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monday
We're now two episodes into The Newsroom, HBO's newest entry in chatter-inducing Sunday programming. Reviews of the show have been brutal, but asking a media critic to judge this show is like asking a cannibal how his gallbladder tastes. Outside of media circles (amongst the vegans, to continue this overwrought metaphor), the show seems somewhat more widely appreciated.
This phenomena fascinates me. We seem to have some sort of uncanny valley relationship to art. If we are extremely close to it -- if the subject matter is about us -- then it is very likely that we find the similarity ugly, a disfigured clone of ourselves. The entertainment landscape is littered with examples of subcultures (professions, geographies, lifestyles) disagreeing with how they are portrayed by mainstream art.1 It makes you wonder: When does a subculture actually ever like art about itself?2
The anxiety in appreciating art about oneself probably involves some deep Lacanian mirror stage shit. Or maybe it's dormroom pop psych: We are apprehensive about the shortcuts that art must take. We don't enjoy having our subcultures portrayed because it reduces ideas down to sketches, people down to characters. Local significance loses to storyline, depth loses to drama.
So duh, of course we media people hate The Newsroom. It's characters don't act like our colleagues, it's fantasies aren't our realities. So what? Part of me wants to say, fuck it, that's our problem, not Sorkin's. But other times, I'm like, wait, that's fucking bullshit.
I want to talk about the part that's bullshit.
I worked in newsrooms for over 10 years, most of the time at websites attached to TV stations or networks. I've seen, and usually participated in, the creation of news around executions in Texas, riots in Seattle, hurricanes in Florida, and psychotic killing sprees in Virginia.
What I offer here is not an artistic or moral assessment of The Newsroom. Despite having nuanced qualitative opinions about the show3, that's not what we'll be discussing here. Let's temporarily ignore the finer ethical and aesthetic points, which are usually finessed as blustery diatribes, and instead focus on what's believable.
What's bullshit, and what's not?
That eruption from Will McAvoy in the first scene. Yeah, this is kinda bullshit. It's easy to imagine an Olbermann-like figure doing this (actually, that's all he did), but it's pretty unimaginable for a Brian Williams or a Katie Couric. Or maybe our hero is supposed to be more like Dylan Rattigan or Rachel Maddow? Actually, who knows! The way this show blurs the monolithic network anchor with the opinionated cable host is precisely the kind of fake construction that feels like bullshit. Or as the greatest news anchor of our time would say, a great moment of truthiness.
Having a blog. Not bullshit. Olbermann had one, Maddow has one, Brian Williams has a couple, Tucker Carlson has a whole goddamn site.
Not knowing you have a blog. Complete bullshit. This portrait of social media ignorance would have been accurate 10 years ago, but television executives started to freak out about the internet a while ago. They've spent an immense amount of time catching up, so now they're better at Twitter than you.
Walking into a newsroom and yelling "Punjab" to the Southeast Asian character that you know isn't named Punjab. This would never happen, even if your name is Sean Hannity. Bullshit.
Calling out someone as a "sorority girl." Sensing we would deem this bullshit, Sorkin set out to prove it's not.
Dating people you work with. Not bullshit. The only professionals who fuck each other more are actors.
Arguing with people you date while you're working. Not bullshit. The only professionals who argue with each other more are politicians.
The speech from an Executive Producer about fearing Halliburton and the lawsuit it would bring. Bullshit. I don't know a reporter who wouldn't love to catch Halliburton, Scientology, or whatever big scary corporate entity you name. The mere fact that Time-Warner-owned HBO aired this scene seems to completely undermine any truth it is seeking to reveal.
Hiring a new Executive Producer without telling the anchor. I would say this is bullshit, but I've recently heard a story similar to this. Judgement: perhaps not bullshit.
Running to your agent when the President of News hires an Executive Producer over the top of you. Yeah, they're prima donnas, so this could happen. Not necessarily bullshit.
The ongoing debate between popularity and quality. This would never be said aloud. However, it subliminally infuses every newsroom decision. Pseudo-bullshit.
Forgetting the name of your hot blonde assistant. If this show is actually modelled on Olbermann, then this is bullshit. He'd never forget that.
Having a President of News who is drunk "most of the time" at work. Being a heavy drinker can still be romanticized within some media circles (especially if you hang out with bloggers), but being regularly drunk at work would simply not be permitted any more, at any level. Drink up, that's bullshit.
Quoting Don Quixote. Bullshit.
Quoting Man of La Mancha. Epic bullshit, fa la la la la.
Vacationing in Saint Lucia with Erin Andrews. Questionable bullshit.
Figuring out the oil spill that quickly. This is probably the single most annoying thing in the first episodes. If you remember the evolution of the oil spill story, it took weeks for scientists to figure out what our Happy Band of Googlers sleuthed out in a few hours. Complete media fantasy bullshit.
An executive producer threatening an anchor with a fake on-air graphic seconds before going live. Reminiscent of both Broadcast News and Network, this nifty dramatic effect was as much bullshit then as it is now.
Not knowing where your control room is. Crazy bullshit.
FOX News hiring someone with three Mohammeds in his name. Pass.
Sending an email that accidentally goes to 178,000 people. Yep, bullshit. Of course email groups like that exist, but they were introduced to corporations 10 years ago, not last year. So not only does everyone know how they work, but we all also know that not everyone has access to email all those lists. A reply-all snafu would have been less bullshitty.
A fluff newsreader with a PhD in Economics from Duke and an adjunct professor at Columbia. Sure, this is supposed to be Erin Burnett, but still bullshit! She's barely old enough to have a PhD.
The Three I's. That kind of bullshit would actually happen, so it's not bullshit.
Minutes after delivering the sanctimonious Three I's, commenting on a reporters legs. B-------.
The organization of this network. This is one of the more perplexing elements of the show. ACN is apparently a 24-hour cable news outlet, but this show gets the network treatment. Cable newsrooms are much more fluid than this show suggests, with more interaction of programming and personnel between shows.
Hiding under a bed while your date fucks his ex-girlfriend. I have less expertise on this matter, so I'll let you call this one.
So?
Correlating quality with verisimilitude is always a dicey proposition4. But when a show places itself into history with real news events, and within a professional industry whose mandate is exposing truth, The Newsroom must be aware that it has put itself under the lens of realism's scrutiny.
The Newsroom rubs so close to reality that it makes you wonder how Will McAvoy would feel about it. After a long walk, some nifty orchestration, and a verbose conclusion, he'd enter his closing judgement into the chryon: It's bullshit.
Footnotes
1 For example, I lived in Fargo when the movie Fargo came out. To this day, the city has an extremely antagonistic relationship toward their portrayal as noble unsavages with snowboots.
2 The answer? Lawyers always love seeing themselves.
3 It's bullshit.
4 Didn't those dragons in Game of Thrones grow up just a little too quickly?
sunday
It's usually provoking when the academic press gets ahold of popular technology, because it tends to create new sociological, economic, or aesthetic perspectives. But this long New York Review of Books piece on Facebook reads more like an attempt to coalesce everything that has already been written about Facebook, without any attempt to say something unique. But I wonder: is this the fault of the academic press, or is popular publishing already doing a decent job of contextualizing Facebook?
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.
friday
This is going to be fun... On Monday night at Santos Party House in Chinatown, my team (Peter Rojas, Gavin Purcell, Kelly Reeves, Nate Westheimer) is going head-to-head against Michelle DeForest's team (Bre Pettis, Caroline McCarthy, Irene Polnyi, Tim Shey) in a little something called Know Your Meme: The Game Show! Pwn, Win, or Fail! Hosted by the Rocketboom kids, it's a live game show that should be stellar fun. Our team name is the Chocolate Boxxy Babies -- come on out and WATCH US CRUSH DEFOREST!
wednesday
Village Voice does something linkable: Interview with Carles of Hipster Runoff. The guy uses square quotes like there's no tomorrow: "I don't think I'm looking to 'shame' people. I just think that 'being yourself' is a bold decision. However, the decision to declare 'yourself' can leave you vulnerable to criticism. Not sure if that has to do with our modern world or if it has 'always been that way.' So whether you attach yourself to a band, an idea, a fashion sense, or a general aesthetic, I feel like we're all open to criticism and analysis from various perspectives. I just feel like in our world, 'how you present yourself' matters more than ever to everyone else but you." [via]
tuesday
If we could bundle up the internet into a few snappy headlines, 2008 might look like this:
+ Commenters Went Crazy
+ Twitter & Tumblr Went Mainstream
+ Rickrolling Went Very Mainstream
+ Big Media Went Nowhere
+ Oversharing Went Wild
+ Politicos Went Online
+ 4Chan & Lifecasting Went Awry
If not exactly an admirable time capsule, it still felt something like progress. I personally began the year promising a reduction in my daily internet intake, yet ended it with 100 additional sites in my rss reader. Perhaps it was a resolution meant to be broken.
In previous years, this list was dubbed "The Best Blogs You (Maybe) Aren't Reading." But that wordy contrivance seems presumptuous in these niche-filled times, where everyone seems to read everything yet no one seems to read the same things. So I took some advice that Lindsay gave me last year and dubbed this a collection of "notable" sites instead. That appellation seems more appropriate.
Maybe half of the blogs listed below are new, and the other half deserve attention for having reinvented the medium in some way. Consensus is an impossible task in a world this diverse, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out excellence when we see it. So here they are, the most notable blogs of the past year:
30) New York Times Blogs
Given the variety, it's probably unfair to group them all under one heading, but the old gray lady boldly stuck her neck further into the blogosphere guillotine during a year when retreat would have been forgiven. Old mainstays like Krugman, Freakonomics, DealBook, and City Room continued to drive daily conversation, while new additions like Proof (drinking), Laugh Lines (comedy), Measure for Measure (songwriting), and Ideas (their first foray into link blogging) proved big media could still navigate the niches. The most consistently important, however, was probably Bits, a disarmingly lucid tech-biz blog that proved you don't have to be bombastic or supercilious to win the category. (See also: L.A. Times Blogs.)
29) Boner Party
If you operate a celeb/entertainment/snark blog, you know how you are supposed to talk. The voice, now deeply entrenched in the genre, must be mimicked by any new entrant: bitchy, sneering, unimpressed. Boner Party somehow hit REFRESH on the whole genre this year by instead being celebratory, horny, fanboyish. Unlike, say, The Superficial, which is all attitude and no love, Boner Party is pure happy-happy-boy-boy. Imagine remaking Cute Overload but with pictures of girls next to giddy prose, and you've got yourself a boner party. For instance: "For guys, vaginas are like a cross between a pocket knife, a really cool nightclub, and a wizard. It can do SO many things, you REALLY want to get into it, but you have no idea how it works, and therefore it must be magical." (See also: Street Boners and TV Carnage, Golden Fiddle, and Tumblettes.)
28) Newsless
Matt Thompson packed up his belongings this year and moved to the middle of Missouri to think about the future of news -- not a bad gig if you can get it! (Matt is also known for being half of Snarkmarket, the voice of EPIC, and the founding editor of Vita.mn.) His fellowship at the University of Missouri provides time to explore the issues that many of us in online media are grappling with: poor news filters, a top-down approach to news gathering, the lack of pertinent local information, a broken breaking news model, and so on. While he's been researching these problems and writing about them on Newsless, he also put his ideas into action by launching The Money Meltdown, a site that aggregates the most essential information about the financial crisis. Though his research proposal involves Wikipediaing the News, he isn't naive enough to believe that simply turning on wikis will necessarily produce anything of value -- the right solution will be more complex than that. With the news industry in crisis, it's good that someone is trying to find models for maintaining an informed populace. (See also: PressThink and MediaShift.)
26) NonSociety
While a vocal minority of stoic internet enthusiasts screamed bloody murder when she landed on the cover of Wired (and others advised to just don't look), Julia Allison did something this year that many people have failed at: living a publicly transparent life -- or at least as close to it as possible. The snark machine may resent this, but it has been nothing short of notable. (See also: Reblogging Julia and Jake and Amir.)
19) Magic Molly
Of course, we need a Tumblr in here somewhere. The Tumblr Awards highlight the idiosyncratic characteristics of the platform that has essentially reignited the personal blogging movement: reblogs over comments, overheard conversation over discursive prose, clique over mass, fast over deliberative. Magic Molly embodied all of these things, as her itinerant persona flitted around the internet, from penning the definitive piece on adderall for n+1 to contributing to This Recording. If the Tumblrverse seems like high school, Molly is the smartest girl in the class -- the quickest with the Phillip Roth quote but never hiding her Sasha Grey guilt. (See also: TopherChris, CatBird, hrrrthrrr, Kung Fu Grippe, Soup Soup, Dear Old Love, Mediation, AntiKris, Frangy, and so on and so on....)
