Jeff Jarvis! His talk is called Comments Are Backwards, but it went way beyond comments. So far my favorite talk of the day, though the current one from @lizstrauss is amazing!
More news on that later. First, Jeff’s opening comment:
“Comments are the true voices of assholes.”
Find out how he thinks comments can be fixed: by accepting they aren’t broken – the process is.
I took a pass on blogging Ivanka Trump, but I enjoyed her talk. She was real and unscripted in conversation, and clearly is using social media in a first-person way. The high-level message from her talk was mostly transparency and consistency across brands.
Super excited for Chris Weingarten!
Twitter & The Death of Rock Criticism II: Music is Math – Chris Weingarten (@1000timesyes)
I disliked District 9 from the start, but it took until about an hour in for me to reach the “I really might leave this theater” stage.
Mild spoilers, but not as many as the Rolling Stone review.
1. It’s a personal take on sci-fi, except we’re made to dislike the extremely unsympathetic protagonist very early on. A mid-flick attempt to humanize him (pun) didn’t work for me, as he only seemed repentant as a result of his torturous conditions and quickly reverted to being an ass whenever possible.
We’re left with only a vaguely personal connection to a shallowly defined alien sidekick and a well-executed CG tiny alien tot. (The best scene in the movie is when we first visit their home, and find the pair of them to be defiantly intelligent. Well-scripted and -played.)
2. The transition from documentary to omniscient perspective was clumsy – only made worse by continuing use of documentary devices, eventually leading to a transition back to documentary.
3. The documentary portion is too caught up in it’s tasteless racist (speciesist?) humor, and not interested in enough in its characters. Yes, we get it, subhuman treatment of non-humans is a lot like subhuman treatment of people that are different than us. Were you that afraid the theme wouldn’t play to the back row?
(That said, I did love the abortion joke. Most big summer flicks would never go there.)
4. The movie is gross just to be gross. Gore and splatter is one thing, but did we really need the constant vomiting, dripping, severing, and devouring of unsightly food? Again, gimmick in lieu of plot.
5. The major plot maguffin is a complete deus ex machina, which would maybe be forgivable if it wasn’t for all of the antogonists being completely fucking obsessed with the effects of said maguffin.
6. There isn’t a single good bit of dialog in the entire movie, which leaves the audience to be dragged along for the (yes, frequently compelling) ride rather than strongly engaged and eager to follow. They say “fucking” more than I say “awesome.”
7. Aliens are shown to be viciously strong, except where it doesn’t suit the continually contrived story.
8. The action set pieces just didn’t sizzle – lots of noise and wonderful effects, but the confrontations themselves were one-dimensional.
9. The exploding people trick was just done by Watchmen, though I think it was executed better here. Still, shock value was lost.
I’m in the minority to the tune of 80/20 per the TomatoMeter; the review I agree with most completely is Vancouver Voice:
It’s a bore. Blomkamp offers up an ugly world, poorly photographed. There is more debris, more smudged faces, more gore effects packed into this film than are conceivable in the worlds of, say, Ulli Lommel and Lloyd Kaufman. Worse, nothing happens in this film that the viewer can’t anticipate after the first 15 minutes. It’s mockumentary style is rendered inconsistently since there are scenes shot in mock style but to which the implied filmmakers couldn’t have had access. And, like most so-called science fiction these days, it is really a war story in scientific drag. … [T]he narrative eventually devolves into one of those long CGI fight scenes that at least a portion of the viewing public is finding repetitious and uncreative. The film is also achingly obvious in its political message.
Biggest plus? Constant subtitling, of both aliens and hard-to-understand humans. I’ve been watching movies with subtitles for over ten years; I’d watch every movie and tv show that way if I could.
My ass was firmly planted on the lazy-train this weekend. I watched a lot of movies and listened to a lot of music in my collection that I’ve been inexplicably neglecting (notably Andrew Bird; how in god’s name did I ignore that one?).
Anywho, all of which is to say that I wasn’t ready with links this morning. Boo-freaking-hoo.
Graphic Design Blog‘s list of 45 Creative Blog Designs will make your head spin (although I note that a lot of those huge headers would push the content below the fold on my laptop). Moradito, Kulturbanause, and Matt Bernstein are favs.
A look at the present realm of reader revenue from the charmingly named “Newspaper Deathwatch.”(via @journalistics)
I wouldn’t have assumed my journalism degree would be obsolete quite so soon. At least I’ll always have my hard-won college lap dancing skills to fall back on.
(Don’t knock them, that’s what convinced E to marry me.)
I really enjoyed this list of web ways to learn through play, via Philly blogger Akkam’s Razor.
Here’s a list of the top 42 “Content Marketing” blogs. It’s not definitive by any means, as exemplified by alternate sources provided in the comments – notably, the Ad Age 150 and AllTop’s Content Marketing Page. (via @ritubpant)
The echo chamber of marketing blogs can make me a little nauseous when they’re all trying to reinvent writing with every post when posts are barely 500 words long. I chatted a little more about what I refer to as the “epiphany epidemic” in a comment on Danny Brown’s post “Why Mediocre Blogging Can Still Be Great.”
