South by Southwest 2003 VII

Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks

White is founder of Full Circle Associates and has been researching and practicing online facilitation since 1996. Levin is in charge of strategic marketing and product planning for SocialText. Lebkowsky, founder of Polycot Consulting, has been involved in online communities since 1990. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:

Lebkowsky: The thing with online communities is that they work really well for conversation and exchanging knowledge to some extent, but when it comes to actually getting something done, it's a little more difficult. One of the things we've been doing is giving some thought to how these things work, what their real value is, and whether you can transcend geography. Traditionally we've said that the real value of online communities in business is that you can bring people together online. It's a different way of working together. It's more agile. You can add layers of connectivity. You're building networks that are big and multi-dimensional.

However, this can bring challenges. The one we're probably most familiar with is the control challenge. It's not hierarchical. Everything goes flat.

White: I see networks as a container. It's moveable and squishy. It kid of floats out there. If I had to play charades and give a physical representation of a network, I would be stumped. There's some point of gravity in a network that's a node where things can happen and groups can form. When I look at a network as a group, there's a whole. But when I look at it as a whole, it gets squishy.

One of the amazing things about networks is their ability to contain and facilitate reciprocity. Everything can be flowing in the same direction, or everything can be flowing in different directions. I want to share with you what happened to me in Central Asia. I got an email from a guy who'd seen something I'd written on my Web site. He told me that he'd been given the job to build online communities in post-Soviet Union republics.

We entered into a dialog and came up with a plan to look at the power of the network. We introduced what online interaction can do. The next phase of our our work was to set up a face-to-face interaction. Two of the guys involved were using Hotmail to arrange informal prisoner exchanges. They legitimized the relationships that they had online.

There was no network before. We pulled the people together to create the network. Recognizing that this medium allowed them to cross the physical boundaries that they weren't allowed to cross helped them realize that this medium had potential. Some people were catalysts and were willing to take leadership. The Internet can have power even in a highly disconnected community.

They didn't really trust the aysnchronous tools at first. But the synchronous tools like instant messaging gave them the sense that they weren't alone when they really needed help. It hasn't supplanted face to face, but it's really expanded what they can do in their countries.

Levin: You said something interesting when we were preparing about how the people used the network in a way that was consistent with the hierarchical nature of how they worked otherwise.

White: This medium allows power to spread out to members of the network. One of the things we started with was building groups through networking. Then we moved into facilitating.

We were very severely limited by bandwidth. We tried to move people outside of email to make visible the work of the group. Email is very one to one. We used WebCrossing and IM, and we let people use any language they were comfortable using. Helping people move their ideas about processes from offline to online was really useful. We need to make our patterns explicit so we can move them online.

Lebkowsky: Adina has been working with her own company SocialText to build their network.

Levin: Nancy talked a little bit apologetically about the simplicity about the tools that the teams were working with. Part of the tradition of groupware is to build a complicated set of tools. If you look at what people have used over the years, even in the orgs that have a lot of money, people use email more than anything else. The simple tools often work the best.

I also want to talk about the idea of how groups form out of a network. SocialText grew out of a group of people who met through a quasi-professional network. That group is a networking group that doesn't have any particular goal or purpose. But a member sent a message to the group about a business opportunity that involved using blogs within corporations. Blogs are the simplest way for an individual to publish online. We also looked at how people could use Wikis. Wikis are one of the simplest way to collaborate online. We run SocialText using the tools that we're researching for our clients.

The place I worked before, Vignette, was a very whiteboard-centric culture. People would take turns writing on the wall, and by the end of the meeting, we'd have made a decision, and the writing would be on the wall. The Wiki enables us to collaborate on just-in-time documents wherever we might be. We're also able to have a living library of what we're working on.

Part of the point here isn't one specific tool but that there's a set of processes you can use for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

We see a set of concentric circles around SocialText. There are the employees. We have a board of advisors. Then there's a broader community with which we use the SocialText Workspace to keep in touch with people. That broader network is extremely valuable. Your closest network you already know -- and already know what they're thinking. If you want new ideas, you need to look at the broader network.

Lebkowsky: There's not so much competition as there is collaboration.

White: When you all work in the same building, you get to think the same way. When your organization lives in network, there's more creative abrasion.

Lebkowsky: Clay Shirky wrote a piece in which he talked about the A list of bloggers. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a group of bloggers that everyone reads and the others sink to the bottom?

White: Bloggers for president!

Lebkowsky: Joichi Ito also wrote a paper about emergent democracy to start talking about how bloggers relate to each other. At some point, there was going to be a teleconference, a telephone call. I don't really get excited about teleconferences. You get the audio cues, but I want to type at people. What Adina's people came up with was a Happening, a multimodal event that was a combination of the teleconference, a chat space, and a voting or polling tool involving green, yellow, and red cards.

A lot of times, you never have a sense of whether people are there or paying attention. We knew just was going on. If someone stopped doing their cards, you got the sense that they were paying attention to something else. We also established a Wiki, where we could plant things and store things after the fact. I even transcribed the telephone call because I'd taped it.

We also used QuickTopic. QuickTopic is a very cool little tool that allows you to start a little discussion thread ad hoc. It also involves a document review tool. You can post documents, and people can comment on them. It was almost more effective than the Wiki because it was easier to keep track of comments.

The Emergent Democracy paper was written. It's in version 1.2. But we haven't continued to work. There's not much activity on the mailing list. People have gotten distracted. And there's the question about emergent leadership. Joi was kind of the emergent leadership, but he turned his attention elsewhere.

White: We haven't quite figured out how to take that vision and translate worker bee energy online. There's a thing we struggle with offline, and when we put it online, the warts become apparent.

Lebkowsky: If we're only going to have a democracy of clueful intelligent people who communicate well online, that's not going to work.

White: It depends on how you define heirarchy. There's a question of consistent standards. Are we attracted to this environment because we want to take ownership of our work and other people don't?

Corollary: Blogging About Blogging LII
Earlier this month, Anil Dash offered an interesting commentary on Project Blogger that considers the positive aspects as well as the negative. It's one of the first balanced analyses I've seen. Kudos.

South by Southwest 2003 VI

Dana Robinson: User Not Found

Robinson is online community manager for a nonprofit called Starbright that provides media-based products to seriously ill children. She is currently developing a Web site devoted to the death of online friends. Here is a rough transcript of the discussion:

Nobody else wanted to be on a panel about dying and death, so it's just me. When we talk about experiencing the death of our online friends, we have to go into it believing that these friends are real and legitimate. I don't want to go into the whole Ripper/IRC/Webcam suicide thing. While it's unclear whether what he did was suicide, the fact is he did die. He took huge doses of Methadone and Oxycontin while he was on a Webcam and on IRC. There was a huge debate whether it was a suicide or whether he was just being dumb with drugs.

I'm also not trained to treat grieving. I'm wanting to learn from you as much as I want you to learn from the conversation. I decided to do this project not because I'm gothic. Although I do wear black and have black hair. It started back in 1994. I was using a Telnet-based, Mud-like chat system. I became friends with this guy David who was chronically ill. He was popular within the community, and one day he just stopped coming in. One guy called his parents, and they told him that he had passed away. He wanted the Mud to know that he'd passed away, but his parents didn't know who to call.

I decided to write an essay about it for a journalism class, and I called a bunch of sociologists. They didn't even know what email was so I couldn't do the project. Two years ago I started talking to this guy in Chicago named Timothy. He was 34 and had cystic fibrosis. We talked on the phone a few times, and then he stopped answering his phone. Then the phone number went away. I wondered what was going on.

Online, relationships can be anonymous. You can know a lot about someone, but you might not know how to reach them in real life. Then I got interested in the topic again because of the work I do for Starbright. We hook terminally sick kids up online. Not a lot of kids living with sickle cell [anemia] live in Iowa. Online, they can find other kids with sickle cell, talk online, and feel like they're not alone. One of the kids we got really close with was Bianca. She was dealing with her third bout of cancer, and she'd call us every day to talk to our staff. She was online 7-8 hours every day. When she passed away, I didn't really think I'd feel emotionally invested in one of our users. Her mother told us that my boss and I were in her last thoughts. It was really, really rough.

Our relationships are really getting more intense online, and we need to know more about how to deal with death. User Not Found is my site where I post essays while I'm doing research. The killing off of the persona is another thing I'm looking into. There aren't a lot of people doing this research. There's nothing that's been written. So it's really weird.

In doing my research I've found that online communities in a couple of different ways. They may keep the account up so nobody else can use that ID. And if there are profiles, they may keep the profile available, maybe marking it with a RIP and the years they were alive. They might also set up memorial pages, living obituaries that talk about what they did, how they remembered. And a lot of the gaming communities may have annual memorial events where they have their own little events where they have a memorial avatar. They put down their weapons, come to a central meeting place, and mourn the loss of one of their users.

And some online communities don't do anything. They take no action. And that's unfortunate. With Starbright, we need to be careful. You can't step on parents' toes. Some parents want their children to learn about death in a more controlled way. We're looking into having some sort of a memorial garden that would be online as well offline. They could plant a virtual tree online and write some words about their friend who died. And we could send them a packet of seeds so they could plant a real tree of their own.

At my job, we handle the taboos around death by making jokes around it. That can be even worse. If we don't make jokes, there's no way we can make it through our days. People need to start talking about this and having these sorts of conversations. Clearly it's an issue. The more we interact with people online, experiences like this will become more and more relevant. Now more and more people are accepting the fact that the friendships are legitimate. They have real feelings of grief and mourning. They feel like these feelings aren't legitimate. I would argue the opposite. You probably know them better because you have this veil of anonymity. It may be more impactful if the friends are online.

Some ISPs have policies in place where they require proof of death certificates. It's hit or miss company to company.

Now let's talk about the online cries for help and the community's responsibility to react to those cries for help. Sometimes the intent is not to die but to get some attention. In one instance, a woman took too many pills to be well, and a community member called 911. They tracked down her phone number and were able to get their in time.

Brad Fitzpatrick: I'm Brad from LiveJournal. I had to deal with a lot of those emails saying there had to be a way we could track her down. We were able to get her address from a payment she'd made via check or something like that.

The community was able to rally together and were interested in saving her. If you read the chat transcripts from Ripper on IRC, people thought he was fooling around and didn't really want to kill himself. As he was passing out, people started saying maybe they should call someone. If they'd called somebody, they could have sent someone over quite easily. They had ways of getting ahold of him. But because of their not gettign involved stance, he ended up dying.

Is it overstepping the bounds of the online relationship to bring in the authorities? One of the problems is the hoaxes that have been covered. Because of all the publicized hoaxes, people don't take real situations seriously. The reality is that there aren't many hoaxes. There are more realities than hoaxes. Community managers have a responsibility to investigate further. In the community that I manage, if a kid even mentions suicide, we call their parents and bring in a specialist.

Cory Doctorow: When Google wrote its algorithm for what comes up when you type suicide, they put a lot of thought into it. Right now, the top results are suicide hotlines. But sometimes, when the algorithms aren't working right, it's pages of people telling each other how to kill themselves.

Matt Haughey: It's interesting that when attempts are visible -- there's a Webcam -- they're taken more seriously because you can actually see it happen.

How Americans deal with death is so unhealthy compared to a lot of cultures. And how children deal with death compared to adults is even more different. Children deal with death so healthily. Everyone could learn a lot by talking to these kids.

Paul Bausch: I think it was in the Tipping Point, but if someone dies because they committed suicide and newspapers put it on the front page, it can be seen as permission to kill yourself.

If you over-memorialize kids, and kids view suicide as a way to escape from their illness, you have to be careful how kids take those memorials. You don't want to over-romanticize it.

Another thing I'd like to talk about is when people who aren't really that active in a community die and the community rises up to recognize them. On Fark, there was a guy who didn't post much at all, but when he died in a car accident, the community rose up. There were so many posts about this kid, and nobody knew him. It made me start thinking: Does a person's usage in a given community correlate with how the death is received. Do accoladed users receive more memorials? I think that's how it happens in communities. The community feels a definite impact from that loss. But it's sort of disappointed when someone who's not a big user passes away.

Question:I think it's important to look at the quality of someone's activity. Some people might not post much, but they post well.

Smaller users can make deeper connections with individuals, but it impacts the community in a different way. Active users impact the entire community. On Starbright world, the kids are much more willing to talk about it than the adults are willing to ask them to talk about it. Adults kind of present barriers where there don't need to be barriers.

If you thought that one of your online friends died, how far would you go? Where would you draw the line between doing your own personal research and overstepping the bounds to impose on someone's privacy? Would you contact the family? When we contacted David's family in 1994, most families would have been closed to being contacted by strangers in their time of grieving. For you, as a person, to be able to move on, you kind of have to know what's going on.

There's a service called Died Online. You register. And you choose the increments on which you check in on the site. If you fail to check in twice based on your increments, the service contacts people you've listed to let them know that you haven't checked in for awhile and they might want to check in with you.

For my job, we're working in prevention as well as what to do if it's already happened. It's tough. You have to take it on a situation by situation basis. It's hard to come up with a protocol that you'd follow consistently because if you know the individual. It can be different in every case.

Only now are we even really at a point where we can have these conversations. Things change so rapidly. Maybe a year from now we'll have this conversation and it will be totally different.

Brad Fitzpatrick: Whenever someone dies on LiveJournal, and it's happened maybe a dozen times now, the last post will get hundreds of comments.

That's one of the healthier things I've seen. It's grieving. It's sharing. And it brings the community together so people don't have to deal with it themselves. The only deaths I've experienced have been online. Friends, family. I've only experienced death online. That might be why I'm so interested in this.

South by Southwest 2003 V

David Weinberger: Why the Web Matters

Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a contributor to World of Ends, and author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Here is a rough transcript of Weinberger's remarks:

The Web does matter. Every time you hear somebody say, "The bubble is over," what they're really saying is that the Internet doesn't matter. They're just wrong. I want to go through seven or eight ways in which the Web really matters.

The first is that I have 10 times as many friends than I used to have. There are 100 times as many people than I knew before. There are 1,000 times as many people that I can call. Every imaginable interest has its spot on the Web. Anybody can find a set of people who are interested in the same sorts of things.

We take for granted that we can get more information about anything. If you don't like Cheerios and their marketing messages, there's a world out there online that can give you a perspective and the information that you're looking for. Truth doesn't have to have the voice stripped out of it. That link is gone. It's not just happening in Web logs. It's happening in the adult journalism world, too.

Every day I get a link to stuff that matters to me. And it comes from young people who are 18 steps removed from me. When I was growing up, to learn meant to be on a one-to-one relationship with a book. When my kids are on a computer using a word processor, they have nine IM sessions going, and they're working together. The teachers probably think it's cheating. It's not. It's learning.

The Web matters because if you're a 13 year old in Hong Kong or a 12 year old in Florence, you take it for granted that you can speak and the world will listen. I grew up believing that the world consisted of countries separated by borders.

The Web matters. I don't know why people dismiss it. They want to take something that's impressive and make it dull.

