of the station's launch last Monday came the bitching. It wasn't this enough or that enough. It was too soft or too hard. The porridge wasn't just right." My friends like to debate The Current, and that's what I like most about it. Plus, it does things like interview Low.
friday
TV
Someone has posted the video of the new American version of The Office.
Amazon plugs A9.com on The OC.
ONLINE
Yahoo introduces a new mobile tool, which moves online content to your cellphone.
FILM
A couple new documentary trailers: Gunner Palace (Iraq) and Watermarks (female Jewish swimmers).
Oh, and finally Christina Ricci is back, in a Wes Craven flick, Cursed. (Plus Portia de Rossi!)
TOYS
Action figures from Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, -- my fave -- Pieter Breughel.
Probably the first time we've linked to a poem here: I Ate My Ipod Shuffle.
MEDIA
Up next: Marketwatch's Jon Friedman answers how CBS can salvage the evening news.
MUSIC VIDEOS
Norman Cook's Bikini Wax.
MUSIC
Mojo's Top 100 Soundtracks of All Time.
LOCAL
Old friend, Sarah Henning reviews Low for the Duluth News Tribune.
tuesday
ONLINE
I'm sure your inbox filled up yesterday too. All your nerdy friends sent the link to Bill Gates striking a pose in a 1983 issue of Teen Beat. Hot!
The New Yorker picks a strange site to profile: CollegeHumor.com.
Up next: Google is buying.... dark fiber?
The world's first blogger, Justin Hall sort of had a breakdown in January 2005.
Somebody claims to have created a program that will remove DRM from Windows Media files. If true, this could be catastrophic for Microsoft. Bah, nevermind. But it makes you wonder what happens when this actually does occur.
TV
You're not hallucinating. Networks have been tagging an extra minute to their schedules to deceive TiVos (though they deny that's why). See also in the L.A. Times: Looking for New Ways to Make Viewers Pay, which hypothesizes the future of DVRs becoming a pay-model for the networks.
The Long Tail TV Conclusion.
Time lists those in the running for Dan Rather's job: Katie Couric, Ted Koppel, John Roberts, Scott Pelley, Mika Brzezinski, and Anderson Cooper. Katie is gonna get it, but I'm cheering for Anderson.
I'm probably the only person you know who TiVos Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. CommonDreams.org has an editorial critiquing the CNN show.
T-SHIRTS
The Blog!
PHONES
Good close-ups of the new Treo. I still haven't decided if it's worth $500+ to upgrade. The only benefits that affect me are the increased screen quality and the better camera.
IDEAS
Random thought: do you think we'll start hearing the word blink all the time now? I imagine in the blink of an eye being resurrected just like tipping point was. Damn you, Gladwell!
MUSIC
Getting there before Pazz & Jop do, Amy's Robot applies the old algorithm methodology on the best albums of 2004.
I've never heard of this collective of video directors: Colonel Blimp. You'll find videos from The Chemical Brothers, The Streets, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Spiritualized, New Order, Dizee Rascal, Bjork, and Basement Jaxx. Good stuff.
MEDIA
It's interesting that I haven't found a single reason to link to Slate.com since the buy-out by the Washington Post. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it certainly looks like dullville over there lately.
thursday
DESIGN
Pitchfork redesigned. I don't know why this is considered better -- it looks more busy and harder to digest. But there oodles of new ads, so that's probably why they redesigned.
Nerdy Wired-ish graphic of the Apple's Tipping Point.
MUSIC
Jay-Zeezer, a mashup of Jay-Z and Weezer. Prediction: after a certain point, the phrase "interesting in theory" takes over this entire genre, and no one ever listens to a mash-up again because everyone just imagines what it will sound like.
Creative Commons and Wired have launched CC Mixter, "where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
Because I know at least one old-school indie rocker still reads this blog: Steve Albini talks about food.
MEDIA
E&P: All about the International Game Journalists Association.
New magazine: JPG Magazine.
This week, Media Hack looks at bloggers who are also reporters, with observations from Chris Allbritton, Om Malik, and Peter Rojas.
New WSJ column, The Numbers Guy, "a new column on the way numbers and statistics are used -- and abused -- in the news, business and politics."
BOOKS
The Chicago Tribune profile of Jessa Crispin (the proprietor of Bookslut) contains a list of her favorite books of all time. (Bookslut was one of my blogs of the year.)
Malcolm Gladwell's book tour dates.
TECH
You probably saw the interview where Bill Gates calls the Creative Commons advocates communists, and now Gizmodo asks him to clarify. (There's the funny point at the end where they disagree on agreeing.)
NYT: Google corrects advertisers' grammer.
T-SHIRTS
Architecture Sucks.
More Cowbell.
Gawker.
LOCAL
Mary Lucia posting about the new NPR music station.
monday
BEST YEAR EVER
I'm closing the doors on Lists 2004 with over 550 links and nary a word of rhapsodizing from me. See ya next year.
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.)
BoingBoing has put up the video to ABC's "people of the year" award that went to bloggers. The piece included visuals (but no links) of Gawker, Kottke, Instapundit, and Wonkette.
I missed linking to it over the holidays, so let's put up Wired's BitTorrent story now. If you work in TV media, you should read it. (In the meantime, Suprnova went down, but a successor to BitTorrent, Exeem, which includes decentralized indexing, was released.)
Anonymous CableNewser readers (half of whom are probably cable news network employees with Fox News ringtones) make their 2005 predictions.
TiVoToGo has launched. AP story.
T-SHIRTS
I wish I had thought of this idea: Preshrunk, a blog about t-shirts. My two faves pointed out so far: I Fuck Like A Girl (from Mighty Girl) and I Liked You Better Before You Sold Out (from Diesel Sweeties).
MEDIA
As something of a follow-up to the fantastic Control Room (which, by the way, Chuck Olsen gave his Artist of the Year award to), Al Arabiya (the main competition to Al Jazeera) lands on the cover of Times Mag this week. See also: Wired's similar story from July.
Dan Gillmor (who recently left the Mercury News to start his own citizen journalism business) has a new blog: Grassroots Journalism.
Future of media predictions from Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, NY Post, and L.A. Times.
IDEAS
The Fast Company profile of Malcolm Gladwell is online.
MUSIC
Nellie McKay gets the long profile in NYT Mag.
ART
Choire Sicha interviews the creator of CremeasterFantic.com, which turns out to be a quasi-hoax.
DESIGN
Somewhat funny: The Vice A to Z of Design.
LOCAL
I saw our girl Randi Kaye reading the news for the first time on CNN today. It also looks like she'll also be on the unbrazenly-titled CNN Saturday Morning.
The rogue taxidermy just keeps on rolling. Creative Electric lands in The Times today. Dave has added more pics and a storefront to the Creative Electric website. (The closing party for the Mark Mothersbaugh show is Jan. 15.)
My pal John Lamb, who writes a column for the Fargo Forum, is doing a column where his readers vote on what his New Year's Resolution should be.
saturday
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.
monday
Holy retromania. At least a hundred new "Of The Year" lists showed up over Christmas break. They are all still collected right here, but below are some highlists:
Google Zeitgeist from Google.
Best Films of 2004 from Roger Ebert.
The Year In (Your Catchphrase Here) from NY Times.
Top Six Reality TV Whores from Reality Blurred.
Top Cryptozoology Stories from Loren Coleman.
20 Best Music Videos from Rolling Stone.
10 Greatest Music Videos from RES.
Top 50 Albums from Pitchfork.
10 Best Albums You Didn't Hear from Spin.
Media Person of the Year from I Want Media.
10 Moments In Bad Journalism from L.A. Times.
Best Architecture from Time.
Best Architecture from NY Times.
Best Video Games from Time.
Best Video Games from San Francisco Chronicle.
Top 100 People of the Year from USA Today.
Entertainers of the Year from Entertainment Weekly.
Best Live TV Moments from NY Times.
10 Best TV Show from Entertainment Weekly.
Most Watched & TiVoed from NY Times.
10 Ads You Won't See from Ad Age.
Best Ads from Adland.
The Year in Satire from Salon.com.
Best Comix from Time.
Take 6 from Village Voice.
The Full List.
tuesday
Before anyone tries to talk you into uttering senseless historical inanities, let's just clear this up: 2004 was not "The Year of the Blog." This was not the year of Howard Dean's bold online campaign, nor was it the year of dismantling Trent Lott. It wasn't even the year of the Paris Hilton tape. That was all last year, and while we have plenty to celebrate about '04, it's best to approach the past 365 days wearing a new look: maturity. In other words, this was the year blogs grew up.
Don't mistake that assessment as a suggestion that blogs are slipping into a rheumatic slumber. To be sure, it was a good year, one in which we (may I use the royal first person?) booted a tiresome TV anchor, sparred with the FCC, pre-reported Ken Jennings' demise, and discovered an entire radical music movement. Excellent work, and that's not even counting the intrepid analysis of Tara Reid's nipple.
But this was a landmark year for independent publishers not so much because of Lewinsky-size scoops, but because the internet came into its own as a medium for experiencing news events. Think about it -- look how many events didn't necessarily happen first online, but seemed to exist because of the blogosphere. The moments that best defined culture in '04 -- the best political debate (Jon Stewart pouncing on Crossfire), the best sex media scandal (Bill O'Reilly raping a falafel), the best TV moment (Janet exposing a Super Bowl nipple), and the best music video (Ashlee Simpson lip synching on SNL) -- were all probably delivered to you via blogger keystrokes. These media events all somehow felt, if you will, "internety" -- somewhat like how Jon Stewart's Daily Show has that intangible quality that makes it feel like television's version of a blog.
In other words, 2004 was the year we became the medium that mattered.
