dietsch ::

Walk the Line

I'm skeptical about the film, but boy howdy, do I love this poster:

Wokka wokka

I got a pocket full of quarters, and I'm headed to the arcade. I don't have a lot of money, but I'm bringing ev'rything I made. I've got a callus on my finger, and my shoulder's hurting too. I'm gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they turn blue. Still Love At First Bite

Times finally notices

The New York Times finally notices what I've harping on for a week:

While each paper has written things that might be considered unflattering about both Mr. O'Reilly and his accuser, The Post has tended to paint Ms. Mackris in a more negative light than The [Daily] News has.

...

Martin Dunn, deputy publisher and editorial director of The [Daily] News, suggested in an e-mail message on Friday that The Post might be pulling its punches because the News Corporation owns both The Post and Fox. (The News runs Mr. O'Reilly's syndicated column on its editorial page.)

Have Papers Taken Sides on O'Reilly?

More Post hijinks?

You know, I don't really care about this he said/she said shit, but when will Page Six acknowledge its ties to Fox News? New York Post Online Edition: gossip

Ted Turner and the death of modern civilization

Answer: Maybe it means that CNN sucks. (Good picture choice, Page Six.)

Remake remake remake

I don't know what's a worse idea: This one, or this one.

Blog, the magazine

Hey, U! magazine is hiring, and although the CL description calls the publication a "reality magazine," it sounds like a printed blog to me. Read on for the description, in case it runs off the CL site. Continue reading "Blog, the magazine"

Interrotron

Errol Morris, on his interview style:

"I put my face on the Teleprompter or, strictly speaking, my live video image. For the first time, I could be talking to someone, and they could be talking to me and at the same time looking directly into the lens of the camera. Now, there was no looking off slightly to the side. No more faux first person. This was the true first person."

Movienet [via Kottke]

Van Dyke reunion

I used to watch the Dick Van Dyke show in reruns all the time, and I still think it's among the best sitcoms. Now, reunion shows usually suck, but what I like about this idea is that it's just an episode--presumably, just a single half-hour episode. One reason reunions normally suck is that they're just overlong. You might be able to squeeze an hour, at most, out of even the best sitcom, but not two. We'll see how this works out. I'll TiFaux it for sure.

Joe Camp goes his own way

When I was small, my mom took me to see the first Benji movie, which I just adored. The latest film, Benji Returns: Rags to Riches, is now out, and its director, Joe Camp, refuses to take film-making cues from Hollywood. Let's all hope he does well. Children need more from film than the endless exploits of spy kids and Scooby-Doo.

To hell with Orkut

I've been invited to join Orkut, and I've tried to register a username, but every attempt I make craps out. I enter a username and jump through the first couple of screens, and then I get an error screen that the server's acting up, so I quit and come back in a few minutes. I try the username I've just used, and it says that one's registered already, but when I try to log in with that one, I can't get in. I have now blown through nearly every username that I normally try: mdietsch, mtdietsch, dietsch, michaeldietsch, michaeltdietsch, sodietschy. What an annoying, useless piece of shit. It might be alpha software, but it's hard for me to believe that anyone would willfully publish alpha software THIS buggy. And this is from Google people?

Teen Titans, NASCAR, and Black Cinema: Unsuitable for deaf audiences

Television Captioining Censorship "The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) urged President Bush to overturn a recent decision by the U.S. Department of Education to declare almost 200 television shows inappropriate for captioning by the Department’s Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities program, effective October 1, 2003. According to NAD President, Andrew J. Lange, the Department's action is government censorship and contradicts President Bush’s promotion of family values and parental accountability." [More and still more; via Boing Boing and Neil Gaiman]

FCC to investigate boob flash

FCC head Michael Powell, already under pressure from Congress and conservative organizations to tighten its policies on obscenity, vows to investigate the puerile stunt Janet and Justin pulled during the Super Bowl half-time show. Janet might sell more copies of her new single thanks to the publicity, but the climate of outrage she's sparked will likely make it easier for the FCC and Congress to crack down on televised speech.

