Your Sexy Stories
Gaper’s Block wants to hear your sexy stories.
Bloggers Gonna Work it Out:
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.
Thanks for Home, Thanks for Away:
A reading…
Close CBGB’s?
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.
Z Channel:
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.
One Sentence Movie Reviews: “River’s Edge”
River’s Edge (1986): “I need to write a book about 80s teen movies.”
Help Jewhoo!
Jewhoo, the search engine for any remotely famous Jewish person, needs help.
Eh, Screw It:
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
Vacation…
Suzan and I are heading out on vacation. Blogging may be light until our return on the 23rd.
Pandora v. Last.fm
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.