Aug 31 2005
Really Cool Word: "Malfeasance"
Noun : wrongful conduct by a public official
Heard tonight in the movie Fargo. "We're investigating some malfeasance."
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Noun : wrongful conduct by a public official
Heard tonight in the movie Fargo. "We're investigating some malfeasance."
Backstory: I always buy a hardcover book on my birthday, something I've been keeping an eye on but can't justify buying in hardcover. I dug Sittenfeld's essay on lit groupies in the New York Times (even wrote a reply) but didn't know much about Prep and felt, somewhere, I'd only be buying it to read about grouping sessions in the P.E. supply closet. But your birthday is when you let such defenses down.
Notes: 4 years in the life of Lee Fiora, a lower middle class kid from Indiana at an exclusive prepatory school in Massachusetts. I think she's been called "Holden Caufield in a kilt" although she lacks HC's brazen and misdirected confidence. By a whole lot.
Verdict: I love books, movies, TV, anything about the high school experience. My father and I watched Dawson's Creek together for most of the length of its run. Proudly. But you're bout 150 pages in before you realize that Sittenfeld is telling the story backwards, that Lee is older and has, we hope, learned a few things. Sittenfeld inhabits both halves of her protagonist with complete confidence. This isn't another annoying tale of pubecent self-absorption or a smug cultural shooting gallery with WASP privledge as the ducks. She plays fair with her text, a coming of age tale in the archetypal sense. Lee goes to class, has crushes, makes friends and loses them, fights and makes up with her roommate. It's all been done before but Sittenfeld seems to know that. She focuses on character instead of milestones, making Lee a real person, someone we might pity but are more than interested enough to spent 409 pages with. There are times when her whining never stops and her self-analysis sounds rote rather than inspired but they are rare enough not to distract from Prep's achievement: A novel about high school that doesn't make you wince or look away in predictibility.
Recommended. If you're into this sort of thing.
So this fall all San Franciscans are hereby assigned to read the same book. I'm eager to see how this turns out, especially with my friend Rosie at the helm.
The Onion AV Club has redesigned and looks great. They've also got several RSS feeds, the lack of which prohibited me from reading them more frequently in the past. Now, I'l never miss another interview with Pat Benatar again.
My friend Elizabeth Spiers spells out in 800 words what I've been yammering about for 3 years. And better. She's going to put me out of a job.
So my friend Roman does this thing called "Epic Walks" where he'll walk with a friend or loved one for several hours and enjoy each other's company. 'Course he lives in Chicago where the steepest hill is a speed bump, not here in San Francisco where hills as much a landmark as the Golden Gate Bridge.
On Saturday, I hadn't been to gym but I also wanted to go to the movies. Suzan had errands to run so she dropped me off at Stonestown Mall where I caught an early screening of Junebug (lovely, sweet litte film) and walked home.
I shouldn't have worn brand new shoes. 10-12 blocks in my angles were already starting to tingle. So I slowed down, started up, skipped dawdled and tried to focus on what a beautiful summer afternoon it was in San Francisco rather than how much cardio benefit I was getting.
The whole walk took about 90 minutes not including lunch. If I focused on number of blocks left, I got discouraged so I tried to concentrate either on my immediate surroundings or let my thoughts wonder. And keep my feet moving.
When I was 14, my mother and brother and I climbed a 3,000 foot mountain in Switzerland without knowing it. We just kept following paths this way and that. The elevation was gentle enough that it didn't strain you. We got to the top without realizing it because we didn't look up or ever stop and think "I wonder how far we've come." Our minds were elsewhere.
I believe I can walk a helluva long way if I'm not in a hurry and my focus is on the steps rather than the finish line. But when you're done and you look at how far you've walked and yes, you're feet probably hurt and you wonder where the afternoon went, you can say "I did that? Man, that's pretty damn cool," and you'll remember it for a long time.
Eons ago I linked to WORDCOUNT, which links every word in the english language by commonality of use, then promptly forgot what it was called. My buddy Emily Hambidge just linked to it as part of her Weekly Roundup. Thanks EH.