For posts that go beyond sound-bite to actually make you think, check out the killer “What Twitter & Facebook Can Learn from Phish at Mashable, a social media workflow at the consistently smart P Morgan Brown, performing a social media audit from regular read Overcommunicated, and the two-part The Future of Influence post at Colorado Business Mag. (PMorgan via @kimwood; CBM via @TobyDiva/@ThomasFrey)
Want to break out of the echo chamber? PodCamp Philly is an unconference on social and emerging media, or, in their words, “for anyone interested in podcasting, blogging, video-casting and social media.” Which, um, hello, that’s me. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to who has attended has amazing things to say about it. It’s on October 3 and 4 for just $20.
I think that’s enough remainding for the time being. I’m off to a #blamedrewscancer meeting in NoLib.
Being “Network Agnostic” is a practice I’ve been preaching over the past few months as my business and personal lives converge on social networking.
It’s a simple concept: don’t let the technology dictate your content, and make sure your content adapts across multiple technologies.
While the concept is simple, the ensuing conversation is huge. How worried should an individual be about the permanence of their social network content? How responsible is a marketer to keep their business connected with users across a host of different networks?
Here are a few thoughts on the matter.
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Social Content Isn’t Forever
Imagine the following scenario:
You spend years adding content to a free social network. Links, blogs, photos, videos – anything. The network gets popular, gets acquired or goes public, and the features begin to change – sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse.
You eventually migrate to another network, and a few years later you receive a curt eviction notice via email. Turns out, everybody left, and the network isn’t financially viable anymore. Now your content will disappear in a matter of months – evacuation is now or never.
The first half of that example probably sounds familiar – I could easily be describing Facebook or MySpace.
If you think the second half is just hyperbole then you were never a GeoCities user.
GeoCities was the best way to get a free website off the ground in 1996, and even in 2000 it was still in the game. Now the clock is ticking on that content – it’ll all disappear by the end of the year.
This isn’t a very dire example. GeoCities was always FTP-based, so it was easy to create your own content mirror. Plus, it was crawlable, so your content is cached at Archive.org. If you created something awesome on GeoCities, chances are you could evacuate it before the impending network apocalypse.
Next time you might not be so lucky.
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Social Networks Constantly Reinvent a Similar Wheel
Friendster was the first prominent Social Network in America. Now it doesn’t even factor into the domestic conversation – 90% of its use comes from Asia.
People didn’t know that in 2003, so they gamely wrote their bios and uploaded their photos on Friendster. Many of those people migrated to MySpace, where they posted more photos and wrote on a ton of walls. A lot of that same crowd also started to use FaceBook, where they posted yet more photos, wrote on a whole new network of walls, and penned pithy third-person status updates.
For a single user the musical chairs of social networks can be mildly annoying. Do you even have your own copy of those photos? Do you really feel like hunting down all of those high school classmates again?
For a business or a band, annoyance transforms to hindrance. Those 10k fans or 100k plays you mustered up on MySpace? You just have to do them again on FaceBook, Twitter, and whatever comes next. And, as people migrate away from networks that are on the decline, you lose a hard-won audience that was once captive.
Not only that, but you’re putting in time on content that is invisible to many current and potential customers! Social Networks don’t get crawled and archived the same way as typical websites. They are closed loops, by design. That means limited traffic from outside the network, limited benefits from search engine crawling and long-term page rank, and no easy way to export your content in aggregate.
The only solution is to stop treating each network as the be-all and end-all of your online life, whether you’re a person or a brand. You need to diversify. You need to be network agnostic.
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Case Study: The Twitter Titanic
The hottest social network of the moment is Twitter. After many months of mushrooming growth the micro-blogging platform hit the zeitgeist like a wrecking ball – even on Oprah. Suddenly, everyone and their mother was on Twitter – literally!
Individuals and businesses are in a hurry to have a conversation, but will that conversation have any value in five years, or even six months?
As more and more people pile on to Twitter, there are more demands made of the network. It isn’t fast enough. It needs a better search feature. Can we get threaded conversations? What about groups? A post archive would be nice, and so would an export feature.
All of it would be nice, but that doesn’t mean it will occur.
Twitter currently operates with no revenue model. It’s run by the brains behind Blogger, who have been there before, and they learned from past lessons. Twitter is purposefully lithe, farming out feature development to apps mining their API. Facebook made itself more addictive by doing the same thing – allowing outsiders to code apps, spawning legions of waring zombies and mafiosos.
Still, open-source doesn’t equal impervious-to-obsolescence. Twitter could easily fizzle like Friendster or fall slowly from favor like MySpace. Every titanic has an iceberg.
When the iceberg hits, what happens to your followers? What about your favorite conversations?
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The moral of the story (so far):
the sky isn’t falling, but there’s a strong chance of rain
Here’s what this argument is not.
It is not suggesting that you ignore the online sea change that is social networking. It is not saying all Social Networks are unreliable. It is not about being sparse or overly-protective of your content. It is not downplaying the value of personal connections.
It is encouraging you to be nimble, to rely on some (intentionally) redundant content, and to remember that you get what you pay for. It is reminding you that strategy comes before technology, and that connections come before objectives.
Two years ago we were all on MySpace. Last year we were all on Facebook. Today we’re talking about Twitter. In two years it’s going to be something else. There’s only so much the networks are (or can be) responsible for our content, and the responsibility we have to them is to accept that and be willingly mobile.
Your content strategy can extend across multiple technologies. A intriguing Tweet can also be a FaceBook discussion or the inspiration of a blog. You can host your own snapshot and share it on other networks instead of uploading it separately to each of them. Your users can connect with you across multiple networks, via email, or with profiles on your own site, so that they don’t slip away when a network goes south.