18) What Would Don Draper Do? and I Am Chuck Bass
After serving as a useful foil for the past couple years, the fake personality blog expired this year. But a new form arose from its ashes: the blog inspired by a character. Rather than feigning a famous person, these sites explored a character through a different set of criteria. The outcome was such projects as What Would Don Draper Do?, which imagines the Mad Men mad man as a self-help columnist, and I Am Chuck Bass, which invokes the notorious boulevardier's name to explore the inner-torment of Gossip Girl. (See also: Fire Nick Douglas and Rex's Scarf.)
16) Buzzfeed
After first landing on this list in 2006, Buzzfeed has been slowly transforming from a blogger favorite to a legitimate cultural force. It has also become unbelievably fast at identifying online trends before they happen. (See also: Radar Archive and Stuff White People Like.)
14) Videogum
Launched in April as a Stereogum offshoot, Videogum aggregates, dissects, and comments on everything happening with viral videos. If you saw a funny video this year, it was probably on Videogum first. While popularizing such phenomena as the live puppy cam, Amelie Jr., and the Ice-T / Soulja Boy feud, Gabe and Lindsay mixed in the occasional funny routine themselves. And Videogum elicited the best overheard faux-insult of the year: "I hate you. I hope your viral video doesn't go viral." (See also: Tilzy, First Showing, Antville, and Flavorwire.)
13) The Big Picture
It seems illogical that a photoblog using generic wire service photos and sitting atop a MovableType installation could possibly cause such a stir, but The Big Picture did one simple thing right: super large photos. After its June launch (by Kokogiak), the design/photo blogs instantly sent their link love, causing Boston.com's traffic to reportedly skyrocket. (See also: Media Storm and Getty Moodstream.)
12) Gawker & Radar
Fourteen months ago, not long after the Grigoriadis story, I guest-edited Gawker for a few days while Choire went off to Fire Island to feed his demons or some such thing. Everything was chilly at the office, but I had no idea I was living in antediluvian times. Since then, too many things have transpired to even count. But let's try: Denton introduced a pay-per-click model for bloggers, Emily quit, Choire quit, Josh quit, Denton hired himself, whoa -- NYT Mag cover story!, Josh responded, Emily landed a book deal, Moe had that unfortunate incident, Moe went to Radar, no wait she didn't, ack, Denton axed pay-per-click model, Choire hopped to Radar, a new Gawker editor joined, Moe was laid off, poor Balk, oops Radar folded, Denton predicted the end of the world, Sheila published photos, not you too Pareene, and a few redesigns happened. What'd I miss? If this all seems like some sort of horrid bukakke ritual performed by the blogomedia on you -- it is! And yet, we somehow ate it up. So give the guy credit -- he knows how to turn his empire into a compelling, twisted tale.
(See also: Fake Nick Denton and Cover Awards.)
10) Alley Insider
I'm as surprised as you are. When Alley Insider launched last year, it seemed like another unessential tech/biz blog whose purpose was to clutter the internet with more rewritten press releases. But Henry Blodget, the infamous former Wall Street analyst taken down by Eliot Spitzer in the first dot-com boom, had something else in mind. What immediately differentiated Alley Insider from the fracas of other also-rans was analysis -- sometimes provocative, generally accurate, and occasionally funny. A Wired profile chronicles Blodget's difficulties with living down his past, but the empire is growing with spin-offs like Clusterstock (financial dish) and The Business Sheet (business gossip). (See also: Paid Content and Techmeme.)
9) This Recording
From what I wrote in July: "What we have here is failure to communicate... strange little essays, or collages, usually around people, like Cronenberg or Ashbery or Anselm or Scarlett or Diablo or Sun Ra or Pasolini or Sasha (!!!), that are pieced together with aphorisms, links, pictures, and music, with lots of italics and ellipses. You don't really "read" the posts so much as "scan" them, which is not the same as "skim" -- it takes time. Sometimes they adopt the style of a writer -- Brett Easton Ellis -- and other times it's just something random like deducing who killed Chris Farley. Even the straight-up stuff, like the memo to Hollywood on which books to adapt, has this strange outsider voice.... It's more like some crazy ass pastiche, like this random thing about Mad Men from a few days ago, which we can either call an "essay" or visual-poetry-media-criticism-mashup." (See also: Public School Intelligentsia, Fey Friends, and Hipster Runoff.)
7) The Daily Beast
I don't know if it's really a blog either, but Tina Brown is creating, well, something over there. She has claimed in interviews that the site's intent is to sift through the online detritus for the best information -- a noble cause, but it already seems to be busting at the seams with its own information overload. Then again, features like The Cheat Sheet, Buzz Board, and Big Fat Story are at least trying to winnow the data flow to something manageable. (See also: Culture11 and AllTop.)
6) Kanye West
At some point in October, I made the most difficult decision of the year: I finally unsubscribed from Kanye's blog. The fatigue of trying to keep up with his 50-posts-per-day pace had finally set in. But I still say everyone should be forced to ingest all-things-Kanye for at least one week. And I mean everything -- including the random cut-and-paste jobs from IMDB and Google Image Search. And the comments -- oh yeah, you gotta read the comments. And you know what -- who cares if he's really writing all this stuff! You don't think Warhol made every painting, do you? (See also: Aziz is Bored, Lovely Package, and Pretty Much Amazing.)
5) Fred Wilson
Although there's no way to prove this, it seemed like the tech/media blowhards finally became less relevant this year. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but the old guard of Scoble/Winer/Calacanis/Arrington/Cuban seemed to lose influence, while more sober voices emerged -- those who weren't creating incestuous diurnal feuds with each other to game Techmeme. In the vacuum, Fred Wilson, who has been around the scene for a long time, became the analyst to turn to. Though he is a venture capitalist (with investments in del.icio.us, Outside.in, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, FeedBurner, and Disqus), he uses his blog (and Twitter and Tumblr) to address everything from his music tastes and Halloween costume to investor liquidity and google juice. (See also: Shirky.com, Rough Type, and Steven Berlin Johnson.)
4) Waxy & Ana Marie Cox
Whattup, old skool? Andy Baio and Ana Marie Cox are blog pioneers, which means they would be forgiven for getting crotchety and sedentary like several of their grumpy peers. But this year they adapted to the changing landscape and invented new ways to deal with it. Andy tore apart the data-centric stories that no one else was bothering with -- by using Mechanical Turk to collect Girl Talk data, by visualizing one-hit-wonder trends, and by investigating pirated Olympics video. (Along the way, he also coined "Supercuts" and tried to end FAIL.) Meanwhile, after losing her job at Radar, Ana Marie launched a pledge drive to cover her travel expenses on the McCain trail. Both of them repurposed old-fashioned blog ideas -- the tip jar and the online investigation -- for modern times. (See also: Young Manhattanite, ASCII, Alex Balk, and Tony Pierce.)
3) Twitter
Though it came in tied at #1 on last year's list, Twitter gets a rare repeat appearance because it made a big jump this year from a chatty novelty to a legit news stream. Toward the end of the year, people were still struggling to define the microblogging platform on a continuum between publishing and communication -- a debate that only illustrated the complexity of a such a simple platform used differently by so many people. (See also: Posterous and 4chan.)
1) Single Serving Sites
More than any medium before it, the internet is fueled by gimmicks. This particular gimmick, the single serving site, has been around for a while, manifesting itself in odd forms like YTMND and The Hamster Dance. While amusing, these sites were mostly inside jokes for the Goatse Generation. But then something happened last year when the concept was applied to a useful binary question -- IsLostARepeat.com and IsTwitterDown.com, for instance. These sites provided the kernel of an idea that exploded at the onset of 2008, beginning with Mat Honan launching BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com in February. Three days later, Jason Kottke officially coined the term, which unleashed the craziness. (In its own way, you could label Sergei Brin's one-post abandoned blog a single serving site.) This all concluded with the brilliant and inevitable IsThisYourPaperOnSingleServingSites.com, the definitive academic investigation on one of those short-lived phenomena that makes the internet feel continuously new, even if hitting refresh changes absolutely nothing. (See also: RickRolled and ICanHasCheezBurger.)
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Special thanks to Rachel, Noah, Andy, Emily, Spencer, Matt, Lindsay, Joanne, Matt, Karina, Kelly, Robin, and Taylor for their tips -- and inspiration -- in compiling this list. See you next year!
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This list on previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007
tuesday
"I am a filmmaker who lost an eye so naturally I decided to modify my prosthetic eye into a video camera." Whoa. [via]
friday
Washingtonian interviews the people behind @fakejohnmccain, @fakejoebiden, and @fakesarahpalin. It gets into the psychology of why someone would want to create fake identities and the aesthetics of what makes a good impersonation. (I had the first fake twitter account, the defunct @condi, which Slate once mentioned.)
friday
I told Choire the other day that he's the anti-Deborah Solomon. Everything about her interviews are sculpted, perfected, edited to these crystalline little moments that end up feeling lifeless. (I've argued elsewhere that the accusations of over-editing never bothered me ethically, just aesthetically.) Choire's interview with Matthew Broderick has the opposite feel, like what would happen if you accidentally got seated next to him at dinner.
tuesday
When the teenage version of me visited NYC, the destination was always the punk-infested East Village. I don't know if anyone has written about that moment at St. Marks Place, before hip-hop made it to MTV and grunge blew its head off, but it was a weird mix of stuff. Punk, at that moment in the form of hardcore, persisted as the prevailing aesthetic of the region, but it also seemed vaguely interested in the popular music of the time, which happened to be heavy metal and country music. It's a weird memory, but that strange influence created more hairsprayed manes and cowboy hats than you'd expect. It was punk, but it was punk trying to stay current -- somewhat humorously, or maybe ironically. And politically, punk seemed alive because it was a bit flexible, current, pragmatic. Now when I walk through St. Marks, I see something different. The punks who remain, in far smaller numbers, and now peeing on the Chipotle, all look like original '70s punks, with an aggressively retro aesthetic. Perhaps my philosophy of pastiche pragmatism would make no sense to these purists, but I can't help feeling that this reactionary anti-style is only style. Anyway, that's what I was thinking while reading this NY Mag story on the current punk scene at St. Marks.
monday
From the trailer, Visioneers starring Zack Galifanakis looks promising. [via]
tuesday
How much does marketing work? Fuck if I know. But a campaign called "Fuller Spectrum of News" we did at msnbc.com was nominated for a Webby. [via]
monday
When I revisited the first issue of Wired last week, it was obvious that I had unfortunately glossed over several areas (the design, in particular, got an unfair treatment). But as Valleywag ruefully noted, it was already 1,600 words long.
So I was thrilled when the founding editor, Louis Rossetto, emailed me a lengthy response, which serves as a great Round 2 of the first issue. With his approval, the email is printed below.
Rex,
Liked your piece on Wired 1.1.
A few things:
1. There was a beta. Actually two. Back in April 1992, John, Barb, Jane, and I created a "Manifesto" in a three day-and-night charette in the studio of photographer Neil Selkirk in Chelsea that stated what Wired was about, and set out the design philosophy. Barlow was on the cover, swiped from the New York Times Magazine, if I remember correctly. It had a proposed table of contents, proposed masthead (we still hadn't contacted any writers except for Markoff and Michael Schrage), an ad or two, the opening spread of a story. Six months later, I created a second prototype on my own. Learned how to use Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator in the same month -- and juggle too. Eugene Mosier, who was later to join us as head of production, called in sick to his day job and helped put it together (making him employee number zero since we couldn't pay him anything but cookies). Jane sweet-talked equipment out of Radius (a name from the past) and others, since we not only didn't have money to pay people like Eugene but to buy equipment either. This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive. He did, hence Origin's ads in our early issues.
2. Nicholas's statement about HD was not inaccurate. Resolution is not the big deal -- delivery and access is. YouTube is a bigger revolution than HD by a mile, regardless of how many big flat panels are in people's homes.
3. True, Nicholas's email address was laughably wrong, but I'm not sure even now I know why. It's certainly not because we were shy about printing email addresses. Addresses of writers appear throughout the issue -- a first for any magazine, as far as I know. My email address appeared under my editorial -- got hundreds of replies, each of which I answered. I think there was some kind of screw up in the handling of the text, perhaps someone slugged something in waiting for his real address, and then, in the insane rush to get out the first issue, it ended up being published as is. Nicholas himself was perhaps the most chagrined. It was corrected by the second issue, and yes, that address reached him.