Last year, while giving the numero uno slot to Howard Dean's Blog For America, I wrote a now-embarrassing blurb which said, "When Dean wins in November, Joe Trippi will take a post in the administration that completely alters the way communities and governments function." Mm-hm. In an attempt to correct that gaffe and atone for the mistakes of the past year (and to prove that blogs are more than a collection of celeb up-skirt shots), here are the Best Blogs of 2004:
1) Buzz Machine. It's almost a shame that Jeff Jarvis' blog had to become the most important read of the year. After Janet's nipple kicked off the revised culture wars in January, the tension seemed to build all year, right up to a foreboding red-blue November. All along the way, Jarvis was there warning us of what was coming. When the FCC started tossing around fines faster than Howard Stern's tongue can move, Jarvis (who was the creator of Entertainment Weekly and now heads Condé Nast's internet strategy) became suspicious of some claims and filed a Freedom of Information Act request (actual reporting! bloggers beware!), which revealed the number of complaints had been greatly exaggerated. One show (FOX's Married by America) turned out to have received considerably less than the 159 complaints that the FCC reported. "Considerably less," as in three. An indefatigable Jarvis went on to critique other FCC mistakes, all of which seemed like a prescient glimpse into the news that Howard Stern would move to Sirius radio. Deriding Michael Powell as the "National Nanny," Jarvis slipped onto the talk show circuit, regularly appearing on the cable news networks to denounce the direction American media control was headed. For being a spokesman against cultural censorship (and for helping spread the word into Iran and Iraq), Buzz Machine is my blog of the year.
2) Wonkette. Dear Wonkette, I am responding to your personal on Craigslist seeking a "submissive Jim McGreevey swallower willing to do an 'Anderson Cooper 360' on my puckered red-state ass." It took forever to write that faux-sentence, and it's not even funny. Wonkette could have spit out a better one faster than you can say "Joe Lockhart is drunk again." By the end of the year, our little foul-mouthed Dorothy-Parker-resurrect was appearing on Tina Brown's show, being invited to online news conventions, and getting handed a quarter-mill book advance -- yet Ana Marie Cox never shied from her role as Media Deprofessionalizer in Chief. For frisking the DC wonks, Wonkette is the #2 blog of the year.
3) DailyKos. Whereas Wonkette is one person's personality spread like mayo over the entire political scene, DailyKos is more like the perfect sandwich -- a whole community that is greater than the sum of its parts. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga didn't actually uncover too many political stories this year -- but he created a community that did. Just some of the little political stories created by DailyKos readers: 1) A famous Bush print ad containing additional military personnel Photoshopped into the background was discovered by DailyKos users, which led to a Bush administration apology. 2) During the vice-presidential debate, Dick Cheney claimed that he had never met his rival, John Edwards, but a DailyKos participant found TV footage to the contrary, which was eventually aired on cable news networks to much embarrassment to Cheney. 3) A boycott of Sinclair advertisers to protest the airing of an anti-Kerry documentary caused the broadcasting group's stock to tank, and forced the company to adjust the broadcast. Along the way, DailyKos also raised a half-million dollars for Democratic political candidates. For foreseeing how political campaigns will be run in the future, DailyKos is the #3 blog of the year.
4) Waxy.org. Waxy proves that in the blogosphere, discovery trumps invention any day. Way back in February, Andy Baio posted the first links to DJ/Producer Danger Mouse's notorious Gray Album, which consisted completely of music sampled from Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Of course the cease-and-desist letters showed up immediately, but it was too late -- mirror sites popped up everywhere, Gray Tuesday was launched, and the word "mash-up" suddenly entered the lexicon of the Newsweek-reading crowd. Last year, Waxy.org discovered the Star Wars kid; this year his link to NickNolteDiary.com triggered a debate about the relationship of celebrity and blogging. Waxy for President! For forcing the nation to confront its archaic copyright laws, Waxy.org is the #4 blog of the year.
5) Power Line. Who the hell saw this one coming? Who could have predicted that a cadre of right-wing bloggers out in Apple Valley, MN, would drastically change the course of media history? It was so simple: download and analyze the documents that CBSNews.com posted to support the 60 Minutes piece on George Bush's military record. That little act (along with some assistance from other blogger sleuths such as LGF) changed Dan Rather's life forever, and landed Power Line Time's first Blog of the Year award. For showing that truth in reporting matters more than any political ethos, Power Line is the #5 blog of the year.
6) BoingBoing. The subtitle, "A Directory of Wonderful Things," pretty much sums up BoingBoing's run of hits in '04. From Jack Chick tracts to rogue taxidermists, Japanese fetish objects to "I fucked Alec Baldwin in the ass" stickers, Asimov to Zelda -- BoingBoing collected every piece of esoterica you missed. Cory Doctorow, who toils by day as a Creative Commons activist and science fiction author, also somehow got invited to Microsoft HQ to talk about Digital Rights Management -- perhaps the best (and, given the audience, most difficult to imagine) speech of the year. For reminding us the best parts of the internet are still uncommercial weird shit, BoingBoing is the #6 blog of the year.
7) Plain Layne. C'mon, admit it, you like being fooled. For three years, Plain Layne was the online girl you wanted to know. Sexy, smart, irreverent, and willing to talk about expensive dildos and cheap wine, Layne Johnson told you all the naughty details -- in e-mail, on AIM, or on her website. When she turned out to be the fictional work of Odin Soli, a thirty-something dot-commer with a penis, the investigative effort (chronicled here) became the real story. In hindsight, the salacious details should probably have tipped off more people, but, as everything from The Passion of Christ to the Red Sox showed in 2004, people really want to believe in myths. Plain Layne pre-dated a number of conspicuous fake celeb blogs in 2004, a trend which included Quentin Tarantino, Nick Nolte, Bill Clinton, Julian Casablancas, and Adam Nagourney. For two reasons -- forcing us to think again about online identity and accidentally personifying the investigative power of digital communities -- the defunct Plain Layne is the #7 blog of the year.
8) Metafilter. Grandpa Metafilter, you know I would never let you fall out of the Top 10. I wish your participants had done some of the same unique investigative work we found on places like DailyKos and Power Line this year (your community is certainly smarter than theirs), but you were always there with the context that made the story resonate. For staying above the fray, Metafilter is the #8 blog of the year.
9) Gawker. Frankly, I think Gawker Stalker is dull. I don't really care that you saw James Lipton at a train stop. But I do care about that Condé Nast cafeteria! If blogs could have clipped teaser critic quotes like movies, I'd give Jessica Coen this one: "Best media snark this side of Vincent Gallo's cock! Two thumbs up [the Olsen Twins]!!" For redefining NSFW in 2004, Gawker is the #9 blog of the year.
10) I Want Media and Romenesko. Sure, it's cheap to give them a tie, but they're inextricably linked. For finding the needles in that big fat media haystack, I Want Media and Romenesko are the #10 blogs of the year.
11) Kottke.org. Lucid, informed, reasoned, simple but never simplistic -- these are the qualities that make a good blogger, and Jason Kottke personifies all of them. Kottke's big scoop this year was reporting Ken Jennings' Jeopardy loss before anyone else, and he managed to do it in a completely internet-centric way (you had to highlight the text in your browser to see the spoiler). For keeping the bar high, Kottke.org is the #11 blog of the year.
12) Lost Remote. When Lost Remote held a tagline contest a couple months ago, one of the winners was "The future of media is stuck between the cushions of your couch." For chronicling in real time the shift of power to the user, Lost Remote is the #12 blogger of the year.
13) Whatevs. Uncle Grambo used to speak his own language, but now everyone else speaks it. The blogosphere is littered with good pop culture sites (Amy's Robot, Golden Fiddle, Lindsayism, Stereogum, Zulkey, Information Leafblower, Witz.org, Defamer and The Superficial -- to name just a few), but Whatevs won the most snark hearts by talking in some sort of futuristic jive-speak, inventing names for celebs like Brit Brit and The Thighmaster and Gawky Bird and M. Daytime Shamalamadingdong. This dude from Detroit probably doesn't even know that half the NYC mag publishing world is combing his site for lingo to steal. Whatevs. For grokking the epithet, Whatevs is the #13 blog of the year.
14) Engadget. In the mock-battle between Calacanis and Denton, I'm cheering for the guy who thinks less is more. But Peter Rojas at Engadget out-scooped his former digs, Gizmodo, on nearly every gadgety moment this year. For making us want more, Engadget is the #14 blog of the year.
15) PaidContent. Every morning, after the inbox got its cleansing and the Cocoa Puffs were finished, PaidContent.org was the first site that I visited. A bit of a misnomer, PaidContent actually covers everything you might call "digital media." For scouring a wide range of topics between business and technology, PaidContent is the #15 blog of the year.
16) Drudge Report. What did Drudge do this year? The only thing I really remember was hitting refresh constantly on election night (damn those exit polls!). For just being Drudge, Drudge Report is the #16 blog of the year.
17) Low Culture. As far as dichotomies go, "grave" and "shallow" pretty much cover all the ground. For eschewing the happy medium, Low Culture is the #17 blog of the year.
18) Largehearted Boy. I hear this MP3 Blog thing is quite the fad! A lot of press went to Fluxblog this year, but Largehearted Boy was the most comprehensive independent music blogger out there. For pre-dating podcasting, Largehearted Boy is the #18 blog of the year.
19) Bookslut. Choosing a favorite book blog is hard work (GalleyCat is the most recent addition to biblio blogs), but Bookslut seemed the most rapaciously slutty of them all. For reminding me to read more, Bookslut is the #19 blog of the year.
20) The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork. For defying the category blog, The Smoking Gun and Pitchfork are the #20 blogs of the year.
21) Blogumentary. For creating the first great celluloid (well, digi video) document of the blogosphere, Blogumentary is the #22 blog of the year.
22) I Love Music. For being the largest collection of music nerds ever assembled, ILM is the #22 blog of the year.
23) Best Week Ever. For finally doing a tv-blog combo, Best Week Ever is the #23 blog of the year.
24) Green Cine. For obsessing about every possible film-related link on the internet, Green Cine is the #24 blog of the year.
25) Dan Gillmor's eJournal. For publishing the book that defined citizen journalism in 2004, Dan Gillmor's eJournal is the #25 blog of the year.
26) Slashdot. Do I gotta? The discussions on Slashdot are as bulimic as an Olsen Twin -- lots to intake, lots of purging, a gross and skinny final product. You probably had a better chance getting juicy tech commentary on places like SearchEngineWatch and Many-To-Many and John Battelle. Nonetheless, the hatahs at Slashdot also seemed to reliably provide context to tech news events. For making you wish you could run more of your life from a command prompt, Slashdot is the #26 blog of the year.