That is network agnostiscm.
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This a big topic – so big that it took me two months of note-taking to even arrive at this post.
This is just a fraction of what I hope it can be part of a lasting conversation about what we can do as responsible bloggers and communicators to make sure our content doesn’t become obsolete.
I’m very interested in your comments, further examples, or rebuttals.
A strongly-worded NYT Style Article about my American Idol obsession Adam Lambert, whose “is he or isn’t he” gay controversy is DOA.
Interesting, though, that the article is ostensibly about the recent Neil Patrick Harris effect – wherein “He crossed the Rubicon. He did the ‘sudden death’ play. Supposedly you come out and your career is over. He came out and his career is in better shape than it ever was” – and yet carries a sidebar pairing Lambert with Bowie, Liberace, and Prince – two flamboyant straight men who managed to plausibly deny any actual homosexual tendencies and a gay man in deep denial who was finally outed by his own lifestyle.
Essentially, NPH is the only example to date of the mythological Rubicon-crossing that Lambert is currently forging through.
And, not every hot, talented, triple-threat gay guy was Doogie Howser.
(from my stalkee J. Clifton on Twitter, who may have just hinted at having a farcical virtual Tori Amos listening party with me next month, the mere thought of which slays me. Oh, the list of bloggers in this country I could get into trouble with (Jett, I am looking at you).)
Tonight marks the third and penultimate event in the series of debates between the two major party presidential tickets.
I love the debates because they represent actual interaction between two candidates. Yes, they are on-script and on-message most of the time, but even if they were singing a duet straight out of a phone book their tone, body-language, and physical reactions would say a lot. And, we have the chance to watch it live, unfiltered and uncommented upon.
So, please allow me to muddy the water with commentary.
Final Verdict: Obama 32, McCain 22.
In my 5-points-per-question system that so often breaks 3/2 that means Obama averaged a win on every question. And, honestly, I think I over-corrected on giving McCain the benefit of doubt on foreign policy after my viciousness on his failure to adequately address health care – the score should probably be slightly higher in Obama’s benefit
I’m going to adjust my overall scoring here, because the ratio of points from one debate to the next is not very consistent. Rather than rejigger every time, I’ll just weight all four equally to add up to a 100 total points, with each debate worth a quarter of the total.
In debate #1 I gave McCain the slight edge – 18 to 16 over Obama. That’s 13/25 McCain, 12/25 Obama. Then, I awarded Biden 42 and Palin 31, which is 14/25 Biden, 11/25 Palin
Tonight it’s 15/25 Obama, 10/25 McCain.
Current total standings: 41/75 Obama/Biden to 34/75 McCain/Palin. McCain would have to win the next debate by a factor of 2:1 to close the gap at this point, and most of that gap was opened tonight due to a few very incisive answers from Obama.
Washington Post provides an excellent annotated transcript of the debate that provides some fact-checking as well as allowing you to watch specific exchanges as you read. Similarly, C-Spans Debate Center offers isolated video and graphs each exchange by speaker over time. The two most effective recaps I’ve found so far.
I’m apparently in the vast minority in my opinion that McCain held a slight edge over the course of the entire debate. I even got flamed for saying so on Huffington Post!
I think part of my opinion was the expectations game. After all the ridiculous, manufactured drama this week from the McCain camp I thought he’d be vastly under prepared. That was not the case. At the same time, virtually the entire country touts Obama’s speaking and debating skills, while not giving McCain much credit at either.
Based on the combination of those two factors I was expecting an Obama blowout, and since it wasn’t I likely graded Obama harder than he deserved. Also, I’m not nearly as liberal on economic and foreign policy issues as I am on civil rights and domestic issues.
Essentially, I’m willing to admit that my deck was a bit stacked against Obama, in this particular instance. But, I have an equally stacked deck against any Republican presidential nominee, so if anything I think this might represent one of the few chances to capture my unbiased opinion on the political process.
I’m interested to see if I have a similar reaction next week to the VP debate, where I have a significant absence of respect for one side and expectations about neither.
I love words.
I was notorious as a child for needing something to read at any idle moment. Eating breakfast? Better hope that cereal box has lots of copy on it. Long car ride? Multiple paperbacks required, just to be safe.
The internet has taken the edge of my constant need to consume the written word, but I sometimes get intellectual heartburn from all the junk food of message boards and user comments I devour to keep my gears spinning. Even worse than the junk are insubstantial articles – 500 and 1,000 word affairs that get me all spun up and then just stop.
I vastly prefer, and eternally adore, longform journalistic writing, especially in the form of media critique. It’s a style of writing I love to consume, and the style I enjoy writing the most. You can trace my appreciation back to being hooked on the reviews at Furia.com in the nineties, and more recently in Jacob Clifton’s poetic, academic, polemic recaps of Battlestar Galactica.
Last weekend the piece that caught my extended attention was from the New Yorker – a complete recounting of the personal history and personal psyche of Keith Oblermann.
Based on the sheer word count that has been devoted to Oblermann recently, I’m assuming you know who he is. You have to remember, I don’t consume these people on television – just through their print coverage and occasional video clips – so I commensurately don’t understand how famous they are to actual teevee viewers. However, even from my detached vantage point Keith Oblermann’s name and face seem to have reached zeitgeist levels of recognition.
