Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Very good. Very funny. See it.
Wed, 100818
Wed, 100811
Idiotic New York conventional wisdom
It’s bad enough having to hear Boomers drone on about how New York has lost its edge. These tend to be folks who rarely leave Manhattan and have almost certainly never been to, say, an illegal Todd P show in Bushwick, surrounded by naked dancers and kids doing lines in plain view. Distressingly, though, this loss-of-edge notion has gone global:
“I’d hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitized away in New York,” said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.
Ms Adler, please contact me before your next visit, and I’ll show you a thriving “alternative art scene”. In Brooklyn. Which is still, last I checked, part of New York.
Fri, 100618
Thu, 100617
The World What?
My latest World Cup-themed podcast for PBS’s Need to Know is now available. Includes gratuitous clips of right-wing nutjobs bloviating about a sport they hate.
Sat, 100605
Proposed football chant for USA-England
To the tune of Frère Jacques:
Ninteen-fifty, ninteen-fifty
One-to-zip, one-to-zip
You are going home now, you are going home now
Have a nice trip! Have a nice trip!
Bonus annoyance points for Americanism “one-to-zip” sted “one-nil”.
The “Little Pink Pill”
My new PBS podcast examines Big Pharma’s rush to find a sex drug for women. It’s a kind of preview of a piece that should air on Need to Know on June 11 or 18.
Thu, 100527
Dust to Dust: PBS podcast, episode 3
This week’s topic is the finale of Ashes to Ashes, with some thinking about the future of digital media, of course. Earlier episodes on vulnerable voting machines and l’affaire iPhone are online. And yes, we’re working on getting it syndicated to iTMS. That ain’t so easy in the PBS world.
Thu, 100211
Iain M. Banks
Per suggestions from my friend Rufus Blooter (and others), I’ve started to dig into Banksy‘s … I mean Banks‘s work. The Player of Games was Rufus’ initial suggestion. I enjoyed it and loved the idea of The Culture, but found the characters flat and the prose uninspiring. Now I’m working through Use of Weapons, and finding it to be a much better read — better-rounded characters, prose that sings, and a structure that heightens the narrative arc.
Thu, 100107
The Cloud -v- the Paradise of Infinite Storage
In other words, what’s the value of the cloud when the cost of storage is declining precipitously? Or, conversely, what’s the point in buying lots of storage — however cheap it is — when we all have access to the cloud pretty much whenever and wherever we want?) Last year, my pal Sandy Pearlman and I discussed this during a session at the Future of Music Coalition‘s annual Policy Summit in Washington DC.
Below the fold, I’ve posted an essay Sandy wrote to set up the topic, followed by a couple of responses:
Sun, 091129
R.I.Fucking.P.
James Luther Dickinson died a few months ago. How did I miss this? The man was a genius, and now I’ll never get to interview him.
Seriously — the man who turned two Alex Chilton records * into masterpieces died, and I didn’t even know.
“Everybody goes as far as they can, they don’t just care/
You’re a wasted face, you’re a sad-eyed laugh, you’re a holocaust”
Goddamn, Jim — rest in peace.
[UPDATE (and the asterisk ***): Plus he produced yet another masterpiece, the one that led me to the Big Star and Chilton stuff.]