Are you ready, boots? Start walking.

R.I.P. Captain Kangaroo

Johnny of the Cross

"Johnny could sing about murder and God in the same song and with the same voice because to do otherwise would have been dishonest. At the same time, he let that despair, agony, and rejection stand on their own—he lent them integrity." [via Arts & Letters Daily]

Ad*Access Collection, at Duke University

Duke University's Ad*Access collection compiles images from over 7,000 ads published in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Also of note on this site are the brief but informative history pages for each industry. Although the archive covers radio and television and personal-hygiene ads in addition to transportation ads, it's the images of train and airline advertisements that most interest me. [via muxway]

Eeeeeeee

"Rubin, unsuccessfully, kept trying to get Cash to make a version of Radiohead's 'Creep.'" The other remarkable quote from that article: "In preparation for the fifth disc in the American Recordings sequence, he recorded some 50 new songs after his wife, June Carter Cash, died in May. None of these songs appear on 'Unearthed.'" The girl wants me to add this to my Christmas list, but ain't no way I can wait a month, dammit.

Strummer's Redemption

Old pirates, yes, they rob I; Sold I to the merchant ships, Minutes after they took I From the bottomless pit. But my hand was made strong By the 'and of the Almighty. We forward in this generation Triumphantly. Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom? - 'Cause all I ever have: Redemption songs; Redemption songs. The final album from Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros arrives in stores tomorrow. I downloaded an exclusive prerelease version from the iTunes Music Store, and damn is it good. Of special note is Strummer's solo acoustic recording of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, produced by Rick Rubin, who also produced a recording of the same song featuring Strummer and Johnny Cash.

Oops

New York Daily News - News & Views - World chumpions! "The Yankees couldn't get the job done at home; their season ended last night in the seventh game," wrote the New York Post in an editorial Friday morning. The Post blames the gaffe on a production error. The Daily News, of course, is having fun tweaking the Post for its error. See the editorial page reprinted at Smoking Gun. (If the Smoking Gun page disappears, Gothamist has another reprint here.)

Your life in photos

Matt Haughey, creator of MetaFilter and PVRblog, among other cool sites, has started Ten Years of My Life, a website documenting, in photos, Matt moving through his 30s. Intriguing idea. This is worth following.

amNewYork

amNewYork, a free commuter paper aimed at young professionals, has people out this morning (10/7) handing out a free preview, and Christ is it sloppy. Poorly written, and typos everywhere. The paper launches Friday, October 10, and I hope they have a copy desk in place by then. But what really amuses me is the amNewYork manifesto. After running down the old saw--the WSJ is read by those who run the country, the Times by those who think they run the country, and the Washington Post by those who think they should run the country--amNewYork proclaims: "Well this newspaper, amNewYork, will be read by people who will be running the country by tonight's pm." Whee! amNewYork will enable the proletariat to seize the means of production and finally stick to those damn bourgie WSJ readers. [Links: Crain's Chicago Business; Gothamist]

Social hygiene poster archive

American Social Hygiene Posters from the University of Minnesota. [MetaFilter]

Opus returns to the comics page

Berke Breathed Gets The Lead Out. Back In the Funny Business. "After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called Opus, starring his beloved penguin of the same name." (Washington Post) [MetaFilter]

"In space, it's never Miller time."

Great animation online

Okay, I don't normally post funny 404 errors, but this link showed up in my aggregator right after I read this story on the New York Times site, about the guys who created Homestarrunner.com.

The seamless, richly nuanced animated universe they have created is a place not of indie sarcasm but of pop innocence, where the mentality of the characters is at fifth-grade level. Its influences are not the Velvet Underground, Big Star and the Stooges but "Peanuts" cartoons, Japanese anime and Atari video games.

[This same "pop innocence," by the way, is one reason I enjoy the new Teen Titans cartoon so much.]

The Times story talks about animation collectives and music videos.