The Web is like Michael Jackson. The more you see and the more you know, it gets weirder and weirder. The weirdest thing about the Web is its success. What is the Web for? 600 million people don't know what it's for. Something big is happening. It's weird because we're looking at a 2-D screen, yet we talk about it as though it's spatial.

The Web is also familiar. But what does the Web remind of us? The spoiler here is that there's a default philosophy. What does it mean to be a human among other humans? We live in an age of deep alienation. Our ideas of what it means to be a human are deeply out of whack with the way we live our lives. Your understanding of what you are determines who you are.

My motto for today is: Our attraction to the Web is proportional to the depth of our alienation. I'm going to look at this in two ways. The first has to do with Ray Kurzweil's "Age of the Spiritual Machine." If we can move ourselves into silicon, we can escape our bodies. There's nothing magical about silicon. It's just fast and cheap. What if we didn't do it with computers. What if we did it with beer cans?

I was in a wheat field last summer. Take the motions of the wind and the movement of animals. If you kept track of left-leaning stalks as off and right-leaning as on, there's Ray again.

It's an odd idea that we can take brain states, model them in another material, and have something that resembles human consciousness. Why spend so much time knocking the highly intelligent doer of good deeds Raymond Kurzweil? We're really alienated in our beliefs if we think this makes any amount of sense.

Has anyone worked for an organization whose tag line was "We deliver the right information to the right people at the right time"? The idea that good input leads to good outcomes is fine if you're a robot. What does making a decision consist of? It consists of making a decision which inputs to make sense of. We had the causality backwards. We're not software. We've got time backwards.

What I want to suggest is that that's not the way information appears on the Web, and that that's extremely appealing to us. How does information look on the Web? Most commercial Web sites are valueless marketing crap. When I was looking for a washer and a drier, I googled Kenmore, Maytag, and discussion, and I got this site, which is extremely ugly. But I found exactly the model I was looking for. I posted a question, and within a couple of hours, a guy named Jim replied. Jim wouldn't lie to me. If I went into Sears to look at a Kenmore, the salespeople wouldn't tell me about the buzzer being too lous. On the Web, it's contextual. There's a physicist of lint hanging out on the Web waiting to answer someone's questions.

What do we get out of this knowledge? Smarter customers? That's not really the goal here. Knowledge used to be fat and chewy. Over time, that evolved into a quest for certainty. We started looking for the certain and knowable based on the statements themselves. That's the skinniest approach to knowledge. We've become anorexic in our knowledge. We've also become a cult of precision. That helps explain our obsession with bits. What's really important is that atoms and the analog world are messy and sloppy, and bits and the digital world are extremely sharp and precise. We're missing ambiguity. The world is not precise. The Web is the counter to the overly precise world of bits.

We also seem to have the idea that the world is perfectly precise and that's it's just our measuring devices are lacking. If I ask you what's real, you're going to give me a rock. A rock doesn't change. It changes very, very slowly. If I were to say to you that three rocks make up a triangle, you would say the rocks were more real. If you move the rocks, the triangle goes away, but the rocks remain. The triangle is dependent, and dependence is weak. Our default philosophy is individualism, but without groups, we cannot be individuals. Individuals don't come first. We only become individuals because of gifts from groups.

Relationships among humans are not obvious, but they are on the Web because relationships are links. Here's Doc Searls. Here's his blogroll. To be on the Web means to be linked. The Web is made up of links. Would you rather be well linked or well read?

You often hear about the abundance of the Web. 20 billion pages, 100 billion links. I can't find an attribution for the 20 billion pages, and I made up the 100 billion. But it's not about the abundance, it's about the generosity. The people who made the Web, and the people who make the pages. The Web's architecture is about links. Every time I put a link on my page, I'm telling people to go somewhere else. Every link is an expression of selflessness. The Web is an architecture of generosity.

When are humans at our best? We're at our best when we're out of ourselves and involved with others. When we're being generous. That's reflected inevitably in the Web. Every time we're on the Web, we're engaged in that.

What does the Web remind us of? It reminds us of our selves, and of ourselves at our best.

South by Southwest 2003 IV

Richard Stallman: Copyright Vs. Community in the Age of the Computer Networks

Stallman was introduced in part by SXSW Interactive Event Director Hugh Forrest, who said that this was the first-ever programming event scheduled on the opening Friday night of SXSW Interactive. In the spirit of Stallman's work with the Free Software Foundation, the event was also SXSW Interactive's first free event. (The audience applauded at this point.) As former editor of The Austin Challenger, Forrest also introduced Doug Barnes, formerly of The Spark, The Hot Spot, and The Austin Weekly, and now on the board of EFF Austin. Barnes, then, introduced Stallman.

Even though Stallman is a brilliant and prolific programmer who launched a movement exploring the future of software and copyright, Barnes said Stallman is also a "pain in the ass." "Programmers are often honest to a fault," Barnes says. "If they weren't the world would collapse around us. According to Richard, it's the people that need to change, not the visions." Here is a rough transcript of Stallman's remarks:

Putting the Free in Freedom
This talk is not about free software. In 1983, I reached the conclusion that for people to use computers freely, they needed to have access to free software and be able to use it freely. You should have the freedom to use software once you've got a copy. There are three freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program. Freedom 1 is the freedom to help yourself by studying the program and changing it to suit your needs. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor by giving them a copy of the software. Freedom 3 is the freedom to help build your community by working together to build that software.

Cooks use recipes and have the same freedoms in using recipes. If you tell a cook that they can't change a recipe, they would probably be outraged. Some people say: Can these ideas extend to anything? What about tables and microphones and cars? That's a silly question. There are no copiers for tables and microphones and cars. It's a moot point. The only way to make more physical objects is to build more. But what about the freedom to modify? If you buy this microphone, you are free to modify it. If you buy a chair, you're free to modify it. You can weld on more legs, saw them off.

Our freedoms are restricted by copyright law. Should people feel a reason to obey? The history of copyright is connected with the history of copying technology. The basic principles of ethics can't be reached by changes in technology. But when we consider ethical questions, we judge alternatives based on their consequences. Change the context, and the same alternatives may have different consequences.

The History of Reproduction
Back in the '70s, it was fashionable to say that computers were causing problems for copyright. I would rather say that copyright causes problems for computers. In the ancient world, the copying of books was done with a pen. This technology had certain consequences. Any reader could do it. If you could read and write, you could copy a book just about as well as anybody else. There was no economy of scale. Making 10 copies of the same book took 10 times as long.

Books were copied wherever there were copies. There was no centralization. There was also no need for all copies to be identical. There was no gulf between writing a book and copying one. Writing a commentary was a useful thing to do. Writing a compendium was also appreciated and considered worthy.

As far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the ancient world. Then there was an advance in copying technology. The printing press made copying more efficient but not uniformly so. It takes a lot of work to set the type and comparatively little work to make many copies from that type. There was far more economy of scale. Another change was that you needed to have a printing press and type, which was fairly expensive and unusual material. Not everybody could make copies. This centralized the copies of any given book. Printing did not entirely replace hand copying. Very rich people and very poor people continued making copies by hand.

The Advent of Copyright
Most of the copies, however, were made by printing. Copyright came along with the printing press. Italy in the 1500s was apparently the first place there was copyright. You could go to the ruler and ask for a monopoly on printing a work. Rulers liked giving our monopolies. The nature of printing press technology had certain consequences for copyright. It was understood to only affect publication. Not copying. It was an industrial regulation. It restricted something only specialized businesses could do. It didn't restrict readers. It was painless, relatively easy to enforce, and arguably beneficial.

Copyright in England started out as a sort of a monopoly system for publishers that was relatively harmful. Then it was reformed and rewarded to authors. In the Constitution, there was thought given to copyright being an entitlement for authors. But what came out was a very different idea. It doesn't say that authors are entitled to exclusive use. It doesn't even say that there would be exclusive use. It just says that Congress should benefit progress. Any benefit for the authors is just a means to that end.

The Price That You Trade
The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you.

Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal.

That's the rational thing for the public to do. We need to hold onto the parts of the freedom we want to use and give up freedoms we can't use. That's what our federal government would do if it were democratic and representative of our interests. We have government of the people by the flunkies for the corporations. Our freedoms are being taken away to empower corporations.

What's Going Wrong
Copyright used to last 14 years. It's been extended over and over in the last century. The publishers have figured out a way to disregard what the Constitution says. If they keep on extending it, it's in effect perpetual copyright on the installment plan. Any given work is supposed to enter the public domain on a certain date. But their plan is for no work to enter the public domain ever again. They pay Congress to give it to them 20 years at a time.

In 1998, they passed the Mickey Mouse copyright act. It was basically to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain, and it was basically bought by Disney. It's actually called the Sonny Bono copyright act. Sonny Bono was a member of the Church of Scientology and a member of Congress. The Church of Scientology actively sues people based on infringement of copyright laws. The movie companies were saying that 75 years wasn't long enough. This is just something paid legislators can use to do what they're getting paid to do.

Another dimension of copyright is how much it covers. There are freedoms we have as readers. But they're freedoms publishers want to take away from us. You may have bought a used book. You may have lent a book to a friend. You may have bought a book anonymously using cash. You may have borrowed a book from the library. Or you may have owned a book for many years, reading it several times.

All of this adds up to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's why the people who make DVD's want to insert ads that you have to watch. They don't want you to know how DVD's work. Linux programmers wrote a program so you can play these encoded DVD's. The right to play the DVD is lawful in this country, but using this software -- even linking to the software -- is illegal. They're doing the same thing with e-books. And the record companies are doing the same thing with their fake CD's. They look like CD's, but they can't be played on your computer. In one European country, they can't call them CD's because they don't meet the minimum standards.

Companies like this -- like EMI -- deserve to go broke. I hope you will help to make the record companies go out of business. There's nothing wrong with making records per se, but this infringement on our rights needs to be punished. Companies as arrogant as this do not deserve to exist.

A New Copyright Model
There's no reason why copyright should be the same for all kinds of work. If copyright policy is considered uniform, they can pick whichever narrow little area seems to justify copyright restrictions and then apply them uniformly. We also need to look at the various dimensions of copyright such as length of time. Most books are out of print in just a few years. They're remaindered after 18 months. A 10-year copyright would be perfectly adequate. People usually assume that authors love publishers and that copyright benefits them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Another dimension is what copyright covers. I have three basic categories of works, and they're not distinguished by media: functional works, documentaries and representational works, and artistic and aesthetic works.

Functional works are things that you use. Computer programs and recipes. Manuals and textbooks. Functional works should be free. When people are using this information, they may be able to improve it. If we give up the copyright bargain, would these works be written? We have half a million volunteers working on free software. We're starting to venture into other functional works as well. The Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world.

In the second category, works that represent the views of people, to change them is to misrepresent somebody's thoughts. There's no social imperative to publish modified versions of the works. You might envision a modified copyright that allows commercial reproduction of the works verbatim and nothing else.

The third category is aesthetic or artistic works. For these kinds of works, the hard problem is modification. These works have integrity and modification can destroy that integrity. Shakespeare took the plots of his plays from other plays. If copyright law existed then, they would have been illegal. We consider them masterpieces. For novels, maybe you can't make them better.

Another issue is Internet music sharing. We should simply legalize it now. The musicians and the public would be better off. Record labels treat musicians like dirt. The contracts that they impose on musicians are extremely cruel. When you buy a commercial CD, you fail to support the musicians. Concerts are how musicians make money. I want music that's made by artisans, not in factories.

Getting rid of the Hype Industrial Complex and moving toward Internet music sharing is one way to get there. Instead of having a public relations campaign saying that sharing is piracy -- sharing is like attacking a ship, which goes against human nature -- we could have a public relations campaign saying, "Have you sent $1 to your favorite band today?"

South by Southwest 2003 III
Just got back from dinner at Curra's with Ben and Laurie. The chicken mole enchiladas were wonderful, and I topped dinner off with a bottle of Shiner. Shiner Bock is one of my favorite beers, and it's not widely available outside of Texas. Tonight, our waiter tried to discourage me from having a Shiner so I could have a Newcastle of all things. Newcastle, I can get anywhere. Shiner? Austin.



Over dinner, we talked about the small-world and microstar nature of the self-publishing and Web communities, the importance of politics and urban planning, why people think Ben's a jerk, and the future of Ben's So New Media empire. I gave Ben the origami globe that came in the SXSW gear bag, and I decided that I might need to be less dependent on the 15 bus if I want to see everyone I want to see while I'm in town. In 30 minutes, Richard Stallman. I need to go upstairs to find a seat and a power plug. My battery just edged into the red.

Music to My Eyes XII
The fellow who just sold me a large cafe latte for $3.50 has never been further northeast than Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But so far during South by Southwest, he's met people as far away from Austin as Boston (me), Philadelphia, and New Zealand. In October, he'll go to New York City for his honeymoon. Turns out that Mr. Coffee is also in a band, the Austin-based space rock band Spacetruck. I'll have to check out the MP3's later, but it seems that Mr. Coffee plays bass.

And, to add to your small world file, it appears that one of the women my friend Rick works with at Akins High School is the mother of Jordan, drummer for the Boston band Fooled by April. Can't go far enough to escape bands from Boss Town! They're playing SXSW at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Fox & Hound. Check 'em out if you're here, not there.

South by Southwest 2003 II
For Austinites, a Harry Knowles sighting might be of relatively little import. But being from Boston, not Austin, I just had my first Web celeb fan moment, when I spotted the Ain't It Cool News founder sitting at a table near the registration area. Always a kick, almost more fun than sitting near Lyle Lovett at the Alamo.

South by Southwest 2003
I'm at the Austin Convention Center, with time to kill before South by Southwest Interactive officially begins at 7:30. Escaping the heavy snow in Boston, I was delayed getting out of Boston and finally arrived in town around 9 last night, catching a cab to Rick and Melissa's new house in Highland. I met their dog Dudley, and we stayed up a little catching up.

This morning, I caught the 15 bus downtown, getting off a hair too soon and walking down Trinity from 15th to the convention center. I registered, caught lunch at B.D. Riley's on Sixth, and got organized for the days ahead. The rain here has ended, and it's absolutely beautiful. Sunny, warm. In a couple of hours, I'll meet Ben Brown for dinner in South Austin before coming back here for Richard Stallman's talk.

Hello, Austin. I've missed you.

Event-o-Dex XLI
No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

8 p.m.

Cambridgeport Saloon

300 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge

You are invited to the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash, the first in a series of occasional Boston-area blogger get-togethers.

Instead of sitting at our computers for 24 hours blogging about nothing to raise money for charity, instead of buying a plane ticket to Las Vegas for a conference featuring people you don't know and may never see again, and instead of worrying about whether your personal Web work makes you anti-social or depressed, come on out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash and meet scads of local bloggers. You've read their words. Now meet them live and in person!

We're inviting hundreds of Boston-area bloggers and Web writers, and you can freely transmit this invitation yourself. Who's invited initially? Readers of Media Diet, the blog run by co-organizer Heath Row; members of Boston Blogs, a project managed by co-organizer Shannon Okey, and participants in the Bostonites Unite! Web ring.