See also:
A Small Selection of Blogs that I Read.
30 Best Blogs of 2003
23 Best Blogs of 2002
2004 Lists
sunday
MEDIA
Yipe. Tucker Carlson is quitting CNN and moving to MSNBC. (Note: The blog TVNewser gets the scoop first.)
Poynter.org has a New Media Timeline (from 1969 to 2004) that would have been much better if there were a single-page version that you could print.
ONLINE
NYT Mag on blogs, privacy, sex, journalism, and identity: Your Blog or Mine? The thesis: "In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them." Perhaps I'm too blithe about this topic, but I rather enjoy a world where everyone is a walking reality tv show.
Here's a story idea for one of you cute little intrepid journalists out there: What ever happened to Apple girl Ellen Feiss? Actually, you could do a whole series of former internet celebs, including Mahir and the Star Wars kid.
PEOPLE
Who's the Time Person of the Year? Not bloggers. Of course, plenty more "of the year" action in the constantly growing list.
Guilty pleasure of the week: pics of our favorite home video experts, Paris and Pam, out shopping.
TV
Ursula Le Guin: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
FILM
Looks like Uma and Travolta do another dance scene somewhere in Be Cool (trailer).
MUSIC
PJ Harvey says she will never play live again. Me either.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" done with Legos.
TECH
Apple is working on a cell phone that works with iTunes.
Days after donations to Mozilla fund a two-page ad in the Times, the biz section raves about Firefox.
LOCAL
Dave has posted the Maxim "story" on the Rogue Taxidermists show at Creative Electric.
The news all my friends were talking about this weekend: MPR is launching a new music radio station. Looks like it has all the potential in the world... or it could completely suck. Not sure what to make of this: "Our staff will be hanging out in clubs, searching the Internet, reading the music magazines and streaming music from around the globe to find the best music for you." They've also started a blog.
tuesday
This was supposed to be the year that our past saved us from ourselves. But at least far as popular music is concerned, that wasn't true, as new releases from the Beastie Boys, Courtney Love, REM, Prince, Bjork, and U2 all turned out as noble attempts at pretending not to be boring.
But then, just as the failure of the legacy acts opened the door for newcomers such as Nellie McKay and Arcade Fire, a couple unexpected true legacies came from out of nowhere to surprise us: Loretta Lynn and Brian Wilson. Who saw that coming?
As I saw it, here are the best albums of 2004:
1) The Streets, A Grand Don't Come For Free -- When I was upset about another relationship breakup, when I was getting ready for a party, when I was choosing an album for my alarm clock to wake me up to in the morning -- it was always The Streets on the stereo. Beyond its versatility, it was also completely indescribable. By default, it's called hip-hop, but it seems more like some kind of ancient syncopated storytelling. That's right, Mike Skinner is our Homer. And the craziest part was when people would ask for a description of the album: toward the end of explaining the Pulp Fiction-ish structuring narrative, I had to pause and say, "I can't say any more without ruining how it ends." That's the sign of a good album.
2) Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand -- Idea for us to make millions in Hollywood: let's make a movie set in the summer of '04, and play "Take Me Out" during the party scene. Millions, I tell you! The way I see it, "Take Me Out" starts like a good Strokes (or Beatles?) ditty and segues perfectly into a great White Stripes (or Stones?) romp. Before you can even realize it, you're singing "I know I won't be leaving here... with you" to every girl at the party. And you won't be leaving with her, because she's having too much fun dancing. This was the album for people who wanted to forget in three-and-a-half-minute increments that GW has already taken us through two wars.
3) TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes -- Just when you thought every possible option for fusion was gone (country electronica? check. indie hip-hop? check. a capella dance? check.), a few dudes in Brooklyn came up with what is essentially doo-wop punk. Yet it sounds nothing like that, as this fusion is probably the most unique sound of the decade so far.
4) DFA, Compilation #2 -- At first, this album -- which sounds approximately like "dancing to a plane crash" -- seemed impenetrably "too New York" for me to "get." In fact, every time I described it to someone, I threw around scare-quotes just like that last frightening sentence. And then somewhere around track five on the second disc, it hit me: this sounds like Minneapolis in 1985, when punk (Husker Du, The Replacements) and funk (Prince, Morris Day) were banging heads with each other. Suddenly, it felt like home.
5) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose -- Out of the gate, this album was criticized as a forced mash-up. Which of course it is, and that's what it's so gorgeous.
6) Dizzee Rascal, Showtime -- There's something about Dizzee Rascal that reminds me of playing Tetris. Must. Fit. Blocks. In. Holes.
7) Wilco, A Ghost Is Born -- Though immensely frustrating at times, the brilliance of Jeff Tweedy shines through in spurts and whistles and grunts.
8) The Walkmen, Bows and Arrows -- The Walkmen are sort of the Built To Spill of 2004. We always need an indie rock band that turns the guitar fuzz louder than the vox.
9) PJ Harvey, Uh Huh Her -- It's probably her second-weakest album, but PJ still makes the most shamefully annihilating recordings of anyone alive.
10) "Rockism" -- Even though Michaelangelo insisted that the debate is at least three years old, 2004 was the year that rockism went, well, mainstream. Kelefa Sanneh's critique of the goofy word led me into more conversations than any album this year, and because of that, it was better than all those boring old-timer albums. I still think it's a straw man concept, but hey, it was nice arguing with all of you about it. For at least a half-second, it actually tricked me into thinking music criticism still matters.
22 runner-ups:
Arcade Fire,
Funeral;
Bloc Party,
Bloc Party;
The Hold Stready,
Almost Killed Me;
Interpol,
Antics;
Air, Talkie
Walkie;
The Fiery Furnaces,
Blueberry Boat;
Morrissey,
You Are The Quarry;
Nellie McKay,
Get Away From Me;
Modest Mouse,
Good News For People Who Love Bad News;
Bjork,
Medulla;
Sonic Youth,
Sonic Nurse;
Madvillian,
Madvillainy;
Big & Rich,
Horses of a Different Color;
Pavement,
Crooked Rain Reissue;
Tom Waits,
Real Gone;
Le Tigre,
This Island;
The Killers,
Hot Fuss;
The Thrills,
Let's Bottle Bohemia;
Bjork,
Medulla;
Har Mar Superstar,
Handler;
Clinic,
Winchester Cathedral;
Eminem,
Encore.
See previously:
23 Best Albums of 2003
16 Best Albums of 2002
20 Best Albums of 2001
See also:
Lists 2004
tuesday
TIVO
Engadget interviews TiVo's CEO.
FILM
The Online Film Critics Society's Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s.
MUSIC
Slint is reuniting. (Only three shows in America.)
TV
Watching the rather silly new Ben Franklin biography on The History Channel last night, I realized Benny and I shared a similar temperament.
And the new host of The Late Late Show will be.... Craig Ferguson. Who?
ONLINE
The Guardian profiled Gawker.
thursday
ONLINE
Microsoft has launched their version of blogging software: Spaces. Features include mobile blogging and picture sharing. (Video: Demo of Spaces | Interview with Spaces Team.)
Here's something new to play with: Singing Fish A/V Search.
WORDS
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year: Blog. It's of course added to the 2004 List of Lists.
CELEBRITY
New York profiles Molly Ringwald.
CONSUMPTION
This is interesting. Josh Rubin of Cool Hunting has published an online Gift Guide that he thinks will be so good, you'll pay $8 for it.
Recently discovered: Versace Barbie | Juicy Couture Barbie.
FILM
Trailer to Guerilla, a new documentary on the SLA and Patty Hearst. Looks great. (Voice review.)
Don Knotts plays George Bush in what would make a great real movie.
Waxy asks about the future of movie theaters, and generates some good discussion.
MUSIC
Motley Crue: reuniting.
INDUSTRY
Mark Glaser (OJR) and Jay Rosen (NYU) do a long thing called The Media Company I Want to Work For.
New blog: Newsblunty, "the blunt news about broadcast journalism."
Just think of the possibilities.
LOCAL
Blogumentary Chuck quit his job at TPT and is going solo. His post about it also details the struggles of the new liberal network INdTV, where he was applying.
thursday
LISTS
Every year, I put together a massive collection of Best Of lists. (Previously: 2003 and 2001 -- okay, almost every year). A few of you have emailed me recently to ask if I'll be doing it this year again -- and of course I will be. Today is officially the start of the season, as NYT Circuits published their Top 10 Games of the Year and Rolling Stone has The Year's Best DVDs. Let the lists begin...
ONLINE
Seen this one yet? A website outta Texas that lets you do target practice online: Live-shot.com. Gotta love those red states.
Ask.Metafilter.com answers What are some good pop culture blogs?
TV
The final season of Buffy came out on DVD this week.
FILM BUT NOT FILM
High Tension looks like another mediocre horror movie, but ya gotta love the song playing in the trailer -- Sonic Youth doing The Carpenter's "Superstar," which is one of the best covers of all time.
Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avery sues Microsoft over a video game about yoga. (Only Microsoft would steal the worst game idea ever.) And he has a blog chronicling his lawsuit.
PUBLISHING
Whoa, talk about future-dating a story. Frank Rich's Sunday column is already online with a dateline of November 21.
MUSIC
If you missed it, Vanity Fair launched a website this week. Check out the oh-so-1995 list of links. There's a long profile of kindler, gentler Eminem.
SEARCH
Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, Google launched an academic search engine.
TORTURE
New Scientist has a very interesting interview with chief interrogator in Israel's security service.
COMEDY
Decent Chris Rock interview in The Onion.
FOOD
Cooking With Cum (Dot Com). Uh-huh.
TECH
Whoa, Mel Karmazin has jumped to... you never would guessed this... Sirius Radio.
LOCAL
The Rake started a blog.
Lindsey wrote a funny piece about the Minnesota RollerGirls and Peter has some great pics.
wednesday
I'll be outta town the next few days, attending the ONA Conference, which I might also blog. If you live in L.A. and want to throw back drinks with me, let me know.
POLITICS
Fuck The South (Dot Com).