4. I think you radically underestimate John and Barb's design work. As they often said, their job was to imagine what the future looked like, and do it on a medium out of the past. They brought amazing design smarts to the process of putting out the magazine, as well as incredible production chops, which were reflected in Wired from the first issue. That opening multi-page spread illuminating the McLuhan quote which launched the issue, that incredible graphic indulgence which continued for the entire time I was editor, and which is conspicuously absent from the current, was true modern graphic art -- in the case of the first one, a collaboration between John and Erik Adigard (Erik's work would appear regularly in the mag, and, for a while, he worked at HotWired/Wired Digital helping Barb create it's graphic sensibility). John and Barb were the ones who landed us our printer, a company back East in Connecticut John had worked with on slick annual reports. They had just taken delivery of a brand spanking new Heidelberg six color (CMYK plus two spot colors -- ah, that's how it was done!) press as big as a couple of box cars. We were the first clients on the press. The first issue was on press over Xmas 1992, and John, Barb, Eugene, and I were on press check. The pressmen were grizzled 30-year pros. They set up the press, they put on the VW size rolls of our special matte paper, they poured in the gallons and gallons of our eye-burning fluorescent ink, they started the press, they adjusted the print flow, they ripped off the first pages and put it under the calibrated lights to check color, they looked at it through a loop to check the dot gain, they did this half a dozen time, then they pronounced it perfect -- calibration was absolutely nominal. I can still remember how John took one look and said: put more ink on the page. The pressmen were aghast. It was perfect as is, just the way it was supposed to be. John insisted. They ultimately relented. He looked at the new sample. He told them he wanted still more ink. They protested again. They finally relented again. John looked at the new sheet. This time he told them: I want you to turn the ink up until it smears, and then dial back to where it's only just not smearing; and that's how I want the entire job done. The pressmen were appalled, outraged, embarrassed. But ultimately, they did what John told them. That's why the magazine looked and felt the way it did, because it literally carried more and brighter inks than a normal magazine -- they leaped off the matte paper. Later, as the magazine started to get recognition, the Wired job became the one the pressmen all wanted to work on. Under John's direction.
P.S. We collected the opening spreads of the first few years of Wired when we started our book company Hardwired. Called it Mind Grenades. Each of those introductions reflected my trolling through an issue and finding a quote somewhere that seemed portentous enough to be chiseled onto the side of a public building. Funny thing was, taken all together and in sequence, those randomly picked quotes made a coherent argument. As well as a mindblowing visual statement. Eugene did the press check, in Singapore. That book reprinted the original colors used in the intro spreads, which meant, I believe, something like 26 spot colors. Not many printed objects with 26 spot colors.
5. The baby pissing ad got us some shit. We were glad.
6. Wired/Tired was an afterthought, John Plunkett's idea, I think. On the last day of production, we would shout stuff around the office as we were working, and I'd write it down. Utterly subjective. Except, for about the first two years, we made sure that Manhattan was always in the Tired column in some way, trying to stick to the know-it-alls in what they parochially thought was the center of the universe. It was either Clay Felker or Jann Wenner who said that it's not only important for a magazine to have heros, but also pick the right enemies. Course, NY got its revenge at the time of the IPO, but that's another story.
7. The dotcom stock market bubble occurred after I already left the magazine, so I will decline to comment on whether Wired abetted it or not. But while I was there, we frequently indulged our cynicism, as with Chip Bayers' story in our April 1996 issue, "The Great Web Wipeout."
8. The colophon was fun. I wanted to list the stuff we used to make the magazine, because I wanted people to see that it didn't require a huge operation to make a great magazine -- in other words, that you didn't need Hearst or TimeLife or IDG overhead to produce a magazine that looked better than theirs. I think it was Eugene who added the drugs, with some notable exceptions, given that we were figuratively and literally at the epicenter of the SF rave culture. For that first issue, I might have also added adrenaline and optimism.
Thanks for taking the time. Hope your archaeology didn't screw up your issue too much. If so, let me know, maybe I can scrounge up a replacement.
Best,
Louis Rossetto
Thanks Louis!
For anyone who is really into this history, I also recommend Gary Wolf's book, Wired: A Romance, which is basically a biography of the magazine.
friday
Wired magazine turns 15 years old this month. This column looks back at the very first issue.
Wired didn't even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release:
Issue 1.1.
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can't help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the "Information Superhighway" yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn't even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren't even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway. Goatse wasn't even a dirty thought yet.
And yet there it was, the premiere issue: that blocky logo and Bruce Sterling peering out from the cover. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the nerds were about to take over the world... right up until the suits showed up a few years later to pummel them with their briefcases of money.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves in this story. Let's take a look at that first issue, piece by piece.
Staff Box
Started by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, who moved to California from Holland in 1991, Wired opened with a staff box of unknowns, at least to the traditional media world. Many of them would become the most important technology writers of the next decade.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor, came from the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. John Battelle, who would later found Federated Media and write the definitive book on Google, was the managing editor. The rest of the staff box was sprinkled with names that are now recognized as tech pundits of various stripes: Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Stewart Brand, John Markoff, Michael Wolff, and Nicholas Negroponte. And of course, the "Patron Saint," Marshall McLuhan.
(An aside: it's difficult to remember how McLuhan was perceived pre-Wired. Though certainly a revered scholar in his lifetime [let us not forget Annie Hall], I also seem to recall a huckster backlash around this time. But three years after the premiere issue of Wired, McLuhan was on the cover of the magazine. Today, even his worst theories get roundly quoted, especially by blowhards like me.)
Tired / Wired
Magazine editors tend to hyperbolize their craft, and nothing gets deliberated with more over-analysis than the opening pages of a magazine. The conventional wisdom is that the blurby, picture-filled front pages set the philosophical agenda of a magazine. The "front of the book," as they call it, psychologically defines who should be reading this rag by persuading you to join the club of similarly excellent tastemakers. So the Wired/Tired Index probably seemed like a stroke of genius. It was the perfect way to divide the world into two simple categories of people: There are those who are wired -- they get it! And there are those are tired -- they don't!
It's classic hippie logic. And congratulations! Because you're reading Wired, you're in the right category.
In retrospect, it's unclear which side of this great divide the actual editors themselves fell on. On its maiden voyage, Wired deemed Nintendo a tired entity, while the long-forgotten gaming console 3DO was celebrated as wired. And for mysterious reasons, painting (painting?) crept into wired status, while performance (performance?) was strangely shelved as tired. But the clincher certainly had to be declaring REM (who had just released their best album, Automatic for the People) tired, but passing wired status onto midwest alt-country act The Jayhawks. This is akin to saying that Graham Parsons was a great DJ.
Other front-of-the-book items: a preview of a cult film called Jurassic Park, a review of a print zine called bOING bOING, and a report on a crazy new technology that could free up your cable tv lines for phone calls.
Features
For all the peculiar editorial choices in the early issues of Wired, the strangest must certainly be giving Camille Paglia license to talk about Marshall McLuhan.
But the editors actually turned this stagnant interview into something a little funny by reprinting Paglia's handwritten edits scrawled over the top. From the first issue, one could already foresee that Wired was going to be a good publication, but this bit of whimsy suggested that it might just go beyond being the next Mondo 2000. This brand of self-awareness only comes along in decade-long chunks: a '60s Rolling Stone, a '70s Esquire, an '80s Spy.
Or it was just a dumb prank. Whatever.
The cover story, penned by Bruce Sterling, is one in a long history of virtual war stories that Wired would publish. It forgoes references to Ender's Game, but doesn't leave out video game comparisons. "It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war." Considering that the page directly preceding this is an ad for a new book called The Windows 3.1 Bible, it seems difficult to image how revolutionary these virtual war games could have been.
But what the other features portend has become a Wired hallmark: the clash between culture and technology. John Markoff's story on cellphone hacking dissects a digital subculture in a way that would be replicated several times in the proceeding decade. Similarly, the Otaku feature was prescient in its analysis of Japanese society before it had become a Western obsession. And an interesting note: the story on Richard Stallman's obstacles toward free software doesn't include the phrase "open source" because it had yet to even be popularized.
The Ads
Here's the prevailing question when persuing the ads in this issue: were they as unintelligible then as they are now? The two companies that bought this issue's very first ad and very last ad -- Origin and Trans Rebo, respectively -- were probably as unknown then as they are now. And it's unlikely that the 100,000 copies that the first issue of Wired sold on the newsstand helped them in any way.
A few pages in, the most emblematic page of the first issue of Wired appears.
He looks like an old John "I'm a PC" Hodgman! And look closely -- that screen really says "Fax Transmittal."
Oh, to be young again.
Design
Early Wired is often remembered for its edgy design aesthetic. The disillusion of this myth that you will feel in looking back at the first issues of Wired is comparable to when MTV replays those once-edgy Pat Benatar videos.
The Negroponte Index
MIT scholar, Wired investor, and OLPC creator -- Nicholas Negroponte is himself something of a patron saint to the digerati. But he's clearly crummy at making predictions.
In his inaugural back-page column, Negroponte takes on the emerging technology known as High-Definition Television. With the goggles of a decade-and-a-half to look through, the opening line hits you like a DeLorean hurled from the past: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."
Negroponte contends that the future will actually be fuzzy, arguing that it's a mistake to believe "achieving increased image quality is the relevant course to be pursuing." As anyone who's pored over debates about 1080 vs. 720 and counts their HDMI jacks like their children, this looks like the crazy ramblings of a fuzzy-headed college professor.
To be fair, the futurist gets it half right, such as when he prognosticates a burgeoning on-demand culture but mistakingly fetishizing perspective viewing:
What is needed is innovation in programming, new kinds of delivery, and personalization of content. All of this can be derived from being digital. The six-o'clock news can be not only delivered when you want it, but it also can be edited for you and randomly accessed by you. If the viewer wants an old Humphrey Bogart movie at 8:17 pm, the telephone company will provide it over its twisted-pair copper lines. Eventually, when you watch a baseball game, you will be able to do so from any seat in the stadium or, for that matter, from the perspective of the baseball. That would be a big change.
Sounds awesome! Too bad approximately 1 kjillion dollar were spent last year on cramming living rooms with big ass TVs instead.
Colophon
I remember exactly where I was when the first issue of Wired was handed to me. Exiting a coffee shop called The Urban Stampede -- the only coffee shop within 70 miles of the small midwest state school I was attending -- a friend accosted me, clutching a mysterious magazine with a striped spine. He shoved it in my hands, exasperated, "You have to see this." Wired instantly became required reading for all of our friends.
And our favorite part of the magazine was buried in the back, in the pages that articles jumped to: the colophon.
There were probably two reasons why we loved the colophon: 1) we had no idea what a colophon was, and 2) it showed the means of production of the magazine. The colophon listed the computers (Apple Macintosh II), the printers (HP Scanjet IIc), the layout software (Quark XPress), and even the routers (Farallon). And then it concluded with some music (Dinosaur Jr., Curve, k.d. lang, etc.) and a final heading for "drugs of choice" (caffeine, sugar, Advil).
It sounds corny, but we loved this magazine because its creators drank the same soda as us. These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!
I don't know if this is surreal or predictable, but it's certainly obvious now: futurism and nostalgia are intricately linked with each other. Revisiting the early pages of Wired reminds one of a time when there was an underground culture -- when not everything was known by everyone else. Can you remember a time when there were secrets? It sounds so naive.
But it also sounds tremendously boring. Thankfully, we'll always have the future.
saturday
Convergence! Synergy! Well, this one gets some points for modest ingenuity if nothing else... Celebutantes is a new novel coming out next month that has an accompanying web tv series, which will immediately carve out the lovers/haters of the book (is there really any way to intellectualize superficiality?). Tilzy describes it as "a young Sophia Coppola farce with an exaggerated Entourage and/or Californication aesthetic."
thursday
Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual "best blogs" post [2002, 2003, 2004] by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos -- or Cute Overload.
It turned out that this change -- pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed -- was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us' typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it's time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading:
30) The Informed Reader
As mainstream media organizations continue to close their foreign bureaus out of cost-saving desperation, the less expensive version -- "the international news blog" -- has become a staple property on nearly all sites (nytimes.com, msnbc.com, cnn.com, newyorker.com, etc.). Though the foreign news consumer might be tricked into believing these will reveal new forms of international reporting, it actually means that none of these sites stick out above the rest -- except for the Wall Street Journal's The Informed Reader, which somehow kept my attention this year by finding the right balance between gathering links and providing context. (See also: Good Magazine.)
28) Paleo-Future
If the dictum "the future is now" has any veracity, then what do we do with the past? This blog chronicles how past generations envisioned what the future would look like. With an archive that goes back to the 1880s, Paleo-Future is an essential compendium of a new historical category: nostalgic futurism. (See also: Subtopia.)
27) TV In Japan
If ever there were a genre in need of aggregation, Japanese TV would be it. This site (from my friend Gavin Purcell, whose day job is running Attack of the Show on G4) is religious in its pursuit to bring you the best moments of televised weirdness from the Land of the Rising Sun. (See also: Neojaponisme and Ping Mag.)
26) BookForum
For those of us who have given up on the once-spectacular and oft-praised Arts & Letters Daily, the transformation of Book Forum to an aggregation blog has been nothing less than a savior. (See also: ArtsJournal.)
23) Metafilter Popular Favorites
Every year I sneak a reference to Metafilter onto this list. And every year a Metafilter post ridicules its inclusion -- can't wait to see this year's! My longstanding love-hate relationship with Metafilter (check the archives) tilted back toward the negative this year, which is why the Popular Favorites feature was almost a panacea for my frustration. More big sites are adding this "favoriting" feature (BoingBoing, Gothamist, etc.), which I initially appraised as a cheap way of avoiding depth, but now find the only way I can continue reading some sites. (See also: Ask.Metafilter.)