The Cambridgeport Saloon is a wonderful little bar between Central Square and MIT in Cambridge. Within easy walking distance from the Central Square T stop, the saloon sports video games (Golden Tee and Radikal Bikers, last we checked), pinball machines, a great juke box, pool tables, and darts. The bar also has history! Originally called Father's Fore, the bar has been in operation at least since the mid-'70s.

Be a part of history. Get in on the ground floor. Belly up to the bar and come out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash. And spread word.

(Apologies for those Boston-area bloggers too young to attend an event at a bar. We'll try to find all-ages venues for future Boston Blog Bashes, and, absolutely anyone and everyone is encouraged to convene their own blog gatherings.)

Music to My Ears XXIX
Knowing that I'm heading to Aus-Town tomorrow, a co-worker brought in a CD by one her friend's bands, Kissinger. I'm listening to their "Charm" CD right now, and it's relatively interesting hard rock. Unfortunately, they're not playing while I'm in the area, but their Web site sports MP3's, music videos, and multimedia slideshows featuring photos taken at shows, including one at the Fort Worth International Raceway -- and the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Not totally my cup of tea, but well done, and presented with a clear sense of humor. I bet they're fun live.

Conferences and Community III
I leave for SXSW Interactive tomorrow afternoon, and I'm getting excited. It'll be nice to go back to Austin, where I almost moved in 2000. And I'm looking forward to catching up with a lot of friends I haven't seen for awhile.

Depending on the wireless network and other Net access on site and at my host's house, I hope to file frequent SXSW panel and speaker updates while at the conference. If that doesn't happen, Media Diet might be quiet until mid-next week. While I always hope to update Media Diet while traveling, if I don't, that doesn't mean that Media Diet is dead (long live Media Diet!). It just means that it's resting.

Corollary: Technofetishism XXVII
Sigh. Chris' car got hit while it was parked in front of a building. I'm here until 7 and walking to band practice anyway. I learned this via email.

Blogging About Blogging LII
Say what you will about Richards Interactive's Project Blogger and its marketing move into the blogosphere, but I just filled out their application survey. We'll see whether Media Diet's 150 unique visitors a day and content mix passes muster -- and what the experience is like. It's official: Media Diet is selling out. I can always stop participating in the project if I'm chosen, no?

Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust III
According to the New York Post's Keith Kelly, Jungle Media, publisher of MBA Jungle and JD Jungle is experiencing a series of top-level editorial exits. Three editors in almost as many weeks. It's clear that Jungle Media publishes stepping-stone magazines, in terms of staff as well as readers, as once you get your MBA or JD, the magazines are less relevant. The exiting editors have ended up at Popular Science, New York, and Ski. All steps up.

Thanks to I Want Media.

Technofetishism XXVII
In this ever-online, always-connected, widely distributed world of communications, it's good to know that there are still gaps in the system -- and steps that people can take to cross the voids. Earlier today, I emailed a couple of my bandmates to inquire about getting a ride to Anchormen practice tonight. I did so on my laptop, using Eudora.

Minutes ago, my cell phone beeped, indicating that I'd gotten an SMS. It was Chris, saying he could give me a lift. I replied via SMS, but I wonder: Does Chris get his email on his phone? Did he read my email and then decide that replying via SMS was more expedient? It was kind of nice not to get an email in response. Gaps to cross, voids to fill, steps to take.

North End Moment XXXV
I found this wallet photo from a junior high or high school formal dance this morning on the pavement in the back alley. It was face up, beaming at the grey skies of Boston, image surface speckled with the light rain we're getting this morning.



Oh, to be young and in love. She looks so pleased with herself: her dress, her hair. He looks so pleased to be with her. His suit is no match for her dress, and do you think he's almost hiding behind her so he doesn't look so wide? I don't know. What I do know is that if he really loved her, and she him, the photo wouldn't have found its way to the gutters behind the Scotch & Sirloin building. Just a little bittersweet welcome to the North End today.

Digesting the Daily IX
Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.

Alderman champions struggling Evanston skate park
Proposed budget calls for park to close; some say sport is bigger than baseball
(Feb. 18, 2003)

Twisted logic behind library's bizarre design
(Feb. 19, 2003)

Hip living
The Co-op has picked up a reputation as a "hippie commune," but tenants just call it home
(Feb. 24, 2003)

Weekend detention to Kellogg student Brady Busch, who was arrested Feb. 21 for pushing, grabbing, and insulting a female officer of the Evanston Police Department. Charged with battery, Busch reportedly shoved the officer, who was checking IDs, from behind so he could get past her. "Get out of the way, b-tch," he said. When arrested, the Kellogg student said, "F-ck you." Dude. You go to the Kellogg School of Management. What kind of business person do you want to be? What kind will you be? The kind that bruises the arms of police officers just so you can get into a bar? I am not impressed. Shame on you.

From the In Box: From the Reading Pile XVII
Thanks for the review on the "Nowhere Fast" deal. I have something for you to review further. I say that Jesus Christ rose from the dead 2000 years ago, and that the resrrection of Jesus Christ is an undeniable fact. What is your review on that? -- Simon Woodstock

I would say that while I was raised Christian and read the Bible nearly every day, I don't think that the Bible is infallible. And that I would much rather concentrate on living in line with Christian morals and values than debating over theological-historical particulars. Live the change I want to make, I guess.

The original manuscripts of the Bible are proven to be infallible. Besides the biblical account of the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, there is much evidence from first century non Christian historians that support the resurrection of Jesus Christ as well (i.e Pliny, Tacitus, Josephus etc.) The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most historically verifiable event in all of ancient history.

Besides this, the Bible claims that Jesus is in fact God in the flesh. If a book claims that somebody is God, and they are in fact not God, that book is no source for any type of moral guidelines. That book would have to be considered to be the biggest lie of all history, and thus of no moral worth.

The Bible is infallible. The Bible claims that Jesus is God. Jesus rose from the dead, proving once and for all that this was so. The resurrection is not a theological/historical particular. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is either the most crucial event of all time, or it is absolutely nothing at all.

I respect any conclusion that you make, and I also respect you as a person, even if we disagree. Your review please.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LIX
Fast Company's under a denial-of-service attack, so it's a challenge to work on our Web. I'm usually not this prolific with Media Diet, I promise. I've been trying to be productive at work otherwise, but here I am again.

For what it's worth, I've decided that it's not fair game for me to review movies I stumble across on the TV and watch with less than full attention -- "Ford Fairlane" and the 1977 "Island of Dr. Moreau" recently -- so I'm going to stick with movies I rent or watch on DVD. Maybe movies on channels like HBO, but definitely not commercially interrupted movies.

Battle Royale
Amazing. The concept alone behind this movie is intriguing, but its final execution is quite impressive. Because of an economic collapse and population explosion in the Japan of the future, a law is passed that allows the government to send one class of ninth graders to a deserted island for three days. The students are given weapons, food, and water; are instructed to kill each other; and the survivor at the end gets to return to the mainland. While one would think the plot would establish an unnecessarily gory, Friday the 13th-like slasher film, director Kinji Fukasaku did a brilliant job downplaying the violence, of which there is plenty, and making sure that the characters -- more than 40 at the movie's beginning -- are relatively distinguishable from the next. Takeshi Kitano sings as the subtly unstable former teacher overseeing the whole operation, and concept aside, there are some interesting developments and twists along the way -- including the boys who hack into the military's computer system and the Battle Royale alumnus who plays a role in the most satisfying plot surprise near the end of the movie. If you're a fan of Japanese or Hong Kong action and exploitation films, this is one to see for sure.

Dot
This is an independently produced mockumentary about a start-up company called Zectek. It's been billed as the Spinal Tap of the dotcom era and hailed by Business 2.0 as more realistic than Startup.com. While it's no Spinal Tap -- and while I've yet to see Startup.com (I just moved it up in my Netflix queue) -- it's an extremely funny, caustic, and biting satire of the Net Economy hype and hyperbole. Combining reality TV-styled footage with one-on-one candid interviews and voice-over news account narrative commenting on Netscape, Yahoo, and Boo.com, the movie slowly reveals the true leadership and character traits of the founders of Zectek, as well as those they hire later. What struck me hardest in this movie is that Zectek was a business founded on nothing: no ideas, no goals, and no business plan. The founders -- all of whom, outside of the technologist, perhaps, were full of hot air -- did everything necessary to run a startup business, from acquiring office space and hiring a receptionist to making T-shirts and raising millions of dollars in venture capital. In the end, the company never did anything, much less make a product or service. It reminded me of the band I was in in junior high. We opened a bank account, designed a logo, and bought sheet music for "Axel F" and "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight," but beyond one half-serious practice in the Methodist church's youth group room, we never did anything. We even researched our band name against existing trademarks, changing our name from Nitecap to Knightcap to avoid future litigation involving a hotel chain. A silly -- and slightly sad -- callback to the heyday of the Net Economy, when you didn't even need a business plan sketched on your cocktail napkin. All you needed was a napkin.

Freejack
How did this movie ever get made? Based on the Robert Sheckley s-f novel "Immortality Inc.," the film stars Emilio Estevez, of all people, as the protagonist -- and Mick Jagger as the bounty hunter antagonist. The story is pretty basic. Emilio's heroic character is a race-car driver who perishes in a fiery wreck -- and who is sucked into the future to serve as the body for a transplanted mind. The bulk of the movie is a series of Running Man-like chase scenes in which Emilio outpaces Mick; reconnects with his fiancee, played by Rene Russo, who's become a hard-edged business woman since his death; and tries to track down the wealthy business man who took out the bounty in the first place. That person turns out to be Anthony Hopkins' character, Russo's character's mentor and employer -- and outside of a visually stimulating final sequence in which we're drawn into Hopkins' character's preserved mind, the movie is devoid of value or interest. But the movie might be worth watching for the last scenes. And if you dig Sheckley, the movie might satisfy the completist in you.

Rock Shows of Note LVI
Like the good 30-year-old I am, I stayed in Thursday and Friday nights so I could venture out in the drizzle Saturday for a solid show at the Abbey Lounge. I arrived around 9, about 20 minutes early for the start of the first set, a solo performance by the Brooklyn-based Jennifer O'Connor. O'Connor's been coming up from New York a lot lately, and I was impressed by her emotive singer-songwriter set. More indie rock than folk, her time on stage included several highlights. Her friend Kim joined her for a song on the melodica and played really well for her first time doing so. O'Connor played one of her friend's songs -- a pleasant little number musing about whether animals dream about zoos -- that stuck with me. And she seemed to nail the cover she said she tried to play in town last week -- but screwed up. You can catch her again April 10 at the Kendall Cafe with Eric Saulnier, whom I've mentioned here previously.

Next up, Soltero. I last saw them near the end of January, but I didn't really pay much attention. Saturday night, I did. And it was high time. Reminding me of what Papas Fritas might have sounded like in their earliest of days -- if they'd come from the Coctails school of self-taught bash pop -- they delighted with some delicious strained singing, off-key harmonies, and other antics -- such as clapping in the crowd and surprising "woo-hoo" yelps. Incorporating Johnny Cash-like baritone singing, several songs really hit me hard: "The Moment You Said Yes," "Autobahn," and "Fight Song for True Love." Lyrics blend the bittersweet and the banal. And the band had its own cheering section! Two tanktopped women on the left side of the club really whooped it up. Fun on stage, fun on the floor. I'll catch Soltero again.

Admittedly, Choo Choo la Rouge was who I was really there to see, however. While I've loved their shows in the past, while I love their CD, and while I'm sheepishly embarrassed that so many of the band members remember my name while all I can muster is Vincent, this show fell a little flat. They opened with a couple of new songs, which were good to hear, but I felt that their older songs were different -- either performed with less passion or slightly rewritten. With the past strength of their choruses and catchy hooks, I'd be surprised and disappointed if the band has expurgated some of my favorite sing-along parts. Maybe they didn't. Maybe my favorite songs just seemed to end too quickly.

Lastly, the In Out. Some sad news. They were supposed to have copies of their new CD on hand Saturday night. And the label had even shipped them several boxes of the disc. But some lame jerk stole the boxes from in front of where they'd been delivered, and the band arrived with only a few copies of the record. Now, what kind of person steals packages off of porches and whatnot? That's right, a bad, mean, stupid person. From what I gathered, the band called some local used record stores to warn folks that someone might be trying to sell them, but I shudder to think what fate befell those CD's. Did the thief just trash them? People, please don't steal. Despite that setback and letdown, the band put on a good show. Sure, I wish that they'd push what they do a little further. They are an extremely good Fall-like band, but I can't get past the comparison. They're not a tribute band, but sometimes they sound so much like the Fall that I get confused. I wish they'd grow beyond that focus and make the sound they're chasing a little more their own. Regardless, they had energy. They were relatively fun to watch. And the music is worth listening to. Can't wait until they get more copies of the record.

Blogging About Blogging LI
Ever wonder where you might fall in the blogging food chain? Thanks to Truth Laid Bear's blogosphere ecosystem project, now you can find out.

Corollary: Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust II
In a recent AlwaysOn column, Red Herring founder Tony Perkins says that the magazine may be down for now, but it's not out of the swimming yet. Perkins had just penned his editorial for the magazine's 10th anniversary issue when he himself heard the news about the magazine's impending dissolution. The two pieces make an interesting inside look at the last days -- for now, perhaps -- of one of the longer-running technology business magazines.

Books Worth a Look XII
These are the books I read in February 2003.

The Blizzard of '78 by Michael Tougias (On Cape, 2003)
Published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Blizzard of '78, which resulted in 27 inches of snow in Boston proper, as well as 54 deaths, hundreds of destroyed homes, and 125 arrests for looting in the city, this book largely comprised photographs documenting the storms impact. The text accompanying the photos is relatively scant and drawn on news accounts and some first-person interviews, and focuses on the storm's progression, its effects on the coastline, snow removal efforts, and the accompanying destruction. Tougias compares the blizzerd to the Blizzard of 1888, which hit hardest further west and wasn't as intense as the Blizzard of '78, providing a useful interesting context. Even more interesting, I read this on the eve of a heavy snowfall this year, a snowfall in which we almost rivaled the Blizzard of '78, in accumulated snow, if not the gale-force winds and destruction. Shades of the 30 inches that fell April 1, 1997, it was a good time to read this book, safely ensconced on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner.
Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.

The Bostonians by Henry James (Penguin, 1986)
First published in 1886, this classic novel is awesome on several levels. One, as an analysis of political thinking about the North and South just after the Reconstruction, James' portrayals of Basil Ransom, a Mississippi lawyer now living in Boston and New York, is extremely intriguing. Two, James' primary theme is the state of women's rights and social activism. His characters Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor provide wonderful foils and divergent examples of the new woman. And lastly, the novel's setting in Boston offers a lushly detailed snapshot of the city as it was in the late 1870s. James' descriptions of Harvard, the Back Bay, and even Cape Cod make me want to walk around, book in hand, to compare the landmarks as they are today with his imagery. A must read if you live in the Boston area. And the best book I've read in a long time.
Pages: 438. Days to read: 9. Rating: Excellent.