"The" is the most commonly used word in the English language followed by "of" and "and".
Emily just sent me a link to the Really Free Market, a once a month garage sale in San Francisco where everything is free. What a neat idea.
It's the last Saturday of the month, which means tomorrow. I think we're going.
So SFist is all hating on Burning Man. A few of the comments took offense but most seem to agree with their assertion that
Really, is there that much of a difference between Burning Man and Spring Break? All it is a bunch of (mainly) kids going somewhere warm to party and get laid. The only difference is that while Spring Break is made up of meathead frat boys from the Midwest and airhead sorority girls from the South, Burning Man is made up of frustrated liberal art majors and artist types who have to turn it into something that's just so important and so much better than what mere mortals do so they can make themselves feel that they're just so much more important and so much better than anyone else.
I'm a little surprised the Burning faithful haven't risen up in protest. The whole dang festival was born here. Maybe they've heard it all before. Or maybe (and I could just be suspicious), the folks who scream loudest about the values of the Playa aren't the ones that read SFist?
Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and I have talked some about this. In the early '90s (before my time, right in the middle of his), the San Francisco undergroud art scene and embryonic web community were many of the same people. The hacker ethic fueled not only obvious geek/artist hybrids like the Survival Research Labs but the early Well discussion boards and the founding of Wired Magazine are examples of the same art/technology crosspollination. The dot com boom cleaved the two communities somewhat, with inflated rents displacing artist spaces and the glut of media and cultural opportunities necessitating the need for more obvious and diligent marketing of creative work. When I arrived in 2000, it was quite common to meet a writer with a half-dozen best selling books who didn't see the need for a web site or think the Internet was all that big a deal.
Things have been turning around and I couldn't be happier. I love the web and the arts with equal ferocity and believe in celebrating creativity no matter in which half of the brain it begins. It's not silly but potentially self-destructive to say that artists should fear technology or technologists don't get true creativity. All of our work can't help but be enriched by exposure to modes of creation unfamiliar to ours.
I think the return of Webzine could be huge, ushering in a new arts era for San Francisco where technology is seen as ann instrument of artistic endeavor instead of a necessar evil. Here's hoping...
Though I don't use Flickr much myself (because I don't own a camera), I love it's weird groupings, collisions of simple creativity and manic lateral thinking. Like this one, inanimate objects that look like human faces (via Kottke.org).
So my old friend Pamie Ribon has redesigned her site and relaunched her forum. Pamie's forums is where I got started on the whole Internet thing way back in 1999, made a lot of friends, was a sex symbol for about 5 minutes (ask if you want. It's really not that interesting), and pretty much started off down the path I'm on now. Going back to the forums feels a little like visiting high school the week after buying your first house, charming yes, nostolgic of course, but mostly very weird.
I'm way tied up in catch up from my many weeks away and won't be able to blog for a few days. Until then Suzan took this awesome picture of the State Theatre in Ann Arbor that I'd like to share with you. Enjoy. I'll speak to you soon.
Famtracker now has an RSS Feed. We rejoice.
Or we did. They managed to remove it when putting up their vacation announcement. Wha?
Television Without Pity, still 1996 over there. Still no RSS Feed. Still not able to print out a complete recap. Still need to spend 45 minutes clicking through 13 single pages like a lab rat asking for a food pellet. We cease rejoicing.
Six Feet Under airs its final episode tonight amidst much hype. I started watching the show on DVD about a year ago and had shut myself off from all media mentions for fear of spoiling plots three seasons down the road I hadn't got to yet. Nonetheless, I heard a retrospective on Fresh Air which just about blew everything. If you're in the same boat, listen the interviews indivdually and not in the round-up format like I did.
Creator Alan Ball is scheduled to give the post-mortem (ha!) to Terry Gross next week.
I had no idea the folks who brought you Wikipedia had all these other projects going on. Wild.