22) Drawn.ca
Drawn bills itself at "collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw," but it acts more like a comprehensive guide to visual culture. (See also: Design Observer.)
21) FourFour
The overabundant jungle of pop culture blogging leaves little room for new voices to emerge. One can read only so many snarky reviews of every episode of every reality tv show on every network every night (I know!). As an antidote to Perez Hilton's pretty hate machine, FourFour's Rich Juzwiak (whose day job is blogging for VH1) has carved out something unique in the pop landscape by balancing critical insight with a celebration for the lovable. And what does FourFour love? For starters: Tyra, America's Next Top Model, Beyonce, Tyra, Project Runway, and... Tyra. (See also: Golden Fiddle and Best Week Ever.)
20) Reverse Cowgirl
Her: "Why don't more sex bloggers make your list?" Me: "Cuz they all talk about the same thing." Her: "Yes, but in many different ways." It's true, sex bloggers don't usually end up on this list, but Susannah Breslin's blog was one of the few sites in the genre to stay in the "to read" pile all year long.
19) Kanye West: Blog
Too much was made again this year about famous people getting blogs. Do you really want more insight into these people's opinions? Of course not -- you want to know their passions, their desires, their interest in dropping $7K on a bottle of cognac. Kanye's blog is more like a scrapbook of his id: some links (hey look, the new Lupe Fiasco vid), some photos (hey look, a Delorean), but surprisingly little ego.
16) Pussy Ranch
Several years ago I included Diablo on a "hot new blog!" list. Now she's super famous, and I'm still making this stupid list.
15) Serious Eats
Food blogging has always been a blind spot for me, but Serious Eats was the first site to find the right mix of editorial voice and community interaction.
14) Shorpy
The photoblog genre is easy to overlook, but this blog puts itself in a curatorial role by collecting photos up to 100 years old. (See also: The Triumph of Bullshit.)
11) The Daily Swarm
Looking for an alternative to Pitchfork? Who isn't! But Daily Swarm isn't exactly that -- it's a music news source that somehow seems to break news before anyone else. And it's not "press release" news that Pitchfork delivers, nor the salacious celeb news of TMZ, nor even the industry banter of Idolator; rather, The Daily Swarm's beat is a rare kind of -- dare I say -- investigative work that no one else is doing. (See also: Stereogum and Culture Bully.)
10) A Brief Message
Brevity seemed to only increase its role as the ruling doctrine this year (see: Snack Culture), and the designers hopped on board with their micro-manifestos on this site. (See also: Very Short List.)
8) emo+beer = busted career
When Earl Boykins mixed the infographic with a passion for Brooklyn indie music, he ended up with several pieces in the New York Times that could have passed for art installations. (See also: Infosthetics.)
7) Frolix-8: Philip K. Dick
What we once called "the news" is increasingly becoming different filters for perceiving reality. If you think about it, watching the news is just putting on someone else's reality goggles. Philip K. Dick would probably agree, and so this amazing site gives you today's headlines matched up next to which PKD novel the story corresponds with. If it seems that science fiction gets less fantastical every year, then this is the site for you. (See also: Cyber Punk Review.)
6) Snowclones
A snowclone -- says Wikipedia, cuz it oughta know -- is "a type of formula-based cliche that uses an old idiom in a new context." The best example is the rampant usage of "X is the new Y." But there are so many others, such as "Don't hate me because I'm X," "In X, no one can hear you Y," "No rest for the X," "To X or not to X," "Xgate," "Xcore," "Got X?" -- and many more. The site is so diligent in its pursuit of the cliche and the trite that you might fall stricken with a loss of words, gasping "This is not your daddy's snowclone." (See also: Language Hat and Away With Words.)
5) Jezebel
Gawker Media's modus operandi is to enter a content category (gadgets, politics, sports, music, etc.) by summarizing that industry with enough volume (in both senses of the word) to basically become the essential trade mag in that sector. This is why Jezebel represents the biggest coup in the empire's history. Rather than beguile its way into the women's magazine industry, Jezebel burst onto the scene in May by defining itself in oppositional terms. It isn't so much a thing as it is not those things. To be clear: it is not the celeb porn that Conde Nast and Hearst have been splooging on you from newsstands for decades. Whereas the average Idolator post would fit in just fine in Blender or Pitchfork, Jezebel was an entire take-down of Glamour, Cosmo, and the rest of the airbrushed crew. This is the holy grail of publishing: to find a voice that is completely unique while still appealing to a broad category. Nicely played, Mr. Denton. (Note: By the numbers, Jezebel probably doesn't qualify in the "overlooked" character of this list. But with as many dudes like me reading this "women's fashion" site every day...) (See also: Spout.)
3) Vulture
New York Magazine is a perplexing contradiction. It is probably the best magazine on the newsstand right now (Wired is the only competition), but it also has an editorial voice that is occasionally annoying in its sense of privilege and entitlement. On its worst days, I call this attitude "Aggressively SoHo" -- as in, it surpassed believing that NYC is the center of the world by declaring the epicenter somewhere south of 14th St. and north of Chambers St. When my bestest friend Melissa (disclaimer!) said she was co-launching this blog (she has since moved onto Rolling Stone), I was worried that this voice would ring through on its cultural coverage. But the opposite has happened -- Vulture has kept the best parts of New York Mag (the nuance, the design, the clever), while leaving the Aggressive SoHo Tude at the door. (See also: Wired's Blogs.)
1) Twitter and Tumblr
"Blog" has always been an elastic term, just barely surviving the stress of containing everything from Hot Chicks With Douchebags to DailyKos to your mom's Vox account. But this year the seams of the term finally burst, and out spilled some brand new words, tweets and tumbls, and these two new forms of quasi-blogging that are more personal, more immediate, and of course more annoying than anything online communication has rustled up so far. Twitter and Tumblr are the Rubik's Cube and the Tetris of the blogging world -- simple concepts that are immensely more complex and compelling than they logically should be. I've explained Twitter to a hundred people in a hundred different ways, each time not quite capturing why it's different, why it matters. "You just have to play it to understand," I eventually say, choosing the only verb that approaches the nuanced complexity. And yet, there's another very simple way to say it: Twitter and Tumblr made blogging fun again this year.
And finally, thanks to Taylor, Ben, Robin, Lindsay, Melissa, Scott, Alisa, Gavin, Jason, Peter, Matt, Choire, and Anil for their tips on this project. See ya next year.
wednesday
Infosthetics' 20 most wanted Christmas gifts for the info-addicted. (I already own nearly a third of these, which totally weirds me out.)
wednesday
This year proved again that when it feels like the entire goddamn world is going to hell -- that's a good time to throw a dance party. Whether you were fist-pumping for Maya's admittance back into America, chanting "We are North American scum!" at the club, or just jumping in giddy delight that Justice somehow landed an MTV Music Video Award nomination, it was a good year to dance in the streets, especially to these, my favorite albums of 2007:
1) Kanye West, Graduation
Take away his ego, and Kanye's music ceases to exist. That's because Kanye is one of a dying breed of artist, like a Bob Dylan or a Woody Allen or a Bjork, who create art out of sheer force of will and ego. Art and life aren't binaries for these people. How else to explain this album's sui generis cocktail -- a sampling of his mentors in dance (Daft Punk), street (Jay-Z), fashion (Louis Vuitton), and art (Murakami). And, I suppose, literature (Nietzsche), by pinching that particularly arch aphorism about surviving adversity. "That which does not kill me..." might suggest that Kanye's force emerges from some sort of Ayn Randian individualism, but it's more clearly the power that comes from treating your life as collage.
2) M.I.A., Kala
The '80s would have been much better if M.I.A. were around to squelch that wretched little phrase "world music" -- she would drop some street on those marketers. Although she would resist this, Maya has somehow emerged as one of the few relevant voices in the language of globalization: descriptive not prescriptive, street not studio, itinerant not stagnant, and most importantly, local not global. This is why I've written before that M.I.A. brings to mind Rem Koolhaas more than anyone else -- one can visualize her building little markets (songs) on the streets of Lagos or Sri Lanka or Kingston. That's what this album sounds like: all the streets in the world playing music at once.
3) LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Though James Murphy's second album will fill your daily dance-punk requirements, it's the fifth track, the ballad "All My Friends," which stands out as the best song of the year. Pretty much the exact opposite of his glib underground hit "Losing My Edge," this song starts with a cold, repetitive keyboard line that's probably pinched from some minimalistic Steve Reich score. And it never really deviates from there, except by layering some lines about friendship, which becomes the song's theme -- not about a single friend, but about the celebration of friendship as a concept. "You spend the next five years trying to get with the plan / And the next five trying to get with your friends again" has been the mantra for a couple hundred 30-somethings who I know.
4) Justice, Cross
Even though they never released an album, one could call 2007 the year of Daft Punk. Between their Coachella appearance, their movie, and Kanye creating their first Billboard hit, Daft Punk was an invisible success story. And to complete the story, we could call this the best Daft Punk album in years -- and get away with it without too much guilt.
5) Mark Ronson, Version
Prepare thyself for a strange reason to like a musician: Ronson exposes the weakness of Pitchfork. The plucky music site has been an aggressive foe of Ronson and his entourage (Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen). The reasons for this are somewhat paradoxical, since the Ronson aesthetic -- let's call it "synthetic retro" -- is usually a Pitchfork touchstone. But beyond all that industry prattle, Ronson is one of the few producers who can put together a cohesive solo album of his own. Some might tire of the ska inflections on a few tracks, but then Winehouse's cover of The Zutons' "Valerie" comes along to make you remember that synthetic nostalgia is the best kind.
6) I'm Not There, Soundtrack
Of course you want to hear Sonic Youth cover Dylan. And Malkmus, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and The Hold Steady, and Karen O, and two discs more of this.
7) Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55
Did Charlotte haunt you this year? Because she haunted me. And does she remind you of a long lost love? For me, she does. Are you glad that someone finally found something decent for Air to do? Yes, me too.
8) Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future
Fuck "new rave" -- this is "new Iron Maiden"! The album has enough arcane mythology to fill the new D&D manual. If you caught Klaxons in concert this year, you witnessed this strange spectacle: teenage kids dancing around on stage with a Mello Yello high, quoting Coleridge and Pynchon, and playing their instruments like they invented them.
9) Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release
Let's get this out of the way: there's a lot bullshit on this album. Some of these tracks are the worst offenders of the reductive, repetitive, retrograde kind of techno/house that gives the entire genre a bad name. But in those moments where humanity creeps in -- on "Hustler" and "It's The Beat" -- this turns into something like the best of Bjork's dance work.
10) Battles, Mirrored
What happens when you throw another "post-" in front of "post-rock"? Prog rock! No one expected this segment of the '70s to reemerge this year, but Battles at least added a little head-shaking to the shoe-gazing genre.
11) Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
When I forgot to bring my iPod on a trip to LA this year, I bought this CD to play in the rental car. And then I turned it up every time I started to fight with the girl who was traveling with me. I now know this album by heart.
12) Britney Spears, Blackout
Yep, above Radiohead. Why? Because while Radiohead is obsessed with dystopic futures, Britney actually is the future. Like one of those fake Japanese pop idols, Brit-Bot is the complete cypher that gets invented by producers and the media. This album is like a Wikipedia entry in which everyone -- The Neptunes, TMZ, whoever -- should get a writing credit. You may not like to hear this, but Britney is you.
15) White Williams, Smoke
Since no one seems up to carrying the mantle anymore, the title of The New Bowie could be passed onto White Williams. But more than pure retread, Williams rips '70s glam through a processor that admits the existence of disco, Beck, and laptop pop.
16) The Pipettes, We Are the Pipettes
This album caused my dorky friends in San Francisco to actually dance. For getting nerds to shuffle, some might say this album should be much higher on the list.
18) Prince, Planet Earth
Although I didn't make it back to Minneapolis to see him perform at First Ave this year (which was a blessing, because the cops shot it down in less than an hour), Prince put out the album that's aesthetically the closest to Purple Rain that we've seen in some time.
20) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is
If it felt like Karen O spent this year trying to figure out what people wanted her to be, this EP didn't necessarily contradict that. Even its title seems obsessed with self-definition.
21) Tomahawk, Anonymous
While we wait for Michael Patton to do something a little more digestible again (We! Want! Lovage!), he put out this strange Native American Heavy Metal album.
23) Bloc Party, Weekend in the City
Bloc Party have me hanging by a thread. I want them to have staying-power, but this could just be their last relevant album.
24) Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha
I think of this album as what happens when you mash together Chicago and Minneapolis. It has the sound of Drag City, but the aesthetic of Tim. Which makes sense, because Bird is from Chicago but the album with recorded in Minneapolis with some of its finest locals.
25) Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy
You know how Beck tends to alternate between doing a rock/hip-hop album and doing a down-tempo/acoustic album? This is like the response to last year's rocking Rather Ripped.
And finally, here are some albums that I tried to like this year, but it just never happened: Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew - Spirit If..., Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder, The Good, the Bad & the Queen's The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Air's Pocket Symphony, Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero, Timbaland's Timbaland Presents Shock Value, T.I.'s T.I. vs. T.I.P., 50 Cent's Curtis, Arctic Monkeys's Favourite Worst Nightmare, Amon Tobin's Foley Room, The Shins' Wincing the Night Away, The National's The Boxer, Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, Bjork's Volta, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, Low's Drums and Guns, PJ Harvey's White Chalk, Jose Gonzalez' In Our Nature, Bruce Springsteen's Magic, Feist's The Reminder, and Les Savvy Fav's Let's Stay Friends.
Previous Yearly Music Roundups: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006.
tuesday
Breaking: the trailer to Juno is out. Stars include Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, opens December 14. (Juno was written by Minneapolis pal Diablo Cody.)
wednesday
Seattle Weekly strangely gives the large story treatment to cougars -- no, not the ones found in the wild. Although this is purely anecdotal, Seattle seems to have a larger cougar population than most places. (In other Seattle news, H&M is finally coming here, which, at this point, is as exciting as another Target opening. All the girls want a Zara, but Seattle just can't handle fashion -- the REI aesthetic reigns supreme.)
saturday
My favorite new song: "Atlas" from the band Battles whose debut album drops in May. Math rock meets post rock meets laptop mashup.
wednesday
I already linked to it once, but I'm doing it again because one of my favorite blogs also linked to it today: MSNBC.com Newsbreaker Game. I know, it's no Desktop Tower Defense, but check it out anyway.
friday
Just when you thought hoped boomer nostalgia had become passé, along comes the film Across the Universe, which strangely fetishizes the Beatles while still looking not quite horrible.
wednesday
Update your urban myths: someone actually stole a kidney from the "Bodies" exhibit in Seattle.
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.
monday
For me, 2006 was the year of inconsequential hype. Wasn't this the year of Snakes on a Plane? And what ever happened to Pearl Jam's big comeback? And weren't The Raconteurs s'posed to be the best rock band ever? And don't even get me started on what the bloggers were telling you to like. Whatevah, you were too busy watching Journey on YouTube to care.
Despite the odds, this was a pretty good year in music. I've got 21 albums to prove it:
21) The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon
No one realized it at the time, but Party Music was probably the most important album of 2001 -- but like everything else after 9/11, it had to be sublimated for a few years. Boots Riley returned this year to "laugh, love, and make love" -- while wearing camo. When the apocalypse comes, you know The Coup will be playing the soundtrack.
20) Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom
The cast of characters alone -- Norah Jones, Amon Tobin, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, Massive Attack, Kid Koala -- make this a seductive record. But even after the novelty wears off, Mike Patton's obstinate weirdness and whispering/screaming vocals make this album continually engaging, if not terminally perverse.
19) Be Your Own Pet, Be Your Own Pet
This is the kind of punk rock that your pre/post-cool skater friend in high school liked but you didn't understand. Then she made a mixed tape for you with a noisy mess called "Fuuuuuuun" on it, and even though it included a wink to "Stairway to Heaven" you still didn't understand, but you adored her for playing a song called "Fuuuuuuun" -- I mean, how couldn't you?
18) Sparklehorse, Dreamt For Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain
I have no idea why people ignored this album, but I predict the hipsters will trackback to this release next year when DJ Danger Mouse and Mark Linkous collaborate on something called Dangerhorse (I'm not making this up). Linkous makes the kind of raspy pop static that everyone has forgotten is the reason that recorded music still exists.
16) Cold War Kids, Robbers and Cowards
The first four songs on this debut record are so ridiculously good that it makes you suspicious of their ability to maintain it, which causes you to unfairly judge them on the potential of future work that you've never heard, which is grossly unjust, but is also the strange state of music today.
15) Bob Dylan, Modern Times
He hates technology more than your grandma, but that's probably why he makes albums better than your kids.
14) Joanna Newsome, Ys
This will take a moment to digest: Diamanda Galas meets Bjork and June Carter Cash in a dark alley. They magically morph into a harpist who makes an album engineered by Steve Albini that has only five songs but is still an hour long. And yet you love it.
13) The DFA Remixes, Chapter 1 & Chapter 2
No one asked for another version of Fischerspooner's "Emerge" or NIN's "The Hand that Feeds," but you couldn't pick anyone better than DFA to reconstitute nostalgia as futurism.
12) Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon
It's the strangest thing in the world to leave town and watch your friend's band explode like this. One second you're playing Katamari Damacy and listening to GNR, the next they're trying to get time off work to tour Japan.
11) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
If you didn't know, fishscale is super-high quality uncut cocaine -- sparkly and glimmering like a fish's scales. This album is singularly obsessed with coke -- kilos and bricks, snorted and smoked -- all of it, in multiple different forms, which you can view as a metaphor of quality or race or economics... or not.
9) Girl Talk, Night Ripper
One ritalin-and-coffee-induced diatribe about how this album is perfectly of its time yet paradoxically timeless is more than enough.
8) Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Just when you think the dance rock thing has hit the windshield, along comes the best of the genre -- from a bunch of kids slamming on the gas pedal, no less. Two of the songs on this album include the word "dance," yet they're the least danceable songs on the album.
7) Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
The only thing that makes less sense than these old-timers writing what might be the most relevant love song of the year ("Do You Believe in Rapture?") might be the same fogies writing the best rock song of the year ("Incinerate"). "Do you believe in a second chance?" Totally.
6) The Streets, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living
At the beginning of the year, Mike Skinner was in rehab; at the end of the year, he was preparing to run the New York City marathon. This sums up The Streets -- slacking yet overachieving, a bad decision that always turns good, a big story yet a complete fuck up.
5) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones
I'm likely rating this album higher than almost anyone else will this year, but it probably deserves even higher. Why do you all hate Karen O for wanting to make a Blondie record? Sometimes I think you're bigger than the sound, too.
4) Mickey Avalon, Mickey Avalon
Rock critics fucking hate Mickey Avalon -- my friend Missy thinks he's egotistical scum. But this is my kind of punk-rapping scum bag: he stylizes like Kool Keith, he narrates like Eminem, he snags the aesthetics of L.A. glam rock (but bi), and packages it all like Beck-on-meth-not-Beck-on-scientology. And despite that description, he sounds absolutely nothing like Kid Rock!
3) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
Can you imagine the pitch to the record label? "Okay, we're gonna make a doo-wop punk album. But it won't sound anything like that. It will sound more like a lazy day in the Prospect Park. Oh, but you can sorta dance to it. Got it?"
2) Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
The second you heard it, you knew it was going to be the song of the summer. By the second bar, you could visualize the sin wave over the next couple months: the pre-buzz, the raves, the saturation, the backlash, the overhype, and the backlash to the backlash (because you read NY Mag too). It was a crystal clear moment, which so many will remember as defining the summer of '06, when everything seemed to have a thrilling predictability.
1) The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
During a year that I moved away from the Midwest, no other record could possibly top this list. I'm not sure what non-expats do with all the Lyndale, Penn, and Nicolet references (cross-check them to their Replacements records?), but this will always be one of those records that will be impossibly linked to my life in mysterious ways that make me equal parts sad and hopeful. Every time Craig roars "We walked across that Grain Belt bridge / Into a brand new Minneapolis," I wonder why every city can't be so lucky as to have such a perferct homage. And then I remember only one city deserves it. I miss ya, boys and girls.
This Year's Disappointments:
Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics, Emily Haines, Knives Don't Have Your Back, DJ Shadow, The Outsider, Thom Yorke, The Eraser, Beck, The Information, Outkast, Idlewild, Nellie McKay, Pretty Little Head, Lily Allen, Alright, Still, The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers, Beyonce, B'day, Bjork, Drawing Restraint 9, Peaches, Impeach My Bush, Morrissey, Ringleader of the Tormentors, Prince, 3121, Kool Keith, Nogatco Rd.
saturday
Those elegant bachelors at Aesthetic Apparatus are getting into the t-shirt biz: Mister Hip-Hop. And I've seen the preview to a "Death Kitty" tee that will rock your socks off.
wednesday
Bodies: The Exhibition opens this weekend in Seattle. The Stranger has a preview.
monday
FILM
So that little movie that got me in a little t-shirt trouble last Fall finally came out this weekend. I wish I still had enough agitprop in me to call for a boycott, but I'll probably go see it this week.
MUSIC
I doubt you watched VH1's Story of Heavy Metal last week, but the best part was a puffy, wasted, maudlin Jani Lane saying he could "shoot himself in the fucking head" for writing "Cherry Pie." Dude, Decline of the Western Civilization was decades ago!
If you missed it, Gnarles Barkley on the MTV Movie Awards.
The boys from Aesthetic Apparatus were on Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books. I started a MNspeak thread.
Do you think the Flaming Lips snagged the bouncing balls idea from this famous Sony ad for their new video?
BOOKS
Doctorow on Coupland.
ONLINE
I should totally take Scoble's place.
Rocketboom Amanda was on Reliable Sources this weekend.
NORTH DAKOTA
North Dakota continues to befuddle me. I don't know how one can measure this, but it must be the most conservative state in the union, yet it still somehow elects Democrats to congress and has occasional socialist streaks. The latest is the North Dakota Farmers Union opening a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Agraria, which cost about $4 million to open, will feature home-grown product shipped directly from farmers -- about a third of it from North Dakota and the rest from family farms in 25 states. AP has some photos.
monday
My life coach (Daily Show | NYT Styles) says I better get blogging again because not even Amanda reads me anymore. So here are some links:
FRIENDS
I have much to talk about, but first here are some updates from various Friends of Fimoculous:
Tapes 'N Tapes were on last week's Best Week Ever. After taking SXSW by storm (and landing an 8.3 on Pitchfork), last night they played the last show on this tour here in Seattle. They were awesome.
Diablo Cody was on Letterman last week. So best, go girl.
Michaelangelo Matos has exited his perch as the music critic at the Seattle Weekly to join the up-and-coming eMusic. For his final goodbye, he gives a farewell mixed tape to Seattle.
Waxy is still fighting Bill Cosby.
Elizabeth Spiers' DealBreaker.com launches on Wednesday. Interview.
Chuck Olsen interviewed Bruce Sterling.
Klosterman wrote an essay for the upcoming Criterion version of Dazed & Confused. His forthcoming book, Chuck Klosterman IV, is a collection of his previously-published work.
MNstories did a video of my farewell party in Minneapolis. That's really not me crying at the end.
TV
Whoa, did you know Andy Milonakis is 30 years old? According to The Times, he has a growth hormone condition. He's the Gary Coleman of our times!
In addition to VH1's Web Junk 20 and Bravo's Viral Videos, other upcoming projects include a show on USA based upon eBaum's World and a show on NBC called The Net With Carson Daly. In the future, everyone will create a viral video.
The first season of Wonder Showzen is coming out on DVD this week.
BOOKS
Which is more peculiar -- that Terry Gross' interview with J.T. LeRoy is online without any notation of recent events, or that J.T. LeRoy sounds so obviously like a chick in the interview?
Enter the ISBN number of a book into BarnesAndNoble.com and get a quote for how much they will buy it for. Cool.
I've been busy alphabetizing my CDs and running to Ikea for book shelves, so somewhere along the way I missed that Malcolm Gladwell started a blog.
Although I'm morally obligated to read every book even remotely related to the internet (especially if it has something to do with blogging), I haven't decided whether to dive into Kos' Crashing The Gate. The decent NYTBR review includes the first chapter, so maybe that's a good starting point.
FILM
[Insert Snakes on a Plane link here.]
Well, at least William Gibson liked V is for Vendetta.
A second Scanner Darkly trailer.
Bob Saget is friggin nuts.
MUSIC
Go read Douglas Coupland's "interview" with Morrisey, which is really an essay on the state of the interview.
Even Tom Waits once did a commercial -- for dog food, no less. It's especially interesting since he later sued Frito-Lay for impersonating him.
ONLINE
There's hope for all of us: Jason and Meg got married. Remember when they sorta spatted on Blogumentary?
Newsweek's cover story: Putting the 'We' in the Web.
You've probably read Danah's essay on why Friendster lost to MySpace, but here's the link anyway.
CITIES
The Top 15 Skylines in the World.
GAMES
One of the many things I like about Wired is that it truly is a magazine. That is, for all the talk about the death of print, Wired stories are the best example of the perfection of a medium that doesn't easily translate into other mediums. You can, for instance, read most of Will Wright's game issue online, but it's not nearly the experience that the magazine is. (See also: Wright doing a walk-through of Spore.)
GOOGLE
On the new Google Finance, you won't find this info: how much of Google stock that Google execs have sold.