Boston's North End by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1997)
Despite this book's inclusion in Arcadia's Images of America series, Sammarco's visual history of the North End, one of Boston's most historic neighborhoods, doesn't quite hold up the level of excellence established by other volumes in the series. Perhaps because of the range of photographs archived by the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library and Pizzeria Regina (seems they have quite the extensive photography collection!), or perhaps because of the advent of photography, this book is limited primarily to the North End's Italian history. That's fine, but it eclipses the district's African-American and Boston brahmin past to a fault. Most of the pictures and accompanying historical text is of little note, concentrating on churches, businesses, and civic activities organized by the library, but there are a couple of notable aspects here. One, the book ably considers the neighborhood's proximity to the harbor, and there's some good maritime history included. Two, the section of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 helped me accurately the location of the tank that burst, and impressively documents the flood's wake of destruction, as well as the location of the elevated train line once trailing along Commercial Street. Worth getting for that chapter alone, but disappointing otherwise.
Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Fair.

Boston's Red Line: Bridging the Charles from Alewife to Braintree by Frank Cheney (Arcadia, 2002)
I love these Images of America books published by Arcadia Publishing in South Carolina. What a wonderful, wonderful concept. This edition concentrates on one line of the now-MBTA subway and trolley car system. Drawing heavily on photographs, as all of the Arcadia books do, the tome considers the history of transportation from Cambridge to Boston, William Bancroft's role in the construction of the Cambridge Tunnel, the expansion of the subway from Harvard Square to Park Street, rapid transit extension to Mattapan, and the rolling stock used on the Red Line. While many of the photographs aren't that interesting -- I'm not that interested in the cars themselves, much less which civic leaders were present at a dedication ceremony -- the image-driven representation of now-defunct train stations, stations houses, maintenance facilities, and what's replaced them on the urban landscape, offers a nice physical history of public transit in Cambridge and Boston.
Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.

Brain Candy: Boost Your Brain Power with Vitamins, Supplements, Drugs, and Other Substances by Theodore Lidsky and Jay Schneider (Fireside, 2001)
Written by a brain researcher and a neurology professor, this is as objective a guide as you can get to smart drugs and related substances. Concentrating on nootropics, amino acids, hormones, vitamins, and other substances that affect mental performance and memory, Lidsky and Schneider consider the research done on each substance, their possible benefits, and their risks. Their relatively strict science is highly appreciated. By lending credence primarily to double-blind studies in which a control group was present -- and by considering whether research has been done using healthy adults, not just the elderly or those suffering from Alzheimer's -- the two are able to weigh in on the hype and hyperbole surrounding many substances no approved by the FDA. I've already decided to stop taking choline and start taking piracetam. Useful if you're interested in smart drugs and vitamins.
Pages: 236. Days to read: 12. Rating: Good.

Con and Cthulu: Uberdub by Matt Howarth (Aeon, 1996)
Matt Howarth is one of my favorite comic book artists, and while I've missed most of his single-issue work, I'm always jazzed to come across collections of his miniseries. Featuring a real-life electronic musician, Conrad Schnitzler, and the old one Cthulhu, who's disguised himself as a shoggoth and changed the spelling of his name to hide from the Elder Gods. It's an interesting mix of Savage Henry adventure story, electronic music fandom, and Lovecraftiana. But beyond the story, what I simply adore about Howarth is his artwork. Bridging the styles of the underground comics from the '60s, the first wave of minicomics makers, and the independent comics of today, Howarth's work astounds. Extremely clean yet detailed, his work incorporates some of the best shading and hash-mark drawing I've ever seen. An unsung comics hero.
Pages: 80. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.

Deathlands: Skydark Spawn by James Axler (Gold Eagle, 2003)
Another of the men's adventure series published monthly by Gold Eagle, a division of Harlequin, this is one of the few series not ghostwritten by mulitple authors. As such, it's relatively true to the original vision of the series, which I first read while a teenager. Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the book details the adventures of a team of survivors. The team comprises stereotypical foils like most adventure team books (including Gold Eagle's former Able Team and Phoenix Force series), a neanderthalic albino, a time-traveling professor sort, and two romantically involved couples. There's also a father-son pairing, shades of Jonny Quest. Not as well-written as the Mack Bolan books, but better penned than the disappointing Destroyer series, this volume involves a factory farm for breeding children that ensnares our adventures -- and is eventually destroyed by them. Sexual festishism, the dangers of inbreeding, and an oddly comic band of mutants that follow a human female as their savior, are all worked into the story, which ends well, if not extremely quickly. I almost thought the book would be continued, but then Axler wrapped everything up in the last 20 pages. These are the Saltines of the book world, a real palette cleanser.
Pages: 349. Days to read: 22. Rating: Fair.

The Destroyer #131: Unnatural Selection by James Mullaney (Gold Eagle, 2003)
Originally created by Warren Murphy and Sapir, this men's adventure series is a counterpoint to Gold Eagle's Mack Bolan series, originally created by Don Pendleton. But it's nowhere near as interesting. The story of Remo Williams and Chiun, two comically paired masters of Sinanju, an uber-martial art, isn't quite in line with what I remember about Williams. Despite the dissatisfying lack of realism in the action scenes, the book has two redeeming features. One, the plot centers on genetics and nanotechnology -- interesting to see how that's rippling through popular culture. Two, there's an extremely silly and stereotypical celebrity cameo including Winona Ryder, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Buffet, and Mike Tyson. Ghost writer Mullaney caricatures them mercilessly. I appreciate the Mack Bolan books much, much more.
Page: 347. Days to read: 3. Rating: Poor.

Hellblazer: Haunted by Warren Ellis and John Higgins (DC, 2003)
Collecting Hellblazer #134-139 from 1999, this is one of the better Hellblazer story arcs, ably written by Ellis. The plot centers on John Constantine's haunting by an old friend, Isabel Bracknell, who was ritually murdered by an Aleister Crowley wannabe. By tracking down and defeating the ambitious dark magician, Constantine is able to release the spirit of Bracknell in the end. Ellis works in several innovative elements to the book. Constantine's magician friend Map wanders the tube tunnels beneath London to keep tabs on the city and its populace. I also enjoyed the recurring characters Sanjay, who sells Constantine his cigarettes; his undead advisors; Haine; and the bad cop Watford. Iconic characters -- and ideas -- might be what Ellis writes best.
Pages: 144. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good.

Hopping Mad edited by Albert Feldstein (Signet, 1969)
Collecting material originally published in Mad magazine in 1964 and 1968, this is one of many anthology paperbacks published by Signet. Despite occasionally awkward layouts given the dimensions of the paperback pages, it's a good look at the magazine's better days. While the Mad books are rarely thematic or cohesive in their content, there are several threads running through the pieces collected here. Two of the most obvious involve comic strips -- Bob Clarke and Frank Jacobs' "Insecurity Is a Pair of Loose Swim Trunks" and "Comics for Publications That Don't Have Comics" -- and marketing -- "The Mad Plan for Fighting the War Against Junk Mail," "Watch That Price with the Asterisk," "The Great Filter Tip Cigarette War," "Fake-Out Record Jackets, and "The Long Range Effects of Products on People." The book also includes some classic artwork from Dave Berg and Don Martin.
Pages: 192. Days to read: 2. Rating: Good.

From the Reading Pile XVII

Bear with Me: A 24-Hour Comic
Reminding me slightly of the work of Andy Ristaino and Woodrow Phoenix, this 28-page 24-hour comic was created by Mason between 8:05 p.m., Aug. 15, and 8:04 p.m., Aug. 16, 2001. Drawn in an at-times overly abstract animation-influenced style, the wordless comic tells the tale of a door-to-door salesman who tries to introduce a bear to the pleasures of city living. Mason's slow-paced cinematic timing on pp. 4-5, the Kochalka-like affection on p. 11, and the ending -- p. 24 is basically a mirror of p. 2, only with a change of setting -- indicate that Mason put a lot of thought into his work. Better than most 24-hour comics I've seen, writing wise. But the stark lines and wordless nature of this mini make me wonder what else Mason can do. $2 to Joey Mason, Young American Comics.

Deadbeat #5 (November 2002)
Sent to me by Matt Johnson, the incarcerated publisher of the zine Poor and Forgotten, Deadbeat is published by his friend Mike S. Clocking in at 40 pages, Deadbeat is a well-printed, amateurishly laid out, stereotypical punk zine. Mike's opening editorial on the foibles of punk fashion neglects the fact that British punk was fashionable from the start. His quick history of the Dead Kennedys is a fun rundown of the band's legal crises and Jello Biafra's political ambitions. The MC5 piece is basically a track-by-track listening guide to "Kick Out the Jams," accompanied by a discography. There's also a brief piece on Teengenerate, an interview with Death Becomes You, and record reviews. Equal parts local fanzine, personal zine, and punk-rock history lesson, Deadbeat is a worthy effort deserving further development. While slightly naïve and self-analytical like so many young punk zines, Mike's attention to the past shows that he's trying to understand what formed the basis of the music he loves so much. I'd like to see more local scene commentary, however. Mike's quips about emo and skate parks made me grin. Free from Deadbeat, P.O. Box 460106, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33346.

Divocorp
I'm not quite sure where I picked this up, but I'm quite impressed by Frey's comic work. Artistically, this 40-page minicomic blends the cartoony simplicity of Herge (p. 5, panel 1) with the hyperreal attention to architectural detail of Jeff Zenick (p. 7, panel 3, and p. 33, panel 1). The story, then, is a postmodern mystery. An employee of Divocorp, Ike makes a connection between his employer and a man from the future who came back with a special message. After receiving a mysterious package, a cinematic "dream" in which he kills his boss, and a trip to a rave with the receptionist at work, we are left thinking Ike's swum to his death at sea. Frey's callbacks to earlier story details is extremely impressive, and I'm still not sure whether the murder was a dream, Ike's boss' head isn't in the box, the rave wasn't a ruse, and Natalie the receptionist isn't the author of Ike's death. But it's a wonderful story, and the cartooning is delightful, especially the back and forth on p. 14. Wonderful! I can't wait to see more. Sebastian Frey.

Genetic Disorder #16
It's been a couple of years since the previous issue of Genetic Disorder, and now that Larry's no longer running with the Kill Zinesters of Bunnyhop and Ben Is Dead, he's been living in a van, running from the law, and writing for pornographic magazines and Canadian children's TV commercials. This 76-page issue, done up in the old Flipside production style, only comic book-sized, makes me miss those halcyon days of 1996. Zines were kings then! And Larry's long-awaited re-emergence reminds me of what we've lost. I hope he's able to get work for magazines other than Hustler and Barely Legal because Genetic Disorder is one of the best one-man megazines remaining. Even Mommy and I Are One's Jessica Hunley is writing for Flaunt these days. What's in this issue? "Loser's Guide to San Diego" remembers the social club entrepreneurialism of Thad Poppel, who operated a string of sex clubs around San Diego. "Jailbait" is a two-sided telling of Larry's winter formal date with a high-school girl. "Curses" and "Dates from Hell" compiles anecdotes and newspaper reporting about curses and Satanism. "Sacrificial Lambs" continues that theme with a six-page retelling of a mistaken child abuse case in San Diego. "The Seven Days of 'Stache" and "Reader (Phone) Matches" looks at the underside of dating culture and telephone personal ads, pairing actual ads with the phone recordings and voicemails left by callers in response. And "The Skulls of Punk Rock," perhaps one of the best features in the issue, serves up more than 25 band logos that incorporate the skull. Beautiful. Larry's an extremely journalistic zine publisher, and I really appreciate his blend of seamy local history, prankish narcissism, and popcult commentary. And you know what? I met Larry briefly at the Kill Zinesters tour stop at Jacque's in Boston. I even asked him if he were a Satanist. I might be the guy he mentions in the introduction to "Curses." But then again, maybe I'm not. $4 to Larry, P.O. Box 15237, San Diego, CA 92175.

Go Metric #16 (Winter 2002-2003)
Today is a day of zine connections as I sit on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner, it seems. Were I Mike Faloon, I'd map them all, later correcting and reprinting the chart. But I'm not. Yet, here they are. Mike is friends with Jef, drummer in the Anchormen. I last saw Mike at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, and I first met Jef at the Kill Zinesters stop in Boston. I also met Larry of Genetic Disorder there. Larry reviewed Razorcake in Genetic Disorder #16, which I just reviewed. There's a Rev. Norb and Maddy Tight Pants! column in Razorcake #12, which I also just reviewed. Norb and Maddy also contribute work in Go Metric this go. I've traded letters with Maddy, and Norb's from Wisconsin, my home state. Oh, and Jef drew the cover for this issue of Go Metric. Small freakin' zine world. And Go Metric? Big freakin' zine. If you only send for one zine mentioned in this Media Diet entry, make it this one. Mike compares Ben Weasel's "Fidatevi" to Yes' "Tales from Topographic Oceans;" interviews documentarian Russ Forster about his look at tribute bands, "Tributary;" provides a listeners' guide to the Figgs' "Slow Charm;" interviews Young Fresh Fellows' Scott McCaughey about his project with Wilco; discusses cultural engineering with s-f author Jim Munroe; appreciates Captain Underpants creator Dave Pilkey; and reviews 101 records. In the meantime, Brian Cogan remembers Joe Strummer, David Cawley details the history of Godzilla, Rev. Norb takes on the pratfalls and promise of the Spider-Man movie, Maddy compares the Boys to the Dead Boys, and Frank Leone reports on the state of punk rock in Japan. Arguably, this is the best issue of Go Metric yet. Mike's embrace of movies and books is extremely welcome, as long as he continues to broadcast in Indulge-o-phonica and participate in the Tuned to Itself Publishing Cooperative. Luckily, Go Metric's popcult obsessions are worth sharing. $2 to Mike Faloon, 15A South Bedford Road, Pound Round, NY 10576.

An Inside Job #2 (November 2002)
This collection of dream comics by the pseudonymous Hob is produced in an extremely appealing envelope-sized format. The four-page "Who What Where" is a pencil-shaded assortment of dreamland scene setters. The other pieces -- "Up to Date," "Hosted," Down Time," and "The Action" -- are more simple in their line work and much more involved in their storytelling. My favorites are "Hosted," which features the line, "It's the kind of life where you can get away with a lot, if you're quiet;" and "The Action," the longest selection. "The Action" recounts a dream about a party, a back-of-van orgy, and jealousy. I'm not the biggest fan of dream comics, but Bishop's artwork is extremely clean and emotive, and the stories here are interesting enough. I look forward to more non-dream comics. $2 to Eli Bishop, Graphesthesia, P.O. Box 420596, San Francisco, CA 94142.