I used to enjoy Keith’s critical essays on MSNBC dot com long before I knew he was an on-air personality because he didn’t do the typical journalistic dance of balance when someone was clearly in the moral right or wrong. He just spoke the truth, which sometimes meant speaking out against his topic of discussion. Yet, he wasn’t an op-ed writer – he was just a reporter. He just reported the truth.
Given the recent backlash against him, it seems that Keith (or, at least, his public persona) has undergone a translation from truth-speaking broadcaster to liberal figure(talking)head, held in apposition to make-pretend journalists like Bill O’Reilly.
The difference, I think, is that Keith has aggressively shifted the focus of his considerably audible and influential voice away from the morally black and white and into the politically gray. He’s still engaged in a mainly journalistic pursuit, rather than an opinionated one.
As discussed in the feature-article, Keith recently punctuated a special commentary by commanding our commander-in-chief to “Shut the hell up!” Of course, most of Bush’s words and actions seem more morally black than politically gray to any rational human being, but it is a bit beyond the pale to viciously criticize a sitting president from your anchor chair.
However, Keith has also turned his focus into the Democratic fray to slam Hillary Clinton for invoking the assassination of RFK when discussing why the nominating process might (and, per her, should) continue through the summer. Unlike Bush, this is clearly a gray area, or at least gray enough that a nine-minute retort seems a little overboard … possibly the vented hot air of a gasbag.
As the hot air continues to vent, and as the dissenters continue to get in line, the picture of the New Oblermann becomes increasingly crisp. He is not just liberal Bill O’Reilly, or liberal anyone else, because he’s not simply espousing liberalism. He’s espousing truth and logic, much in the same way Jon Stewart does, except he does not have the shield of “Fake News” to hide behind. And, sometimes to highlight the illogical he needs to rachet up his own rhetoric to full blast to make sure there is no mistaking his commentary for equivocation.
Sometimes Keith Oblermann needs to be illogical to attach the illogic.
A commitment to truth and logic in real news is a scary thing – something many Americans haven’t experienced in their lifetime, and certainly not anything they’ll catch on their local six o’clock news. Keith is treading into untested waters with his brand of journalistic critique. And, even if it’s all just hot air, right now you can hear the bones of the rest of the mainstream media establishment creaking in the wind.
Or at least that’s what it seems like from my teevee-abstaining, mainstream-media-eschewing vantage point.
February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.
Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).
The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.
Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.
(“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)
Like 2004′s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.
In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.
I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.
Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?
Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”
Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.
Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.
(Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)
(Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)
(Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)
My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:
Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.
Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.
And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).
I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.
And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.
E and I just got in from a sneak-preview of the new feature-length Battlestar Galactica episode, Razor, which doesn’t air for another two weeks.
We didn’t have to sign any confidentiality whatsits, so I suppose I’m free to divulge whatever plot points I see fit.
However, it’s hardly worth it – there’s nothing shocking or titillating present for any well-read BSG fan. The sole delights are Michelle Forbes portraying Admiral Caine’s descent into her ends justifying any means necessary, and an impressive turn from the slight Stephanie Jacobsen in the lead role – as newly introduced Kendra Shaw.
Past the leading ladies Razor is a empty husk of less-than-gripping retconned plot. The twin stories it portrays are both extraneous – the Pegasus history just as grim as you imagined it, and the Battlestar present (actually, occurring just after The Captain’s Hand) is an inexplicably unmentioned adventure in vintage Cylons, hybrid models, and nuclear warheads. The acting in the Pegasus half is up to BSG par, but the present is plagued by limp, frequently stilted performances the two Adamas, with Kara Thrace escaping with a few good scenes (especially with Kendra).
Also, keep an eye out for a too-long, horrifically lazy young-Adama flashback that would have been so much more effective as a patented, heavy on the gravitas Edward James Olmos speech intercut with a few illustrative frames. Nevermind how they plan to explain why he’s never mentioned it before or since.
Without a single true shock to its credit, Razor is drab filler that supposedly presages the major revelations of Season 4. I can’t say that it has inspired any additional fervor from this fervent fan. If anything, it just emphasizes why BSG’s lease on life is drawing to a close.
I could seriously maintain a blog just about Rolling Stone‘s declining credibility.
Despite occasional highlights, I usually have a hard time deciding on my least favorite element of each issue. Is the the bland new layout that completely eschews RS‘s quirky sense of design? Is it the complete lack of attention to cutting edge music or film, often in favor of a retrospective cover article that displaces a much better piece of writing? Is it the seemingly random array of irrelevant cover stars and the unimaginative photographs that document them?
Usually I go with “All of the Above,” but this issue was extra-special – RS’s annual Hot List (usually a summer issue, but I guess Guns & Roses was a more relevant cover topic at the time).
In general the Hot List was filled with boring stuff that I heard about three months ago, but one article especially made me laugh: Hot Scene – Philadelphia. (1MB JPG / 2MB PDF)
Riiiiight.
First of all, we’re certainly not the hottest scene in the country; I’d wager to say we’re not even in the top five. I could have maybe bought this designation if they focused on how World Cafe Live seems to have reinvigorated the city’s local concert scene over the past few years, but they seem to have chosen us based on the logic that our low rent allows musicians to craft their sound without having to hold down a day job.
Um, what? Maybe RS was mostly hanging out in the Great Northeast (thus the highlight of Johnny Brenda’s), but otherwise their low-rent thesis is pretty much an outright lie.