FOOD
Every side-street around Microsoft campus seems to have one of those create-a-home-meal shops, so I'm not surprised to learn that Seattle is home to one of the biggest chains. From the NYT story: "The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction." (Old MNspeak thread on the MSP-based versions.)
wednesday
LIFESTYLE
Slate.com asks Which Condom Is Best?
ONLINE
Yahoo is 10 years old today. A 10-Year Netrospective. They're giving away ice cream.
TECH
No! It looks like NYT is cancelling Circuits [second item], the Thursday tech section. Actually, the section, which used to be a must-read, has been on the slow downward slide toward irrelevance for the past year.
AIM At Work allows you to synch your AIM Buddy List with Outlook.
TV
NYT has more on the reality tv show about the art world mentioned here a couple weeks ago.
FILM
WSJ reports that Green Cine Daily (which is one of my favorite blogs) "sparked a 20-fold rise in hits" for Green Cine (the rent-by-mail DVD service). See also: Netflix' corporate blogger, The Rocchi Report.
More ridiculous trailer premieres: Star Wars Trailer to Premiere On The O.C..
MARKETING
Slate loves that "All about the 'O'" commercial from Overstock.com.
T-SHIRTS
Some new ones at Non-Zero Change. I like "I'm Somebody's Fetish" and "I'm Not Your Damn Search Engine".
TIVO
Forrester Memo to Steve Jobs: Buy TiVo.
LOCAL
Dylan Hicks does a great job on a suite of stories about 89.3 The Current in CP. Paul Demko talks about the successes (sometimes forced) of the station, Diablo Cody looks at the personalities behind the station, and Dylan critiques the whiteness of the programming. Have you noticed that everyone is talking about radio lately?
I completely missed the story about a screenwriter who took out an advert in City Pages to contact Josh Hartnett about his screenplay. I almost hate to tell the guy that Josh regularly gets orange juice at my neighorhood coffeeshop.
You a nerd? Then MarsCon, which is going on this weekend, is probably for you.
A friend of mine from college has published her book about the Grand Forks disaster of 1997, where I lost my apartment and everything else in a flood and fire. (Previously: Ashley Shelby's book, where I'm a prominent "character.")
I haven't made it over to Creative Electric for the new poster show with Squad19 (CP story), but it looks like Minneapolis has another great design collective to add to the list.
wednesday
I'll be in San Francisco this weekend. If a Bay City Roller out there wants to buy me a drink, drop me a note.
ONLINE
The Atlasphere, a dating service for Ayn Rand freaks. I bet there are many more doms than subs.
Some guy dialed 867-5309 with every area code in America, and posted the results.
Big merger in blog land: Six Apart is buying Live Journal. Two things that interest me about this: 1) It almost seems like it could have been the other way around. 2) The user base for each product represents the complete opposites of the blogging spectrum. (Danah rhasodizing on why this is bad.)
A blog for Vloggercon has launched. (WSJ story on video blogs.)
It could be a mirage, but it looks like TMFML might be back.
IDEAS
The annual Edge Question this year: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
FILM
I reopened the Year of Lists page again just to add Top 20 Nudes Scenes (NSFW, duh).
TV
Buy the dress that Buffy wore on her first day of school on eBay.
A Daily Show writer makes a joke in New York mag about the show's plans for 2005: "Then we invade the blogosphere, since that's where the money is."
ART
Top 100 Artists.
LOCAL
In a move that everyone in the Cities who knows a shred about radio saw coming, Mary Lucia has joined the new MPR station, 89.3.
Chris Danforth has joined my #1 for Picked To Click this year, The Deaths.
Slanderous Minneapolis is telling its readers to answer the Strib's call for MLK events by emailing fake events.
Dara's Top Dozen Dishes of the Year is out. Delish.
monday
Today, I want to touch on a few topics related to game culture -- and how it intersects with movies, music, and digital communication. I know, that intro sentence sounds about as fun as an a capella Bjork album (oh wait!). So instead of getting pedantic, let's look at the gaming landscape by pointing out new phenomena in digital entertainment, with a focus on how gaming is influencing all media. This isn't necessarily a cohesive essay with a single objective, but I hope it's more than another "Synergy of The Matrix" piece. Let's just call this a Scrappy Collection of Thoughts About Various Gaming Trends that have been of recent fascination to me:
VIDEO MODS
I won't try to convince you that the mashup of a teen-goth BloodRayne 2 video game and a teen-goth Evanescence music video belongs in the canon of required cultural material for our time. In other words, don't sigh if your TiVo missed Video Mods, a new series on MTV2 in which video game characters and landscapes are used to create music videos. I guess the worst thing that one could say about Video Mods is that Viacom is blatantly ripping off Machinima to attract video game advertising to television.
Even if that's true, it's also much more.
But first: a part of me wants to tell you that the convergence of these mediums is the perfect metaphor for the current state of the music industry. This cynical critique would go something like this: little pac men (consumers) run around a contested maze (Virgin Records) gobbling up indistinguishable dots (songs/albums) and ghosts (musicians). It's a sociological Flatland out there, in which demographics are empty ciphers with unlimited purchasing power -- the same goddamn person buys (or downloads) Outkast, Evanescence, and Creed. À la carte pop culture icons are sculpted with the same care that goes into creating Sims characters -- complete with readymade identities that become obsolete faster than you can blurt "Friendster." Identity is the currency of the music industry, and it's a free market economy of Pokemon cards: I'll trade you a "Britney Reinvented #24" for a "Cleaned Up Christina #9." Virtual video game characters taking over the role of musician is nothing more than the next step in the MilliVanilling of the music industry.
But, like I said, I don't really buy that mojo. Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in cynically looking at pop culture icons, but I think it ultimately misses a key point in understanding the attraction of Video Mods. For evidence, take a look at The Sims 2 video mod of the Fountains of Wayne song "Stacy's Mom."
The Sims is the top dog of this medium so far. Not only is it the highest-selling series of all time, but it has come to represent a watershed creative moment in the industry. So why, one might ask, would "Stacy's Mom" score the grand prize of The Sims mod?
I honestly have no idea. But I think you'll see a clue by looking at the storyline behind "Stacy's Mom." You might say the Fountains of Wayne song is just a MILF romp imagined by a horny adolescent. But in reality, it's not even that -- it's actually sung by thirty-somethings who are themselves projecting a tweener dream. Basically, it's a wish fulfillment nostalgia fantasy from guys old enough to be Stacy's Dad.
So now, what is The Sims? That's more complex, but one could say it is an interactive world where players bring to life characters outside their normal demographic makeup. In other words, it's a giant role-playing fantasy.
Starting to see a trend here? Let's move on....
PLAYBOY
In the age of Suicide Girls, it's amazing that Playboy is still around. And it's amazing that I bother to mention the publication in a video game rant. But even as I say this, I realize that for the first time in my life, I bought an issue of Playboy last month, simply because the magazine has done a remarkable job of staying relevant in a digital age. For instance, the Google guys interview and the Washingtonienne spread reminded me that the magazine could still be relevant.
Or maybe these are just the last gasps of breath of a dying Boomer ideology. I'd entertain that argument too.
Anyway, when Playboy announced they would be doing a photo spread of characters from video games, you could instantly picture a digital historian somewhere writing this event into a timeline of important virtual character events (chronologically right after reality TV and right before the holodeck). Hackers modding Lara Croft into a pinup is one thing, but the mainstream culture industry getting sly with virtual sexuality says a lot more about where we are. This single layout might actually become the best indicator of the mainstreaming of a number of (previously) fringe activities and concepts: virtual sexuality, video game culture, user-modified content, reality blurring. And a new video game, Playboy: The Mansion, a Sims-like romp through Hef's mansion, will take this even further.
WAR GAMING
Forget sex, war is where it's at.
A lot has been said recently about the relationship between the industrial war complex and video games (such as in articles in The New York Times and Wired). When the Army created the game America's Army to recruit soldiers, it seemed that Ender's Game truly was going to happen. I'm working on an article for publication about this theme, so let's breeze past this topic for the moment.
SIMS 2
Every night over the last week, I've sat in a room with a computer and TV, playing the recently-released The Sims 2 and watching late night talk shows. Something important changed last night: I turned off the TV and started watching the show that my Sim character was watching on his television.
I don't think I can even articulate how hyper-real this is.
REALITY GAMING
The spurt of ironic glee about Flash Mobs last summer was more than a hipster punchline. It illustrated how gaming was leaking from the pores of society. The products of this spillage have included Big Urban Game (Minneapolis) and PacManhattan (NYC). And the glut of competition-based reality shows (Survivor, The Apprentice, Fear Factor, etc.) are all just extreme versions of reality gaming. (One could also argue that these Reality Games are a sort of tame suburban version of more serious planned events like the Seattle WTO Protests. That's for a different essay though.)
THE VIDEOGAME REVOLUTION
Anyone who has played even five minutes of Zelda will find PBS's new two-hour special The Video Game Revolution a bit tedious. I suppose it serves a valid purpose -- to provide a historical framework of popular video games. Too bad it's as engaging as a two-hour Pong match.
But what interests me is what this documentary represents in this moment in time. It seems we have reached a period in gaming where we can reflect on the past equipped with the gear found in the toolbelt of historical analysis: summary, bricolage, and nostalgia. The Video Game Revolution implicitly declares video games as a real object of pop culture study. Of course, this should not be surprising given the rise of academic programs designed to study gaming. Something about this evolution reminds me of 1990s-era Camille Paglia promoting the notion that universities should start rock music programs. I have mixed feelings about whether turning an academic eye to rock really does anything for musicians or fans or society, but I do worry an accidental effect of academizing a discipline in the past couple decades: studying it is synonymous with taming it. (I know many people in academia who are studying game and play, and they all get sour-faced when I suggest this possibility.)
WATCHING TV AT WORK
Many companies have planned events on Fridays that provides employees a break from work. But what our workplace does is truly unique. The idea started innocently: let's use our in-house online video streaming technology to deliver a movie to employees on Friday.
Thus was born The Friday Matinee.
Here's how it works: every Wednesday, an email goes out to a dist list of programmers, designers, engineers, and editors. It contains a list of movies, and the community votes on which one it will watch. On Friday at 2:00, the intranet streaming servers are fired up and the 'play' button is pushed on the DVD player. This is where it gets interesting.
If you walk around through the darkened cubicles at this time, you will see dozens of programmers donning headphones and staring at their computer monitors. They are simultaneously performing a number of tasks: writing code, watching The Friday Matinee, and IM-ing their colleagues about both. In other words, people are working, being entertained, and communicating all at the same time. There's something about this collapse of mediums and lifestyles that suggests a complicated future of media and entertainment.
CONCLUDING
This last example has nothing explicitly to do with gaming, but it illustrates something that's happening in our times: people are hacking mediums together for their own purposes. The provocative questions are just starting to come out: what happens if you mix film with instant messenger? what would a music/game hybrid look like? how could role-playing influence traditional one-way entertainment?
In an average day, I perform numerous activities which have nothing to do with gaming explicitly, but which feel somehow game-like. These include blogging, creating a playlist for my iPod, programming my TiVo, Googling girls on my cellphone at bars, and learning the hacks behind Yahoo Internet Messenger. If there's one point from all these examples, it's that "gaming" might become so pervasive as to become invisible.
Game on.
friday
DIGI MEDIA
Gizmodo reviews MSNtv, bascially the next generation of WebTV.
Years ago, I edited a newsstand magazine that basically reviewed websites. That genre of publishing sounds a billion years old now, but don't tell the Times Art section, which reviews music websites.
CNet has a follow-up story about the uphill battles a Netflix/TiVo partnership will face.
When I first saw the new BlackBerry, the keyboard totally confused me. Circuits finally explains the mentality behind this unique (and my guess is, ultimately flawed) 20-key keyboard.
Group investigative typography? The controversy that LittleGreenFootballs.com and PowerLine.com launched over the 60 Minutes piece (I won't try to explain it -- just go look) is fascinating group-think research even if it seems that most of the people sleuthing this together are complete morons.
FILM
New trailer to the Wes Anderson / Bill Murry flick, The Life Aquatic.
WORDS
Slate reviews graphic novel Persepolis 2 in slideshow format.
ONLINE
CNN Money has a strange slideshow of the animated characters who will appear naked in next month's Playboy.
MEDIA
SF Chroncicle tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Maureen Dowd.
PERSONAL
My pal John Lamb wrote a column about blogs this week in which he makes fun of my Amazon Wish List.
LOCAL
If you were at Mark Mallman's crazy 52.4-hour show last weekend, you witnessed one of those little pieces of Twin Cities rock history that will be recounted as often as Prince at First Ave. and Lifter Puller at the Triple Rock. David de Young has a review.
tuesday
You think that fat dead Atkins guy lost 21 grams when he died? Ba-dum-dum. On with the show:
WORDS
The American Library Association site is selling posters of celebs holding books. Way too many to name, but just a few: Weird Al (Stephen Hawking), Julia Stiles (David Sedaris) Bill Gates (Hemingway), and Britney (Harry Potter). Oh hell, Christina Ricci, put down The Fountainhead before you hurt someone!