A Last Cry for Help #2
Wow. I said not one word to Souther at APE, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I may be comics starstruck. He and Kiersh are two of my favorite comics makers, and this 24-page Crashlander production piloted by Kiersh shows good reason why. I continue to be impressed by how well these two collaborate and connect. Peas in a pod! Their combination of sentimental cartooniness a la Dan Moynihan, the cute brut of Ron Rege, Jr., and occasional process comics astounds. The mini mixes dreaminess with direction, and several elements really hit me hard. The watertower and Pac-Man icons on p. 3 are used to good effect. P. 4's main panel is a dark, introspective counterpart to the goofy strip at the bottom. P. 8 is amazing in its two-part emotional content. And the density and complexity of pp. 13 and 17 is nice to see in addition to the largely simple art. I'm not quite sure how old this is, but trust me, anything these guys do is worth checking out. Consistently creative. $2 to Dave Kiersh, 568 Grandview Ave., 2nd floor, Ridgewood, NY 11385, and Souther Salazar, 106 N. Chester Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106.

Mythos Collector #2 (Winter 2002)
Heavy on the mythos and light on the collector, this slightly misbilled Lovecraft fanzine doesn't quite live up to its promise. While its editor, Brian Lingard, has tried to differentiate it from other HPL zines such as Crypt of Cthulhu, it's really just more of the same. What we have here are three Lovecraftiana-oriented articles -- an interview with comic book adaptor Steven Philip Jones, the second part of Lingard's Lovecraft comic book price guide, and an auction watch lifted straight from Ebay (and therefore immediately outdated -- and three mythos-inspired short stories. The fiction accounts for more than 20 of the zine's 56 pages, and as far as Lovecraft-inspired writing goes, they aren't really worth the ink. That said, Shawn Scarber's humorous three-page nod is extremely welcome. Get in a get out. Until Lingard truly focuses on collecting Lovecraftiana, this fanzine isn't worth $4 -- or $5 postpaid, as his handwritten carbon copy receipt for me indicates. But as the interview with Jones shows, the idea behind the zine is solid. What's needed now is execution. $5 to Dark Tree Press, P.O. Box 748, Boylston, MA 01505.

Nowhere Fast
This full-color pamphlet was written by Simon Woodstock, a former professional skateboarder who was active for seven years in the '90s. Now he's found God and a new calling -- evangelizing to the youth set. This eight-page almost-zine, which was largely dismissed by the mainstream skateboarding magazines, outlines Woodstock's self-realization. For the most part, his religious growth stemmed from falling prey to the party lifestyle he engaged in while a pro skateboarder, which caused him to lose focus with his skating. While the pamphlet is full of photos of Woodstock skating, complete with dyed hair and clown suit, it's unclear whether he kept up his skating -- although it seems he couldn't regain and maintain focus without giving up his skating career. While I'm glad Woodstock found renewed meaning in his life, I'm not sure his work with the chapel or this skater-oriented pamphlet will have the evangelical effect he's hoping for. One, very few people in the skateboarding industry will take this seriously. Two, people interested in skateboarding in general will not know who Woodstock is. Now, if Tony Hawk were to come out as a vocal Christian, the church might have something to work with. Regardless, this is an interesting outgrowth of church culture and skateboarding fandom -- and an intriguing parallel to Christian punk rock. It's just a shame that stuff like this always starts with religion and then culture instead of the other way around. Following that path almost always results in watered-down culture. Free from Simon Woodstock, Calvary Chapel, 1175 Hillsdale Ave., San Jose, CA 95118.

Razorcake #12
Funny how things run in threes. Last night, before falling asleep, I read the Dillinger 4 interview in this issue of Razorcake, learning that Erik and Paddy grew up in Evanston, Illinois, where I went to college. Then I read a review of Razorcake in Genetic Disorder #16, learning that Razorcake was founded by former active Flipside contributor Todd after Flipside folded. And today, in the Media Diet mailbox, I received a second copy of this 108-page issue of Razorcake. I first purchased this issue at Newbury Comics because of the D4 (the real D4) interview. The second of assumedly two parts, the conversation involved everyone but Bill and touches on drunken shenanigans in Las Vegas, Lane's Ph.D. in clinical psychology, the band's penchant for Motown, punk-rock snobbishness, the Boy Scouts, working class influences, media coverage, and Erik's bar in Minneapolis. It's one of the most wide-ranging and in-depth interviews I've read with the band, and I'd imagine they interview relatively well. Other interviews include Nardwuar the Human Serviette's conversation with New York-based rapper Princess Superstar, the Rattlesnakes, the Arrivals, LA classics the Skulls, and the Spits. About a fourth of the zine is made up of reviews, and the requisite columns lead off the issue. While columns are often my least favorite part of zines, Razorcake includes several notable writers. Rev. Norb's advice column is a typgraphically aggressive, caffeine-addled, and heavily annotated roundup of letters about Ebay, hamsters, and subliminal messages in porn videos. Always worth catching up with Norb in all of his Wisconsinite glory! Former Boston zinester Rich Mackin, who left his job working on the Truth campaign for Arnold Communications to travel cross-country, offers a column about bicycles, Critical Mass, and anarchy. And Maddy, editrix of the cute zine Tight Pants!, lists her top 10 punk rock and non-punk things, some of which include scholarships, D4, Ben Snakepit (with whom I'll hang out at SXSW), grad school, and the Portland Zine Convention. You can guess what side those things fall on. But the magnum opus of the issue might very well be "East L.A. Punk Rock Family Tree," a six-page, flowchart-driven history of what area musicians played in which bands compiled by Jimmy Alvarado. Ranging roughly from 1980 to 2000, the project reminds me of my old hypertext history of the Bay Area punk-rock scene. All in all, Razorcake is just as dense as Flipside ever was (RIP, Flipside), but is eminently more readable to me. Maybe it's because it's less LA-centric. Maybe it's because it seems less cliquey and scene in-jokey. And maybe it's because it combines the familiar and the new -- a welcome read. $3 to Razorcake, P.O. Box 42129, Los Angeles, CA 09942.

War Against the Princes
This is a photocopied 20-page collection of anti-authoritarian writings by poet and guitarist Doug Saretsky. Written between November 2000 and May 2001, the chapbook is largely inspired by the anti-globalization protests in Ohio. Saretsky lambastes apathetic punk rockers who aren't politically active. He parallels the authoritarianism of high-school hierarchies with the police state. "Black Bandanna" comes across as almost-lyrics to a Dillinger 4 or Propagandhi song. Saretsky also remembers the first time he was arrested for shoplifting and his various moving violations and run-ins with the law. I appreciate the local nature of his poetry -- and I respect the romantic activism surrounding the Transatlantic Business Dialogue at the of 2000 in Ohio -- buy Saretsky's series of "Arrest" poems bother me. Drunk driving is not only illegal -- it's dangerous. Criticize the cops when your direct action is valid, but cop to your own bad decisions, too, OK? Doug Saretsky, Black Hoody Nation, 1970 Westwood Northern Blvd. #5, Cincinnati, OH 45225.

Soundtrack: Count the Stars, "Never Be Taken Alive," and Wayne Kramer Presents Beyond Cyberpunk

Music to My Ears XXVIII
One of my not-too-long ago Ebay impulse buys was a 100-plus cassette collection of mid- to late '80s heavy metal and hard rock music. This is a slightly awkward pairing of reviews of two of those recordings -- I'm not sure whether I'll try to review all of them, but these two fill a particularly soft spot in my heart -- and a long-delayed local record review. Thank you for your patience!

Anthrax "I'm the Man" EP (Island, 1987)
This multi-faceted and belatedly unfortunately named metal band's jokey rap entreet is a slightly self-aware yet clever parody of what would eventually emerge as a genuine genre -- rap metal or nu metal. By presaging the mixture of rap and metal, poking fun at the malevolent Metallica in the process and playing off the stupidity of one band member, Charlie Benante, the band released this 1987 EP laden with live tracks that should have been relegated to a cassingle of the day. Padding the EP wiith the "censored radio version" in addition to the "def uncensored version" unripe for radio play, as well as a live "extremely def ill uncensored version" represents the worst kind of commercial complicity. The "Among the Living" album brought the band new attention, but did it really attract the demand for this? Anthrax's cover of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," as well as the Dallas-recorded live versions of "Caught in a Mosh" and the Judge Dredd-inspired "I Am the Law" are interesting solely as lively rarities, but "I'm the Man" as a joke song with unintended consequences hardly deserves its own EP. The song, as good as it is, could have easily been a bonus track on the next album. Had Anthrax not stayed with Island, I'd cry contractual obligation.

Def Leppard "Pyromania" (Phonogram, 1983)
My sister was a big Def Leppard fan, and this was one of the first cassettes I borrowed (stole) from her room. Despite the synthesizer opening to the first AC/DC-inspired track "Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)," the record's not that embarassing. The guitars and vocals are anthemic, and the drums are mixed well. But outside of the video-ready "Photograph," and perhaps "Die Hard the Hunter," the album is relatively boring, given the songs' speed. Leppard's too-long faux-live opening "Stagefright" is interesting, albeit a cliched rock-band concert shill. "Too Late for Love" and "Die Hard the Hunter" close out what might be one of the more promising A sides of an LP, regardless of the slow tempos. The B side, then, starts with the synth-heavy single, "Foolin'." I must admit that I'd forgotten "Rock of Ages," which holds up well despite the flawed drum effects. And then "Action Not Words" happens. All in all, this is an extremely strong album. The synth-swelling "Billy's Got a Gun" is a weak ending, but otherwise, with several solid songs on the record, Def Leppard is able to keep it real 20 years later.

The Fleece "Wrecked at Rehearsal" (Teagown, 2002)
I have a Fleece T-shirt. It's not made of fleece, and I didn't feel ripped off when I bought it, but there we go. The band sent me this CD about six months ago, just before I left for the 2002 CoF Roadshow, and it's well worth waiting to concentrate on. Thanks for your patience! With the quiet opening to "The Press Release," complete with Papas Fritas-like vocals, albeit out of tune, the band's come a long way from the first time I saw them. Tuneful yet discordant, their earnestness is admirable. And the triumphant head of the song is awesome. Hooray for organ. The second song, "The Vanishing Face," features some Lance Hahn-styled vocals and more triumphant guitars over keyboards. Quite pleasing. The stop and start section preceding the ending is most impressive. The rest of the record continues to impress. The keyboard-tinged Elephant Six-ness of "Perfect Hands" perfectly casts the slightly out-of-tune vocals, shades of Sinkcharmer and Soltero, which I totally appreciate. There are some piano flubs, but they're OK, as the jangly "Everything Has Not Been Discovered" entices rather than discourages. Wrapping up the record, "As You Were" cascades with an almost triumphant guitar proposal leading into a Neutral Milk Hotel-meets-Graham Smith vocal overture that indicates an increasing interest in melodic mention. A fine release, slightly uneven at first, but in the end, impressive. Beautiful, little-known New England pop goodness.

Pieces, Particles XIII
The following media-related stories recently spotted in print publications might be worth a look. Heads and decks, only. Heads and decks.

Books on the Run by Andy Cornell, Punk Planet #46 (November/December 2001)
The projet Mobilivre-Bookmobile project builds a bridge between zines and book arts.

Caution, Planets Ahead by Sam Hooper Samuels, Smithsonian, March 2003
The world's largest (maybe) 9-planet solar system model goes up along Route 1 in northern Maine

Comic Book Collection by Ed Symkus, The Cambridge Tab, Feb. 28, 2003
Zeitgeist reveals true comic superheroes: the artists

A Concept in CDs That Offers Profits to Artists, Prized Tracks to Fans by Sean Glennon, The Boston Globe, March 2, 2003
Discs available only at concerts grow in popularity among indie acts

A Critic Reading His Critics by Bernard Holland, The New York Times, March 2, 2003
Some letters from readers are very nice, some genuinely instructive. But others are alarmingly vicious.

The Crusaders by John Pilger, New Internationalist #333 (April 2001)
John Pilger uncovers the hidden history of Western media propaganda.

Drawing a Blank by Chris Ziegler, Punk Planet #46 (November/December 2001)
DIY comic artists sketch out life in the margins

Empires of the Senseless by Katherine Ainger, New Internationalist #333 (April 2001)
The media don't just promote globalization -- they're an integral part of the process

Fire Your Inner Slave Driver by Joe Robinson, Utne, March-April 2003
Is "work guilt" keeping you from getting most out of life?

Going Postal by Sarah Raper Larenaudie, Fashions of the Times, Feb. 23, 2003
When W or Elle puts Gisele on the cover, you can expect a torrent of letters, pro or con. Who would bother?

Hitmakers for Hire by Jenny Eliscu, Rolling Stone, March 20, 2003
Writing chart-toppers isn't complicated for the Matrix

Hooked on Comics by Mike Miliard, The Boston Phoenix, Feb. 28, 2003
Collector Robert Cronin give fans a glimpse beneath the panels

How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly by Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2003
"Smart mobs," text-messaging -- and organizers who think like field commanders.

Kaufman on TV by Jason Dove, Chunklet #16
The following lists several of the many pieces of Kaufman footage that I have obtained in the past few years. Some are available as regular or standard releases and some are considered hard to find, rare, out of print or bootlegged. With this trusty key we can categorize most of the Kaufman performance footage that is available. In the process, we can analyze and perhaps begin to understand some of the many facets of this ultimate method actor

A More Perfect Union by Linda Frye Burnham, Utne, March-April 2003
A troubled Southern community turns to theater for healing

A New Monopoly Earth First, August-September 2001
Large-scale, global anti-capitalism protests putting smaller, local, anti-capitalism protests out of business

Sitcoms and the Single Girl by Marcelle Karp, Bust, Summer 2001
These TV gals showed us that you don't need a man, as long as you've got your girls

Social Centers by Adam Bregman, Alternative Press Review, Spring 2001
Italy's cultural underground

Staging a Comeback by Rick Rothacker, Northwestern, Spring 2003
Richard Geer helps economically depressed towns find their muse -- and their pride -- through community theater.

A Star-Studded Kid-Lit Scam by Tracy Mayor, The Boston Globe Magazine, Feb. 23, 2003
What do Spike Lee, Lynne Cheney, and Jerry Seinfeld have in common? Along with other celebrities, they write children's books that shoot to the top of the bestseller list no matter how bad they are.

Top 12 Most Luddite Films of All Time Alternative Press Review, Spring 2001

Up Against Wal-Mart by Karen Olsson, Mother Jones, March/April 2003
At the world's largest and most profitable retailer, low wages, unpaid overtime, and union busting are a way of life. Now Wal-Mart workers are fighting back.

You Are What You Queue by Craig Tomashoff, The New York Times, March 2, 2003
Our lives and psyches are more public than ever, thanks to Netflix.

If you work for a magazine and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

Music to My Ears XXVII
Charles Foster of Sparklemotion, which I stumbled across while trolling through some Blog Hot or Not sites, points to some music worth listening to. Molly Pitcher is an "alternative-folk" duo from New York. Their song "No One Loves a Folk Song" reminds me a little of the Indigo Girls. He also recommends several songs by Tripod, as played on the Breakfast Show. The songs are classic novelty song material, which would be right up Cory's alley.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LVIII
I'm behind on these, as I watched several movies over the last couple of weekends, but if the Pieces, Particles entries are any indication, I'll all about catching up.