...some of the best videos of the last year have been animated. Among them are the Atari 2600 graphics of "Move Your Feet" by Junior Senior, the unspeakably clever diagrams of "Remind Me" by Royksopp and the lovable miniature aliens of "In This World" and "Sunday" by Moby.

All were created not by lone directors but by collectives like Shynola, h5, StyleWar, Plates Animation and the Brothers Chaps, as Matt and Mike Chapman call themselves....

The Times fails to mention the Kansas City-based MK12 and its videos for Hot Hot Heat or The Faint. (The MK12 site offers a link to a nice QuickTime file Hot Hot Heat's "No, Not Now" video, which I think is beautfully animated.)

So, y'know, take some time outta your day and visit Homestarrunner and MK12.

Bands to iTunes: Don't kill the album format

Reuters reports that several bands--Metallica, Green Day, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers among them--are denying iTunes the right to distribute their music. The bands take issue with Apple's iTunes service for allowing users to download single tracks. Reuters talked to Mark Reiter, from Q Prime Management Co, which represents Metallica and the Chili Peppers. Reiter told Reuters that Apple requires artists to make singles available in addition to entire albums. Reiter then stated:

"If you download a single, you may ignore the other tracks on the album.... When our artists record a body of work, it's what they deem to be representative of their careers at that time."

Fun piece of Web junk

I don't post Flash animations or little Web games, much, but this one really charmed me:
http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flyguy/
 

A history of the music industry

From the music sheet to the MP3. From Sheet Music to MP3: Music through the 20th Century Among the current notices of legal online music stores finally coming of age across the 'Net, this is a lengthy but quite deep and interesting analysis (deepest I've seen so far) on how the music industry ended up being what it is today, how "pop" music came to be, and more. If anything, it shows how corporate greed and shady business practices are far from being a recent happening in the industry everybody loves to hate. The study ends with the state of the industry circa 1999, but that makes it no less valuable. [MetaFilter]

This looks like a remarkable document. It's long (34 pages, printed), which means I haven't read it yet, but it's definitely worth looking over if you want to understand why the music industry acts as it does.

A handful of photo blogs

Via the newthings blog:

• One hundred mini-pictures of the Soldiers and Sailors arch in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza.


• More from the Moonmilk site.


• Slower.net

New York photoblogs, courtesy the links sidebar on Gothamist:

• lightningfield


• rion.nu


• quarlo

I want a digital camera so much my teeth hurt.

Apple's e-store security flaw

Apple Squashes E-Store ID Bug. A programming error at the company's online store leaves customer accounts vulnerable to hijacking by intruders. The key to breaking in: knowing a victim's e-mail address. By Brian McWilliams. [Wired News]

Oh shit.

Economist discusses digital music

The Economist covers the lay of the digital music land. [via GrepLaw]
I keep telling myself I have something intelligent to say about all this, but I haven't taken the time yet to write it all down. Feh to my busy damn life.

Porn, porn, porn

Smut Trading Outstrips Tune Swaps. Will Apple's new paid music service put a dent in free file-trading services like Kazaa and Gnutella? No, because most files being traded on P2P sites aren't music files at all. Surprise -- they're porn. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

Honda's Cog advert, in QuickTime

The Honda Cog commercial, in QuickTime [4.9MB], courtesy ext|circ. Dan Hon also discusses a free DVD of the commercial, available in the UK, with extras on the making of the advert. (Hmmmm. If the DVD's not region-encoded, it should be playable in the U.S.)
 

Online collaborative fiction

Here's an interesting experiment; Cory Doctorow writes:

Unwirer: an online, real-time exhibitionist sf story collaboration. Charlie Stross (who's up for the Hugo, Neb and BSFA awards this year!) and I are collaborating on our third story together, working title "Unwirer." And we're doing it online.
We've set up a Movable Type blog for the collaboration. You can read along as we write, rewrite and discuss the story as we work our way through it. I think this might be a net-first -- an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.
...
We're going to be updating the site daily, more or less, and we hope to have the story done in about a month.