Also, though they ever-so-briefly mention AKA – a legitimate hot-pick – they prominently feature aphoto of The Last Drop coffee shop, which was already old and lame ten years ago when Gina stopped playing open mics there due to all of the creepy men that would flirt with her if she did a Neil Young cover.
Aside from the dozens of other shops they could have highlighted in Philadelphia proper, the obvious choice would seem to be Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore, which is as unavoidable at The Point was a few years ago, but with even more music.
In the 90s The Last Drop was full to the brim with pseudo-artistic posers and the trash (and high school students) who were desperately in love with them. As actual music fans we didn’t usually fit in.
Maybe that’s just the point; ten years later and that’s Rolling Stone’s target audience to a tee, isn’t it? I mean, we’re talking about a magazine with Kid Rock on its cover.
In eighth grade I started writing the story that would eventually give me my longtime internet handle: Crisis.
It was half a high school drama and half a superhero comic, paralleling puberty with the onset of special powers that brought with them the life and death choices of adulthood.
I wrote and re-wrote the story endlessly. Sheaths of handwritten pages, endlessly revised files on my first word processor, and an infamous purple binder in which I worked in parallel on a sequel novella, allowing Gina to read it once a week in the back of Health class.
I never finished Crisis Team on paper; it mostly existed as a narrative daydreamed in slow moments of class and long waits at the bus stop. Still, I knew every beat of the story, and how they broke down across every chapter. If someone had sat me down at a keyboard for a week I could have typed it in a single unbroken string of sentences.
Then came Gen 13.
I can’t even remember why I ordered it at the time, but when I cracked the first issue I realized that Crisis was over before it was finished – Gen 13 copped my entire storyline almost beat for beat, and it did it’s job very well.
It was too late to change the core concept of my story. all I could do was rewrite and revise and hope to transcend our shared archetype to create something more distinct.
For the past year I’ve been reading breathless media coverage of Heroes, and how it is the next generation of television, way better than 4400, and a comic fan’s wet teevee dream.
I admit, I let my hopes get slightly up as details of the plot saturated the media and eventually leaked to me through magazines. The Wolverine/Cheerleader wakes up from an autopsy. The Japanese Nightcrawler learns how to use a sword.
It all sounded fascinating.
Now that we’ve Netflixed the DVDs my hopes are proven to have been in vain. I can’t detect anything beyond the mundane about the show, except for Mohinder’s hair. The best I can say for it is that it’s nice to watch so many standard comic archetypes being explored on screen. Not thrilling, or must-see. Just nice.
By contrast, Elise returned from her pre-Australia shopping trip to inform me that, so far, she loves it. She even powered through an extra four episodes while I was asleep and out at rehearsal.
I was annoyed for a moment by the disconnect; Elise and I share a perfectly tuned kismet sort of taste in sci-fi television shows from which we hardly ever deviate. The Pretender. Buffy. Alias The 4400. Battlestar Galactica.
A second later I was all caught up.
Elise is Gina in Health class, reading from my big purple binder. She can pick an X-Man out of a lineup, but she isn’t connected to the collective comics unconscious that stores all of those many standard stories – that place that Crisis and Gen 13 and Heroes draw their underlying structure.
I, unsurprisingly, am me, and in my mind Heroes is the same thing as Crisis – just a different medium spinning a familiar archetype.
Of course, you can argue that about almost any concept. Aren’t most of my songs just reconstituted versions of songs by other people? Haven’t I written this post about this feeling before?
What’s the difference?
The difference is the execution.
I kept rewriting Crisis, hoping that at some point my skillful execution would transcend my story.
I was hoping the same for Heroes, but it’s all archetype and no execution. The script is inert compared to Buffy (chosen one fights evil, fate) , the pace sluggish compared to The 4400 (people gain and struggle with powers, are discriminated against), and the acting pale in comparison to the revised Battlestar Galactica (original Battlestar Galactica crossed with Star Trek Voyager (original Battlestar Galactica)).
I was so hoping for something along the lines of that trio of shows – a done-to-death concept rendered thrilling through unusually outstanding execution. And, though Heroes has plenty of story, and plenty of network gloss, it’s that extra ingredient that’s lacking.
If I was Britney Spears’ manager her big comeback would’ve went down a hell of a lot differently than the hot mess that graced the VMAs.
(First of all, that atrocious club single is not going to get her back to her bestselling days. They really should’ve got her a vocal coach and pitched a Britney unplugged with two new songs and followed up with a hybrid acousti-dance album, a la Madonna’s Music. But, too late for that…)
My version of Britney’s performance would have started the same as Sunday’s – a mopey, slightly chubby, lip-sync-flubbing Brit Brit would emerge with her dancers and mime through a verse.
Then, when all looked dire (but not as dire as tonight’s performance), the song would start skipping, a la Milli Vanilli (or, for the younger crowd, Ashlee Simpson). Then the music would cut out, leaving a befuddled Britney staring into the crowd, helpless. Then, one of the male dancers would turn around and say the song’s opener, “It’s Britney, bitch.”
Suddently you would realize the dancer was her! But, instead of doing a strip-tease out of the suit (as she has in the past) she would just toss her hat to show off her crazy post-buzz hair at actual length and color, and proceed to just wail the song live without correction to the best of her ability while strutting around in a killer tailored suit.
The audacity of the emphasis on real hair and real vocals with less dancing and less skin would have left everyone’s jaws on the floor.