Thursday: The Pianist
After a quick dinner of French toast and strawberries with a Harpoon IPA with Andrea and Lauren at Zaftig's in Brookline, we headed to the Coolidge Corner. I've been trying to maintain a low threshold for experimentation and spontaneous experiences lately, so when Andrea told me they were going to the movie -- and asked if I wanted to join them -- I jumped at the chance. And even though I might not have gone to see The Pianist by myself, am I ever glad I did. Set in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, the movie details the plights and ongoing flight of a radio broadcast pianist. While Roman Polanski could have easily gone over the top in terms of portraying the atrocities that the German forces exacted on the Polish Jews, most of the violence, while present, was rather tastefully done. Similarly, the cinematographic styling was top notch. There were several scenes that were absolutely breathtaking, including several snow and blowing leaves in autumn shots, and a wide pan of some CGI ruins of Warsaw. The characterizations in the movie were deeply rooted, and I felt a real affinity for many of the characters. Best line, paraphrased: "Weren't you lucky to run into us today? That's the historical imperative in action, as I like to say." A beautiful classical soundtrack, stunning visuals, and a sensitive script made this a beautiful movie. Well worth seeing.

Among the Literati XXVII
Neal Pollack turns 33 tomorrow, March 1. Media Dieticians everywhere, if you're familiar with his work and appreciate it, send him some happies!

Subway Soundtrack IV
This is a silent film of sorts, but David Crawford's Stop Motion Studies concentrating on passengers on the Red Line is a beautiful look at the people who ride the T. Poetry in motion!

Thanks to Boston Common.

Better Fred Than Dead II
Even Neal Pollack has something to say about Mr. Rogers' passing.

Music to My Eyes XI
Pleix is an online community of digital artists, including 3-D artists, musicians, and graphic designers. There's a lot of interesting video work available through the community, but the video developed for Plaid's piece "Itsu" strikes me as especially important today. Equal parts anti-consumer culture commentary, mainstream media manifesto, and economic erotica, it's well worth watching.

Thanks to Memepool.

Sites on the Side of the Road VI
Mike and Nathan are gearing up for more Roadtrip Nation activity soon. They've revamped the Web site, incorporating interviews with the leaders and innovators they meet along the way, and updating folks on their documentary, roadtrip, and book projects. They've also launched the Green RV, an informative email newsletter about their activities. It's an awesome project. And they're good people. We've ridden side by side in many ways since the first CoF Roadshow in 1999. Now, if only they could make a T-shirt that's not in such a ghastly color!

Corollary: Blogging About Blogging L
What's the "official" word on Google's acquisition of Pyra and Blogger? Ev says...

From the In Box: Better Fred Than Dead
Thanks so much for the beautiful tribute to Mr. Rogers. I have always been a big fan. Interestingly, just yesterday, I was torturing my daughter with my rendition of "You Are Special" (I add a bit of drama and jazz to it to make it extra special). And a friend just said she had watched "The Neighborhood" two days ago, on a whim. He is part of our common television heritage and we are better for it.

When I was a child, my father was an executive at WNET, the New York PBS station. Because of his work, I was exposed to all of those great public television shows for children (as well as Monty Python at a very early age!). My father did not work directly with, but interacted many times with, Fred Rogers. Through the PBS connection, my mother developed a pen pal relationship with Fred (they had teaching and divinity degrees in common), and every year at Christmas we would receive a family Christmas card featuring Fred, the Mrs. and their two sons (who looked very much like him). Fred wrote a lovely note of condolence when my mother died, suddenly, five years ago.

Again, thanks for the thoughtful piece. -- Mari Guarino

North End Moment XXXIV
As I left Mangia Mangia with my grilled cheese and tomato, tater tots, and cranberry juice, a man with several leather coats draped over his arm stopped me on the street just outside the restaurant.

Man: "Do you know if anyone in there would be interested in buying a leather coat?"
Me: "What?"
Man: "Is anyone in there interested in a cheap leather?"
Me: "Um, no."
Man:"What are they, some kind of f*ckin' cheap people?"

I crossed the street and angled away as quickly as I could -- "Hey! Now where are you goin'?" -- but I have a couple of questions.

How much do you think the coats cost?

What kind of a man walks down the street selling leather coats off his arm?

What kind of person buys a leather coat from a man walking down the street?

Nervy, Pervy XI
Just to show that I am a true Webaissance Man, I'm going to write about Suicide Girls immediately after mourning the passing of Mr. Rogers. Matt wonders "when did Suicide Girls take over from Playboy in the 'I only read it for the articles' department?"

Yes, Media Dieticians, you've got to pay to play with most of SG's content, but access to its interviews, features, and fiction is free. Recent interviews feature William Gibson and David Cronenberg.

Better Fred Than Dead
Fred McFeely Rogers died today, becoming a full-time resident of the Land of Make Believe. His TV show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, played a large role in the formative years of my life, and I have many fond childhood memories of Mr. Rogers.

I used to sit on my mom's lap -- or beside her, when I was small enough -- in my dad's recliner watching Mr. Rogers on the local PBS affiliate. I have several Mr. Rogers records, which remain prized possessions because of their mix of gentle homily, slightly out-of-tune singing, and extensive liner notes, lyrics, and positive messages for children.

Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood was my show, loved more than Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, the Electric Company, or 3-2-1 Contact. My mother and I wrote a letter of protest to a local TV station when Captain Kangaroo was going to be canceled. They kept the show on the air, and I received a letter of thanks from the Captain. That, too, remains a prized possession.

I would have saved Mr. Rogers from stomach cancer if I could have. He was a gift to children, and every time I put on a cardigan sweater or change out of my boots into my Vans at work, I feel like Mr. Rogers. What are we to do? Thanks to PBS, we can listen to some of the songs sung on the show. And thanks to TV Barn, we can read a poetic memorial to the man's life and work.

I'll miss you, Mr. Rogers. Thanks for helping make me who I am today.

Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust II
Red Herring is about to flounder. Its folding might only result in the sale of the name and its subscriber list. Media Life speculates that the Herring's closure will help magazines birthed in the now-empty "new economy" niche better resposition themselves.

Thanks to Fucked Company.

Conferences and Community II
SXSW Interactive is next weekend, and the anticipation is starting to rise. I'll be staying at my friend Rick's new house. I'll be hanging out with zine and comic folks, including Joe O'Connell from Lost Armadillos in Heat and Ben from Snakepit. Evhead will be there. Scott from Meetup will be there. Cory Doctorow, Sandy Stone, and Jon Lebkowsky are hosting an EFF party Monday night, the night Bruce Springsteen is playing in Providence. And I'll connect with some CoF members from Austin and Houston. Should be a blast!

Among the Literati XXVI
Some friends of a friend guest edited the current edition of Slope. Slope 17 is an anthology of FU poems. If you ever needed to say FU to someone, here are 25 poetic ways to express how you feel.

Games People Play VI
One of the highlights last night -- at least for me -- was playing Radikal Bikers. The game has several flaws -- including horrible graphics and a too-linear narrative -- but it's pretty easy to see past them and get into the game. At least for me.

Basically, Radikal Bikers is a moped-racing game set in Rome, Italy. As a player, you have your choice of four pizza delivery people, two of whom are scantily clad women. The goal is to beat a competing pizza delivery person -- labeled "CPU" -- to the delivery points. If they beat you, you cry. If you win, you proudly present the pizza box. The game, while full of eye candy, is extremely linear. If you play it a couple of times, you can map a route to winning, and I'd imagine that it gets boring after awhile.

The game adds some interesting aspects to the race, however, adding shortcuts -- which earn you points when taken -- and special effects such as turbo speed and a power kick so you can destroy cars around you. My favorite parts of the game include scooting through the catacombs, shooting down the side alleys in which laborers are moving boxes, watching the rampaging rhinos escaping the zoo, and cutting through the cemetery, where you encounter zombies. Zombies! And rhinos! Zombies and rhinos!

I'll go back to the Saloon just to play Radikal Bikers. But another thing that intrigues me about the game is the economic story the game tells. Just as it's bad form to call a cab to pick you up -- and then hop into the first cab you see on the street -- it strikes me as silly that two people would be racing to deliver a pizza to the same customer. The delivery people work for competing pizza places, so that means that the customer called both. Does that happen? Here or in Italy? Wouldn't you have to pay for both pizzas because you ordered both?

And, and this is the biggest question, did the customer order the same toppings on both pizzas? Future game play may answer all of these questions, and more.

Corollary: Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XI
I promise, this is the last birthday-related entry I'll publish about my 30th. I'm sure you're sick and tired of hearing about my aging. We all age, every minute, every day. How am I different or special?

Well, last night I felt really special because of the gathering of friends that convened at the Cambridgeport Saloon in Cambridge. Things started slowly at 8, when I arrived to claim a high table by the dart boards and officially open my office hours. There was a small, dedicated crew in the early hours, and then the crowd grew.



I have many different circles of friends, and they don't often overlap. Last night, they did. In attendance, we had people from work, childhood family friends, people from the Anchormen and Handstand Command, folks I know through the Boston-area Web community, and some people I met for the first time last night. One surprising overlap was that a long-time friend went to high school with some people I know through Handstand Command and the comic shop. I had no ideas our lives overlapped that way, too.



Around 11:30, we inherited some second-wind friends from work who had spent the earlier portion of the evening at the Enormous Room to celebrate another friend's birthday. Not to claim the party crown, but folks seemed to think that the Cambridgeport Saloon was a better location, and the dart boards and pool tables, as well as the pinball and video games, occupied much of our attention. I hope people had fun!

Thanks to Emily for working the camera. It was kind of dark in there, huh?

Event-O-Dex XL
Looks like a good weekend for music.

Thursday, Feb. 27: Plunge into Death, Pelvic Circus, Sallie, and Distorted Megabytes at the Choppin' Block, 724 Huntington Ave., Boston.

Friday, Feb. 28: Palomar, Soltero, and the Mittens at the Milky Way, 405 Centre St., Jamaica Plain.

Saturday, March 1: Choo Choo la Rouge, Jen O'Connor, Soltero, and the In Out at the Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon St., Somerville.

Blogging About Blogging LI
Hot on the heels of its acquisition of Blogger, Google has started sending legal letters requesting that Web writers not use phrases such as "I googled for Muppet Baby icons yesterday." Welcome to the blogosphere? Unimpressive.

Trademark protection is an ongoing legal battle -- and expense -- for companies and brands such as Kleenex, Frisbee, Xerox, and so forth. But in Google's case, as I think is true in Xerox's case as well, the terms use as a verb stems from the fact that people use Google to search the Web. While "to xerox" became a generic phrase meaning "to photocopy" and "kleenex" is now used to describe any facial tissue, I don't see this potential danger for Google.

Sure, "xerox" morphed -- because of the brand's early ubiquity and eventual outpacing by other photocopier manufacturers. And, yes, "xerox" is a silly word. "Google" is even sillier. How can we seriously say "I googled for Muppet Baby icons" if we used AltaVista or AlltheWeb? My prediction: "Google" will never become a generic term for "searched on the Web."

When I say I googled for something, I mean it. I used Google. And that, my friends, is an endorsement.

Heavy Petting
Matt and Mary are now the proud parents of a... puppy. Meet Spike. Order your snapshots today!

The Days of Whiners and Posers III
This is awesome. Fucked Company was a little slow on picking up on Bill and Alan's eventual departure from Fast Company, but Pud finally commented on it. (I fully expected the memo we received Monday to show up in Internal Memos yesterday morning, but no such luck.)

While I had to grin at his claim that we ripped off his logo, I had even more fun reading the comments in the Happy Fun Slander Corner.

I read Fucked Company every day, but it's been awhile since I've delved into their discussion boards. Know what? Fucked Company readers aren't the brightest bulbs in the box. I'd much rather work for the readers of Fast Company. Glointhedark pens a somewhat clever parody of a Web-only story we published in 2002 that shows some smarts, but otherwise, the Happy Fun hoipolloi are a sorry lot.

Music to My Eyes X
Handstand Command has developed an online archive of past show fliers and screen-printed posters from musical groups involved in the arts collective. Most of the posters were created by Jef Czekaj, Tom Devlin, and Christy McCaffrey. Jef's section includes a lot of posters from Anchormen shows.

Workaday World XX
From my window at work, I overlook the alley behind the Scotch & Sirloin building -- and Casa Maria, a North End apartment building for the elderly. Every few minutes so far today, my eyes have been caught by a flash of white on the face of Casa Maria. I look up and out every time to see a woman washing the inside of the windows with a white cloth. The white of the cloth catches my eye as she wipes the inside of the windows. So far she's done about 10 windows on five different floors. She'll have been in every room of Casa Maria by the time she's done!

From the In Box: Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XI



Thanks, Shannon!

From the In Box: Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XI
This is just too fun. Media Dieticians are crawling out of the woodwork all around the world!

Here's an embarrassing snapshot of me and Rupert Ravens, designer of the independent Web site for the New Jersey Metro: Montclair CoF group, taken during the 2002 CoF Roadshow event. He just emailed me this with a birthday wish: "Stop smiling!"



My friend in Oregon, Su Yim, says encouragingly, "A premature happy 30th birthday to you! You're getting there before I am." Um, thanks.

Media Dietician Rob Upson says 30 is great "because it's between 29 and 31!" We've got a real math whiz there.

And my colleague Polly Labarre quoth, "I can tell you from experience that it only gets better in your 30's."

Oh, happy day. 30, here I come.

Corollary: Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XI
As I may have mentioned in an earlier Media Diet entry, tomorrow is my 30th birthday.

I was born almost exactly 30 years ago. It was 7:58 in the morning. I weighed 7 pounds and eight ounces. I was 20 inches long. In the last 30 years, I've come a long way. At this writing, it is 5:08 p.m. I now weigh about 150 pounds and top off at roughly 5' 8". I may not have grown much or come a long way, baby, but because tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of my birth, I think it's an eerily appropriate time for me to celebrate my 30th birthday. Spooky, even.

But this isn't about me. This -- as is the future -- is about you.

You, then, if you are in the Boston area, are invited to help me recognize and celebrate my many accomplishments, admirable qualities, and endeavors tomorrow night:

8 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 26

The Cambridgeport Saloon

300 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge

Between Central Square and MIT

Now, I'm no math major, but if turning 30 means hitting the big 3-0, and if 3-0 does in fact equal 3, then 3 is an interesting number. Let's go on a little mathematic journey. The year of my birth, 1973, plus that 3 yields 1976. That year, you American Media Dieticians may remember, marked a historic, patriotic occasion for the United States. It marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of our fine country.

