Archive for Books

Agree to Disagree

// January 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Books, Comics, Current Affairs, Film, Food & Drink, Music, Religion, Science, Sports, Television

I have a question for you.ebertsiskel

Why exactly do you like the things you do? What makes your favorite music, movie, food, TV show, sports team, author, whatever it is… your favorite? And what do you do when someone tells you what you like is stupid?

Taste’s change. People grow up. I was a huge fan of the Monkees in third grade, but today I’d be hard pressed to listen to “Valerie” without rolling my eyes. Although to be fair, you all are now singing the chorus along with me. I know. It’s okay.

Interests usually get solidified early. For example, I grew up in a house full of awesome silver age comic books. So, of course, I love comics. I also grew up in a house knee deep in St. Louis Cardinals, James Bond soundtracks and Starlog magazine.

For example, I know when I fell in love with KISS. It was 1978 and I learned rock and roll super heroes existed. Come. On. How could I not love that? Especially since one of them looked like he belonged on the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland and another thought he was from some planet named Jindell. At the tender age of 10, I found something that I’ve enjoyed for 30 years. I bet you have a similar tale.

The real test is how you defend your likes when someone says what you like sucks. Likes and dislikes are all subjective. I may understand why some people like Radiohead, but I just can’t find myself enjoying much of their catalog. Isn’t there a T-shirt with the slogan, “Your favorite band sucks?”

I’ve never been a music, movie or television snob and I think my open-mindedness has allowed me to simultaneously enjoy a serious, well-made, Academy Award-winning film like The Departed along with a not-trying-to-be-anything-but-a-way-to-entertain-you-for-an-hour-and-a-half-movie like Rock Star starring that girl from Friends and Marky Mark doing his best Jeff Scott Soto by way of Judas Priest.

Another good example is how I can’t fathom why anyone is a fan of the Chicago Cubs. They haven’t won anything in years, yet Wrigley Field is filled each summer with fans hoping next year is this year. It would be easy to say (and I’ve said it more than once myself) that Wrigley Field is the biggest beer garden that also happens to have some guys throwing a baseball around in the middle of it all and that’s the real appeal. There’s some truth to it, but I would never tell a Cubs fan they’re stupid for enjoying their team. It is what it is.

Take it one giant step further with topics such as politics or religion and one can quickly see what kind of crazy intolerance is out there. Nobody is born Republican or Protestant at birth. It’s thrusted upon children from the moment they enter the world. In my view, if your religion gives you personal comfort more power to you, but don’t tell me I’m going to hell because I don’t believe quite the same thing you do.

I enjoy debating with my friends regarding political policy especially because my friends don’t treat being intellectually retarded as a virtue. One of my friends is deeply conservative but he would be the first to tell you he’s not a Republican and the Presidency of George W. Bush was a disaster. I’m way more progressive then he is, but neither one of us would slam the other for our points of view – especially if we find some common ground. We always simply agree to disagree and move on. Our whole lives are not wrapped up in finding the right wing or left wing POV of every little detail. How sad would that be?

My biggest pet peeve is willful ignorance. I get a bad feeling around people who are proud of being stupid. I’m no fan of talking heads and other “personalities” who relish in knocking down the intellectually elite because they graduated from an institution of higher learning and studied the world around them. More to the point, you can’t engage these mouth-breathing buffoons in conversation or, better yet, in debate because their “reality” seldom crosses over into my reality. There’s no agreeing to disagree with these people because it’s always their way or the highway, even when information comes along that destroys their tiny little world view. I avoid them.

In fact, it’s more fun debating with my friends whether or not Wolverine is the best post silver age character ever created. Now that’s a way to kill a Sunday afternoon.

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LINKY GOODNESS

SHOUTING AT THE SEA

“I have masturbated myself out of serious problems in my life. The phone doesn’t pick up because I’m masturbating. And I have excused myself at the oddest times so as to not make mistakes. If Tiger Woods only knew when to jerk off. It has a true market value, like gold bullion. [The reason is] because I want to take a brain bath. It’s like a hot whirlpool for my brain, in a brain space that is 100 percent agreeable with itself,” — John Mayer

COLOPHON

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Content versus Form

// October 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Books, Comics, DVD, Music, Tech, Television, Video

2902815972_86ee6a6584_mI love walking into bookstores. I can pick up three paperbacks and they will all be priced $7.99 no matter if they are by best selling authors or someone I’ve never heard of before. A book that is considered a best seller costs the same as the book that doesn’t crack the best seller list. It’s the same with paperbacks as well. We are buying form verus buying content. It’s simply the cost for book production plus a few extra dollars for profit, royalities, marketing and overhead.