Sorry Everybody (Dot Com).
We're Not Sorry (Dot Com).
ONLINE
Hmmmmm... Amazon.com is getting into... filmmaking?
MUSIC
Slate does a ditty on the Depeche Mode remix album.
MEDIA
Worst headlines from Monday's Six Feet Under story.
If everyone were as cool as Adam Nagourney, we could kill all the lawyers.
Fuck, I hate Maxim.
Fuck, I hate the media.
TECH
I guess Mozilla officially launched Firefox 1.0.
WORDS
Malcolm Gladwell put a FAQ on his new book, Blink.
LOCAL
This week in CP: even more about First Ave.
monday
Several hundred people didn't even get my Halloween costume. Oh well. Here's me and the roomies about to go out. (From left to right, that's a Spam Filter [Rex], the Kill Bill Bride [Melissa], and Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA [Marissa].)
ONLINE
What are they teaching these kids at j-school? I cannot believe that Wonkette visits Columbia Journalism School, but not one of these budding journalists asks about the visible tattoos on her arm. Transcript with pics. (See also: WaPo chat transcript with Ana Marie. And during her appearance on Tina Brown's show again tonight, it occurred to me why I like her so much: she talks in the same fast-and-reckless way I do. I'm serious.)
NYT Sunday Styles has a story on XXXchurch.com, the "#1 Christian porn site," which has computer applications that try to dissuade you from viewing online porn. There was also apparently a documentary made about them too.
Greg Allen does a NYT timeline about Nick Nolte's Diary.
TV
Desperate Housewives was the most-recorded show on TiVo last week.
Video of SNL's "TV Funhouse" from this week: John McCain Supporting Bush.
I was wondering if I was the only one who thought the Donald Trump voice-overs in The Apprentice board room were totally screwed up. MSNBC reports others have noticed.
WORDS
Steven Johnson announces his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, with a working subtitle right now of "Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter." Looks good.
Looks like R. U. Sirius has a new book, Counterculture Through the Ages. Plus blog.
POLITICS
From Audible.com: ListenBeforeYouVote.com
Rather than merely endorse a candidate, Slate.com has everyone on staff endorse a candidate, right down to the Wine Writer and Software Development Engineer.
GAMING
AvantGaming.com
MUSIC
New preachy Le Tigre video: "New Kicks".
LOCAL
After the Vice President of the National Taxidermy Association's Board of Directors wrote to Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, Creative Electric is getting a ton of attention right now in the blogosphere. Boing Boing even linked to it. (More: CP profile and t-shirts.)
City Pages will be doing a live election night blog: Election2004.CityPages.com.
Just a few blocks from my house, on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin, there's a new billboard that says something like "Your election homepage: MPR.org" Could this be the first time we've ever seen a media dot-com exclusively advertised in our fair city?
In the Times Mag this week, the cover story (about faith in the workplace) opens with a story from the Riverview Community Bank in Otsega, MN.
friday
Sorry I've been gone for a few days. It was a busy week on the homefront. Interpol played a good show on Tuesday; I spoke at the MIMA Summit on Wednesday; the single best design-cum-politics event anywhere was on Thursday. Leaving aside my personal life speaking only about local events, this has been the best Fall. Every day has something cool going on. Bite me, New Yawkers.
We have a lot to get to today:
POLITICS
Bush & Kerry live together... as Sims.
Blood relatives of Bush unite for Kerry: Bush Relatives For Kerry Dot Com. (Back story.)
Reason collects answers to the question "Who's Getting Your Vote?" from a diverse set of people including John Perry Barlow, Drew Carey, Nat Hentoff, Penn Jillette, P.J. O'Rourke, Camille Paglia, Louis Rossetto, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Shafer, R.U. Sirius, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, Matt Welch, and Robert Anton Wilson. Some surprising answers.
Results of the Nerve.com sexual/political poll, which answers such important questions as "There are two spots left in your hot tub: Do you invite the Bush twins or the Kerry daughters?"
TV
Mark Cuban's Benefactor was quietly cancelled (thank. fucking. god.). But Trump, who wrote Cuban a letter, ain't letting it disappear so easily.
MUSIC
Franz Ferdinand Ring Tones.
Three more music director videos are coming. The first directors were Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. The second set will be Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer and Anton Corbijn.
A certain Klosterman fellow sorta reviews the new Wilco album in City Pages. (Wherein you learn Chuck and Jeffy Tweedy both like -- ugh -- Jet. Right, right, I don't like Jet because I'm a hipster.)
Now, this is rock 'n roll! A one-week cruise with Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon: RR Holiday Escape.
Pitchfork gives the new Le Tigre a 3.3 and EW dissed the "I'm So Excited" cover this week. This really disapoints me.
MEDIA
Boy-oh-boy, Tina Brown's new website is lame.
T-SHIRTS
I ♥ The Internets.
WORDS
The Book Spoiler Dot Com. "The ending to these books will be revealed!"
Neal Stephenson does the Slashdot interview. Good.
John Le Carre hates Bush.
FILM
Fleshbot Films has an Amazon storefront. Anyone wanna guess what future titles will be?
Gibson reports on his blog that Pattern Recognition might become a Peter Weir film.
BAD BOOKS
This turned up on my Amazon Associates list of things purchased through this site: The Complete A**hole's Guide to Handling Chicks. Is this my audience?
PUBLISHING
As noted here last month, O'Reilly is getting into magazine publishing with Make, but now there's a Wired News story.
MARKETING
Waxy on the highs and lows of viral marketing.
JON STEWART
Wal-Mart nixes the Daily Show book.
I looked everywhere in the Sunday Times for something about the Jon Stewart / Crossfire battle. It took them five days to finally get to it, though.
SCIENCE
One of those things you only know about me if you know me offline: I have no sense of smell. (It's a long tragi-comic story, but I lost it in an accident about six years ago.) I just noticed the Times Mag has a column by a woman who lost her smell, and the process by which she regained it. Looks like I have a winter project ahead of me.
DERRIDA
Terry Eagleton responds to the "bone-headed."
LOCAL
It's Melissa's fault that I've been watching America's Top Model, but I just found out that Nicole is from... Minot, ND. Impossibly, her bio lists herself as "former punk rocker." The kids who knew her (of which I am not one) are talking about her here.
Can you imagine writing this next sentence in 1994? Billy Corgan will be reading at The Loft today. (I wonder if I can get him to say "Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.")
If you live in Northeast (or visit that hidden NE Grumpy's), you've probably met Tom Taylor, the Green party candidate for that district's state house rep. CP profiles him.
Ever wonder why all your friends are leaving Uptown for Northeast. For reasons like this.
If you missed it, a few Pioneer Press reporters were suspended for going to a Springsteen concert. Weird.
Wired's Great River Road Tour is in Wisconsin now.
Just when you thought the film festivals were slowing down, here comes Get Real, City Pages' documentary festival.
friday
DIGITAL CULTURE
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.
Online Journalism Awards finalists announced. I'll be in L.A. on Nov. 11-14 for the conference.
Query Google by SMS. Girls that I meet at bars are now open game.
CELEBRITY
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, EW reports that ABC screwed up and revealed the winner of The Benefactor.
FILM
New trailer: The Machinist.
Casting call: Bad News Bears remake, starring Billy Bob Thornton and directed by Richard Linklater.
UPDATE: Team America got an R rating.
POLITICS
Is Bush Wired Dot Com?
Debate Spotter (debate phrase search engine) udpated to include veeps.
T-SHIRTS
"L is for Loser" (Abercrombie & Fitch story).
DRINK
It's an old story, but it's the first time I saw it: Starbucks and Jim Beam to brew alcoholic coffee concoction.
PUBLISHING
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."
AP interview with Paul Westerberg.
tuesday
TECH CONSUMPTION
Woot.com is brilliant. Every day, one (and only one) piece of gadgetry goes up for sale. The price is slashed low because of a set volume that will be sold. The gadget only stays available until supplies run out. It's a little like Amazon's Gold Box... (Nerdy Tidbit To Impress Friends: "Woot" is an elision of the Dungeons and Dragons phrase "Wow, Loot!")
My biggest gripe about Amazon.com is the lack of benefits given to high-volume users. I order probably $100 of stuff per week off Amazon.com (yes, I even get food and soap and razor blades delivered to me), but I get no special discounts for my repeat visiting. This week, however, after Amazon beefed up its A9.com search engine, the company started offering something called ?/2%. This crazy little gimmick gets you one-half Pi percent (1.57%) off everything if you're a A9.com user. This is somehow both crazy and cool at the same time.
Non-surprise of the day: Google is working on their own web browser.
Sidekick II review at Engadget.
MUSIC
It looks like the first single from the new Fatboy Slim album is called "Slash Dot Slash." That sounds sorta, well, ya know, internety. Here's a video.
Does anyone really care if Nellie McKaye is fibbing about her age?
WORDS
McSweeney's: 20 Under-Used Yoga Positions.
DIGI MEDIA
New Wiki timeline from Dave Sifry chronicling weblogs having an impact on politics.
The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has left the building, and we never even figured out who the author was.
MEDIA/TV
Gobs of media fodder in the transcript from Jon Stewart's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor.
John Kerry's Top 10 List from Letterman: Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals. [See also, in Time: 10 Questions for Jon Stewart.]
FILM
Russ Meyer has died.
CELEBRITY
Parker Posey, what the fuck is wrong with you? Blade 3? Christ.
HILTON LOHAN 2004.
sunday
ONLINE
Bruce Sterling did a fashion photo series called Milan or Tehran?, which I guess is trying to say something about globalism, but I don't know what (hot chicks in scarfs are universal, perhaps?).
McSweeney's: Email Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying To Give Out Over The Phone.
I was interviewed by the NY Times a few weeks ago because of a article I wrote about the defunt scandal known as Plain Layne. The Times angle was mostly about fake celebrity bloggers. The whole topic came up again last week when the Quentin Tarantino blog surfaced, and then quickly sank. The next day, a secret weblog from Julian Casablancas' girlfriend rose, and then also died (screengrabs). It makes you wonder how much of a nano-celebrity you could be and have a fake blog made in your honor. ("No, I'm really Craig Kilborn's cousin!")