The trailer for Shopgirl is fantastic, criminal even, that we have to wait until Oct. 21 to see the movie. Never has Claire Danes looked so luminous. However, despite getting lost for several minutes in her deep aburn tresses, something struck me as a bit calculating about this role and then I remembered: Shopgirl is Ms. Danes's first post-homewrecking role, her first screen appearence after leaving boyfriend Ben Lee for the arms of Billy Crudup, her co-star on her last film, who was at the time expecting a child with Mary-Louise Parker. Crudup didn't come out of the publicity hail smelling so sweat himself but he's 11-years Danes's senior and, unfair as it is, has the burden of age, gender and a serious artiste's reputation on his side. Danes, as Fametracker points out, has never quite lived up to the goodwill heaped on her from My So Called Life, the TV blip that brought her to our attention. She's young, beautiful, and has made a series of career choices which look great on paper but don't add up to much in the moviegoer's imagination. Shopgirl is Claire Danes playing a grown-up, a working woman desired by two men. Chosing what you want in a mate and what kind of person embodies it is among the first adult decisions we make. Ms. Danes seems to be making it on several levels here, an art/life/chicken/egg happening that now, I'm even more eager to see.
So everybody knows John Waite's ballad "Missing You", #1 on the pop charts in 1985 and covered by Tina Turner in her Leggs pantyhose campaign. A few of you might know that Mr. Waite became the lead singer of the 80s arena rock super group Bad English (they who gave us the wedding ballad staple "When I See You Smile"). But only a few other sad souls like myself have been with JW since his early days as the lead singer of the British proto-boy band The Babys, own not only The Essential John Waite but a few of the long-out-of-print studio albums from his solo career and may even check up on The John Waite Worldwide Consortium from time to time.
If you aren't in group #3, count your blessings. But if you've ever thought "Hey that I-Ain't-Missing-You-At-All song was pretty dang good. What happened to that guy?" I offer up "Dark Side of the Sun", the song immediately following Missing You on Waite's 1985 album No Brakes. It has the same pleading vocals and heavy-handed metaphors jambed into a conventional pop framework. But lay over a nice sing-songy keyboard/guitar combo, an addictive little chorus and a handful of "whoah whoahs" taking you home and you've got my favorite John Waite song.
Have a download. You'll be goofily pleased when it pops up on your iPod.
SFist applies for press pass to Blog Business Summit. Blog Business Summit gives shady-ass answer. SFist calls them on it by posting about the whole affair. BBS Organizer DL Byron and Jackson West hash it out in the comments of post, email about it, get it resolved. All is well. Resolution at the speed of thought.
This article thinks its time, arguing that the club has existed on its legend, rather than what got it that legend for too long. I don't agree but he makes a convincing argument.
Fans of the club have created SaveCBGB.org as a central resource.
No film lover can afford to go on living and not see Z Channel: A Magnificant Obsession, an amazing IFC documentary about a Los Angeles TV station in the early days of cable that played a wildy diverse slate of films in groupings only the manic programmer Jerry Harvey could understand. Z Channel was to early-cable TV what Pauline Kael was to film criticism: opinionated, difficult, in love with movies, and intrumental creating a space for film lvoers to diver in and swim freely. It's important to remember that, in Kael's day and when Z Channel was founded in 1974, there were no video stores, no Netflix and no TiVo. If you wanted to see a movie some professor/parent/older friend crowed "classic!" about every five minutes, you had to catch it on TV if you were lucky or live in a town that had a university film series or a repatory house. If you didn't have either of those, sucks to be you. Great aged movies belonged to the obsessive, the urbane, or the geographically fortuitous.
Z Channel only operated in LA but held fast to the belief that good movies, however they performed at the box office needed champions for them to be seen. And they needed venues with as few barriers to entry as possible. The channel has been credited by the creators of movies like Salvador, Once Upon a Time in America and Heaven's Gate from the ax of oblivion.