Content versus form is everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, movies and music have the same problem. Are we paying for the content or the form? Also, what happens when users start acquiring these things online for free?

Newspapers like to pretend they provide news, but that would be false. A newspaper provides eyeballs for businesses wishing to advertise with articles, editorials, and pictures used to bring in those eyeballs. But of course, the vast majority of those eyeballs just want the articles and stories and could care less about the advertising. Even worse for the poor newspapers is when those readers actually want advertising they don’t go to newspapers. Instead they go to Cragislist or eBay or somewhere else. Craigslist and eBay destroyed the classifieds section of most major newspapers practically overnight and remember classifieds used to be a cash cow.

Which brings us back to content. When users can find the content they desire for free they rarely will pay for it. Unless it’s at a price point they will tolerate or there’s value added incentives. I could easily download any movie from the net, but not the commentary tracks or the behind the scenes featurettes. Those are value added. I love it when muscians add DVDs or other material to their releases because it brings something extra to the purchase. It also helps when they price their product correctly – $10-12 for new releases. Distribution is easy – Just use Wal-Mart.

Apple and iTunes have figured out the content/form equation perfectly. They don’t overcharge for content that is basically created for iPods. They are the perfect middleman. Google has created tools to aggregate news, blogs and other social media into one user interface in a way newspapers and magazines only dream about.

Speaking of relatively free or low cost content, Hulu has figured out a way to get eyeballs on shows with limited commercial interruption. In fact, with Hulu the era of appointment television is over. It began with the arrival of DVRs and skippping over of commercials, but really has come into the forefront with the success of Hulu.

The people who are watching a program on Hulu or use a DVR like Tivo are not the same people who will watch a program during regularly scheduled times.

A quick aside to those who postpone putting a new show on Hulu by a week (Fox with House, for example) are doing themselves a tremendous disservice. Those who will watch a program online will just simply go to a site without any commercials to watch it on a more timely basis. And guess what, they aren’t watching your commercials and even worse they may just decide to watch ALL their programming that way even if the quality is not as high as Hulu.

The networks are slow dinosaurs who like record companies before them are slow to pick up on how this generation views entertainment and content. Every step is incredibly tentative and they will continue to lose viewers, listeners and money.

Today, it is a different audience. Almost anyone who would buy a book to put on their Kindle is not the same person who wants a bookshelf full of books. The same can be said for iPod owners. Anything you want that can be digitized in some form or another is available online with a few clicks of a mouse and a high-speed internet connection.

It’s the content they want, not the form. And people are tired of the old forms.

Short Bursts

// October 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Books, Twitter

I’d Like You to Meet my Co-Author, Neil Gaiman Department

Today, I collaborated with Neil Gaiman on an original story using the collaborative power of Twitter.

The idea was for Gaiman to start a story on Twitter and other Twitter users can then contribu te to the story with their own tweets (all tweets must include @BBCAA and #bbcawdio, cutting into those precious 140 characters). Once the tale reaches 1000 tweets, the BBC editors will edit it into a (hopefully) coherent story. An audio version of the story will be made available in the iTunes store for free.

My contribution was thus:

Scene 2 #23 “I can help. No strings attached, if you pardon the pun.”

You can read Scene 1, the rest of Scene 2 and most of Scene 3 before the experiment crashed Twitter on the BBC Audiobooks America site. Because of the crash, they are going to restart the collaborative story tomorrow.

I’m just happy I made the cut and look forward to downloading the original story. Although, I do wonder if they will give any kind of credit to the contributors.  I hope so. Lots of creative, smart people participating.

POD + Google = Digitized Texts On Demand Department

With book retailers struggling, Google has stepped up to fill a niche traditionally filled by used bookstores – the out of print book. Google is digitizing the two million out of copyright texts and setting up a Print On Demand option for $8.