[via Boing Boing Blog]

Honda goes Rube Goldberg

Don't click this link yet.
http://www.honda.co.uk/newcars/accord100k.html
This is a Honda commercial that's aired in the UK. For some reason, they've recorded it as a Flash file, which means it takes bloody forever to load, even on broadband. So don't click unless you can spare the time to let it load.
However, if you do watch it, you'll see one of the most clever ads, I think, ever made for a car company.
If you know what a Rube Goldberg device is--or you remember the Wallace and Gromit cartoon where Wallace has that machine that gets him out of bed, dressed, and ready for breakfast--that's what going on in this ad. Pieces and parts of a new Accord model set each other in motion, culminating in the unveiling of the new auto.
According to the Daily Telegraph, it took 606 takes to get this thing done right.

Apple isn't buying Universal Music after all?

Apple Said to Discuss a Music Deal, but Not Too Seriously. Apple Computer has discussed an investment in Universal Music, but a deal is unlikely to be concluded, people close to the discussions said. By Geraldine Fabrikant with Laura M. Holson. [New York Times: Technology]

Apple reportedly in talks to buy Universal Music

Apple said to be in talks to buy Universal Music
[Full story in link, which I urge you to read; requires registration]

In a pairing that would alter the architecture of the music business, Apple Computer Inc. is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, for as much as $6 billion, sources said.
Such a seemingly unlikely combination would instantly make technology guru Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, the most powerful player in the record industry.
Universal, which reaps about $6 billion in sales annually from artists such as 50 Cent, Shania Twain, U2 and Luciano Pavarotti, would be controlled by a maverick who revolutionized the computer market and coined the mantra "rip, mix, burn," which many in the music business read as an invitation to electronic piracy.

[via Boing Boing Blog]

"Revolution OS" released without CSS protection

What's So Free About This DVD?. A documentary filmmaker who labored for years on a film about open-source software programmers -- including Linus Torvalds -- releases it on DVD, without any copyright protection. He hopes people won't pirate it. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]

Travel art archive

Get me a ticket for an aeroplane.... Graphic Design from the 1920s and 1930s in Travel Ephemera . Amazing collection of posters, road maps, steamship and airline timetables, (more timetables here), post cards, luggage labels (more labels here and here), brochures and more. Seeing this stuff makes me wish I had been born seventy-five years earlier (and with an obscene amount of money.) (Warning: the site is seriously painful to look at, but the content's good. Link via Coudal.) [MetaFilter]

I love stuff like this, as anyone who's seen my apartment knows. I can't even begin to look at this right now, though. And, yeah, the site design is painful, but the ad reproductions are beautiful.

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Journals, records and some images from the Apollo lunar missions. [MetaFilter]

Neat. Photos, movies (in QuickTime format), PDFs of the mission reports, commentaries by the astronauts involved. Very nice work.

I hate the teevee

So, I came home tonight to find a production crew set up and filming an episode of Third Watch in my neighborhood. Equipment trailers, craft services trucks, and "talent" trailers all lined Seventh Ave. for three blocks. Second St. was blocked off to traffic and a film crew and an ambulance were out in front of a brownstone, filming at a basement unit. Looks like the scene will show someone being removed from the apartment and loaded into the ambulance. Pretty cool. I've never watched that show, but I'll probably try to catch it (a PA told me it should air in a month) to see my neighborhood on the teevee.

Global media?

Global Media. Big media barons are routinely accused of dominating markets, dumbing down the news to plump up the bottom line, and forcing U.S. content on world audiences. But these companies are not as big, bad, dominant, or American as critics claim. And company size is largely irrelevant to many of the problems facing today's Fourth Estate. By Benjamin Compaine. [Foreign Policy]

Well-reasoned, well-researched. Worth a look.