ONLINE
Jenny's Phone Number [867-5309] up for sale on eBay. Current price: $200,100. Yipe.
Gothamist interview with my own personal heartache, Lizzy Spiers. Low Culture: the stapler.
Gum Blondes.
TV
The WB has cancelled Angel. RenewAngel.com spings up.
Surprisingly strong "future of search" piece in WashPost. It gets into some of the ideas of Bayesian Machine Learning, also discussed in many places including last month's MIT Tech Review's 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World.
Friends is the most over-rated comedy ever.
Season 2 of Six Feet Under on DVD finally announced.
MUSIC
How do I know summer is coming? Cuz the new Wilco is here soon.
Backflip. Edson covers The Darkness.
Polaroid FAQ on "shaking it like a Polaroid picture."
monday
INTERNET/MEDIA
Interfacing media, democracy, and social software into one important cluster, two big recent publication in my industry that everyone should care about: New Directions for News' We Media | Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy. I spent my weekend devouring these.
Red Herring on social networking software.
OJR's sprawling interview with the principal scientist behind Google News has many good tidbits.
POLITICS
Rolling Stone interviews Wesley Clark.
Steven Johnson took the small idea of the web generating strategies to campaigning and called them mob spots. In praxis, he crated an ad for Clark's campaign.
The Bush Regime Card Deck.
MUSIC
The new Strokes album really is all that. (It's not out until Oct. 28, but if you look around you might find it.)
The Onion interviews Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian.
Did you see the New Yorker anti-RIAA cover this week?
UBER-CELEBRITY
Of course it makes sense that Vice is now appearing in the Style section. The Antic Muse rants.
Is Jack Black as over-exposed as Britney? That's my theory. Long profile in the NY Times Mag. (And a School Of Rock Blog.)
WORDS
Gigantic archive of the writings of Edward Said.
FILM
Yeah, yeah, yeah... the new Matrix trailers are up.
TV
Simpsons: If They Mated.
LOCAL
Former Minneapolitan, David Carr, now at The New York Times, interviewed in Mpls St. Paul Magazine.
The Rake interviews another ex-local, Al Franken.
I'd like to be the CJ of the online world. For instance: I spied Buy-Me-A-Beer and MinneapolisHappyHour in deep conversation at the Sound Unseen opening party. Could there be a merger in the works?
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.
thursday
LIFE
Two years ago today, I got on a plane that was over the Pacific when planes were flying into buildings in NYC.
WORDS
Idolatory review of David Foster Wallace's newest at Wired.
Scrabblelog.
Just one more day of this. Salam Pax has a site to promote his new book. You can download chapter one. And there's a crazy promo that looks like a bad MTV commercial.
Speaking of crazy promos, did you see the one for Coupland's newest?
MUSIC
Watch out world, Moby produced part of Britney's next "trance-y" album. I wonder if John Kerry is getting trance-y with Moby.
Pixies: reuiniting. Where is my mind?
Deliver love. Outkast videos for you already: Hey Ya | The Way You Move.
Great MP3 of Wilco's performance on Leno.
FILM
There are days I should just give up this category to Green Cine.
LOCAL
Nate Patrin reviews the new Atmosphere over at Seattle Weekly.
CP's Fall Arts Roundup includes a profile of a local film fave of mine, Melody Gilbert.
Aesthetic Apparatus' poster for the Liz Phair show was tres cool.
Marilyn Manson wins!
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."
tuesday
FILM
Trailer to the new Larry Clark film. (Heavy traffic; might time out.)
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights trailer. Is there a word signifying worse than vile?
And somewhere in between, Mona Lisa Smile trailer, with three women who dominate about 90% of my personal fantasies: Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal (plus some chump named Julia Roberts as their teacher).
MEDIA
Even if you're not a fan, the Tour de France map/app from NYTimes/AFP is cool.
Finally, some good news. The Guardian is coming to America. Oh, and Michael Savage was fired.
WORDS
Someone asked me the other day about my favorite writers, and I stumbled through saying Ron Rosenbaum was my favorite columnist, but only when he does culture instead of politics. His latest dissects the origin of the word dude. In other linguist notes, Geoff Nunberg discusses slippery slope (audio).
MUSIC
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and others are spurning Apple's iTunes, some because it contributes to "the demise of the album format." I like how people think they can stop change.
Jewel "sold out" to a razor ad.
The Bangles are back.
INTERNET/COMMUNITY
The comments that Anil generated with his atomic elements of a blog post are really good. A lot of what's said informs my thinking about this blog, which a) has been experimenting categories and b) implicitly posits the "day" as the atomic element rather than the "post."
Times: Blogging in the workplace.
Sneak peak at AOL 9.0.
One of those "candidate selector" applications.
Cool thing to play with: microsimulation of road traffic.
If you have some time, WashingtonPost.com has a massive project interviewing photographers who were in Iraq.
Steven Berlin Johnson has a column in Discover about There.com, which is gonna be an ultra-cool community site.
This story in the Times about multitaskers makes me feel all icky inside. I don't care how many studies tell me having three monitors, two phones, and one PDA is less productive -- go ahead, believe those LIES while you eat my hyperkinetic mental tread.
LOCAL
Yikes! Wired News has a story about moblogs, with this line: "In Minneapolis, a mob is planning to gather at an as-yet-undisclosed location on July 22 at 6:25 p.m., according to the group's organizer, who asked to remain anonymous." Discussion group.
On the newstand rack this weekend, I noticed that Aesthetic Apparatus (more info) has landed features in HOW and ReadyMade. Rumor is they're starting their own magazine too. Good job, fellas.
thursday
It's one of those weeks where you're pretty sure hanging up the profession and working in a coffee shop is a good idea. Just saying.
Romenesko's MediaNews is changing its named to just Romenesko because of some fascist newspaper owners. (Why didn't they just go back to MediaGossip?)
The jig is up, North Dakota boys.
Animatrix. First of nine episodes, four of which will be available online (the rest available on DVD).
Slate eulogizes Leslie Fiedler, who, to be honest, I sorta forgot about. Salon had an interview with him a couple months ago.
This article in The Register talks about Akamai's push with something called EdgeSuite. We have actually been one of the companies leading the charge in using and testing their product, which has some marvellous potential.
William Gibson's new book is out.
Slate: Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games.
monday
Somewhere in the middle of 2.5 bottles of wine, I said "Al Gore is the Axl Rose of politics," so I knew it was time to stop. Let's get on with the links.
The past just won't die. New Mad Max? Rocky VI? Ugh.
Not exactly a sea change: limited-edition Beck iPod.
New DJ Shadow video for "Walkie Talkie".
McSweeney's is publishing the next William Vollman novel. Eggers is probably the only one who wouldn't force an edit down from six volumes and 3,500 pages.
Cronenberg's new movie: Spider. (The trailer.) The Guardian interviews him.
The Times Ethicist on Googling. New Yorker cartoon on "being Googled".
International Museum of Flight Attendant Uniforms.
Why Axl, why?
Post: 10 Critical Flaws.
...and the award for Biggest Zip File I've Downloaded this year goes to: Matrix Reloaded trailer. (Trust me, don't bother.)
If you're in the biz, you know that Reuters does some of the best infographics in the industry. Their hidden "pick of the week" graphic this week is an odd one, which is why I link to it: The Lord of the Rings Map.
For those who missed it, Firefly has been cancelled. Joss vents here.
Yeah, duh, I'll link to it. Times Mag Year In Ideas.
Yup. Entertainement Weekly Best And Worst of 2002.
thursday
The should-be-infamous Darin Kerr provides today's Fimoc Band Name of the Day: One Trick Vagina. That trickster.
Interesting new genre with spectacular production: Life of Pi. The Booker Prize winner this year is the first of five novels to be turned into a Flash promo. The Guardian has the full story.
I've probably linked to this before, but I always get a thrill when I go there: Bjork video gallery.
A nice collection of authors reading their own poetry, which includes pretty much everyone in the modern canon. The one that jumped out at me was Oscar Wilde -- like, we have audio of Oscar? Apparently so.
DestroyEvil.com.
It's good to see that I'm not the only one following every step of the new Solaris.
tuesday
Shift has an okay Top 10 Defining Moments In Digital Culture. Attaching dates to events that seem long ago is probably the most interesting aspect (Aug 1995: Suck.com launches; 1997: first MP3 online; July 31, 1998: Jenni on Letterman).
ZippoTricks.com.
Umberto Eco interview in the new Bookforum.
I hadn't heard that Dan Savage has a new book out.
More scary attempts by Republicans to use Flash.
McSweeney's: Windows Messages, As If Rewritten By Scott, This Guy Who Bullied Me In Second Grade.
I remember not too long ago when those handheld DVD players came out, priced around $1200. Now there's one for $200.
The 20 Worst Video Games of All Time.
Life Lessons of the Buffyverse.
monday
I'm back again. Paul's death rattled me. Thank you, Paul, for being the most human politician of our times. (Cursor has all the reading material, if you need to catch up.)
I finally saw Bowling for Columbine last night. The best part is the critique of fear culture. Anyway, an hour later I found this site by accident.
I just give the headlines, you make up your own mind whether to gasp: Mariah Carey Covers Def Leppard On New Album.
IGN has the actual full cursed video from The Ring that causes death. Looks like Buñuel's senior thesis.
I met a couple local bloggers over the weekend: Incoming Signals and Blogumentary. Good stuff. And for those who keep up with their blog brethren: Anil chooses life, and Arts & Letters Daily is back from the dead, Dack has gone back to the future.
City Pages looks at the the Lizzie Borden porn oeuvre, which Salon and PBS's Frontline chirped about a few months ago. Apparently, Lizzie is popular enough to be in the Top 10.
The Times has its way with Grand Theft Auto.
Things overheard at the STD clinic.
The Solaris remake website has launched.
The text archive, textZ has relaunched. 677 experimental, avant-garde, and theory-driven texts.
I missed this story from last week: North Dakota is considering paying college grads $10,000 to stay in the state for five years after graduating.
Kronos Quartet meets NASA.
I received my very first PayPal donation today. Thanks Waxy! If you feel like contributing to the cause that is Fimoculous, here are your options.
thursday
Here's a cool find. In January of 1996, a student at Stanford was asking the comp.lang.java group for advice on setting HTTP headers for a "web robot." That student was Larry Page, who is now president of a very big web robot known as Google. Some guy named Joseph Millar provided an answer on the newsgroup, but, well, he ain't famous now.
Decent Wall Street Journal interview with Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster.
You won't get it unless you're part of the community, but this is the best Metafilter thread of all time.
In college we all loved John Frusciante and hated the Red Hot Chile Peppers. Slate.com gets close to understanding why.
Cleveland Free Times and New Times Los Angeles shut down by Village Voice Media and New Times, respectively.
Tina Brown's debut column in the Times of London.
New Scientist has a good design/usability interview with Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things.
Matos reviews Lifter Puller in Village Voice and nails the Minneapolis aesthetic perfectly at the same time.
Really good new issue of Shift, which contains a BrokenSaints article.
monday
It's Microsoft Day here at Fimoculous. First, the office of the future. And Windows MediaPlayer 9 (beta) is out. And finally: pressthegreenbutton, the official band of the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
I had this very idea a few months ago. Glad someone made it: Make Your Own Bush Speech.
Get ready to adjust the pop culture lexicon, cuz you're gonna start hearing this word over and over: Crave. I unboldly predict Calvin Klein's new cologne will be enormously ridiculed and adored by millions.
What's the font called? You know what it looks like, but you don't know what it's called. Answer questions at IndentiFont to identify font names.
Ten Things I Hate About Tom Cruise.
New Ring trailer.
McSweeney's has a new Kurt Vonnegut interview Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.
I like getting asked to recommend books to people. A favorite answer of mine is Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. A visitor passed on a new book that made me think of it: Reel Shame. It has its own website.
saturday
Layne has a killer assessment of American Psycho today. The trajectory of my relationship to Ellis is the opposite. I first found his book perfectly representative of the 80s, and then later I sadly realized that it was perfectly representative of the 80s.
Holy Cow! Hindus Eat Meat.
Are You A Living Computer Simulation? --Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Yale University.
Take the Google Quiz!
Sigur Ros' next album: ..
Have a special song that you're absolutely certain contains hidden knowledge which only you are privy to? Then go to SongMeanings.net and spill the truth. Picking out some groups randomly, here's Beck, Wilco, Sonic Youth. The place is full of meaningless comments, but also some great one's such as a post about Nirvana's "About A Girl" where one person postulates the song is... about a girl.
Where were you when I needed you? DrugTestHelp.com.
monday
I don't know how it happened, but over the weekend I ended up researching upcoming movies. Let's call it the Fimoculous Movie Preview:
AUGUST:
Prediction: Natascha McElhone will be the new It-girl. She stars in a movie I'm destined to love-hate in that B-way: Fear Dot Com (here's the trailer). Best line: "Can you promise me one thing? That you won't visit that site."