FILM
Somewhere in my mind is a top ten list of events that I'm sad not to have talked about here over the past six months, and Vincent Gallo is definitely not on it. The controversy seems to be wrapping up today with Roger Ebert telling "the whole truth" about Vince.
New movie trailer alert!:
Silver City. John Sayles political parody starring Chris Cooper.
Finding Neverland. Looks like Tim Burton meets Merchant & Ivory (ergo, bad) with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet.
Closer. Another entry in the hot genre of the moment -- let's call it the "romantic deceit thriller" (see also: We Don't Live Here Anymore). Starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen, but really starring cool Suzanne Vega and Damien Rice songs.
The Yes Men. More liberal-docu-essaying.
And did you see Hero this weekend? It's either the best movie or the worst movie of the year.
WORDS
Rumors on Bret Easton Ellis' new book (involving the return of Patrick Bateman). And here's the cast list for the upcoming film version of Glamorama.
David Foster Wallace on RateMyProfessor.com. ("Very neurotic and tends to chew tobacco and spit in a cup while lecturing.")
Neal Stephenson interview in Wired.
MUSIC
Shatner has a new album, produced by Ben Folds.
Somewhat funny parody of the director's commentary concept: Britney Spears on SNL. (Speaking of which, the new video of Britney covering "My Prerogative" reportedly cost $7.2 million "to market and promote" a "happening, rather than just a video." Apparently, she's taking cue from Axl and getting faux-married to her quasi-celeb mate in the video.)
Does anyone else suspect the only reason the MTV Video Awards were in Miami tonight was because the Republicans took over NYC? Best moment? I guess when Nick "Newlywed" Lachey and Paris "Simple World" Hilton appeared on the stage at the same time, and suddenly you had a vision of reality tv worlds colliding like a nuclear reaction. Yeah, boring awards this year. Blame the FCC.
OLYMPICS
Olympic Medal Count by population.
Get it before Fark does: titty twister polo.
SEX
Everything I ever learned about sex and porn I learned from the Sunday Times' story What Women Want To Watch. Shoes, eh? Yeah, me too. Totally.
KY Jelly: it'll fit.
MEDIA
Has anyone else been watching Maureen Dowd blah-blahing her new book on the talk show circuit? I'm not sure what it is, but something about her reminds me of Sofia Coppola -- demure but cunning, cute in a you-can't-be-seriously-be-that-coy kinda way.
New York Mag saucy feature on the Bush Twins.
MARKETING
The Apprentice cast on Friendster.
When Halo 2 finally comes out, will anyone think that ILoveBees.com was a viral success? Well, since Subservient Chicken did so well, who knows.
Speaking of... the same ad firm that did those BK ads tried to recently get Paris Hilton to become a BK spokesperson in a David LaChappelle spot (featuring her own music!). It didn't work out, but Paris Hilton is trying to trademark her own logo (a tiara).
SCI-FI
The Guardian asks scientists to pick their Top 10 Sci-Fi Authors and Top 10 Sci-Fi Films. C'mon, no Gattica?
LOCAL
Everyone's fave sexy local blogger, PussyRanch has hung up her blogging tassles and closed the ranch. She's a little oblique about what she'll actually be doing now, but her recent work at City Pages has been quite good (check out the piece on the new Gotti ("one tough biscotti") reality tv show).
Last week, The Times did a story about online fantasy leagues, which gave major mentions to Best Buy and Fanball (two local companies). This week, the Strib basically does the same story.
There goes the neighborhood. Strib gives a major feature to Psycho Suzi's.
Cool or uncool? Hot or not? Sen. Norm Coleman's wife, Laurie, has given the Post approval to post sexy lingerie pics of her.
monday
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.
Neal Pollack lecture offered via Salon/MediaBistro: The Professional Satirist's Guide to the Perfect Orgasm.
Back home in academia, Naomi Wolf has outted Harold Bloom as "sexually encroaching" on her when she was a student at Yale.
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.
Huh, The Times reviewed the new Jason Blair book.
MUSIC
Sex Advice From Liz Phair over at Nerve.com, wherein Eddie Murphy is quoted.
ONLINE
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 Tribune picked up by accident (correction).
POLITICS
That Urban Outfitters Voting Is For Old People t-shirt everyone is talking about. Well, sorta.
LOCAL
Mom sent me an article about North Dakota's shrinking population.
monday
POLITICS
McSweeney's: Quotes From Either President of the United States George W. Bush or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Movies.
DIGITAL
What does the porn industry think about digital piracy? The Times looks. In other NSFW news, Suicide Girls is syndicating to Playboy.com now.
Age Maps.
ONLINE
Seattle Weekly goes ga-ga for Michael Kinsley. I like the chap too, but c'mon, 5000+ words? You think this is the New Yorker or something?
WORDS
I rather like that half of Paris' book proposal is pictures. Brilliant title.
David Foster Wallace parody winner.
MUSIC
In addition to a Friendster parody site, Lambchop has a couple new albums out.
saturday
Need a body double. Simple can't keep up. Who won Iowa and New Hampshire? Who, you say? Here's what we've got:
WORDS
Salon is serializing Dave Eggers new novel.
FILM
Gothamist reports on the casting to the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, which includes Martin Freeman from The Office, Zooey Deschenal, and Mos Def. In other news, NBC is gonna try to adapt The Office. Ahem, no comment.
POLITICS
GQ profiles Joe Trippi.
PUBLISHING
Michael Wolff leaving New York, off to Vanity Fair, which sucks because now I'll have to start buying Vanity Fair.
WORDS
Another mainstream "theory is dead" story.
Huh, there's a Name of the Rose board game.
ONLINE
SXSW web awards finalists announced. I'm trying to get down there this year, but it's looking iffy.
I need a metaster too.
Busuiness 2.0's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.
CONSUMPTION
I bought a red Danish couch named Opus today. Hello, modern world.
New cut-n-paste agitprop flick: The Corporation.
MUSIC
Res feature on Air that includes an excellent videoplayer. Go buy the new one, Talkie Walkie.
Slate.com: Why Is Airplane Music So Universally Bad? NYT: A Better Night's Sleep, Flat Out at 35,000 Feet.
A very large collection of insects in rock and roll cover art.
Billy Corgan (or his 15-year-old sister) is blogging.
TV
The Voice gives The L Word a rave. So far, so do I. And the Joan Jett wannabe is my fave.
CELEBERITY
Tallying the celebrity endorsements.
Alex Trebek, genius driver.
If you missed it, someone uploaded a quicktime video of the Paris Hilton appearance on SNL a few weeks back.
LOCAL
Have you been reading Melissa's new don't-call-it-sex-and-the-city-ish column at CP?
Fog of War finally opens here this week.
Shhh... don't tell anyone else about our entrepreneurial genius.
tuesday
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 Times interview 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.
TECH
Salon's tech predictions for 2004.
New stuff Apple announced today: GarageBand and iPod Mini. And here's some stuff they didn't announce (Wired).
While getting a couple fillings put in today, my dentist told me he's going to CES. Yes, my fuggin dentist. Rafat from PaidContent.org and Peter Rojas from Gizmodo are there.
MEDIA
Ziff-Davis is going to launch a new tech magazine: Sync. Doomed to suck.
Somewhat interesting that The Guardian reprinted 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.
New documentary: Sounds Like Techno.
DESIGN
Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s.
The 2005 Mustang looks totally retro. (Sorry for the car link. I drive a 2000 'stang.)
The "Reflecting Pools" design was chosen for the WTC Memorial.
FASHION
Gimme.
LOCAL
Bye, bye, Flash Mobs; hello Action Squad. Minneapolis urban adventures!
I'm looking for a good Flash Designer/Developer for a big project. If you're all that, find me.
North Dakota Blogs.
sunday
And the winner for most unique use of my Best Of The Year lists goes to: RocketJump, who took all the music lists, shoved them into a mathematical formula, and came up with a uber-list. Also cool: All-Consuming's 100 Most Frequently Mentioned Books By Blogs. I'm glad this is all over.
TV
Watching SNL the other night, I witnessed the "Atkin's Diet Safe" Subway commercial for the first time. At first, I wasn't sure if it was an SNL parody commercial, but it was real, and the Times says there are more to come.
Emily Nussbaum in the Times and Tom Shales in the Post on the final episodes of Sex and the City. Shales includes this tidbit: "Sometime during the year, HBO began imprinting each preview cassette sent out for review with the critic's initials in one corner of the screen, allegedly as an anti-piracy measure."
This one is a bit crazy. Universal Music (i.e., GE; i.e., NBC) is teaming up with DirecTV (i.e., NewsCorp; i.e., FOX), Vivid Entertainment Group (i.e., porn), and Shady Records (i.e., Eminem's label) to launch a music channel featuring porn videos.
MUSIC
Casey Kasem is leaving American Top 40. Tidbits about CK: he is the voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo; his wife, Jean, was Loretta Tortelli on Cheers; he is vegan; he is of Lebanese decent; he will be replaced by the host of Amerian Idol; and he didn't know that Snuggles tape was leaked until 10 years after it happened.
Courtney Love has a "15 day trial version" (?!) of her new single, Mono," available on her site.
I Love Music thread: Worst Hypothetical Rapper Names.
Devo has a new DVD out. For a relatively cheap $13, you 17 videos and other stuff. Wash Post writes about it.
TECH
A couple decent pieces hypothesizing this year's technology advances: Robert X. Cringely's Predictions for 2003 and ExtremeTech's Predicting the Tech Flops of Tomorrow.
CULTURE
Recommended: this James Poniewozik essay, where Time shockingly gave him 3,000 words of space to talk about decline of mass culture and the ascendency of niche marketing. Full of somewhat obscure cultural reference points that prove his point.
Times: Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs. Question of the day: Is Eagleton losing it?
Slate: Should Students Be Allowed To Hookup With Profs? Answer of the day: Yes!
friday
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.
5) Gizmodo -- Gimme!
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.
29) Archinect -- Blog + Architecture = This.
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.
