VBT Completionist:

Danyel Smith is fine. Her last days of her Virtual Book Tour continue with a simply awesome interview here.

30 going on Pathetic:

I saw 13 going on 30 last night, a flawed but sweet little film that made me cry at the end. This means a) I am no longer a man and b) I spent entirely too much time writing yesterday and the whole enterprise made me crazy in the head.

I'm choosing both.

Travel Scale:

In New York. Got in about 8 PM to Chateau Mom and Dad, dropped bags and took off down Broadway for a meal at Josie's. Got home just after 10, watched the remainder of The Iron Giant on my laptop which is a sweet little film. Then called Suzan and said goodnight.

Whenever I travel, which is a lot, I'm asked "How was your flight?" I rarely have a good answer for that. Well, I didn't crash over Nebraska so that was good. But my seatmate snored the whole trip and she wasn't even alseep. That's bad. Mostly I'm just glad it's over.

I hate air travel mostly because you have to divide your pleasures and pains into such tiny chunks. Am I really better for it that I got a handful of dried cherries instead of peanuts or that the kid behind me only shrieked occasionally instead of crying from takeoff to landing?

So I'd like someone to come up with a rating scale to measure the quality of air travel. We have the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights which mentions comfort briefly but focused mostly on price and reliable information. I'll be firm here. Price is not a measure of quality The airline business is competitive as all get out with low-cost providers like Southwest and JetBlue leading the way. Keeping the discussion focused on price allows the airlines to divert your attention from being stacked like lumber in a metal tube hurling across the skies and thanking them for it.

So I'm going to to create this little scale here that you can use the next time you travel to answer that question "How was your flight?" It's completely based on the flight experience and has nothing to do with whether you received adequate information about connecting red eyes in Witchita.

Add up your points at the end.

1) Does you seat recline? +3 points

2) In doing so, does your seat cushion end up on the floor? -5 points?

3) Does you window shades open and shut without you breaking out into a sweat to do it? +2 points

4) Is the air conditioning already on when you enter the plane? +4 points

5) Does it not turn on and the captain or flight attendent makes a joke about how hot it is today? -7 points

6) When boarding, does the gate agent insist you board by row number (Good for them. Better I sit here at the gate reading Cosmo Girl than be trapped standing up on the plane when passenger 23B realizes their seat is 13F)? +1 point

7) In doing so, does every overhead bin fill up when only half the plane has boarded (There has to be some corrolation between the size of the bag you are allowed to check and the amount of space available for storage. And jamming it at my feet when my knees are already touching my ears doesn't count?) -6 points.

8) In something edible served on any flight over two hours? +2 points.

9) I said edible. -2 points

10) Do you show a movie on a transcontinental flight? +3 points

11) Old episodes of Dharma & Greg are not a movie. -1 point

12) Does the plane have more than one bathroom in coach class? +5 points.

13) Does a flight attendent scold you for "getting in their way" while you wait to use it? -8 points.

If the airline has done its job, you should have a positive score after taking this little quiz. And still have feeling below your knees.

Seen Thus Far...

Recommended from what I've seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival, hopefully coming soon to a theatre near you.

+The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: Documentary on a flock of wild parrots that live in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood and the man who takes care of them. Sweet, hopeful.

+Everyday People: Fiction film about a Jewish deli in Brooklyn closing down and the effect it will have on its employers, patrons and the community. Powerful, sad, and painfully relevant.

+Shirley Chisholm '72: Unbossed & Unbought. Shirley Chisholm was the first woman and person of color to run for president. This documentary looks at her campaign, a fascinating, charged, moment in American political history.

+God is Brazilian. God needs a vacation. He heads to Brazil looking for a stand-in while he's away. It take a while to find one.

Today at the VBT: An audioblog interview with Danyel thanks to George Kelly at Allaboutgeorge.com. Audio is brand new for the tour. Thanks guys!

Discussion of the tour continues at Readerville.

A Record Passing:

Norris McWhirter, the noted British sports journalist who founded the Guinness Book of World Records with his brother Ross, has died from a heart attack. He was 78. Founded in 1954 and sponsored by the Guinness brewery as a promotional item to settle bar disputes, there are over 100 million copies of its various additions in print. McWhirter served as editor until 1986 and advisory editor until 1996 when he retired.

I have aq special fonded for GWR since they were the first books I checked out of my elementary school library when I was in the first grade in 1979. I would spend hours pouring over the feats of human endurance and oddity then go running throughout the house shrieking "Mom, Dad. Did you know that the world record for yawning is 8 straight months?"

In recent years, The Diageo corporation who owns the Guinness brand decided that old fat books needed a facelift. The blurry newspaper photographs were recplaced by full-color spreads, freak-show era records tossed out in scads. In the Guinness Book of the 21st century, no one eats a bicycle or tries to waterski across the Pacific Ocean. Records now are cafefully manufactured for the maximum star wattage. Instead of Most Successful Pop Music Artist (the passe' Elvis Presley), we get Most Top Ten Hits in the 1990's by an Artist Named Britney. Even the cover is now a swarm of sparkles and holograms, like a booth in a 1950s dinner.

