Dying Magazine Business Take Note

NY Mag has made admirable attempts at video content with cheapo production value but finally they got a real filmmaker to do something and it turned out great. It'd be nice if other magazines got with the program.


The internet is not just for porno, but can also be used to keep dying industries afloat if they would pull their heads out and adapt. Notice how the pre-roll advert is now on my blog and not just on NYMAG.com? You can't do that with an article. Sure, links are fine, but that pre-roll action provides more value to an advertiser than a crumby banner ad. The future...The future...this is what your grandkids are gonna be smoking.

A Good Year?

A good year...?


Will this be a good year? I dunno, shit's F'd these days. Sure, Obama is a giant cultural supernova, but look around, shit's F'd. 2009 and all the aging that is occurring every second of every F'd up day of every F'd up week...let's hope it serves to fortify us. Like grandparents who pinch pennies due to erstwhile habits formed during The Great Depression we might all be participating in a forging of values that has repurcussions for lifetimes. Or maybe 2009 will be swell, a soft kick in the pants, like treading water for 10 minutes to gain your life saving certificate. Maybe we're all ok. But it's cold and I shiver and shit's still F'd until consensus says otherwise.

2 versions of 1 song

I know, enough with the Bush bashing, let's look forward, blah blah. But this is some intense shunning that has to be seen to be believed.

Bush Be Gone

So this happened last night and amazingly Margot And The Nuclear So And Sos got ahold of the footage and turned it into the official video for Tall As Cliffs. Peace Bush, GET OUT OF MY LIFE!



for kicks, a live version from Conan that is perhaps better watching

Every Winter, round the time it get cold and stay cold, when snow make itself at home on the ground, I think of them good days. We were still together then, that Winter, in our one bedroom on 122nd. I was still hustling then, nothing too dirty, but nothing too clean neither. I was making paper wasn't I? Yeah, sometimes we fought. She didn't like me hanging around with who I was hanging around with. Said they was doing no good. Said they was headed for trouble and If I wasn't careful I'd go down with them. Shit, I'm from Harlem, that's just who I know.

There's a lot to remember but mostly I remember them cold Winter days we'd stay inside. Me lying around in bed, she'd be at the piano; playing, singing. Good days them days.

Oh shit I ain't even mention the piano yet. One day driving through Brooklyn I come across this pretty little upright joint and copped it right on the spot for twenty three hundred. Didn't even blink. No reason for a man to be hustling if he ain't putting it down for his boo. She happy, I'm happy. Back then, them days with the piano, we were good.

Just yesterday I was passing through Morningside Park on the way to see my man, and I felt it all come back to me, all them old Winter days they came to me right then in that one moment, and like a cold ass wind that sneak up on you from around the corner it took my breath, maybe even made my eyes water. I still get it like that a little bit every Winter but it's worst when I'm walking through Morningside Park and there's snow on the ground and I'm walking up them stairs and I'm breathing fog and I can't do anything to change anything.

NY Times Blowing It, Should Join TV Biz

That's the headline of the opinion paper I'd write if I were an NYTimes columnist. NYTimes.com is making some nice digital programming, mostly documentary video treatments of some reporter's news story. Of course they're also losing money like bastards trying to stay in the publishing biz. Here's how I think they should address their problems; problems that aren't going to get better if the Old Grey Lady doesn't learn a new god damn dance. Classic or not, the foxtrot is wack.

They should start marketing their digital videos, pitching series ideas to The Discovery Channel, and hiring more filmmaker/producers. They should also get some writers and reporters that are somewhat TV friendly, and they should build shows around this talent.

They should try to get high-quality video content in front of as many faces as possible; TV, Web, Mobile, DVD. They might have to sacrifice page views and let their content disseminate as freely as possible. Then they can figure out a way for the videos to unobtrusively carry sponsors (ignoring the rationale that a sponsored news video might somehow compromise the objectivity of the piece). Then, NY Times should make some 21st Century money.

I'm sure NY Times is already doing some of this, but get on with it. Do more of it better and faster. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think this could work.