We take a lot of this for granted now. Turner Classic Movies makes old film available through a fairly elementary cable package. Netflix puts thousands of movies not available at Blockbuster available through the mail. The Independent Film Channel and Sundance exist to provide quality cinema to the average cinemaphile. "Independent" is now just as much a brand name as "Blockbuster."
It wasn't always so. Just 25 years ago, great films with even a few years behind them were the property of the few and the fortunate. Efforts like Z Channel (as illustrated in this magificant documentary and avilable exclusively on IFC and through Netflix) were the pioneering efforts to make great cinema the province of everyone who wanted it.
River's Edge (1986): "I need to write a book about 80s teen movies."
Jewhoo, the search engine for any remotely famous Jewish person, needs help.
I've been tagged.
1. How many books do I own?
Hard to say. They're scattered all over the house, my office, next to the bed, tilting dangerously off the top of the living room cabinetry. But if I had to guess? About 1100, or one for each square foot.
2. Last Book I Bought:
Everybody into the Pool by Beth Lisick at ACWLP in San Francisco. I buy a hardcover every year on my birthday.
3. Last Book I Read:
The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. Finished it ten minutes ago.
4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:
1. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
2. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
3. Random Family by Adrien Nicole LeBlanc
4. The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of his Best Newspaper Stories
5. Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White
5. Tag Five More:
Mark Sarvas
Dave Thomas
Erica Olsen
Sarah McCauley
Wendy McClure
Suzan and I are heading out on vacation. Blogging may be light until our return on the 23rd.
So the web is all atwitter about Pandora, a new music service based right here in the Bay Area. Pandora asks you to type in some artists you like and then measures descriptors of those artists against others in the Music Genome Project then creates a playlist for you based on both. The interface is a neat little flash window featuring the album cover art, name of song and band. In a pull down men, you can say you the love the song, you don't like it, or ask why Pandora selected it for you. I heard about from my friend Lucia who correctly describes it to me as "relentlessly addictive."
Until now, I've used Last.fm and been fairly satisfied. I describe both of them as No-nonsense Launch. Launch.com is Yahoo's music program that has a similar rating-then-suggesting set up. Except it only works on a Windows system. Which is just stupid. But Last.fm and Pandora don't care what you're using. Which is the opposite of stupid.
Last.fm just redesigned their site which is pretty snazzy yet doesn't quite solve the difficulties I've had with it. You still need to download a plug-in for iTunes or whatever your music player is so that what you play gets added to your Last.fm playlists. And since Last.fm works on a stream through your computer's music player, it's only as good as the strength of your Internet connection. In a wireless cafe, for example, it's pretty haphazzard.
Pandora has eliminated many of these problems but lacks the community features of Last.fm. You can't create friend networks or listen to their radio stations (well, unless they send it to you specifically). But Pandora is only a few weeks old and is most likely planning for this sort of thing in the future.
Last.fm is 3 Euros a month (about $3.75) v. Pandora's planned $8 a month. Both serve up great music but at this point, Pandora wins on ease of use. I need to see more to decide entirely though. I'm just glad this kinds of thing is around, which I consider one of the great gifts of the digital age. I'm quite sure now that I will never run out of good music to discover.
Pandora is in very new Beta right now and is invitation only. But if you'd like to try it, email me, and I'll invite you.
Of CNET's Top Ten Dot Com Flops, the one I miss the most is Kozmo.com, which delivered stuff to you for free. It was like a drug store on wheels, perfect for when you needed batteries or dental floss or a bag of Funyons and were too lazy to leave the house.
I hear Pink Dot in Los Angeles does the same thing and has attained some mythic status. Based on it's Sunset Blvd. location, it became the Stoner 9-11, munchies or condoms at any hour of the night. Alas, we're not so lucky here in San Francisco. And although I only used Kozmo once, I still miss it a little (via Kottke).
Wow, what a lovely birthday! Suzan and I went to brunch at Miss Millie's then took a walk in the crisp fog of a summer Sunday in San Francisco. She then left for the Stern Grove concert series with her sister while I drove down to San Jose to take in California Extreme, 300 classic video games in one room. Two hours of playing the Journey video game suited me just fine so I split for home and cleaned up the house until Suzan got home.