Honestly, I’d be good at this stuff. It’s a shame I’d prefer to get famous myself…
As someone who has ostensibly spent the last three and a half years of my life studying journalism at times i have a lot to say about the current state of the American news media. Any major US news outlet is over-reporting, under-representing, over-the-top, unprofessional, and altogether useless as far as i’m concerned. However, this isn’t really the fault of the programmers — it’s the fault of the American public. You would think that consumers would reject local news that resembles an erstwhile clip of Entertainment Tonight, or that they would at least demand that Philadelphia have a single daily paper not owned and published by the Knightridder corporation. But, they don’t, and their low expectations and low-brow interests are the undeniable trend-setters of what gets covered, with sometimes shocking implications.
As such, i was initially taken by surprise to see CNN headline with an internet story. My surprise only lasted long enough, though, to realize that the lead-in to the story was rife with buzz-words, and that it primarily existed to address the intermittent but highly-annoying slow-down that began earlier this weekend. The article proclaims that “Experts called the worm the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months,” and it was assertion that i found most shocking of all. Plainly, it is incorrect, even without taking into account a conflicting statement made in the same artcile: “It’s not a major risk. It’s not [doing] either of the two things that are terribly damaging,” Paller said. “One is hurting people’s machines, and one is knocking things [off-line].” By contrast, the relative blip on the media radar caused by a distributed denial of service attack this fall that left nine of the thirteen major DNS root servers temporarily down for the count definitely ranks, in my opinion, as possibly the most damaging attack on the Internet. Even the CNN article admits the potential deadliness of this tactic, albiet without acknowledging the recent incident in question.
Before i go on, let me ask: do you know what that means? In case you don’t: Websites don’t really live at the addresses you are used to typing in for them; this one doesn’t really exist at a place named “crushingkrisis.com.” In reality, web-pages exist soley as a set of IP numbers … think of them as PO Box’s that have been set up to forward to your (more meaningful) full street address. DNS servers are what does the forwarding, linking those numbers to names like amazon.com, cnn.com, and whitehouse.gov. And, while there are many local servers around the world that maintain this address information, all of it originates from root servers — the ones that were attacked.
Based on that oversimplified explanation, it should be plain to see how the internet might slowly disintegrate into nothingness if a few more servers had been crippled, or if they had been damaged in a more permanent fashion. Even though sites would technically still work via their IP address, many sites (most blogs included) reference their links and images in such a fashion that they would be rendered useless without a domain name at their source. However, though “[t]his may have been the largest attack on the core of the Internet, it didn’t affect actual users” (Maguire, Newsfactor.com). This, as opposed to an extremely evident slowdown that left many pages totally unavailable this weekend, meant that its coverage was minimal at best
Can you imagine what would happen if the internet broke? Not just your own site, and not just every site you read, use to schedule classes, check email with, or do banking on. No. The whole thing. It would be a catastrophe! John U. S. Doe would find himself utterly helpless at work all day without being able to refer to stocks, research, or company intranets. Jane Americana Doe would be lost without her regular nightcap of Yahoo News. In short, the public should have been really, really, really freaked out by the 2002 attack, as well as this attack and what is implied by them both.
My local news outlets largely did not cover the attack last year. By rights, it should have been the most important story… certainly more significant than impending precipitation or a sports game. Instead i found out about it in class where, unsuprisingly, no one even understood its significance. This attack obviously got picked up by CNN because it affected business and, in an unusually potent turn, disabled some thirteen thousand ATMs. Meanwhile any garden variety email-communicable virus, which i have never once even approached catching in seven years of blithe internet usage, is cause for alarm and coverage. Why? Because it primarily affects the lowest common denominator. That’s what it all comes down.
You may not be able to tell if the chicken or the egg came first — the point is that they both need each other to exist. The same goes for the relative irrelevance of the news and the increasing idiocy of the American public — especially on issues of politics and technology. Individual news organizations should make a change by covering what’s important, and not what’s expected. You should make a change by giving a shit about what they’re telling you. And not telling you.
Via Ernie, Via 37signals: Celine Dion’s new disc will not play in computer CD drives. I’ve been harping about this a lot recently, and there has been a similar amount of speculation in independent internet press on which overblown major-label artist would first allow themselves to play guinea pig to this particular corporate experiment. Ironically, Dion is one of the least relevant: music piracy is obviously most common on college campuses, but Celine is much more of an Adult Contemporary artist. It remains to be seen if labels are brave enough to similarly cripple a disc by Ms. Spears or even Metallica, as the ramifications on record sales alone are potentially horrifying — not to mention the nearly assured backlash by college-aged record buyers (and their potential to find an easy way around the protection).
Not to prematurely give birth to my aforementioned massive media essay, but record labels just don’t get the damned point. Students burns and rip discs because they aren’t realistically affordably. Record companies continue to raise prices to help maintain their profit margins, while they slash artist rosters at the same time. Maybe if brand new pop discs didn’t have an unbelievable list price of nineteen dollars they wouldn’t be so readily copied for under fifty cents. But, rather than assess their own corruption of the artistic process and of the artists’ own rights, the recording industry would rather point the finger at technology and punish buyers who listen to music at their computers. It isn’t the right way to solve things.
