monday, may 31, 2004
LA, not at its worst
I took two rolls of film with my old analog camera. Mister Kyle and I walked to the photo place, waited for a while, and paid $15 to develop them. Out of all that, I only like one or two pictures.
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Highland Park, USC and Fry’s
My camera is home, and it’s all repaired and lovely. I celebrated with a hundred pictures yesterday.
Smog, graffiti, high gas prices, and palm trees: LA at its finest.
A broken exit sign (taken by Mister Kyle, since I wasn’t tall enough).
The panoply of expired parking passes in Mister Kyle’s car.
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sunday, may 30, 2004
Stories and tinsel blogs
Earlier tonight, Mister Kyle and I went to “The Inside Story: Hollywood And The Media Deconstructed” at the American Film Institute next to my old school. I couldn’t borrow Lizzy’s laptop in time to blog it live (like at Mediamorphosis), but I’ll reconstruct the event from my scribbled notes. The official web page said the event was totally full, but some seats were empty after all.
Cecile Dubois blogged it live on Cathy’s (her mom) blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Advice Goddess blogged it live, too. And Sean Bonner (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
The first session was “The Real Tinsel: Hollywood Insiders Take On Hollywood”. A panel of four entertainment-business dudes talked about global politics, journalism, and the television business: Rob Long (TV writer/producer), Allan Mayer (PR guy), Mike Sullivan (Paulist Productions person), and Andrew Breitbart (Drudge’s “right-hand man”). Cathy Seipp (“journalist and blogmeister”) moderated.
Cathy asked questions and the panelists answered one by one (roughly). Later, the audience asked questions. First, Andrew put forth the idea that American television, with all its negative images and views, causes the rest of the world to hate us. Celebrities are the United States’ “unelected emissaries”. Mike agreed that television’s “zone of public civility” has changed a lot from the days of I Love Lucy.
Allan said journalists shouldn’t be seen as moral heroes; journalists today are clueless; the departments of the LA Times don’t even speak to each other. The entire panel agreed that Variety is horribly inaccurate and that journalists hardly ever report anything accurately. By this time, I noticed a few things: these guys (including Cathy) are all rather conservative, they all hate the LA Times, and they all seem quite cynical. If I’ve learned anything from my nascent school newspaper, it’s that journalism is really really hard and really important. These panelists are television people! I can’t stand most television, even “good” television, but I enjoy reading the newspaper.
After deciding what’s wrong with journalism, the panelists moved on to what’s wrong with television. According to Rob, the network executives interfere too much. Mike said that reality shows are popular because the barrier to entry is so much lower than with the two other kinds of shows (drama and comedy). Then, Cathy opened the stage to audience questions. Allan and Rob discussed runaway (outsourced) productions and concluded that they happen because costs are so high.
Andrew feels that Hollywood needs to be criticized more by bloggers, like how bloggers criticize mainstream journalism. I think journalism facilitates blogging: there’s an article to link to! Bloggers always need to link. Allan thinks criticism of Hollywood is relatively unimportant and continued about how disgustingly passive journalists are these days. Andrew said that the message coming out of Hollywood doesn’t show a balanced view of American life. Rob pointed out that the world’s consumption of American news consists of CNN and the New York Times — and how if that was the only thing you read about America, you’d get a horribly distorted view of it. Andrew believes that conservatives are ostracized in the entertainment business. At one point, things got quite heated between one audience member-questioner and a panelist.
After all that, it was reception time. Vegetarian food and cookies: yum! These media/blogging events always have the best food. Everyone schmoozed and ate the free food and drank the free drinks.
The second session was “The Real Story: L.A. Bloggers Take On Politics and the Media”.
That’s my sketch of moderator Cathy Seipp and bloggers Matt Welch, Charles Johnson, Kevin Drum, Roger L. Simon, Moxie, and Mickey Kaus. Somehow, their blogs’ URLs were left out of the official [and skimpy] paper program.
[i’m tired. will finish in the morning, maybe. there seem to be more than enough people long-form blogging this.]
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friday, may 28, 2004
most of my life, in one shot
anyway, i hadn’t posted a picture of my cat for a while.
taken with my dad’s girlfriend’s camera. i can’t wait for mine.
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thursday, may 27, 2004
uno & hackysack
i’m doing a photo essay about break-time games and sports at my school. these are a couple of the rejects.
the essay’s for our little newspaper. i’m the editor. weee! we only started a few weeks ago, so there will only be one issue this year.
one problem: nobody is turning in their stuff. crap. i might end up writing half of the paper.
i took those with the school yearbook’s camera, but mine should be coming in the mail—all repaired!—any day now. :)
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monday, may 24, 2004
single listeners searching msnbc for plastic pee
partial screenshots that have been collecting for weeks in a folder on my desktop.
- that’s a pretty wide variety of artists. i can’t remember whose itms page this was on.
- aren’t all searches custom? this was from some housing-search site.
- “gallium m. smack” is a terrific spammer name.
- quite an unorthodox set of categories.
- the itms said “pee sessions”! teehee.
- doesn’t rob look like he’s made out of plastic? that’s from the banner-ad version of those ubiquitous harry potter movie ads.
- reminds me of “the man in the coon-skin cap / in the big pen / wants eleven dollar bills / but you only got ten”, from “subterranean homesick blues” by bob dylan. it’s part of some banner ad for a dating site.
- a rectangle of very high-density geekiness. the article itself.