Now, I'm no statesman, but to honor and recognize the many men and women who have fought, are fighting, or will fight have fought fighting (or whatever) in the name of our grand homeland, I'd like to propose a new system of social engagement alerts to help you participate in tomorrow evening's festivities -- the Boston Beer Party -- should you choose to do so. This is, after all, a democracy. I call the levels of alert

Red

White

Blue

"That's easy!" you might say. "Beautiful in its simplicity!" To that, I would reply, "Whoa, Nellie! Hold the phone! I'm not done yet!" On its face, the system may seem overly facile, but the alert codes have meaning. They, in fact, gauge your exact social engagement and investment in any activity, event, fete, or folderol, work related and otherwise. Please make note:

Red: I didn't eat anything after work, I was one of the first people to arrive tonight, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get home. Is this your beer?

White: I can't believe she just threw that dart at that guy's butt. I'm kind of embarrassed to be hanging out with people I met on the InterWeb, but this is kind of fun in a weird way. Hey, she's cuter than she is in Hot or Not!

Blue: Calgon, take me away! Is it really that early still? I'm only here because the guy's blog was mentioned in Boing Boing and Evhead and I hope he links to me, the dope. Maybe if I get in his good graces, he can help me become a member of the blogging 3l33t.

There you go. I encourage you to print this out, laminate it, and put it in a safe place for reference. If you fold it before using a laminating machine, be sure not to fold it so the code level descriptions or the details for the Boston Beer Party are on the inside folds of what you're about to laminate. That'd make it a useless piece of laminated paper. Some people.

Remember: Red, White, and Blue. If you don't celebrate my birthday, the terrorists win.

Corollary: Business Media Reportage Goes Bust, Now Boom? III
Some random snaps from this morning's all-hands meeting:

Tele-Phony II
I just called my parents in Wisconsin and misdialed by one number. It's amazing what a difference one digit can make.

The San Francisco Ex-Examiner
I interned for the San Francisco Examiner back in 1994 when it was still run under the joint operating agreement with the San Francisco Chronicle. My experiences there, while good, helped me decide to get out of newspaper work. The Fang family's ongoing abuse of the paper makes me glad that I no longer work there, for sure. What a sad, sad state of media affairs in the Bay Area. A city like San Francisco should easily be able to claim two quality dailies.

Event-O-Dex XXXIX
It's a toss up tonight:

6:30 p.m.: Harvard Business Review's new editor, Thomas Stewart, will speak to members of the Northwestern University's Medill Alumni Club and the American Society of Business Publication Editors at the Holiday Inn Newton.

7:30 p.m.: Sarah Frederick, Erica Friedman, and Kerey Luis will discuss "Schoolgirls & Superheroes: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Japanese Animation" in MIT's room 4-370.

Let's see... anime or business? Anime or business?

Business Media Reportage Goes Bust, Now Boom? III
Around 4 p.m. yesterday, Fast Company's founding editors, Bill Taylor and Alan Webber, circulated an internal memo announcing that their roles at the magazine were changing and that we're going to be looking for a new editor in chief. The Boston Globe's D.C. Denison and Chris Reidy somehow got a copy of the memo, and in today's paper, there's a story on their job shift. The article quotes directly from the emailed memo, positions the transition within the context of the current economic downturn and changing face of business media, and speculates what might happen next.

I've worked here since July 1997. I was the 17th employee. And it's been an amazing time. Bill and Alan aren't leaving entirely, but some relatively big changes are sure to come. Can't wait to see what this next stage in our evolution and development brings!

Workaday World XIX
Despite a relaxing and delicious pre-birthday dinner with Hiromi at Centro and an early bedtime, I couldn't sleep a wink last night. Just before 5 a.m., I decided to suck it up, stop faking coming slumber, get up and get out.

The sun is rising slowly over Casa Maria, and I was struck by how different the 5:30 T commuters are from my usual crew. Dour-faced elderly people, grizzled middle-aged men, and Latino workers joined me for my short hops on the Red and Green lines, and I was pleased by how uncrowded the platforms and train cars were.

I stopped by Mangia Mangia for an egg and cheese and an OJ, and I was slightly surprised -- and pleased -- that they were open at 6. Joe was one member of the restaurant's early-morning skeleton crew, and he had this to say:

Joe: You're up early this morning.
Me: Yeah. I was glad you were open.
Joe: I'm not. You wouldn't like keeping these hours.
Me: I'm not here every day.

Heartless? Maybe I could get used to this early morning thing. It's not even 6:30 and I've already gotten up and out, eaten breakfast, and read the newspaper. Hello, world.

Workaday World XVIII
I came in at 9 this morning to find more than 650 emails delivered since 6 p.m. Friday -- many of them regarding a recent reminder notice sent to Company of Friends members who haven't confirmed their memberships yet. Just now, at 5 p.m., I'm caught up on my customer-service email replies. Checking my Out Box, I've sent almost 200 individual emails today.

This is what I do.

Magazine Me XXIV
Adbusters is seeking cool hunters:

We're looking for help with an upcoming issue of Adbusters -- we're hunting for images of "cool" from outside American culture. By cool we mean everything that is hot, hip and dripping with brand-power, of course, but we're also digging into the older meaning of cool: the outsider, the honest dissenter, the subversive. If you come across magazines from outside the U.S. and Canada that express either of these meanings of cool, please send them our way (we prefer that you send an entire magazine). If what you send makes it into Adbusters, we'll make sure you get a free copy of the issue when it hits the stands.

Cheers,
Aiden Enns
Managing Editor
Adbusters Magazine
1243 West 7th Ave.
Vancouver BC Canada V6H 1B7

Radio Raves II
Streaming live to my laptop as we speak, so to speak, the jazz show on WNUR-FM. Phoneathon runs through this week Wednesday.

On the Blend IV
While I haven't kept up my smoothie every morning plan since December, I do have two or three smoothies for breakfast weekly. And I've been refining the recipe. Stopping my early tofu experiments, I've moved onto vanilla yogurt. There's just something about Stonyfield Farm organic lowfat vanilla yogurt, and I can get through a 32-ounce tub in about a week. Delish! I've also been adding two tablespoons of wheat germ to the smoothies. For the first time this weekend, on Nancy's recommendation, I cut up the bananas I had on hand and put them in little baggies in the freezer. I think that'll cut down on my throwing away of browning bananas, and it means I don't have to add ice cubes to the mix. Frozen bananas are totally the way to go. This morning, I was fresh out of frozen raspberries, so it was a blueberry-only day. Yum, smoothies.

Tele-phony
A friend got her first wrong number SMS this morning. It said, "Do u want to go to the mall later will mom take us."

Rock Shows of Note LV
Oh, I am burning too brightly as I near my 30th birthday. Last night, Kurt called around 9 saying that he was going to TT the Bear's to see Tim Easton play. Some friends and former bandmates of Kurt's now play in Easton's back-up band.

I arrived in time to catch a lengthy set by Jay Bennett and Edward Burch. The club was all a-twitter because Bennett's the guy who "got kicked out of Wilco." Word is he plays a role in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. They performed a solid set, albeit long, and I spent much of the evening chatting with Kurt and Geraldine. In fact, I didn't really pay much attention to Easton at all, and I went home way too late for a weeknight.

Dragging my feet today, Media Dieticians, and it's so beautiful and warm outside. And, adding mystery to misery, I somehow skinned my knuckles last night. I have no idea how I scraped my right hand so. Sigh. Tonight's going to be a quiet night inside, occupied by dishes, laundry, recycling, and the television. I'm getting too old for this.

Corollary: Television-Impaired VI
Pitchfork has published an article about the indie-rock leanings of Dawson's Creek, and the inclusion of local yokels Choo Choo la Rouge on said show.

It's an interesting look at how music is selected for TV shows -- and the impact that inclusion might (or might not) have on a band's "career." Interesting trivial tidbit: The Dawson's Creek Music Guide lists every song played in various episodes, complete with links to bands' Web sites, cross-referenced mentions of other episodes a musical group was featured in, and descriptions of the scenes during which a song was played. You can even compile your own soundtrack of songs from the show.

Now if only my copy of the Gilmore Girls soundtrack would arrive, already!

Magazine Me XXIII
Reasons You Should Read Sports Illustrated Even If You Don't Like Sports:

1. Steve Rushin. The senior writer's Air and Space columns read the way good letters from the editor should: personal, poignant, and principled.

2. The Show. This two-column roundup of one liners penned by David Letterman's head monologue writer, Bill Scheft, offers ample fuel for the water-cooler fire.

3. Faces in the Crowd. Few magazines have celebrated the Everyman -- here represented by junior, high-school, college, and other workaday amateur athletes -- as visibly or consistently.

4. The annual swimsuit issue. Meow!

5. You are -- or you know -- a man. Sometimes, knowing a little about sports, just a little, can be useful. And reading SI is hella better than watching sports, for crissakes.

Corollary: Games People Play V
Here are some snapshots fresh from the Bucket Ball tournament. Get your game on.


The object of our desire: The bucket.


Referee Daigo explains scoring to Andrew.


Dan gets in the zone...


...prepares to throw...


...and misses!


The fans in the cheap seats cheer, nonetheless.


Keeping score.


Showing team pride.


Twintern Paul gives Rob a run for his money.


Boo-yah!


More from the floor.


Wicked Dixon!


A close call.


Murdoch checking the schedule


"Oh, let's check the rules to see if that counts."


Game over.

As soon as the BBL releases the official scores and statistics, I'll file another tournament report.

Hiking History IV
The Boston World Explorers' Foundation gathered this past Sunday for its second expedition. On the coldest day of the winter to date, on the 80th anniversary of the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb, and the day before the Blizzard of 2003, foundation members delved into the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.

The Intrepid Explorers:

David Belson

Hiromi Hiraoka

Shannon Okey

Michael Reed

Heath Row



Here are some architectural, cultural, and historical highlights we explored in Beacon Hill.

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who introduced kindergartens to Boston, operated a bookstore at 13-15 West St. The site, next door to the modern-day Brattle Book Store, is now a parking lot. Margaret Fuller, edior of The Dial, held discussion salons in the shop. And Peabody, an active feminist, was the model for Henry James' character Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians.

The Boston Alms House, one of the country's earliest poor houses, was located at the corner of Beacon and Park streets.

Between 1848 and 1888, there was a reservoir complex located in the block delineated by Hancock, Derne, Bowdoin, and Mount Vernon streets, directly behind the State House. Water stored there was piped in 15 miles from Lake Cochituate in Natick. Today, nothing remains of the squat, imposing, fort-like structure.

Much of Boston Common and Beacon Hill covers land purchased from William Blackstone, one of Boston's earliest settlers. After one of the early colonies failed, Blackstone remained behind with his library of 200 books, making a wilderness home near a spring supposedly where Louisburg Square is now. A plaque at the corner of Beacon and Spruce streets also supposedly marks the location of Blackstone's house. Louisburg Square is the site of the first home owners' association in America. The precursor to the condo associations of today, residents ringing the square share upkeep costs to maintain the fenced park area. And each parking space is deeded to a resident.

William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic, lived at 4 Louisburg Square. He also hosted the Saturday Club discussion salon.

Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragette, edited the Women's Journal out of 5 Park St.

Julia Ward Howe, writer of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" lived at 32 Mount Vernon St. She wrote the hymn at 24 West Cedar, the former home of abolitionist Wendell Phillips. She also held meetings of the Radical Club at 13 Chestnut.

Edwin Booth, the actor brother of assassin John Wilkes Booth, lived at 29A Chestnut. He was performing in a play in Boston at the time of Lincoln's killing. Upon hearing news of the shooting, he skipped town.

Robert Frost lived at 88 Mount Vernon. Henry James' father and sister lived at 131 Mount Vernon. The view of Beacon Hill, the Charles River, and Cambridge detailed in chapter 20 of The Bostonians may have been the view from their home. Mount Vernon was once called "Mount Whoredom" because of Beacon Hill's former reputation as a red-light district.

Not far from the Charles Street Meeting House at the corner of Mount Vernon and Charles is the converted fire station that housed the cast of Real World Boston.

Acorn Street is a cobbled, privately owned street. It's arguably Boston's most photographed street -- sure enough, when we approached it, some British tourists were taking pictures! -- and among the city's narrowest.

Pinckney Street traditional separated black from white Beacon Hill. (When the wealthy moved into the North End, they pushed out the previous black residents. Then, after the Beacon Hill neighborhood was filled in using soil from Trimountaine, the wealthy followed the blacks there, too. Henry David Thoreau lived at 4 Pinckney. Louisa May Alcott lived at No. 20. The House of Odd Windows at No. 24 has no two windows the same on the side facing the street. Workers renovating 62 Pinckney in the '20s discovered hidden chambers that were used to house slaves along the Underground Railroad.

Phillips Street also features Underground Railroad stops. Fugitive slaves stayed in boarding houses paid for by members of the Committee of Vigilance, an abolitionist group organized by Julia Ward Howe's husband. Samuel Gridley Howe also founded the Perkins Institute for the Blind.

Rollins Square, a cul de sac that opens off of Revere Street, dead ends at a fake house. The façade, complete with pillars, window shutters, and a rocking chair, blocks a 20-foot drop to the street on the other side.

Lastly, even though Buzzy's is gone, part of the former Charles Street Jail remains near the Charles/MGH T stop and Mass General. Its central building, which will be incorporated into a new hospital/hotel complex, was built in 1849 at the end of Boston's Granite Age. It was crowded and miserable for inmates and closed in the '80s.

Thanks to everyone who participated! "We may not know where we're going, but we've read a lot about it."

Sources: Philip Bergen, Old Boston in Early Photographs, 1850-1918; William Corbett, Literary New England; Fodor's Boston '96; Walt Kellley, What They Never Told You About Boston; Greg and Katherine Letterman, Walking Boston; and A. McVoy McIntyre, Beacon Hill: A Walking Tour

Music to My Ears XXVI
Bug Bytes is a reference library of digitized insect sounds. Eerily beautiful ambient sounds that, if you listen to too many, may just give you the creeps.

Thanks to Memepool.

Games People Play V
Some co-workers invented a new sport called Bucket Ball. The first Bucket Ball tournament starts tonight at 5 p.m.

It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World XXIV
As if a world in which Maxim shills hair dye for men and Hustler revitalizes seedy strip clubs wasn't bad enough, the female-oriented surf clothes maker Roxy has teamed up with MTV and HarperCollins to create a TV show and book series about girl surf culture. Buy the book, wear the pants.

Shades of DC Shoes' Project Detention show. Is that still airing?

Thanks to Bookslut.

Event-O-Dex XXXVIII
One for the day planners:

Saturday, March 29: Beantown Zinetown 6 will run from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Mass College of Art Gym in Boston.

Thanks to Lisa Off My Jammy.

Radio Raves
WNUR-FM is one of the best college radio stations in the country, if not one of the best radio stations period. I DJ'd there between 1991 and 1995 while a student at Northwestern University, hosting the jazz, folk, and Shaking and Stomping show (surf, rockabilly, and garage).

WNUR's annual pledge drive -- Phoneathon -- starts tomorrow.

Please consider supporting WNUR 89.3 FM this year (between Thursday, Feb. 21, through Feb. 27). The Jazz Show on WNUR runs Monday-Friday from 5 a.m. through 12:30 p.m., giving everyone in Chicago and all over the world via our Webcast 37.5 hours of jazz every week. WNUR depends on its listeners for financial support -- Northwestern University only pays for transmitter-related expenses, basically just enough enough to keep our signal up. Everything else in our budget (programming-related expenses, repairs, replacements, upgrades, etc.) comes from the money we raise.

