April 2009
“I’m a big believer that things are never as good as they seem, and never...”
– The prez. This sums up my worldview pretty well.
Summer of
The first thing I saw when I got into New York today was a guy wearing a medical mask. A guy driving a livery cab, wearing a medical mask. I have seen way too many zombie movies not to be freaked out by that. I knew everything was fine, but there was a brief moment there when I wondered if I was driving toward a fire-ravaged battleground against the undead. I figured it would have been...
More Otherworldly Psych-Rock Investigations with... →
So I guess no one really cares what with the swine flu and the 100 days and the people in New York pullin’ a Tattoo, but the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s ludicrous obscenity fines for fleeting expletives, overturning the apellate court ruling. They let Scalia write the decision, maybe because they wanted it to sound as ridiculous as possible, I dunno:
We doubt, to begin with, that...
“A half-hour into the meeting, an aide entered the Oval Office and slipped Mr....”
– “Obama’s Stand in Auto Crisis Shows Early Resolve,” NYT
The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs By... →
Buy a Fluxtee! →
Hey everyone! Have you bought a Fluxblog t-shirt yet? You should, since it will allow Matthew to continue writing things. Only $20-22, and it’s for a good cause. And they’re cute, too!
Things I have realized tonight
Branding books really like talking about Radiohead, and how crafty their no-brand branding is.
Compromise & Entitlement
tomewing:
Newpapers and the recording industry have a few things in common: they’re both “old media”, their business models are currently failing, they both seem to attract a fair amount of online schadenfreude over this fact. But something else too: they’re both businesses built on compromise - or more specifically, the acceptance of the idea of compromise among their audience.
A newspaper,...
The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a... →
Anyway, if you’re interested in using the current outbreak of overreacting as a teachable moment, you should give a read to Neustadt and Fineberg’s classic case study of the many blunders made during preparations for an outbreak in the 70s. It’s good, I swear!
Idolator: What If Rock Week On “American Idol”... →
Sonic Youth - Shadow of a Doubt
Big storm here...
“Somebody — I think it was Frank Rich? — offered an exceptional insight: most...”
– “Paul,” comment on Paul Krugman’s “Reclaiming America’s Soul”
(Of course Krugman also plays his own particular role in this dance, sometimes providing a counterweight that provides cover to move away from the existing position and sometimes serving as an...
“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to...”
– Scott Plagenhoef, on Lost In Translation: The Problems With The “Pirates Buy More Music” Study
Every survey I have ever seen of teens or young people - and I saw an awful lot last year because I was working on a big one - has them saying that they listen to music, care about music, music is...
“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to...”
– Scott Plagenhoef, on Lost In Translation: The Problems With The “Pirates Buy More Music” Study
This is a very very very good point. Since it isn’t a longitudinal study (er, taking place over time), the thing being measured isn’t how much music illegal downloaders buy, but how much more...
Cue the Green Day
Monday was my last day writing for Idolator. Maura asked me if I wanted to do a farewell post, but because it was 12 hours before my thesis defense and I was freaking out about a PowerPoint remote (not my finest hour), I couldn’t manage to come up with anything. Lemme give that another shot.
When I started doing Idolator regularly last fall, I was in a weird place. I had stopped paying...
devi ever : fx →
The guy who makes the aforementioned pedal makes a bunch of other pedals. Some of them I kind of just want to have sitting around to look at, the design is so good.
“We imagine the opinion editors having a meeting about this, perhaps in a...”
– Ken Layne, “Bono Writing New Larry King Column For NYT”
A sentence from my thesis
“If what we want is a mechanism for reducing the perceived stakes of political discourse, simulating the political process in a medium associated with angry mushrooms and magical karate seems like a good idea.”
Momus takes the hipster grifter thing a little... →
K-Rockathon 1 →
An enterprising Idolator commenter looked up the other bands I saw at the K-Rockathon, and it’s an interesting list:
Reverend Horton Heat, Gus, Verve Pipe, Poe, Howlin’ Maggie, Seven Mary Three, Refreshments, Toadies, Solution AD, Butthole Surfers.
Apparently my Refreshments reblog today was not an accident. Of these, I only really remember seeing the Buttholes and Horton Heat, and...
Holocaust Remembrance and Hitler's Birth Share the... →
The Envelope, Please: An Applicant Responds to... →
The college applicant with the crazy commenters I posted about previously responds to the criticisms, and absolutely nails it. Put this in a book about how to respond to asshole commenters.
New Yorkers support gay marriage. →
The lede gets buried here, kind of. The more important thing is that New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, even after being informed that it’s basically about to happen. And:
Overall, however, every region in the state supports the idea of having the Senate pass the measure, which would virtually guarantee it becoming law.
Yay!
“There’s an odd little strain of American pop that turns up now and then:...”
– A brief history of the spoken-word pop hit. - By Douglas Wolk - Slate Magazine (via douglaswolk)
This is all types of interesting, and this:
But the homiletic spoken-word pop hit didn’t really take off until 1966, when country singer and ex-DJ Buddy Starcher went to No. 39 with...
It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is? →
The NYT has apparently decided to publish the inappropriate e-mails your mildly demented maiden aunt sends you out of the blue.
Sofia Coppola books Marmont film - Variety →
skeetonmischa:
Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning will star in the Focus Features dramedy “Somewhere,” which Coppola penned.
Story centers on a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter, he is forced to reexamine his life.
Stephen Dorff is back, you guys. The Dorff man is back.
Wait, Sofia Coppola is remaking...