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wednesday, may 19, 2004
design, evolution, things.
little necessary/unnecessary things i keep in the front pocket of my backpack:
- old, battered nokia cellphone with the faceplate i painted.
- cornflower-blue mechanical pencil, same kind as the one i had in eighth grade that everyone loved.
- analog point-and-shoot camera with “bright sun & flash” film. i took this one to idyllwild camp.
- standard-issue ti-83+ calculator that used to have “DONT PANIC” written on it in black stickers. now it just has gummy smudges.
- black gelly roll pen. since sixth grade, no other pen is nearly as good.
- glasses, for long-distance. the little plastic ear-piece coverings are pretty.
- mister kyle’s 15gb ipod, containing 1259 songs and 66 text files.
- $11 sony earphones.
each one has its own protective casing and its own specific function(s). they all evoke emotions and memories.
i am two-thirds of the way through the evolution of useful things, by henry petroski. i love it, especially the parts about flatware and zippers. before i began to read it, i imagined it would be like the design of everyday things, by donald norman, which i read recently. but it takes a different approach: instead of being concept-based, teut is example-based.
teut is more accessible (makes for better dinner-time conversation), but it seems less applicable to computery/webby stuff. the main design-follows-failures idea is neat, and i like the implicit & explicit inventing advice, but i find the book to be mostly entertainment of the very best kind.
in this context, some links. the illustrated catalog of acme products is lots of fun — silly, prototype-like inventions for imagined needs…they rarely get revised when they inevitably fail, though. hack this (please) makes inventing seem more like web design than print design. ethics and planned obsolescense is interesting: more issues to consider and design for. the language of auto emblems is about how car brands are inventions that get revised when they fail in different ways. i could go on and on with this, but i have to sleep sometime.
after all, we’re taking the government-mandated standards tests at school this week, so i’m supposed to rest up and get a good breakfast and all that. in the reading/language test i took this morning, one of the excerpts was from i, robot, by isaac asimov:
“Look at you,” he said finally. “I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material - like that.” He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan’s sandwich. “Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity impairs your efficiency. You are makeshift.
“I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.”
yep, improving on the failures of the last design, yet again. like brittabot. ;)
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tuesday, may 18, 2004
dividing line ran through
looking through a big old window on the 20th floor of a minor skyscraper in downtown los angeles is naturally rather interesting. you can see the shiny brown-gold sun set over the hills. the sunset! it’s usually hidden by a zillion buildings (unless i’m standing on a specific scrubby hill in pasadena). i guess you can see the sunset at the beach too, but mister kyle and i tend to be there when it’s already dark.
yeah. there’s the endless cars crawling along the freeway as if they were boxy grains of triclosan in some transparent hand lotion poured down the asphalt. below my skyscraper, a brick building has trees and canvas umbrellas on the roof — somebody said it’s the jonathan club. the smaller roof next to it has a tiny basketball court. i attempt to spy, but i can’t see anyone there.
at this altitude, the other skyscrapers are even more impressive. i like those giant clunky obelisks, covered in all their tricksy reflective glass. i imagine they’d make super-great mirrorproject shots, except that the reflective surfaces are thousands of feet away.
volunteer at kusc and you too can stuff envelopes for two hours and then, on your way out, stare through a lovely window.
i took photographs but they need to be developed.
update 5/31/04: a photo.
it is strange to take photos with my old film camera. first of all, i have to buy film. weird! you mean photos cost money? that’s like saying i have to pay $7 for a small pile of new text files. wait, that’s a notebook. anyway, the camera makes a noise when you snap a picture. i wish i could switch that off; i like to take pictures inconspicuously. then, there’s no little lcd preview screen, so i have no idea what i’m doing. not to mention that i have to pay more money before i can see the results, and then i have to scan them.
mister kyle and i visited the central library this weekend. afterwards, we walked around downtown, but i forgot to bring my camera.
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better stay away from those
five things i’ve read and watched recently, and some of the ways in which they relate to each other.
i want to keep a running diagram like this. everything i read and watch should go on it. it would be huge and sprawling and quite interesting.
i wish omnigraffle’s demo mode let you use more than 20 items.
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wednesday, may 12, 2004
a can of paint it fell on my head
i spent several hours this afternoon fixing the id tags of my itunes library. yeah, that’s my favorite unproductive thing to do when i’m rather stressed from school and stuff.
amazon’s popular music search is the only true source of cover art and release years. it’s also good for total track numbers. i’m not sure about its formatting of album titles, though — sometimes they’re slightly different from the cd’s “real” title. also, i wish it let me search by song title, so i could easily see all the albums that a song is on.
ieatbrainz was somewhat helpful for identifying the albums and track numbers of some songs, but i already have most of my music painstakingly identified. i imagine this would be really good if half your music was “track 8 - unknown” or something.
gracenote’s cddb has a pretty complete set of song/album/artist information. some of its suggested album titles, however, are hopelessly obscure, and sometimes the data is incorrect. amazon is better for most of that, except for when you don’t know what album a song belongs to.
the itunes music store is perfect for figuring out those pesky genres. the chosen categorization isn’t my favorite, but it is fairly consistent. just insert the album into “search” and note the genre.
of course, it doesn’t have some particular specimens of super-awesome music, but you can guess on those genres.
hey wait, it now has the latest album! woohoo!
now i will go listen to 30-second previews on repeat for half an hour, because (alas!) the songs are too new to be well-distributed on file-sharing networks. i have a birthday in a month. maybe i will buy it.