If any of this sounds totally ridiculous to you, then you need to boycott Celine Dion’s new disc as well as More Music from The Fast and the Furious , Universal’s first foray into infringing on our rights as record buyers. I’m sure songs from both of the cds already abound on internet retrieval services thanx to savvy buyers with a line-in function on their computers, so feel free to go and download them without any guilt; record companies have shown us that all they care about is the almighty dollar, so all we can (and should) do is withhold it from them.
So, now it is the morning after and more tiny details are creeping out about cell phone calls and arrests in Florida and etc. However, i won’t be linking the majority of this day two news, and i want to talk about the reasons why.
I am a student of Journalism and, while i lack a vast majority of the knowledge i will (hopefully) eventually be in possession of, i am both very aware and very critical of the dissemination of information in America. In fact, that is probably part of the reason that i am so continually interested and involved with personal publishing.
I am of the very concrete opinion that in a crisis of national importance the networks over-report the most basic and inconsequential of details and too often ignore the most basic facts of an investigation. What is excellent about obtaining breaking news online is that while news can be continually updated it doesn’t have to be continuously live. This means that the facts of a situation can continue to be present while the latest news can be appended to the top of the file.
Despite this fact, the major news outlets with normally reliable websites remained wholly ignorant of how to report such an important situation online. Simple facts like the time of impact were wholly absent from early versions of the story, and i had to view four different news services before piecing together my initial post with the NBC news photo.
I won’t touch upon the inadequacy of internet servers to handle crucial amounts of traffic because the situation became all-too-evident yesterday as CNN and MSNBC pitched all of their various bells and whistles overboard to save on bandwidth. I am primarily concerned with the way we report news, and what we report. Today coverage is focusing on individual families and acts of heroism, and this is totally appropriate and puts a human face on such a mind-boggling situation. However, in the early hours of a tragedy it is not what the general public most needs to initially see and hear.
Essentially, when an entire nation brings their focus to bear on a single state, city, or square block, the news media should be concerned with providing and maintaining an accurate narrative, correct and up-to-date statistics, and reliable eye witness reports. This does not include bringing in blood-thirsty “military experts” who are practically volunteering to deliver bombs themselves to “whoever” is responsible. It does not include repeatedly asking for the obviously unavailable casualty numbers throughout the early afternoon and into the evening. It does not include asking any and all New Yorkers to contribute yet another description of one of the airplanes’ impacts with the World Trade Center.
Human interest is definitely a point of any breaking news story, but my primary concern yesterday was to distill all of the news that had emerged so that anyone could see a single picture or read a single paragraph and glean important facts. The network coverage on ABC and MSNBC broke reports of the flight numbers and the names of the aircraft carriers shortly after noon yesterday, yet the flight numbers didn’t reach a rapid rotation in the coverage for well over an hour and this morning news outlets are reporting the presence of the aircraft carrier as though it slunk it under cover of night. There is a certain something to be said for continuously involving the viewer in the events so that they feel as though they are part of the journalistic process, but i find it disturbing that we have so few high-end news outlets in America when there is obviously a whole nation who are not hungry for death tolls or perpetrators, but who just want to know what is happening to their friends & family in other parts of the country.
Networks are afraid to cut away from coverage for any reason, and rightly so; there is always the chance of more breaking news and always a fresh viewer tuning in. However, not everyone wants a continuous feed of repetitive news, and that is why i turned on my computer at work before i turned on a radio or a television. As was pointed out by various sources yesterday, the internet is truly amazing because it is an entirely decentralized means of obtaining information, and it was this decentralization that provided the most important details as yesterday progressed. However, it is not unreasonable to expect a few reliable sources to be intermingled with this rush of facts from all sides, and i suppose i’m just surprised that the most consistently reliable source that i have found so far is not necessarily a formal news site, but the personally owned public forum at MetaFilter. Perhaps i simply need to change my ideas about a reliable source is, but i think that we all equally need to change our ideas about what we should be expecting from these sources.
I have no personal response to yesterday’s events yet because at the very root of me i am still numb about it all. However, just as yesterday morning my first instinct was to physically confirm news and then distribute it to my co-workers, my primary continuing concern is the inadequacy of some of the reporters and news services who we were relying on to inform us of the most basic details about this national emergency. I suppose in the face of such a disaster the only way i can feel like i have an impact on anything is to do this.
Blagh.
Over three hours later and the news media has done a wholly terrible job in reporting this national tragedy. Save for a few poignant reports from Diane Sawyer in Times Square and MSNBC reporter on the scene Ashley Banfield (?) i have seen everything from threats of war to incorrect facts restated repeatedly to Peter Jennings at a loss for words. I’m going to make an effort to type up my current notes now, and then surf through the national news sites.
Not to be a newsmonger, but i am a Journalism student, and so far the coverage of this is ridiculous.
Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City this morning within less than a half hour of each other. So far there is no official word on the motive or on any casualties. The first plane struck shortly before 9am and was described by witnesses as a small twin engine passenger jet. A witness from Dow Jones was quoted as stating that “it looked like the wing crashed down to the street” despite the fact that the majority of the aircraft remain lodged in the upper floors of the building.
The second plane was filmed by television cameras already present as a result of the first crash, and appeared to be a Boeing 737. MSNBC reports that “the FBI said it was investigating reports of a hijacking. A United Airlines employee said he had heard reports that an American Airlines jet had been hijacked and was one of the two aircraft that flew into the center. It was not clear if there were passengers on board.”
The last infamous terrorist attack on the World Trade Center occurred on February 26th, 1993 in the form of a truck bomb. The blast killed six people in injured over a thousand others.