Hurt Locker

Forgive the Italian, but it's the only trailer I could find of The Hurt Locker, an Iraq war movie from Kathryn Bigelow, the genius director of Point Break

No Wonder the British think Americans are Shitty

How can you blame them when the BBC is making great, watchable documentaries focusing on shitty Americans.

The Phelps family is well known in Topeka. Everyone has seen them picketing. Everyone is embarrassed by them. I almost wish people would stop giving them media attention (yes even you, Tyra) but fuck if it isn't fascinating car wreck quality Americana.

Clearly the saddest aspect of The Phelps agenda is the effect on the kids. It's true, they are shunned and ostracized. This fact basically ensures that their inculcation is complete. If your last name is Phelps and you live in Topeka, people will be leery of you until they know for sure you aren't related to the Westboro Baptist Phelps family. Anyway, happy Friday.

Gatsby's American Dream

Panties are in a bunch over the news that occasionally-schlocky-epic-film director Baz Luhrmann (Austraila, Moulin Rouge) has purchased the rights to The Great Gatsby. Anxiety over his possible treatment of Fitzgerald's dissection of the American Dream and one of THE WORLD'S BEST WRITTEN books is, I suppose, appropriate. Luhrmann says he wants the movie to be, in part, a commentary on the greedy free-for-all that precipitated our current economic disaster, and his detractors have relished pointing out that The Great Gatsby was published a few years before The Great Depression. This point makes absolutely no difference save for the fact that Fitzgerald's critique of his time wasn't done in the spirit of post-hoc finger wagging, so Luhrmann must avoid simplistic, showy nods to the idea that excess inevitably leads to tragedy. Besides, the tragic context of a Depression in the wake of The Roaring Twenties is a value people have placed on the book after the fact. Gatsby is more centrally about how mansions are built, wars are waged, men are destroyed all in the effort to impress girls.

In this way The Great Gatsby was archetype creating; arguably on par with the star crossed lovers of Romeo & Juliet. The story of a man seeking fortune and influence in order to win over the idealized object of his affection shows no signs of fading from American reality. I'm not too hung up on Luhrmann's Gatsby. He'll make it huge and colorful, he'll indulge in the imagery (the billboard in the Valley of Ashes, seems right up his alley). It'll be of interest, without having to serve as the definitive version. Years from now someone else will come along and make another version (American neo-realism, contemporized MTV/ADD, or some new style that hasn't even been invented yet) and we'll all be able to debate which we like best.

In honor of the above: Gatsby's American Dream covering The Cure.

Carlin Lives!

Part of a 3 hour interview totally worth sitting through. This section touches on the craft, but in its entirety it covers his entire biography.


I like it here when he talks about his failed TV show being a necessary detour he "had to make". Sometimes you do shit that doesn't suit your nature, just because it's there and you feel compelled. Like ass fucking. I also like how he says he wouldn't act again unless Sean Penn asked him to play "a bartender who strangles six children". Alas.....

some reading

A column by Paul Krugman on how the failed policies of the GOP were energized by the overarching policy it has employed in courting voters for the last 40 years: capitalizing on racial backlash. In doing so Republicans have painted themselves into a corner because the only folks still buying into this strategy is a shrinking population of whites from the South and Midwest over the age of 50. This is the group referred to by Sarah Palin as "the real America" and I suppose she's right considering that America has been predominantly white and racist throughout its history.

Germans and their rocking

Once, I lived in Switzerland and watched butt loads of German MTV. These are some of the gems I took home from that experience.

The Beatsteaks - Hand In Hand

Not bad right? Back to back guitar solos and everything!

And even though I can't understand the words at all, Wir Sind Helden won me over, over and over.

Wir Sind Helden means We Are Heroes. Super strong name. In 2004 they were putting out the most kick ass product in German music: an album that went four singles deep and quality vidoes for each. The above song was the 4th single, which is is the correct time for the "we're a popular band that goes on tour" video.

more proof

probably hilarious if you read german.

Songs I like

The winter is a time for apartment parties (formerly known as house parties).

Mobius Band - Friends Like These

"There's lots of grey shades, but that don't make black the same as white."

The winter is also a time for the greys, which is fine.

Frightened Rabbit - The Greys