VU Perdition

Speaking of the Velvets, I bought tonight the just-released deluxe reissue of their first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. The new disc contains both mono and stereo mixes of the first disc, along with tracks from Nico's CD Chelsea Girl. Although billed as a solo album, Cale, Reed, and Morrison do backing vocals. Extensive liner notes and a reproduction of Andy Warhol's peelable banana cover make this a nice fetish item for the Dietsch to own. Also on tonight's shopping list, a copy of the graphic novel Road to Perdition. You might have noticed, if you pay attention to television and movies, that Road to Perdition has been adapted into a film, directed by Sam "American Beauty" Mendes and starring Tom Hanks. Now, I'm looking forward to the movie, but not for Messrs. Mendes and Hanks. (As an aside, however, I've bitched for years that it's time for Hanks to jettison his nice guy role and play someone who's actually kind of a bastard. Perhaps he's now done that.) No, what really has me going is the cinematography by Conrad L. Hall and, especially, the production design of Dennis Gassner. You might think, oh, who sees movies for the production design? Road to Perdition, my friend, is a period piece, set in 1920's Chicago. Check Gassner's credits: The Man Who Wasn't There; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Hudsucker Proxy; Barton Fink; Bugsy; Miller's Crossing; The Grifters. Gassner knows period pieces. I've seen the trailer, and this film is just beautiful.

Metropolis!

Metropolis! The Fritz Lang classic has been restored and will soon be rereleased on the arthouse circuit. Happily, it opens in New York during my July visit. Oh, but look: It's coming nowhere near Indianapolis or Bloomington. Further proof that it's about damn time I move from where culture isn't to where culture is.

Jesus, Sagan, and the Cosmos

I purchased the Cosmos DVD set last week. Owning this wondrous series on DVD is a bit of a dream for me, but I have to give a bit of history to explain why. Cosmos first aired on PBS in 1980. The series quickly won critical acclaim but more fortuitously, it premiered during an actor's strike that temporarily crippled the broadcast networks (this, in days before cable had reached most U.S. households). Cosmos quickly became one the most popular programs ever to air on PBS. I can't recall when I first saw it. I believe it must have been during one of the many repeated broadcasts of Cosmos. My copy of Carl Sagan's companion hardcover dates to Christmas 1983, and I know I requested the book because of my deep love for the series, so I saw it sometime between my eleventh and fourteenth birthdays. Sagan's clear love of science, his eloquence, and the high production values of the program captivated me. (Cosmos employed some of the special effects artists from the Star Wars films.) Sagan expressed complex scientific ideas such as evolution and the origins of stars in clear, concise, down-to-earth language that was both clear to grasp and, in retrospect, poetic. Sagan did not merely educate, he inspired. Pay attention when some young Turk scientist explains a breakthrough in physics or astronomy; quite often if asked for her inspiration, she'll be quick to cite Sagan and Cosmos. In watching the first episode again Sunday night, I was surprised at how lucid and energized Sagan seemed. His sense of wonder and awe permeate this series and I quickly felt myself transported back to those days when I would race upstairs to watch Cosmos on the old TV in my mom's bedroom. If I missed a single episode, it sure as hell wasn't my idea; my passion and excitement for it were boundless. I vividly recall being overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the universe ("Our own galaxy takes a quarter billion years to make a single rotation?") and brimming with admiration for the ingenuity and genius of the scientists who uncovered the mysteries and secrets of our origins. Cosmos was also my first real introduction to the idea of life on other planets. Now, when you read that, you might think I'm nuts. How could I have missed Star Wars? Star Trek? The Day the Earth Stood Still? Of course I was immersed in science-fiction as a child, but I knew instinctively that most science-fiction was mere fantasy. Cosmos, however, was my first inkling that there was a scientific likelihood of intelligent alien life. As Sagan explains, in a universe with ten billion trillion stars, what are the chances that ours is the only one with an inhabited planet? But Sagan didn't stop at astronomy or physics. Cosmos was significant for another fact: It rather brilliantly explained the philosophy of science and the methods of scientific inquiry. By explaining how scientists such as Eratosthenes and Aristotle, Democritus and Darwin reached their conclusions, Sagan opened my eyes to the wonder of science and the possibilities of human inquiry. These men and women weren't handed revelation in a book or burning bush; they realized and understood the universe through their own ingenuity and determination. And this leads to the other great understanding I owe to Carl Sagan, one I sadly forgot during my inane slide into religiosity: We are not here by design. This Earth and its inhabitants are the product of a wondrous cosmic randomness, a toss of the dice. We exist because a chance collection of molecules and organic matter coalesced into life, billions of years ago, and eventually evolved into sequoia and elk and herons and humans. In my imagination, the notion that everyone I love, everyone I admire, and every beautiful thing I've ever seen is a cosmic accident is far more wondrous and awe-inspiring than the concept that it was all carefully designed. Understanding how hydrogen and other gases ignite into baby stars, how amino acids form into proteins, and how simple mechanisms for detecting light evolve over millennia into the human eye are far more satisfying to me than reading "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." Knowing this also teaches me that the universe didn't come into being for the sake of humanity, as some religions teach. We're merely a happy accident. This world, this galaxy--they are not our playthings. Understanding this, I hope, inspires humility and a desire to walk lightly. I owe all this to Carl Sagan and Cosmos. Virtually all I know about human origins and the births of stars I can trace back to the wonder and fascination with learning that Dr. Sagan inspired. To call Sagan a hero would diminish the regard in which I hold him. And yet, please don't misunderstand. Sagan opened a door and lit a path. I don't believe for a moment he paved that path. What I owe to Dr. Sagan is the debt of inquiry, the desire to study Richard Dawkins and his explanations of Darwin's theories, Timothy Ferris and his apt explanations of cosmology, Richard Rhodes and his accounts of the harnessing of atomic power, and Eileen Welsome and the dangers of scientific abuse. To me, Cosmos is a lamp, a teacher, and a guidebook, and Sagan a mentor. His contributions to science education are, I believe, immeasurable. Perhaps now you understand why, when I watched the first episode again Sunday evening and recalled the many ways it has inspired me, I actually wept.