Finally, it's my nature to take a few swipes. Disappointments of the past year: Where is Raed? (recently), Boing Boing, Arts & Letters Daily, Plastic, The Kicker (so far), The Nation, Idea A Day, and AndrewSullivan.com.
thursday
There's probably nothing funnier I could say in the NYTimes than "everyone thinks they can write about music" (second item). I'm gonna take a beating for that one. New in the big list: expanded art and architecture links, Google's Zeitgeist, Norman Solomon's annual P.U.-Litzers Prizes, Slate's Critics Critiqued, ESPN's Year in Sex and Sports, Car & Driver's 10 Best Cars, The Post Style section's In & Out, and, ya know, a whole lot more. Coalesce!
TECH
Even Wired is making lists now. 101 Ways to Save the Internet.
MUSIC
Elliott Smith's death might not have been a suicide.
CULTURAL STUDIES
Stumbled across the old Roland Barthes essay on The New Citroen (1957), which I haven't read in nearly a decade, but am stunned at how crisp it sounds. "I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object." How come no one wrote about the Mini like this?
tuesday
Sorry, you're gonna hafta find another Christmas gift, cuz I've already found the Paris Hilton video online. That embarrassing moment her cell phone rings could be the most important cinematic scene of 2003. But hey, enough cinema verite, let's see what else is going on:
TECH
Is it already time for the Best Of The Year lists? Time's Coolest Inventions of 2003 and Popular Science's Best of What's New of 2003.
Bye, bye, Sophia Loren. Miss Digital World.
Steve Ballmer's iPod (reference material).
ADVERTISING
See that KFC ad telling you how good drumsticks are for you? Yum. Slate commentary.
FILM
Naked Lunch on DVD came out today.
Salon has the full script to the Reagan biopic that CBS bailed on.
Chaplin just in time for the Oscars! Hmm.
Nokia shorts. Funny how 15 seconds almost seems too long.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind trailer. Stars Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, and Jim Carrey.
ART
Decent NYT piece on the new digital art space, Eyebeam.
MUSIC
Collection of Pavement cover songs (including Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Velvet Underground, CCR, and The Beatles).
RecordStoreReview.com.
I can't explain why reading Strokes reviews has become my only post-summer cultural joy, but here's Sasha Frere-Jones doing his.
Excellent. Neil Diamond Parking Lot.
POLITICS
John Kerry canned his campaign manager.
The New Republic has a decent profile of Joe Trippi, the guy behind Dean's campaign.
ONLINE
This is already old news, but I'm trying to be cultivate my old media roots. Wallop is Microsoft's attempt to get into the social software industry from the Social Computing Group. Wired News story.
LIFE
CBS Marketwatch: Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.
LOCAL
Har Mar Superstar is everywhere lately. And now he will be in vodka ads. (The article also suggests he's moving from Ibiza to L.A. to record.)
Back in Fargo, I was quasi-fortunate enough to be acquainted with a half-crazy guy named Modern Man. (His real name was Leland, which he had legally changed to "Modern Man." All things considered, not a bad move.) His art and personality (seldom differentiated) was basically a combustible mix of Dali and Warhol, and now he has a website, Museum of Modern's Art. (Modern, you're such a card.) I'm really not recommending the site to you, but the handful of you who know him will be intrigued. (Via Todd.)
I finally read The Rake's profile of the restaurant scene, and I think I actually recommend it. This line got my mind working: "According to the National Restaurant Association, we rank fourth in terms of per capita dining, and in recent years have been as high as number three."
saturday
MEDIA
Tee-hee. Losers.org's page for Journalists.
MUSIC
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."
A baby reviews Madonna's new baby book.
POLITICS
DeanSpace and Girls Gone Wild For Dean. He's so gonna win.
TV
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.
friday
MUSIC
Sophia Coppola directs Kate Moss in the new White Stripes video. It's, uh, hot.
MTV, the magazine.
Guardian: Death of the DJ?
Rock stars and their parents.
WORDS
Kafka's Metamorphosis translated into Flash.... with violin-techno!
UrbanDictionary.com
New short stories from Eggers, Murakami, etc.
FILM
Matrix III (or whatever you wanna call it) trailer.
See now, this will suck, but it has Katie Holmes and Oliver Platt, so it won't.
School of Rock trailer (directed by Richard Linklater, starring Jack Black). The MPAA rating box says it all: "Some Rude Humor And Drug References."
INTERNET
Pretendster.
Looks like the Chicago Tribune is blogging.
I guess this is MTV's contribution to the blog world: VMA blog?
AmItheGovernorOrNot.com
ARCHITECTURE
Times on Gehry's Disney Concert Hall.
UBER
How famous people break up.
Remember the Sex and the City episodes where they go to L.A.? Gawker is there.
Gimme.
LOCAL
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....
AP: Minneapolis Elf Has All the Right Answers.
Turns out the guy that does Buy-Me-A-Beer is also the guy who did Dancing Paul.
The Rake on 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."
saturday
INTERNET
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."
Economist article on "monetising something cool": commercial blogging.
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.
ENERGY
Blackout Photo Moblog.
Through mere coincidence, the new issue of Wired has a piece about power grids. Includes infographic.
FILM
Netflix.com has redesigned.
LIFESTYLE
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 Strib review 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.)
wednesday
WORDS
A must-own: Kerouac bobblehead.
SOCIETY
Nerve: Sex in the age of the cellcam phone.
The Smoking Gun: Legal Document of the Year. Fucker, fucker and fucking fag.
Flocksmart steps smart/flash mobs up a notch.
The Onion: Area Man Knows All The Shortcut Keys.
POP
Good god, I could spend a week here: The A List. It's just a list of celebrity personality rumors, but it's magnificent.
GreenCine has a post with dish on Tarantino's Kill Bill and two Buffy-alum Fox shows coming this fall.
MUSIC
Half-hour BBC interview (audio link) with Morrisey that is very, very, very good. He's so articulate. Recommended.
TV
Sex and the City update: First Duchovny now Baryshnikov. (Secret message: Mr. Big, sorry for petty self-involvement.)
MEDIA
The New York tabloids are all over this. The Times' Bob Hope obit was written by someone who has been dead since 2000.
The Antic Muse: What magazine ads say about you.
LOCAL
Minneapolis is in Friendster.
One year ago today, McSweeney's released The Graffiti of Minneapolis.
sunday
TECH/INTERNET
Slate on Friendster. And Wired News on Friendster. And The Stranger on Friendster. There are now a million Friendster members. See also: The Gothamist's lesson on writing Friendster messages.
Anil on Amazon.com's expanded web service model.
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.
MUSIC
A good Times interactive audio essay on Fela Kuti.
McSweeney's: Radiohead Song Titles Vetoed By Thom Yorke.
That prank Metallica story about copyrighting the chords E and F was picked up by many mainstream news sources like CNN and MSNBC.
TV
Matt of Metafilter launch a PVR blog.
WORDS
The NY Daily News thinks we have a new lit genre: fat chick lit.
STYLE
W.W.J.J.D. t-shirt at Bust: What Would Joan Jett Do?
Somewhat odd Sunday Times article on turning 30.
Adbuster's Black Spot campaign.
Amy Sedaris' appartment.
monday
Golly, there are a lot of links today. Kick it:
MEDIA
MagazinePriceSearch.com. Never ever subscribe to a magazine again without looking here first. The New Yorker for $19.46. Time for $4.67. Spin for $3.36.
Good Poynter.org convergence map.
FoxNews tried to shut down AgitProperties.com for their "Faux News" merchandise. I wonder if my Faux News t-shirt (ordered through Disinfo.com) is a collectors item?
Cyberjournalist's mammoth list of blogs published by journalists.
MUSIC
Zowie, Pitchfork is going mainstream. Or something like that.
SFGate: Hip-Hop Intellectuals: A Radical Generation Comes Of Age.
The video for Foo Fighter's "Low," starring Dave Grohl and Jack Black, is a little extreme. I think it was banned from MTV.
FILM
Someone translated that Baudrillard interview about The Matrix into English. GreenCine ponders it.
FASHION
Gothic Lolita is in this week.
WORDS
Someone has spend a long time cracking the code of the intro page of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. The conclusion is amusing.
Pre-order David Foster Wallace's newest: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which tells the story of Georg Cantor.
Guardian essay on irony: The Final Irony. Recommended.
That funny Onion: Ask Raymond Carver.
Recommended summer reading from dozens of authors.
INTERNET
Game: Dr. Strange Blix.
CityCreator.com. And an elaborate block-building application.
A syllabus to a class I'd like to take: CTCS 505: New Media and the Consumption Cycle.
Tom Friedman in the Times asks Is Google God?
Lame Times story on internet dating.
A zillion Amazon RSS Feeds.
ART
Zoom and explore the art of the Renaissance.
ARCHITECTURE
Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of Baghdad.
FILM
"I used to hate the Internet. I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."
LOCAL
The Strib dissects Block E. See also, from a while back, Peter Ritter's City Pages critique.
The Rake has a decent converging history of Schell's and Grain Belt beer.
According to Alexa, 40% of CityPages.com's traffic is now through Babelogue.
Did you hear that Rock Star closed? It has even been nuked from the City Pages database. Great food, horrible location.
thursday
MEDIA:
Al Gore is looking to get into the liberal media.
Two meta-media columns on bad writing: WashPost columnist writes about the scourge of The List. Meanwhile, MediaBistro attacks the scourge of The [fill in the blank] Nation.
Adbusters: Early Signs of Fascism.
MUSIC:
Salon.com has familiar-sounding speculation that iTunes could kill album-oriented music. Although I didn't write it, it feels like a condensed version of the last 15 music conversations I've had.
WORDS:
WashPost asks if Harry Potter fan fic is stealing. Answer: no.
Al Franken has a new book out: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He's interviewed on AlterNet.
On this day in 1816, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley gathered on Lake Geneva to tell ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. (I just love TodayInLiterature.com.)
TV:
If you missed it, video of Hillary on Letterman.
FILM:
Premiere and Playboy both have lists of the best sex scenes. Not one repeat in the top 10. See also: The Guardian's Sex on the Screen Quiz.
Harrison Ford finger gallery.
