I, being of average intelligence
I, being of average intelligence and limited patience, can’t stand pop up ads. Here’s a way to make them all go away (thanks Dinah).
This is kinda neat. I
This is kinda neat. I can now stereotype myself as a blogger.
My Blogger Code: B2 d+ t k s- u f i o+ x e- l- c–
Dragging ass all day thanks
Dragging ass all day thanks to that micro-dose of sleep. Had a great lunch with my buddy Jay where we discussed activism, erosion of privacy and living by example. Now it’s Sunday and I’m trying to write my letter of the week. Without much success.
Just saw a whole wad
Just saw a whole wad of people at a party thrown by Laura Johnson of Interestingmonstah.com. She’s got a nice little blog, a fabulous Noe Valley apartment and superb taste in music. Plus it was neat to see my friend Ev for the first time in the new year, boogie along to Purple Rain on the DVD player with Wendy Beck and see old social buddies Jish, Kristin and Peter Merholz. Now I have to get up in 6 hours. Goodnight.
It’s so beautiful here. Especially
It’s so beautiful here. Especially today.
Documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is
Documentary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl is 99 years old and has a new film called Underwater Adventures about her lifelong scuba hobby coming out this summer just in time for her 100th birthday. She hasn’t made a film in nearly 50 years but her Triumph of the Will is one of the scariest yet most influential documentarys ever made. The young Riefenstahl was handpicked by Adolf Hitler to sculpt his cinematic image and she did it so powerfully that it got her vilified for decades afterwards. Riefenstahl didn’t exactly handle it well, claiming that politics had nothing to do with her creating the visual language of the Nazi party. Yeah right. Nonetheless, her achievement and her contribution to the art of cinema are undeniable.
There’s a pretty good documentary on her called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, available and any fine local videostore.
I didn’t have much of
I didn’t have much of an opinion of the historian Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers) except I was a little sick of his notion that history started and stopped at WW II. Now that he’s being accused of copying from other scholars for nearly every book he’s written over the last decade, I’m a little more interested. Also I had how to learn how to spell plagiarism.
Now this is a really
Now this is a really cool use of a big pile of data (via my buddy Jish).
Wiretap Magazine, my old employer,
Wiretap Magazine, my old employer, had a nice little piece on print zines, and where they might go in the age of message board communities, chat rooms, and weblogs. I became a zine reader when I moved to San Francisco, and have struggled valiantly to keep up with those that intrigued me. Yet while being a zinester has a low bar to entry (part of the appeal), being a loyal fan is a pain in the neck. Zines by nature are ephemeral, flames of creative energy, quickly extinguished. Zinesters bore easily and rarely print second runs of back issues (therefore if you pick up issue #9 and love it, issues #1-8 are probably already a memory) and distribution houses, usually the tireless work of one person, go out of business very quickly. Even the old big ass catalogs are mostly gone. Finally, without recommendations from other zine reading friends (of which I have exactly none), quality is a very slippery proposition.
Yet I push on. The giddyness and zeal of putting words on paper just because you have to no matter who listens, no matter how ghetto your Kinko’s copied pages are, is what independent media’s all about. And a big part of what I’m about too.