More new G-rated Iranian feminism: Secret Ballot (trailer).
SEPTEMBER:
The Trials of Henry Kissinger, a rendition of the Christopher Hitchens book. Certainly constroversial enough to land Hitchens a permanent slot on cable news talk shows through the winter.
Les Âmes Fortes. I dunno, but it's got Laetitia Casta and John Malkovich.
OCTOBER:
Frida Kahlo will be played by Salma Hayek in Frida. Sweet mono-brow.
Naqoyqatsi completes the amazing trilogy which included Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Directed by Godfrey Reggio with score by Phillip Glass. From the site: Naqoyqatsi depicts the ubiquity of technology in our world. It explores how everything from the media, politics, religion, and warfare to food, weather, sports, and medicine is situated in this "new nature".
In an odd match, Tom Tykwer, the guy who directed Run Lola Run, is taking on a Krzysztof Kieslowski screenplay, Heaven (a Guardian review). I can't think of two more different temperaments.
Round II of BMWFilms shorts hits the street. John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off), Tony Scott (Spy Game, Enemy of the State, Top Gun) and Joe Carnahan (Walk Among the Tombstones, NARC) are the three directors this time around.
NOVEMBER:
Atom Egoyan returns with a film celebrating his Armenian heritage, Ararat.
Hitchcockian claustrophobia times ten, Phone Booth will take place entirely within and around a single New York City phone booth.
Eminem has been getting rave reviews for his upcoming movie, 8 Mile. The site has a couple trailers that could be music videos (what's the difference?).
In Film Threat, Steven Soderbergh described Solaris as "a combination of 2001 and Last Tango in Paris." Gulp. Features more of that It-girl Natascha McElhone.
DECEMBER:
Scorsese is back with Gangs of New York. I fear a dud.
SPRING:
Prozac Nation finally arrives. Or, actually, Christina Ricci finally returns.
friday
Where have I been? Did you know that Steven Soderbergh is directing an adaption of Solaris? Stanislaw Lem's novel is one of my favorite SF works, and I'm just itchin to see how this version (starring Clooney!) will compare to Tarkovsky's. From the trailer, it looks like it's out in December.
Still in the SF department, I recently stumbled across this collection of electronica/dance remakes of sci-fi soundtracks.
I love it when people insist that we should all be dumber. "I'm not stupid, you're pretentious," is the battle cry of these morons. If Annie Proulx is too difficult for you, think about going back to Dick and Jane, y'alright? Seriously claiming that Stephen King is a better writer than Don DeLillo should get you a public lashing. The book in question, A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, is based on this essay from the Atlantic Monthly.
For theory-headz: Jacques Derrida's eulogy of Gilles Deleuze.
Sight and Sound poll of 145 critics and 108 directors indicates that I like the director's list more than I like the critic's list.
I hope this can start a trend. Maybe it's called "literary flash art." Beckett's Bounce.
I just added a one year ago today link over there to the right under the calendar. It will automatically update whatever I posted here exactly a year ago.
And, of course, Friday fun: classic video games done in Flash.
saturday
Secret James Joyce manuscripts discovered, and then purchased by Ireland for $11.7 million.
ABC's upcoming fall series Push, Nevada sounds like it could tread some new interactive ground (and not just cuz Pepsi is involved). The series comes from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's company, LivePlanet. The site says: "Push, Nevada is an interactive television, new media, and physical world experience. The audience will be incentivized to watch the show, participate online and travel to physical world locations in an attempt to win a very real reward." (How do you know it's a dot.com? When they use words like "incentivize" without giggling.) Here is a video of the producers talking about the show, and here is a preview video. [If you're interested in some theory behind such entertainment convergence, mssv.net has sound structural essays and TVMeetsTheWeb.com has video from a European conference with technology and business speakers.]
Similarly, the site for the movie Sum Of All Fears (coincidentally starring Ben Affleck?) has a spy game where you track terrorists.
Also in convergence land, I'll be following Yahoo's success in putting the World Cup online for $20.
Last one in this meme: News On Wheels from J.D. Lasica of OJR. The piece has some interesting insights into the future of "telematics," effectively the synthesis of automobiling, computing, and news.
Looks like the The Onion is following Minnesota baseball politics: Congress Threatens To Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built.
That time of the year again. Turner Prize short list announced. Commence the controversy. Also, the Times Mag has a profile of Okwui Enwezor, the curator of Documenta XI.
HarperCollins has taken over publishing of Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles, and John Fante from struggling Black Sparrow Press.
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.
monday
Stephen Jay Gould has died. Looking back, here's a Mother Jones interview with him from 1997.
The Matrix: Reloaded preview.
Thought Abercrombie & Fitch went too far last time? How about thong underwear for 10-year-olds.
Oh, alright, one more. Which Osbourne Are You?
The Scourge Of Arial.
Review of Belle And Sebastian's soundtrack to the flop Storytelling.
NPR's Geoffrey Nunberg has a piece (audio) on the term "blog" and the evolution of internet technology language.
Strange things found on Amazon:
Death Sticks
Rapid Ice Beer Chillers
Wine Saver Set
Litecubes 6 Pack
3-Car Complete Train Bar Set
Cow Vac
Homer Simpson e-Pal
The Best of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner
friday
I have lived in some weird places -- in a crawl space above my office, in an Alaskan fish cannery, in a renovated school classroom -- but nothing beats the year I lived above a mall.
It was the mid-90s, one of those edge-of-existence midwest towns that has always been struggling for name recognition. A couple decades before that, a scary development had begun to encroach upon small cities everywhere: mall culture. Malls were popping up on the fringes of cities, snagging people from downtowns and putting them onto anesthetized shopping streets recognized only as very high numbers -- 54th Street, 98th Avenue. (Today, they don't hide their cul-de-sac lineage, and instead go with names like Shady Lake Lane.)
But it wasn't one of these malls I lived above. Rather, I lived above the mall that fought against those malls. In the early-80s, downtowns began to devise ways to compete against the sprawling menace on the edge of town. It sounds ridiculous now, but many cities in the midwest contemplated this architectural disaster: put a roof on a second or third street and call that a mall. (If you live in Minneapolis, you know Nicollet Street, right? Well, for a while, there was serious consideration to put a roof on it, and call it a "real mall.")
I lived in a city that actually did that.
Walking through this mall had the effect of being trapped in a prism between the future and the past. All the same rustic brick storefronts were there as always, but there was now also shopping lighting. My second-story bedroom window, which decades before overlooked a bustling downtown, now overlooked a food court. My mailbox was in the same place as the entrance to the mall, so every morning I greeted shoppers in my bath robe. Pumped in from the mall, the same exact song woke me up every morning: "Copacabana" by Barry Manillow in fucking orchestrated Muzak. I wrote a screenplay while I lived there called Face The Muzak, a Dostoevskian tale of a guy who starts to go crazy because of the Muzak that surrounds him.
By now, you're wondering where I'm going with this. Well, of course there's a link: DeadMalls.com, a collection of dying retail giants. My mall isn't on there, but it should be, as my mall is really dead: the roof was torn off last year.
wednesday
A bunch of designers got together to create designer barf bags. I'm not convinced they're any better than the real things.
If I am a "Plushophile," what do I like? What tickles me if I'm a "Zootophile"? Apparently, I would have a fascination -- sometimes sexual -- with stuffed animals and dressing up as them. Of course there's a web page (and a web ring) for you, which includes The Fur Code. (Thanks, DL.)
The internet projects I like the most are ones that bring you back to reality in some concrete way. Go to PostCardX and send people on the list random stuff -- to their snail mail address. Add your address to the site, and come back later to talk about what people sent you.
But I also like projects that have absolutely no purpose, like Shit-Talker, "a program that lets you hold a conversation over the phone with someone by making your computer talk for you."
CBSNews.com has redesigned.
Maybe some things don't need to be interactive, like, perhaps, Interactive Dressing Rooms? (Thanks, Luckee.)
Ultra-Condensed Classic Books
monday
The A to Z of Britney.
Rolling Stone: 50 Best Album Covers.
The artist Alan Berliner (no, not Alain Berliner) has an exhibit opening at the Walker this weekend in which the names of everyone who lives within two miles will be on display. I live a few blocks away, so I guess I'll be on display. Studio 360 has an audio report with Berliner.
Momus: Thought of the Day.
Apparently, another new Flash book that I'll have to buy: Flash Math Creativity.
The new issue (#7) of McSweeney's arrived in the mail Friday. I'm pumped.
Michael Wolff profiles George Stephanopoulos. "He's a soft-spoken nonalpha male. He has really great hair." But he's not gay.
Hang on: Olympic Zoom Movie (video).
You can pre-order the new pseudonymous Paul Westerberg album.
A lot of people in my industry are complaining about the new Knight-Ridder website redesigns. Whether you're in Miami or St. Paul or Grand Forks (they're all the same), you've probably ran across the messiness.
A Map of Hip-Hop from the Geography of Hip-Hop.
Great to know you're just a statistic.
I never knew Fargo-native Michael Byzewski when I lived in Dakota, but I knew his work. His Madison-based design company Aesthetic Apparatus churns out some great posters, and he's interviewed here. (Thanks Todd.)
wednesday
Astounding: a rock musical about Jesse Ventura is in the works.
An investigation into aesthetics: Shakespeare vs. Britney Spears.
ActiveBuddy now has a web-based interface: SmarterChild. For those of you new the game, you can hold a conversation with a virtual entity who is suprisingly life-like. Or at least I think so, cuz I have no life.
Diesel, get your pants on, cuz the Karzai Collection could be the next big thing.
Weekly World News being funny; ha, ha, funny: shuts down website.
wednesday
Amazing. A fine-crafted Lego-illustrated version of the Bible: The Brick Testament.
Cool posters at Aesthetic Apparatus.
WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) is redesigning. A pre-redesign tour.
Cool, you can drive stoned in Idaho.
The sky is falling in Grand Forks.
This is what I look like assmorphed.
sunday
Debka.com sounds like the Drudge Report of the Middle East. The New York Observer calls it "a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations."
Speaking of Drudge, he scoops an upcoming New Yorker piece: "The U.S. military failed to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar when he was in its sights during the first night of the war.... Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was 'kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors,' one military official said."
Mohamed Heikal, who the Guardian calls "the Arab world's most respected political commentator," says "There isn't a target in Afghanistan worth a $1 million missile."
First, Chomsky says he's not a pacifist, then The Nation writes "The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II."
Postcards From Hell has an amazing display of Afghanistan photos. The site even includes interviews with King Zahir Shar and the late Ahmed Shah Massud.
Some interesting maps from the Darunta Camp Complex in Jalalabad.
Another one of these articles: Web Logs Put a Face on a Faraway Disaster (L.A. Times).
Should someone compose a list of comedy/tragedy quotes? I'm thinking of Mel Brooks ("Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall down
an open manhole cover and die") and Woody Allen ("Comedy is tragedy plus time") and Walpole ("Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel"). For those in New York, this looks like an interesting event. Features writers from Conan, Daily Show, The Onion, The New York Observer, and Time.
If you're a Flash designer/developer, you have to read this new piece from AListApart: The Flash Aesthetic. It attempts to identify the formal characteristics that make Flash a distinguishable art form.
I almost forgot how goofy the internet is: CousinCouples.com, an apparently legit support group website "for those romantically involved with their cousin."
And, not only is the internet goofy, it's also still able to invent really cool things that we never had before. I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives is amazing.
If you like Buffy, this BuffyBlog is a must.
Here's my most recent creation: Tour The Aircraft Carrier. If you have any thoughts about it, lemme know.
friday
Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, read -- or, rather, presented and danced and pontificated -- last night at The Walker. My entry into his work is odd. He was first revealed to me through information architects -- people looking at the organization and distribution of content. Then, later, his name came up in literary studies -- people looking at narrative forms. Put those two together, and you have Scott McCloud.
I didn't realize that in the eight years since his most seminal work he had become a spokesman for not only developing new comic forms for the internet, but something of an internet pundit in general. (The follow-up, Reinventing Comics, goes head-on into a topic that no one's ever mastered: digital narrative. It's next on my reading list.)
His presentation was insightful, and I highly suggest jumping into some of his online experiments which test narrative forms in interesting ways. Start out with "Porphyria's Lover" from a Robert Browning poem and "Coins of the Realm" about digital marketplace aesthetics. (These case-studies make me wish I was still an undergrad studying Structuralism, planning a senior thesis.)
When you've exhausted that, there's one site that McCloud suggested in his talk: Demian5.com. Killer stuff in there too.
Oh, I should mention this too: The Industry Standard is done.
thursday
And the winner of "weirdest news story of the year": Black Man Turns White.
And the winner of "this seems important, but why?" Graphical User Interface Timeline.