LOCAL:
Todd has posted a Fargo Forum story saying that Kirby's Bar is shutting down and that Ralph's might be next. (The City of Moorhead is on a buying spree.) This is even worse than the news the First Ave. might be on the way out.
thursday
Music Links:
Top 10 Pictures of Thom Yorke Looking Pretentious.
Slate.com covers the U.S. Air Guitar Championships.
Radiohead.tv has launched. Awesome.
Video Game Links:
The Mob has taken over The Sims.
Media Links:
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 Times pans Hillary's book. Also, The New York Observer asked novelists to critique the book.
It's been a while since someone did a story on Romenesko.
Just Cool:
Gimme retro tv.
MarthaSings.com.
Somewhat Local News:
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 Times piece 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."
OJR article about the business and content prospects of local weblogs.
tuesday
Videos are up from the "Connecting with the Wired Generation" conference I attended last week at Berkeley. I would recommend two items: 1) John Seely Brown's keynote gave an invigorating critique of the social life in the digital age. Brown, former director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), used the post-structural concept of bricolage to assemble and re-assemble a hermeneutics of the digital age. And 2) Playing Games and Gaming the News saw the world of game-makers (including Will Wright of SimCity fame) interface with journalists who have been using game-like environments to deliver news. (In addition, here's more recently archived video: Berkeley Multimedia Reporting Workshop and U of Texas Online Journalism Symposium.)
Waxy.org threatened to not read my site ever again if I didn't finally make an RSS feed. So here ya go. There might be some flaws in that XML -- if so, let me know. (I've been using the RSS-reader Syndirella, but Waxy says he now prefers SharpReader.)
The Guardian has an episode of Cribs with Saddam.
Today in Literature: On this day in 1950, J. D. Salinger's "For Esmé -- With Love and Squalor" was published in The New Yorker.
Music Notes:
Just cuz: Sigor Ros video.
Interview with Spike Jonze.
David Lee Roth to release solo album with covers of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Beatles, and the Steve Miller Band.
thursday
I bought $500 glasses in Haight-Ashbury last weekend. I hate myself and I want to die. You can see them by clicking on the webcam, over there -->
TeeVee.org has a reality tv parody. But, ya know, when Donald Trump is doing reality tv pilots, satire really loses its effect.
Anil has a swell post on the future of self-chronicling technology: A Personal Panopticon. Imagine, if you will, a TiVo of your life.
Interview with Don DeLillo from Inside Border's mag.
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.
Donald Rumsfeld: poet.
Gary Hart has a blog now too. He wants to run for president again.
Three new coolish new media books published recently by MIT: The New Media Reader | Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia | Improvisational Design. Designers might also like this new Taschen tome.
New decent-looking Philip Seymour Hoffman movie: Owning Mahowny (trailer).
What she said.
I know way too many people who wish they had done this for their senior honors thesis: "Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music: A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001".
New Metropolis mag piece on new Tokyo architecture.
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.
tuesday
Random thought: Vincent Gallo & Crispin Glover should do a movie together. Maybe a biopic of Siegfriend & Roy or Penn & Teller.
Pavement tribute album.
This one or this one?
This architecture conference at Columbia has all the heavy-hitters.
Gallery of Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974.
New System of a Down video directed by Michael Moore.
Iranian film critic Kambiz Kahe and four other journalists arrested.
Surprisingly candid interview with Nobuyuki Idei, Sony's CEO.
monday
New provocative Puma ads (some history).
Stan Brakhage has died.
Ideo does some crazy R&D on cell phones: Social Mobiles.
Slate is running an episodic piece ("Superman") on human enhancing therapies.
I got bored pretty fast with Spin's Ultimate Lists issue (on newsstands). Here's the Top 40 Most Important Artists Making Music Right Now.
Jordanian: Loves Microsoft, Hates America.
sunday
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.
Interview with Drew from Fark.
Video of the Dan Rather interview with Saddam.
Okay Times piece on the Interactive Music Exchange, which has actual interactive online programming.
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.
NewsMonster.
wednesday
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.
In other Times-generated tech news, it looks like major-league baseball games will be streamed via Real this year.
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.
Onion A.V. Club has a good interview with the Daily Show writers.
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.
Q13-TV in Seattle featured Phillip Torrone commuting to work on his Segway. (Phillip works for Fallon, runs BookOfSeg.com, and is a wireless and Flash pioneer.)
Ever wondered what William Gibson thought about The Matrix? He liked it.
wednesday
If you were planning to skip all the Top 10 lists this year, I ask you to try just this one: Smoking Gun's Favorite Mug Shots of 2002. My favorite will be the cover of my first novel.
The Nation asks Boots Riley of The Coup, Tom Morello of Rage, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney to talk about the tradition of protest music.
Schlotzsky's joins the wi-fi masses by adding free wireless.
I've been trying to convince people to stop capitalizing internet for a while. Pleased to see M.I.T. is on my side.
AdAge: The 20 Most Effective Ads Of 2002. (Toys R Us lands 3 of top 5.)
Flyguy -- is it a story? is it a game? -- is da bomb.
This year's Time Best And Worst includes a category for design, which I think is new, although comics is not.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys. If you need a refresher, the one at The New Yorker will help. See also: The Pepys Project.
A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, such as "The longest word with the five vowels in alphabetical order is PHRAGELLIORHYNCHUS".
Not sure what to make of NewsKnife yet.
Metropolis has finally posted their Fiction Issue. The idea is that writers create narratives around pieces of architecture. Includes stories by Kurt Andersen, Bruce Sterling, and Rick Moody.
The big Voice Film Critics Poll this year has this top 10:
- Far From Heaven
- Y Tu Mamá También
- Adaptation
- Time Out
- Russian Ark
- Punch-Drunk Love
- What Time Is It There?
- The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat)
- Talk to Her
- About Schmidt
I just took a look at last year's blog resolutions and it appears as though I did absolutely none of them in 2002. Except, perhaps, for "less talk, more rock."
tuesday
You want dot.com fall-out, I'll give you dot.com fall-out. The company Christmas party this year is in a bowling alley. Wait, maybe that's cool dot-com chic? Hook it up:
After seeing Personal Velocity last weekend, I truly hope it provides the opportunity to re-appropriate the term "chick flick" and turn it into riot grrl cinema. Go see it.
McSweeney's: Items from the Neiman Marcus 2002 Christmas Book.
Top 10 Outsider Videos.
You've probably seen Slate.com's Saddameter, but I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't gotten more attention. (But I do think the percentage is a little high.)
Oh, you didn't get me anything for Chistmas? Why, yes, I'd love the Beckett on Film DVD set. Gimme.
Visionary architectural drawings over at MoMA: Changing of the Avant-Garde.
Amazon's best music of 2002.
From The Philosopher's Magazine: How To Be A Philosopher.
Flash movie for art history majors.
For local hipsters, I highly recommend Mel's Beauty Bar, which I crashed this weekend.
sunday
When I Grow Up (video).
Apply!
Gwyneth Paltrow to play Sylvia Plath in new biopic.
Netanyahu: U.S. should attack Iran with Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210.
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.)
New ads in the Apple Switch campaign. Janie Porche saved Christmas.
That Cobain house on eBay is up to $210,000.
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 print issue of Wired has a story about the unwired campus of Dartmouth.
I've been there.
Literary theoreticians take on The Sopranos.
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.)
monday
Robert Pinsky 9/11 poem.
A few months ago, I was at a conference with Sue Johnson from 360degrees.org / PictureProjects. She was just getting started on a new project, an online audio 9/11 memorial for NPR. We had a nice chat about online audio/visual techniques, and her project is now available: The Sonic Memorial Project. The Sonic Browser is probably the most innovative part.
More 9/11: Walter Kirn reviews all those books you've seen, and makes sure to slam Baudrillard and Harlan Ellison along the way.
Ad Age magazine ran a poll a couple weeks ago about fashion, food, and technology preferences among ad people. The results. (See also on Ad Age: Aeropostale's music-video-length advertisement shown on MTV [video].)
Two good McSweeney's lists this week: Crayola Crayons Included in Its New Hollywood Box and Vocabulary Words We Learned by Playing Dungeons & Dragons.
I really don't talk about The Onion A.V. Club enough. The Onion proper gets all the poppy press and gloppy glee, but from a pop-culture criticism point of view, The A.V. Club might honestly be the best alt-culture publication out there (oftentimes better than Village Voice, Spin, and City Pages.) Just a sample: this week The A.V. Club reviews commentary tracks on DVDs.
Hard-to-find Tarkovsky diploma film: The Steamroller and the Violin. It's 43 minutes long, and some consider it Tarkovsky's greatest work (and, unquestionably, his shortest). It occurs to me that it would be cool to create a DVD titled The Senior Thesis Projects Of The Great Directors. Get the first works from Scorsese, Lynch, Wilder, Spielberg, Greenaway, Allen, Kiarostami, Kar-Wai and whoever else all on one DVD set.
I wonder who thought up the action-adventure sci-fi flick based the idea that apocalypse is eminent because the earth's core has stopped rotating: The Core, starring Hillary Swank. And I thought the wayward asteroid was a stretch.
ASCII Music Video.
I'm very excited. I just got June Panic's new album in the mail. (Previously: college friends who've punched me.)
According to the Sun Times in New Zealand (you can figure out how valid that makes it), Britney Loves Lesbian Porn. (I'm a little embarrassed to link to that, but I'm telling myself it's really an investigation into tabloid journalism and not another damn Britney link.)
The Guardian has an excerpt of the new Zadie Smith novel, The Autograph Man. And an interview.
wednesday
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.
Excellent McSweeney's list: Lessons Learned from My Study of Literature.
Two new neat blogs: Don't Link To Us!, a blog about stupid linking policies. The Trademark Blog, about the world of trademark protection.
I wish I had the idea to make a music video that was really an infographic.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a pretty dull story about the shared history of punk and the academe.
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...
Some teases of next season's Buffy.
The Times and Herbert Muschamp are preparing their vision of the future of Ground Zero.