Radio ga-ga

I'm an insane man. Thursday night, after much consideration, I went to H.H. Gregg and purchased a home theater audio system, which is now hooked up and pumping nice sound. Although it's at the cheaper end of the price spectrum, it's the full deal: receiver, subwoofer, center channel speaker, two front speakers, two surrounds. I initially had problems getting sound through the surrounds. The receiver has a test mode that enables me to check the sound coming through each speaker. The surrounds worked fine. However, the Fight Club DVD (among others) has a section allowing you to test and set the audio and video for your system. While testing, I noticed no sound was coming from the surrounds. Puzzled, I tested various possible problems before finally figuring out I had pushed a wrong button on the face of the receiver that disabled the surrounds from pumping out audio. So that problem's now fixed and I watched (actually, listened to) about an hour of Fight Club last night. That movie uses the surrounds incredibly well and so it was a nice way to test them out. But wait, as they say on television. That's not all. I've recently found myself in situations where I thought it would be useful or even necessary to have a phone handy. Getting stuck in airports, driving at night, and so on. So I'm joining the cell phone crowd. Kind of. What I did, see, was I ordered the groovy VisorPhone that Handspring offers. It's a Springboard module that plugs into my PDA. The face of the PDA then displays a dialpad where you can tap out the number of the party you want to call. Pretty groovy and it beats having both a PDA and a phone. I wasn't going to do this now. I figured I could wait, but then Handspring made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm still not sure how to dispose of the horse's head, but Handspring is offering the VisorPhone attachment for 49 Yanqui dollars, with activation. I decided I couldn't pass that up. But here's my secret shame that's now not so secret. When I activated the calling plan, I went a little nutty. I also activated a wireless Internet plan. It's expensive--probably too expensive. If I don't use the damn thing, I'll probably cancel it. But geez, it'll be cool.