music

Tuesday various

Back to the garden party

I had this idea, in the back of my head, that I would get up early this morning to write. But, honestly, it’s an idea I’ve had many times before, and it almost never seems to win out over going back to sleep for another hour.

I suppose there’s always tomorrow to try it again. I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which so far is full of a lot of simple but really good practical advice for writers. It makes a little sad for not having encountered the book except by name before this…but it also makes me want to write, so that’s good.

This afternoon, at work, we had one of our semi-regular “brown bag lunches,” where they invite in a speaker and give everybody shows up to hear the speaker a free lunch. It can be hit or miss sometimes, but today’s talk by NY DJ and author Pete Fornatale was actually pretty entertaining and informative. He talked more about Woodstock than his experience in radio — he’s got a new book on the former — and the presentation maybe got a little away from him near the end — he showed this video in its entirety; Chris Bliss is an impressive juggler, but even if I hadn’t seen the video before, it strayed a little from the topics at hand. But, overall, it was one of the better talks we’ve had.

And hey, free lunch.

Wednesday various

  • The slow (but perhaps inevitable) death of Borders:

    In 2001, Borders would go on to partner with Amazon.com, allowing the online book retailer to handle their internet sales for them, if you can believe it. There’s a photo of Jeff Bezos and then-Borders president and CEO Greg Josefowicz shaking hands to celebrate the partnership. Josefowicz has weatherman hair and a broad smile, and he’s beaming past the camera with the cocksure giddiness of a guy who thinks he just got rid of all his problems because he sold his dumb old cow for a handful of really cool magic beans. But when you pull your eyes away from Josefowicz’s superheroic chin, you notice that Jeff Bezos is smiling directly into the camera with keen shark eyes. His smile is more relaxed, a little more candid than Josefowicz’s photo-op-ready grin. It’s the face of someone who’s thinking, I finally got you, you son of a bitch. [via]

  • The slow (and ongoing) death of Wikipedia:

    After years at the top result on practically every Google search, Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice. [via]

  • Apes From the Future, Holding a Mirror to Today:

    But it has to be said that the movie science fiction of the original Apes era, with its now laughably primitive effects, in some ways benefited from its technical crudeness: the spectacle rarely got in the way of the ideas, and when the ideas are engaging, as they are in the first “Planet of the Apes” and “Escape,” the simple effects function like sketches, indications of some greater, not fully realized, narrative and intellectual architecture.

  • The Playboy Club as female empowerment? O RLY?

    Perhaps the good news is that we’ve now reached the point where it’s considered smart marketing to push a feminist spin on your show about Playboy Bunnies. Perhaps we’ve reached the point, in fact, where you have to try to fit your show into a “we have smart and strong women characters” mold. (Earlier in the tour, we had a panelist argue that Entourage had some of the strongest female characters on television, which raised eyebrows similarly.) Perhaps it’s good news that strength, like sex, presumably sells. Just don’t look for it here.

  • And finally, a little late linking this, but: Remembering legendary Cleveland rock critic Jane Scott [via]

Tuesday various

  • “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
  • I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
  • Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
  • Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

    I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.

  • And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:

    I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]

Monday various