I refuse to link to any Bruce Springsteen reviews.
tuesday
Dear god, I'm full of links today. Hang 10:
Steven Soderberg gets Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, and David Hyde Pierce to star in his new film, Full Frontal (that website has been getting good reviews in places like Entertainment Weekly), and he doesn't even show their faces in the trailer.
Salman Rushdie has a WTC Memorial idea.
Until it's officially released August 27, Aimee Mann is streaming her entire next album online.
Remember that Adobe vs. Macromedia lawsuit? Well, it's over, but this isn't very revealing.
Forget Google's zeitgeist, I'd much rather know if Adorno is beating Deleuze or Godard is trouncing Truffaut at TextZ's own zeitgeist page.
New Ftrain.com: August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web. It's the imagined future of a business magazine published in 2009. I think it's seriously possible that terms like "semantic web" and "RDF" will catch on simply because of this piece of fiction. Stay tuned.
Cool collection of politically-charged 3D/graph art/music: Pleix. I recommend Plaid: Itsu and Beauty Kit.
New Michelle Yeoh flick: The Touch. (Trailer.)
Peter Greenaway: "Cinema is dead." He said this at the opening for his exhibition of paintings. Knuck, knuck.
The guys who wrote Dow 36,000 still think it will happen.
Dan Savage interviewed.
Fascinating video of Philo T. Farnsworth from 1957 game show "I've Got a Secret."
McSweeney's: The Graffiti of Minneapolis. "Eden Prairie Sucks."
tuesday
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.
Arafat chips. Yeah, you heard me right, I said Arafat chips.
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.)
McSweeny's: Questions Most Frequently Asked By Bookstore Customers.
Poynter's Jill Geisler wrote an unintentionally hilarious column about "fuckedcompany.com" last week, which I forgot to link to. Romenesko's letters box has an intentionally fucking funny response that I thought about writing too.
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.)
NameThatPorno.com. (Don't worry, it's safe.)
Salon.com: Mickey Rourke's Desperate Truths.
Just to show that ethics and aesthetics are more linked than you might like to think, the WTC terrorists seem to lack keen judgement of both.
Architecture: All Blobs Lead To Rome
StarShards.com, a new site dedicated to SF writer Samuel Delany.
wednesday
According to "100 noted writers from 54 countries" these are the 100 best works of fiction. How many have you read? Me: 31, none of them in the last five years though. Hmmmm....
Four Cannes stories: Mike Leigh Gives Hollywood The Finger | Adam Sandler In New P.T. Anderson Flick | Cronenberg's New Film, Spiders | Rosanna Arquette Doesn't Make Yesterday's Fimoculous List.
This is the first time I've felt squeamish about linking to something. Rotten.com has digitized the Daniel Death Pearl Propaganda Video.
Eric Alterman starts a blog (on MSNBC.com).
The Onion: Factual Error Found On Internet. Even has a quote from WIRED editor Paul Boutin.
Silkworm (remember them?) presents the Musical Correctness Calculator, based upon the Musical Correctness Scale.
Brooke Gladstone of On The Media is writing a column in Slate.com this week.
When HurryDate just isn't fast enough, try SpeedDating. Or RapidDating. Or, hell, how about 8 Minute Dating.
McSweeney's: Hardy Boys Novel Or Death Metal Album?
Good Winona gossip, about the self-deprecating episode of SNL.
Google is showing off some of its test products at Labs.Google.com. New things include a glossary, voice search, and keyboard shortcuts.
Crazy internet. Big, Beautiful Women Figurines.
friday
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 Observer calls 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.
Nothing So Strange is a mockumentary about Bill Gates' assassination. He ain't happy. (Snagged from MeFi.)
New in McSweeney's: Tom Cruise's Smile, Circa December 2001.
SPECIAL FRIDAY MUSIC SUPPLEMENT:
Finally, Britney is doing it.
Eugene Mirman, the marvelous crooning child, rocks.
Wow, you thought the last Star Wars sucked? The next one (Episode II: Attack of the Clones) will have a cameo by 'NSYNC.
"It's Muzak for the soy latté set." Textism rips Leonard Cohen a new one. Although I don't agree, it's full of truth. (It also gave me this amazing link: Leonard Cohen Covered by Other Artists.)
Manergo.org and IanWhitney.com (both local blogs) have pictures from Lifter Puller's last show on July 29, 2000.
Which Radiohead Collective Member Are You?
75 Or Less reviews music in 75 words or less. Here's their take at the Avalanches.
Ya know, there are a lot of bad websites out there. But when a major media company does one as bad as Rolling Stone does theirs...
In the post-Napster age, I've used Aimster, BearShare, and AudioGalaxy for music filesharing. AudioGalaxy is the only one I might recommend.
I'm currently enjoying the agitprop Swedish band International Noise Conspiracy. "Capitalism Stole My Virginity" pretty much kicks my ass.
tuesday
NPR's "On The Media" had two good pieces about Egyptian film this week: America in Egypt (on America's image in Egyptian pop culture) and Terrorist Actor (on Egyptian actor Sayed Badreya who has played many terrorists in Hollywood films).
I knew that I would regret making my Best Music of 2001 list before the year ended. And not only did I uncover an album to add to the list, but I want to plop it at the very top. Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By is a concept piece from Dan The Automator (Handsome Boy Modeling School) with vocals from Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) and Jennifer Charles (Elysian Fields). It's Serge Gainsbourg for the hip-hop set. It's Barry White for turntablists. It's the trip-hop album Beck could never make. Well, whatever it is, I listened to it for 8 of the 14 hours I had to drive this Christmas vacation. 75Ark lets you listen to the entire album.
I've been quietly rooting for Melissa Maerz, the new music editor at City Pages, but she hasn't always filled the shoes of her predecessors Will Hermes, Peter Scholtes and Jon Dolan. This week, however, her cover story on Matthew St-Germain was pretty darn good. St-Germain is the founder of the local noise label Freedom From, whose most famous group, Reynolds, is an Argentinean outfit whose frontman has Down's syndrome and the rest of the band thinks he's a saint. Although the article somewhat overstates the ambiguity of St-Germain (he's less a charlatan and more careerist), it's still a good read about the underground music scene (and how Thurston Moore of course has something to do with it).
The Year in Review page has a flock of new entries.
thursday
Everyone's blabbing about how Google has opened up the archive on 20 years of Usenet postings. But no one's doing anything cool with it, like, say, diggin up the posts from American Taliban John Walker, aka Abdul Hamid, aka John Philip Walker Lindh. Circa 1997, he was apparently very interested in Kool Keith, drum machines, and Malcolm X. He was as wrapped up in soc.religion.islam as rec.music.hip-hop. Here he is selling his Marvel Comic Cards. Here he is asking about Islam's forbiddance of music. Here is his finding Vivaldi samples on Dr. Octagon albums.
Alright already, stop nagging. My Top 20 Albums Of 2001:
- Ágaetis Byrjun by Sigur Rós
- Rock Action by Mogwai
- Amnesiac by Radiohead
- Drukqs by Aphex Twin
- The Argument by Fugazi
- A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure by Matmos
- Things We Lost In The Fire by Low
- Stephen Malkmus by Stephen Malkmus
- Vespertine by Björk
- The Director's Cut by Fantômas
- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea by P.J. Harvey
- Feminist Sweepstakes by Le Tigre
- Confield by Autechre
- Innocence and Despair by Langley Schools Music Project
- Leaves Turn Inside You by Unwound
- Go Forth by Les Savy Fav
- Fetch the Compass, Kids by Danielson Famile
- Vision Creation Newsun by Boredoms
- Rain on Lens by Smog
- Standards by Tortoise
Tune in later for books and movies. See
other lists.
Nirvana Sues Courtney and Winona Arrested For Shoplifting.
sunday
I have my feelers out there to find out more about this tidbit from the latest Ansible:
China Miéville has the inside story: "My supervisor, an expert in the Middle East, told me about a rumour circulating about the name of Bin Laden's network. The term Al-Qaeda seems to have no political precedent in Arabic, and has therefore been something of a conundrum to the experts, until someone pointed out that a very popular book in the Arab world, Arabs apparently being big readers of translated sf, is Asimov's Foundation, the title of which is translated as "Al-Qaeda." Unlikely as it sounds, this is the only theory anyone can come up with."
Michaelangelo Matos, whose work I've followed in City Pages and Seattle Weekly, has a new online project: The Mix Project. For a year, he'll choose one song per day to write 500 words about. He admits there's nothing terribly unique about this idea, but his mixedtapes are probably better (or at least more evocative) than most.
ArtForum asked smarties to recommend books in the post-WTC world. (Homi K. Bhabha picks Wittgenstein; Avital Ronell, Derrida and Rilke; Andrew Ross, the WPA Guide to New York City.)
The Times has a theory about How The Simpsons Survives.
BBC had a cool Afghanistan Who's Who.
Witty twist on "porn star name game" over at McSweeney's. "Take your middle name as your first name. Take your mother's maiden name as your last name. That's your Romance Novelist name."
Journalists are funny. (I think I can say that since I still sorta am one.) Poynter has a forum called "Songs for Writers" where people talk about music to write to. I never knew my colleagues were so tasteless.
I think all websites should be as helpful as Hummus.com.
sunday
I'm in my office today, and for the first time in weeks, I'm listening to music. I've been compulsively glued to CNN and MSNBC for so long that I nearly forgot about listening to the new Laurie Anderson album. I guess this is recovering.
Today on the webcam, my new SmarterChild t-shirt.
The New York Film Festival forum "Making Movies That Matter" sounds like the biggest post-WTC event for the cultcha set to come along (and, no, I'm not disqualifying the endless benefit concerts). Attendees included Oliver Stone, bell hooks, Christine Vachon, and Christopher Hitchens. Rob Nelson at City Pages does another good job of summarizing the big film event of the day. (On a related note, I've been hearing from various sources that Oliver Stone has turned into a vegetable lately. I'm not sure if it's drugs or dementia, but he doesn't sound well. [Postscript: Aha! The New Yorker says it too.])
Dave Talbot blasts Andrew Sullivan.
A concise list of media lay-offs.
More time-devouring flash fun going on over at FlashForward2001: Amsterdam.
And once you're done with that, here's an absurdist blitz.