Now I think this is a pretty cool idea. It won’t really cut into the sales of places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, but it certainly could hurt the traditional used bookstore. In the short term, this is a great way to find new/old books. Still, if I was Borders or Barnes and Noble I’d be worried because it really isn’t that hard to take that next step and have copyrighted books sold in the same way.

What A Great Bowel Movement Department

A recent study found that the top five posts on microblogging services such as Twitter were “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.”  While I think there are plenty of people who tweet only about what they are working on, how great it is to be home, what they are having for lunch and time for bed, I almost always gloss over those comments and focus on something I find really cool like breaking news or funny hashtags.

How do you Twitter?

Razor Blades in Your Apples Department

Did you go out Trick or Treating when you were a kid? Did your parents scare the bejeebus out of you with horror stories of some kid who ate an apple with a razor blade in it? Yeah, me too. It’s freakin’ crap.  Boing Boing has done the reasearch.

Lenore “Free Range Kids” Skenazy points out that there has never been a single substantiated incident of a kid being sickened, hurt or killed by doctored candy handed out during trick-or-treating in the history of America.

Ever.

Was there ever really a rash of candy killings? Joel Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, took it upon himself to find out. He studied crime reports from Halloween dating back as far as 1958, and guess exactly how many kids he found poisoned by a stranger’s candy?

A hundred and five? A dozen? Well, one, at least?

“The bottom line is that I cannot find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating,” says the professor. The fear is completely unfounded.

Short Bursts

// September 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Books, Film, Music, Performance, Television, Twitter

Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough Department

You may have heard about Michael Jackson? The child singer recently went to the great big “Neverland in the Sky,” but like Elvis before him, he’s worth more now than as the stand-in for Skeletor. Apparently before he had massive heart failure, MJJ was filming his rehearsals for his upcoming British concert gigs. The wise and powerful Sony grabbed the guy from High School Musical and decided to edit the footage down to make some sort of musical documentary that, you know, isn’t Spinal Tap. Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’ will probably generate a few bucks and some rubberneckers at the local cineplex. I think I’ll wait for the inevitable DVD release.

Master of Moptops is Pulling Your Strings Department

I have been informed there is a band which plays Beatles songs in the style of Metallica. They are named, Beatallica, of course. The guy does an amazing James Hetfield impression.

The Future’s So Bright Department

Remember the early 90s commercials from AT&T that asked various technology questions and then ended with Tom Selleck saying “You Will?” If not, here they are for you to ponder. I find it fascinating how truly accurate the predictions were… and a “Before They Were Stars” Jenna Elfman in the baby one. I wonder what would be in a set of new ones created today?

Twits and Bats Department

Once Twitter’s arch-nemesis, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is now buddy-buddy with the blue bird. Cardinals fans were treated to a ceremonial opening pitching by none other than Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s Creator and Co-founder. The milestone event pretty much puts to bed the former quarrel between La Russa and Twitter, which had the baseball manager suing the company for trademark infringement, cybersquatting and misappropriation of name and likeness. The best thing to come out of it was Verified Accounts, which elimiated the Fake Celebrities on Twitter.

Tooting About Nick Hornby Department

I’ve read the first chapter of the new Nick Hornby book, Juliet, Naked. I loved every word. I love the name of the characters and I really loved the plot. From the description:

Annie loves Duncan-or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life.

In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they’ve got. Tucker’s been languishing (and he’s unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin-his young son, Jackson. But then there’s also the new material he’s about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet-entitled, Juliet, Naked.

What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one’s promise.

Here’s a link to the first chapter. If you love music just a little bit, you won’t be disappointed.

Chance Avenue Productions

// September 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Books, Comics, Sean, Wow

I hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. Mine was spent with my daughter. Starting with the half-time show of her high school football game to buying tees for golf practice, I really didn’t do much except hang with her. We made cookies. They were most excellent.

I’ve not been writing lately because I’ve been working behind the scenes on various web projects. The first can now be seen: Chance Avenue Productions.  CAP is the virtual home of myself and Grant Chastain’s projects. It’s basically an easy way to get a hold of us for creative work and a small showcase of some of that work.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on buying server space and trying to get a lightbox or a popup box to work, creating a new contact web form and a bit of non-blog post type writing. All good stuff, but time consuming. I really like how CAP turned out.

More web work is forthcoming regarding this site and a few other things I’ve got planned. Hey, when you’re having fun doing it you can’t really call it work can you?