I’ll continue to update with distilled news as it breaks.
For those of you who didn’t realize that Philadelphia was the sexual technology Mecca of the East coast, check out this msnbc story about two women who were arrested for running a “sex dungeon” out of their residential “computer solutions” storefront. This local flavour story was brought to national spotlight [sic] by my local NBC affiliate, who didn’t even bother to blur out the number on the store’s sign. Good job, guys.
Philadelphia’s NBC10 news crew is the largest local collection of yellow journalists and hyperbole artists that i’ve ever had the opportunity to witness in action, and their newscast tends to be aimed directly at people who circle Access Hollywood and Wheel of Fortune in their teevee listing every week (which is a double whammy, because not only are those two syndicated gems typically aimed at the lowest possible denominator possible, they tend to be on at the same time every night and thus don’t generally require circling). Lead stories on their news teasers feature (in this order) (without fail) death, fire, breaking news on weightloss, & NBC-centric entertainment news. This station followed each NBA Championship game with a half-hour of local coverage featuring reporters standing in every sports bar in the Greater Philadelphia Area rather than run the normal nightly news or the NBC post-game show. They break into soap operas to report a dusting of snow that had been forecasted the night before. Their anchors are local glamourpusses who marry local politicians and are in-turn reported on by local gossip columns. In other words, it’s a quality all-American news organization that focuses on the subject-matter that an alarming number of Philadelphians actually care about.
Please don’t fail to take note of the wholly unspecific and incidental (though ironically written) reporting on this story by Lu Ann Cahn, who recently reported on a “Flash Fire” at Drexel that was really a small propane tank explosion. Aside from her tantalizing lead-in mention of the women possessing a “large knife,” there’s the explicit name-dropping of “medical bondage.” Unless Lu Ann has mistaken “bondage” for the ever popular “masochism” angle of S&M, i can’t imagine what she meant by “medical bondage” other than maybe wrapping ace bandages around unusual body parts. My favourite part of of the article was, without a doubt, friends and neighbors who didn’t mind the (apparently) openly operated sex shop as long as “they would be dressed real nice” and that their customers were “guys in Mercedes.”
B&D, S&M, E&P, and the shocking news about your favourite Friends star’s personal life, tonight on NBC10 at 11! And, for more unsual explorations of sex and computers, head over to Ernie at LYD, who blogged the article all the way from California.
The acoustic “Superhero” from 24/7 just came on… Garrison telling me: we are ten years old, and we are holding our breath under water. ear drums bursting from the pressure; we can touch the bottom. won’t you come away with me? we are flying high, and we are airplanes today; we can do anything. and i don’t ever want to leave the stage, i am a superhero these days. i don’t ever want to leave my age. i am a superhero these days.
I hope she still feels that, because she really is. Meanwhile, in the “Peter wants to be a superhero” category, can i please be this boy? Granted, i’m not pissy and depressed enough to be nearly as captivating as he is, and although i’ve got much better hair than he does i’m not nearly as otherworldly and elfish. Of course, good hair is as good a place to start as any…
I have to say that i’m with Re on this one. While BlogSpot is a terrific idea and opportunity for folks who don’t want to go through all of GeoCities BS to get a webpage, but all too often it’s just a stagnant pool of unimportant and uninteresting blogs. It seems to me that any halfway decent BlogSpot blogger would get snapped up by a domain as soon as they found a few visitors, unless they wanted to stay at BlogSpot for some reason. I personally grabbed Brant as soon as i found out he didn’t really want to stay on at the Spot, and would do the same for any other blog i read regularly and enjoyed. While trolling around to all of the domains for hosting is tedious and rather rude (trust me on this one), getting people like Re or I to read you is a simple thing if you’re interesting, and hosting can’t be too far behind. I think the issue is that BlogSpot makes it too easy to start a blog … so that it really doesn’t take any planning or ambition or thought or anything of the like. At least going through GeoCities forces you to monkey with the FTP settings long enough to decide what you really want to do with your time.
My point? Firstly, i’d blame a good bit of the Blogger overinflation on BlogSpot, which means it’s their own fault (maybe they should just start charging for Spot to make their money back…). Secondly, it seems like BlogSpot is a glut of a lot of uninspired people, and the inspired ones get snapped up pretty quick once they establish their own voice. So, … this isn’t an invitation to inundate me with hosting requests, but if you’re on BlogSpot and you don’t like it there, just know that all you need to do is find your groove and a small audience before your time there is over.
Apparently i was supposed to “hunker down with a pair of headphones” and closely examine Kid A, but i frankly don’t have the time. I’ll be the first to admit that there are hundreds of albums that i would fall in love with if given the chance, but when artists like Sarah Harmer can grab me in a half a listen i don’t know why i should waste my time on an album that i spent hours listening to while only ever really liking two or three songs. It’s one thing to tell me that i shouldn’t just discard an album after a single listen, but i gave Kid A more than just a casual listen at work (where i’ve discovered tons of my current favourite discs, from Ben Folds to Portishead) and it never took hold. Maybe i’m just too into riffs and songs that can be broken down to a single acoustic guitar; god knows i loved Pablo Honey from the first time it ever entered the shop’s disc changer. or, maybe i just hated kid A more and more as i found out from Pablo that Radiohead really was the next best rock band and that they obviously failed us horribly before they could ever prove their point. Or something? I dunno.