Our guests arrived at 7 and we spent the better part of the night eating chinese food and cake, playing Cluesome and enjoying each other's company. Since I hadn't seen most of them at all this summer, that last part was especially sweet.
My friend Leslie made lemon bars, the last of which I just ate. I want that taste to stay with me a while.
*George Washington creates the Purple Heart, a miltiary honor for soilders wounded in battle (1782)
*Explorer 6 takes the first picture of the earth from space (1959)
*Ivory Coast declares its independence from France (1960)
*The Bee Gees have their first #1 hit "How Can you Mend a Broken Heart?" (1971).
*Frenchmen Philip Petit walked across a highwire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1974).
Born Today: Garrison Keillor, Louis Leaky, Charlize Theron, Grandma Moses, David Duchovney...
and me! I'm 32 today. Much celebrating to be done. I'm off.
I leave Vancouver today having had a great time but not seen anything. Not even the Eviro-Taxi Cab. I'll have to come back.
Thanks to the corrupting influence of my friend Maggie.
Pretty damn funny.
Okay, I should know the answer to this but I don't. Everytime I take a picture and want to post it here, the picture is gainormous. How do I size a photo so it fits all nice and neat into my template? I'm using TypePad.
According to this article, magazines are being launched at an alarming rate and are specialized as ever. Which is why as soon as I put this entry down, I'm subscribing to Bonsai Today.
So I'm pissed that I missed National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, which was earlier this week. And that I wasn't in Los Angeles where I could get one from Diddy Riese: Ice cream between two cookies for $1, still the best deal around.
Instead I'm in Vancouver serving as a guest faculty member for this. Which has been a lot of fun so far.
An interview with legendary director Fritz Lang. Includes audio clips. (via Spike Magazine).
Suzan and I have been on a movie tear lately since our smmers are lulling together for the first time in recent memory. Sunday night we took in a late screening of Mad Hot Ballroom at the 4-Star, a wonderful neighborhood theater in the Richmond district of San Francisco, the kind of place where the owner takes your ticket and sells you popcorn. Highly recommended. Mad Hot Ballroom is a documentary about a program at lower middle class elementary schools in New York where the kids learn ballroom. Yes, it's cute. But it's also a facinating look at the role of the arts in education, at race and class and at growing up in urban America. I've heard it called "Spellbound with Dancing" or "Hoop Dreams in Ballet Shoes." I liked it better than both of them.
Last night, we cought an earlier show of Hustle and Flow. I had been listening to an interview with the director Craig Brewer on "The Treatment" and decided I had to see this movie like NOW.
It did not let me down. Terrance Howard (light years away from his performance in Crash.) lines himself up for an Oscar nomination. Taryn Manning isn't a new comer but her role here brougt her into my conscience to stay. And Craig Brewer? Damn. I'll see just about anything her does from here on out. Hustle and Flow is a miraculous, moving, funny, sad movie about the American Dream. And that doesn't really begin to describe it. See it, see it, see it. You'll be glad you did.
I just dropped by my friend Andrew Huff's blog Me3dia and my oh my what a fabulous design! Weightshift, a small Chicago-based outfit is responsible. I think Andrew mentioned they did Gaper's Block as well.
I've beeing slowly realizing this summer that things need a redecoration around here. Much as I love the Trottish simplicity and elegance of this place, I had much different needs in the fall of 2002 when it launched. Now I've got my interests scattered across three additional sites, a cumbersome, jigged together mess. So that's on the agenda for this fall: All me, all in one place.
CBGB's, the legendary New York music club, is facing eviction. Credited with birthing much of American punk rock and 80s new wave, the club owes a pile of back rent. Benefits are planned this enitre month.
Powells.com is having a contest where you can win 15 books recommended by the contributors of Bookmark Now as the books that changed their lives. I think the contest was supposed to stop yesterday but it's still up on their website so hurry! hurry!. Enter here.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