No one said progress had charm.

On another note, The Virtual Book tour pulls into Zulkey.com. Discussion of the tour continues at Readerville.

Great Scott!

My buddy Scott Andrew recently has his first major gig, opening for Hollywood recording artist Josh Kelley. By all accounts, he rocked the house, which is the best news I've heard all day. I've been a fan of Scott's music for as long as we've been friends and it seems that, since moving to Seattle, his working musicianhood is blowing up all over the place, gigging like mad and having fans that come out to see him repeatedly.

To see a friend succeed at what they love is like seeing a dream come to life. And what, by gum, is cooler than that?

Today in History:

April 20 is a day that haunts not just because only bad shit happened on this day in history (Columbine, Hitler's Birthday, the beginning of the Civil War) but because I moved into my house 2 years ago today. There's even a sad, haunting song by Oysterband called "20th of April."

These are times when I shouldn't believe in Karma.

VBT: Danyel Smith is interviewed at Pamie.com today.

Virtual Book Tour's Official Site.

Virtual Book Tour Discussion Thread at Readerville.

The Return of The Virtual Book Tour

I'm pleased to begin another round of the Virtual Book Tour, this time featuring More Like Wrestling, the stunning debut novel by Danyel Smith. Danyel is a former editor at Vibe and Time and has written for The New Times, Spin and Rolling Stone.

Danyel will be blogging and getting interviewed throught the web this week. You can see a complete tour at the spanking new Virtual Book Tour site, designed by Dreamsbay.

Discussion of the Virtual Book Tour, online book publicity, writing, journalism and music criticism will happen at a special discussion thread set up just for the tour by our friends at Readerville. Danyel has been in music and entertainment journalism for nearly 15 years so any aspiring writers should definitely stop by.

Why Didn't I Say That?

I got to meet one of my heroes Nelson George today after a screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Naturally I feel like I made an ass of myself but he also seemed pulled in several different directions. You'd think I'd be better at this by now.

There's Also Death:

With Senor Benton in town, Jane's BBQ this evening, the San Francisco International Film Festival in full swing, a Virtual Book Tour starting on Monday (shhh!), my piece for The Believer due at the end of the month and me leaving for New York a week for Monday, I think it's time to start hiring a personal staff of Umpa Loompas to keep track of my wheelings and dealings. Suzan thinks its easy if I make lists and use a calendar. I prefer to crawl under the bed and weep. Or run headfirst into a bank vault door.

Coup of Fate:

What happens when you're making an innocent little documentary about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and there's a coup? See The Revelution Will Not Be Televised when it comes to your town and find out. It's amazing.

UPDATE: I'm apparently on all the wrong lists because my buddy James posted about the film last fall and got a spitfire of anger from Venezuelan readers. Of which I have none.

S.E. Hinton

I'm working on an article about S.E. Hinton for The Believer. If you have any Hinton, Outsiders, Tex, or Rumble Fish related memories, I'd love to hear them.

Well Duh...

Eddie Izzard is not gay (via House of Laura).

Deco Delicious:

With my parents in town, I took it upon myself to take us all the the Art Deco retrospective at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Art Deco for me has always been some catch-all for "really cool shit from like the 20's or 30's with great geometry, shiny surfaces, and everything streamlined to look like a rocket. I also dug that, true to its birth at the dawn of the 20th century, Art Deco influenced mass market consumer good as much as it did fine art.

I can't speak to the quality of curation (although both Suzan and my dad had problems with the exhibit being on two floors with no discernable flow between them) but the stuff is amazingly, breathtakingly, say-it-out-loud beautiful. Ignore the web site slide show (the link marked "exhibition preview") as it features 19 slides of the least interesting pieces.

Some Art Deco artists I hadn't heard of before that I'm going to look out for now...

+Sargent Johnson. A black San Franciscan who mined African forms to create amazing masks, sculptures and sketchings.

+The mathmatical precision and whimsy of Scotch architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

+Delicious pieces of Lalique Glass.

+My favorite. A clock from Dutch silversmith Jan Eisenloeffel that would have made Faberge hide his head in shame.

+ "Skyscraper Furniture" from Paul Frankl.

Grateful Glacial:

The fine folk behind Interglacial.com have taken it upon themselves to provide RSS Feeds for sites that haven't gotten around to doing it themselves. Thus, I now can get the goods from ALDaily and Molly Ivins. Rock on!

I wonder if they take requests? Whom do you think is missing an RSS feed and needs one?

Hometown Pride:

"San Francisco itself is art. Above all, literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth."

"If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life."

--William Saroyan

When all else fails...

My friend Tara and I recently had a conversation about how Patricia Clarkson makes any movie she's in a little bit better simply by the allure of her presence and the magnitude of her talent. See Pieces of April (and my review), a movie so slight, so whispy so not there that Clarkson's performance is the only thing keeping it earthbound.

So I posed the question to my buddies Dave, Josh and Justin. What other actors can you say this about? Who else makes a movie better simply by showing up? This is what they said....

Josh:

Philip Seymour Hoffman
William H. Macy
John C. Reilly

Justin:

Johnny Depp
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Steve Buscemi

Dave:

Dan Hedaya

I also threw in Frances McDormand as she's the only thing I like about Fargo and outsexes even Kate Beckinsale in Laurel Canyon.

Who would you include?

An Idea Marinated in Geekery...

So I'm the proud owner of a new printer, something I haven't had in a very long time. Since I hooked it up on Sunday night, I've been on a tree-murdering frenzy, printing articles, essays and blog posts from the far reaches of the web. I'm envisioning an orgasmic morning in the near future where I wake up before dawn and read away at my pile of articles until I fall asleep again.

But then what? A termite mound of read-over paper to be thrown away or even recycled seemed so 20th century. So I had this little idea...

I'm going to take my pile of articles and divide it into four. Then, borrowing a page from Bookcrossing, I'm going to leave these piles in cofee shops, on the bus, in the library, somewhere public. Attached to each will be a note that says something like...

"Hello friend. You've found a packet of articles and essays left behind for your reading pleasure by Kevin, local media junkie. Please read as much or as little as you like then leave the packet somewhere for someone else to enjoy. Please let me know what you think and where you left the packet when you were done"

And then my email address.

Whatdya think?

Kinja Unpacked:

The fact that I didn't understand Kinja as an Alpha tester is not surprising because I don't understand any web geegaw the first time around. Or the fifth. By then my patience is drained and I call upon friends to explain it to me in plain English. I give up easily.

This was the case with Blogger, with Flickr, with rss readers which I thought Kinja was until I saw this post from Jason Kottke and this one from Tom Coates, whom I've never met but I'm inviting into my Expert Barn.

I originially saw Kinja as my Great Web Hope, the answer to keeping track of the mess of blogs I like to read but A) forget they exist B) get so sick of clicking and typing URL's that I give up by the letter "B" C) would like to pick and choose which posts I read but some interest me and some don't. My friend Dan explained to me that NetNewsWire does all of these things just fine. He's right. And as soon as every site I like has an RSS feed and I get used to reading them in that abreviated/no graphic form, it'll be all I need.

I thought Kinja would be a kind of souped up reader, all of these things in a nifty web interface, as neat and compact as the Megnut mojo behind it.

I was wrong. Kinja is too feature-weak to be a tool for the experienced reader. You can't create seperate lists for weblogs of different subjects, you can't choose which order you'd like to read your list, you can't view a master list of suggested sites on certain topics. It's basically like a tickertape of your blog universe and useful for just about that amount of time.

However, Jason and Tom have imagined Kinja as a kind of web vouyerism, a way to peek in on other blogger's browsing habits that they might not include in their blogroll. Jason has included a mark next to the links in his blogroll which have Kinja digests. Take this a step further and you've got Friendster For Wlogrolls, where reading lists can be swapped and shared as easily as an Itunes playlist.

This I get.

A Refeshing Breath of Honesty:

I agree with my buddy Scott. This is the best musician's ad I've ever seen.

My Tangled Web:

I know it was an April Fool's joke but if you asked me to design a web page (and please don't), I do all this crap. I stopped learning about June of 1998. Please forgive me. (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

NY Pee Pee:

The New York Press's list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers is the most juvenile, obnoxious thing I've read in a long time. I know the point of these lists is to brim with bile. Bile can be hilarious. But not when it's so nakedly culturally facist like this. Bitchslapping 50 Cent (#48) for "selling out" by appearing in Teen People? The guy has money in his stage name for pete's sake! Yelling at Chuck Klosterman (#38) for liking Steely Dan instead of the Sex Pistols? Knocking Sofia Coppola (#50) down a peg because she has a famous dad? Hating famous people and writing about it is one of our highest callings as a free society with lots of free time. But how about doing it with intelligence and wit, you self-righteous brats, instead of warmed over teenage vitriol, wasting away on the shelf since we all accused Kurt Cobain of "going hippie." (via Bookslut).

You April Fool, you.

For your April Fool's Day merriment:

*The History of April Fool's Day. Why am I not surprised that scholared believe it began in France, a country founded on making others feel stupid?

*A very long list of web-related April Fool's Day silliness.

*Kinja, the blog-reader application funded by Nick Denton that my friend Meg has been heading up has launched in beta. This is not a joke. The New York Times, the world's most humorless publication wrote something about it. Meg also announced that she's leaving the project at the end of this month. No kidding here.

*Joshua Davis's annual peek-under-the-hood of the history of his website Praystation. His cover art only includes 1998-2000. What happened to the rest?

*The annual St. Stupid's Day Parade right here in San Francisco. My home.

Hall of Shame:

My essay on the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame's 2004 inductees (I was not impressed) is up at Pop Transit.