Check out WNUR's Web site starting tomorrow morning to see all the premiums we're offering as gifts to our donors. The Jazz Show is offering over 80 different CDs that are representative of the music we play over the air. If you think non-commercial, independent, and local jazz programming in Chicago is important, then this is a great way to show your support.

That's just the Jazz Show's email solicitation. You can check out WNUR's programming schedule online, as well as learn more about Phoneathon.

I give WNUR money every year. And I don't even mind not receiving the premiums.

Happy Birthday to Media Dieticians XI
I turn 30 next Wednesday.

People tell me that that's kind of a big deal.

Friends and family ask me what I'm doing to celebrate.

I'll tell you what I'm doing.

To honor all past, present, and future university teaching assistants and professors, I am holding office hours.

That's right: Office hours.

If by "office" you mean "bar."

(I'm totally serious about the "hours" bit. Turning 29 was hard enough. 30 should be a cakewalk. If by "cake" you mean "beer." And if by "walk" you mean "drink.")

The essentials:

Heath Row's 30th Birthday Office Hours

8 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003

Cambridgeport Saloon

300 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge

(Between Central Square and MIT)

Any and all Media Dieticians are invited. Come and go as you wish. Bring friends and family members. Bring quarters for the jukebox.

Quoth the Boston Phoenix, "The Cambridgeport Saloon is no den of bigotry; it's not even a very rowdy place. There are just as many MIT students and townie sports fans hanging at the bar as there are skinheads. But thank God the latter have taken over the jukebox, which cranks out a collection of '77-vintage UK punk and early American hardcore as extensive as you're likely to find in any bar."

Quoth the MIT Tech, "The Cambridge License Commission has voted to require the Cambridgeport Saloon to hire a security guard on weekend evenings to patrol the sidewalk outside the bar."

Thank god it's Wednesday. And thank you for your attention.

Event-O-Dex XXXVII
Friday, Feb. 21: Lloyd Arthur (saxophone and guitar) and Frank O'Dell (drums) perform a free spazz jazz show at 8 p.m. at Twisted Village Records on Harvard Square.

Corollary: Big Brother Is Watching XII
Portland, Oregon-based attorney Bert Krages has developed a legal handbook for photographers, as well as a downloadable guide to your rights as a shutterbug. Quoth Krages:

The right to take photographs is now under assault more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples include photographing industrial plants, bridges, and vessels at sea. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.

Ironically, unrestricted photography by private citizens has played an integral role in protecting the freedom, security, and well being of all Americans. Photography in the United States has contributed to improvements
in civil rights, curbed abusive child labor practices, and provided information important to investigating crimes. These images have not always been pretty and often have offended the sensibilities of governmental and
commercial interests who had vested interests in a status quo that was adverse to the majority in our country.

Photography has not contributed to a decline in public safety or economic vitality in the United States. When people think back to the acts of terrorism that have occurred over the last forty years, none have depended on or even involved photography. Restrictions on photography would have not prevented any of these acts. Similarly, some corporations have a history of abusing the rights of photographers under the guise of protecting their trade secrets. These claims are almost always bogus since entities are required to keep trade secrets from public view if they want to protect them. Trade secret laws do not give anyone the right to persecute photographers.

The Photographer's Right is a downloadable guide that is loosely based on the ACLU's Bust Card and the Know Your Rights flyer. It may be downloaded and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry them your wallet, pocket or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography. You may distribute the guide to others provided that such distribution is not done for commercial gain and credit is given to the author.

Thanks to Interesting People.

Big Brother Is Watching XII
Attention, trainspotters! A student at Haverford College was arrested last weekend while working on a homework assignment in Philadelphia. As part of the Cities project, the student was taking pictures of SEPTA facilities when he was arrested, detained for a few hours, and eventually released. Word is that taking photographs of public transit facilities is cause for arrest during "Code Orange" alerts.

Thanks to Interesting People.

It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World XXIII
Ogilvy & Mather in Toronto has created an ad spot for the Television Bureau of Canada's awards, the Bessies. It's a well-produced and bittersweet short film about the birth -- and death -- of an idea.

Thanks to Media Dietician Laszlo Perlorian.

Corollary: The Blogging of Business
Well, one of my questions about how AlwaysOn plans to incorporate members' voices outside of comments and discussion posts has been addressed. In my in box yesterday was an email from Tony Perkins that reads:

AlwaysOn wants your opinion! But it has to be 600 words or less.

AO is your site. I would like to extend you a personal invitation to tell the rest of us what you think. This opinion piece should be 600 words or less, very specific in its point, and ideally supported by a few data points and a few links to other sites.

Once you have a proof-read version of your contribution please feel free to send it to me at this e-mail address. We look forward to seeing what you come up with.

We now have over 6,000 members, and when you browse the member profiles you can see that it is a pretty smart group. So in addition to our regular correspondents, we wanted to open up the site to our most thoughtful members.

In the next version of the site (v.75) we will be adding a member blog room so everyone can go at it. And we will be posting the entries that get the most views and highest ratings on the home page. Any other suggestions on how you think we should evolve the site would be appreciated.

Seems like they're heading in the right direction!

Comic Books and Commerce
Ninth Art's Paul O'Brien asks: Has Marvel sold its creative soul to the anti-smoking lobby?

Blogging About Blogging L
Google just bought Pyra Labs, maker of Blogger. Congratulations, Ev! And happy President's Day.

Thanks to Interesting People.

Event-O-Dex XXXVI
The Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square in Cambridge is hosting an exhibition of original comic art featuring R. Crumb, Dan Clowes, Rick Altergott, Ariel Bordeaux, Jack Davis, Greg Cook, Art Spiegelman, and others through the month of March. "Comics as Art" can be seen at 1353 Cambridge St., Cambridge.

Comics and Community VIII
The March 2003 edition of Wizard includes an item about an interesting music-and-comics collaboration between Jim Mahfood and DJ Z-Trip. Now that Mahfood has moved to LA, he's done some "live art" at the El Rey Theater in December. While Z-Trip played hip-hop and funk music, Mahfood threw up some giant murals. Word is they intend to do more comics collaborations in the future.

Comic Book Collections IV
Not so much comic books as s-f and punk-rock fanzines, here are two interesting DIY archival opportunities.

Per the September 2002 issue of Locus, and as mentioned here Aug. 2, 2002, the University of Calgary Library acquired the s-f book and magazine collection of William Robert Gibson, who died at the of 92 in 2001. Gibson's collection spans Jules Verne's 19th-century work to the 21st century's cyperpunk writing. It also comprises pulp magazines from the 1920s-1950s. The library estimates that it needs to raise $500,000 to clean, preserve, catalog, and house the collection, which will be open to researchers. Email Blane Hogue, director of development, information resources, for more information.

And in Maximumrocknroll #236, Mykel Board says that the Salt Lake City Library System is paying cash money for non-newsprint zines. Mail materials to Brooke Young, Salt Lake City Public Library, 209 E. 500 S., Salt Lake City, UT 84111 -- with a bill -- and the library will send you a check to cover the donation. Board's already sent them some stuff and gotten his.

Pieces, Particles XIII
With the onset of winter in Boss Town, I've been spending some real quality time on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner. I hope to keep up with my clip file more frequently, and I apologize for the daunting entry that follows. That said, the following media-related stories recently spotted in print publications might be worth a look. Heads and decks, only. Heads and decks.

Alternative Voices on Campus by Emma Ruby-Sachs and Timothy Waligore, The Nation, Feb. 17, 2003
Progressive journals are key in creating a movement, but they lack support

Are You Addicted to TV? by Martiga Lohn, Natural Health, January/February 2003
You can turn it off whenever you want, right? Or can you? Find out what TV is really doing to you and how altering your habits can change your life

Big Brother Is Also Being Watched, with a New Alarm by Eleanor Heartney, The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2003
Even before 9/11, artists were looking at issues raised by a society of surveillance

Blabberwocky by Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe Magazine, Feb. 9, 2003
We've all begun to talk in media-driven stupid-speak, clipped cliches and solecisms that amount to a verbal virus

Bone: The End, Wizard, February 2003

Boston's Logan International Airport by Douglas Corrigan, Airliners, September/October 2002
Gateway to New England

Cable TV System Uprooted, and Some Russian Immigrants See Vestiges of Totalitarian Past by Andy Newman, The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2003
A building manager cuts off reception of a Russian-language channel

Charles N. Brown: The Joy of SF by Jennifer Hall, Locus, September 2002

Community Rallies to Aid Creator, Wizard, February 2003

Copyright Monopolies by Andrew Shapiro, The Nation, Feb. 17, 2003

Culture Change by David Goodman, Mother Jones, January/February 2003
Does the selling of Stonyfield Farm yogurt signals the end of socially responsible business -- or a new beginning?

Dial Again by Roger Angell, The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2003
On the Ameche

Doctor, My Eyes by Joel Achenbach, National Geographic, February 2003
How we watch TV ads

Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together by Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2003
A new movement of collectives, with names like rock bands, harks back to the 60's (an uncool notion for these digital-age multitaskers).

E-Epistles by Anjula Razdan, Utne, January-February 2003
A letter-writing revival

Fear of a Punk Planet by Ivan Kreilkamp, The Nation, Jan. 13-20, 2003

Flash News by Geoff Edgers, The Boston Globe, Jan. 26, 2003
Call them reality videos. They show young women willing to life their shirts, and 4.5 million were sold last year

The Forest for the Trees by Michael Ackerman, The Big Takeover, No. 51

Game School's Finest Minds by Mark Schone, Rolling Stone, Feb. 20, 2003
Meet the young stars of a university devoted to video games -- they're the happiest dorks in college

Get Ready for the Blogs by Leif Utne, Utne, January-February 2003
Making good on the Internet's promise of a global village

Getting Your War On by Camille Dodero, The Boston Phoenix, Oct. 25, 2002

Here at GQ by Martin Beiser, GQ, September 2002
Notes on forty-five years of ascendancy

Here Comes the Fuzz by Richard Linnett, Advertising Age, Jan. 13, 2003
Bat Boy crosses the line

The Hidden Life of Art Supplies by Sara Zaske, Sierra, January/February 2003

Holy Rock 'n' Rollers by Lauren Sandler, The Nation, Jan. 13-20, 2003

How to Write a Catchy Beer Ad by Chris Ballard, The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 26, 2003
Footballs, guitars -- and twins -- turned a commercial into a phenomenon

The Hush of History by Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, Jan. 26, 2003
Not all at Quabbin is a watery grave; relics of people and towns remain

Just Plain Folks Write Songs, Too by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2003
For decades, song-sharking has preyed on naive, hopeful amateurs. But sometimes the racket can turn up winners

Ladder to Success by Joanna Weiss, The Boston Globe, Feb. 9, 2003
Step by step, publicists help turn shabby area into hip new district for Boston's martini crowd

The Lost Art of Reading the Newspaper at Night by A.J. Jacobs, Esquire, February 2003

Major Labels' Century-Long Abuse of Artists (and Customers), and Why Things Are Finally Starting to Change by Jack Rabid, The Big Takeover, No. 51

The Man Who Wasn't There by David Wild, Rolling Stone, Jan. 23, 2003
Being the director of Adaptation and the skate-punk husband of Hollywood royalty is one thing. Being able to talk about it, well, um...

A Meter Man with a Mission by Marilyn Berlin Snell, Sierra, January/February 2003

Mexico City's VW Bugs Are Headed for Extinction by Tim Weiner, The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2003

Mobile Afterlife by Katie Fehrenbacher, ReadyMade, No. 5
Where do cell phones go when they die?

New Plaque Marks the First Home of the Globe by Karla Kingsley, The Boston Globe, Jan. 25, 2003

Not So Funny by Mike Miliard, The Boston Phoenix, Feb. 7, 2003
"Comic" strips get serious about life

Online Treachery by Lazlow, Playboy, February 2003 (?)
Net gaming has become a sinister playground for lurkers and assholes

Orville Poundridge's GQ by David Kamp, GQ, September 2002
A scrapbook of the century past

The Power of Music by Ann Powers, The Nation, Jan. 13-20, 2003

Practical Publishers by Phil Hall, The Hartford Courant, Oct. 17, 2002
Online magazines succeed by holding down startup costs, sometimes to zero

The "Public Interest" by Bill O'Driscoll, The Nation, Jan. 6, 2003

Real People by Jenn Shreve, ReadyMade, No. 5
In advertising's new reality, the ultimate sales pitch is you

The Reconnection by Chris Wright, The Boston Phoenix, Jan. 24, 2003
Two years after his break-up with WBUR, Chris Lydon is back in business

Scientists Make Music with DNA, The Boston Globe, Jan. 19, 2003

Social Climbing by Blaize Wilkinson, ReadyMade, No. 5
How to be an urban tour guide

Spambusters by Jacqueline White, Utne, January-February 2003
How to rid your inbox of penis enlargement offers

Spammers ISO Respect by Brad Stone, Newsweek, Dec. 30, 2002/Jan. 6, 2003

Straight to Video by John Mankiewicz, The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2003

Tangled up in Spam by James Gleick, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 9, 2003
Those unwanted messages have become the bane of the Internet. Why we can't just say no

Teen Beat by Mark Singer, The New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2003
What happens when a high-school weekly is the only newspaper in town

That Sucking Sound by Neal Pollack, GQ, February 2003
Gimmicks, antics and ironic distance. Who needs real talent when you've mastered punk-rock foolishness?

TV on DVD: A-OK by Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe Magazine, Jan. 26, 2003
Several television series are now available on disc, meaning a longer afterlife and maybe even better programs in the future

Urban Legends by Michael Azerrad, The New Yorker, Aug. 12, 2002

Utopia 2.0 by Leif Utne, Utne, January-February 2003
Play games, build a future

Video Underground by Mike Miliard, The Boston Phoenix, Oct. 25, 2002
Indie film finds a home

Voices of America by Tom Sinclair, Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 14, 2003
For 50 years, ordinary folk have paid to have their verse set to music. Now song-poems are being hailed as art

Wall Street Journal Bigs Up NME!, New Musical Express, Jan. 4, 2003
Financial bible acclaims our role in breaking new talent on both sides of the pond

Was Romenesko Rebuilt in a Daze? by Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher, Nov. 25, 2002
Forget Iraq, Osama, and the ad-revenue blahs: When a favorite Web site gets redesigned, all hell breaks loose in media land

What It's Really Like... to Give Birth on Television by Stephanie Karp, Parents, February 2003
We agreed to let a camera crew videotape my labor and delivery and broadcast it to millions

When Uncle Sam Wanted Us by Paul Rauber, Sierra, January/February 2003
To Vice President Dick Cheney, conservation is just "a sign of personal virtue." In World War II, it was every citizen's duty

Why Information Will No Longer Be Free by Michael Scherer, Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2003

Zen Is Not a Perfume by Jan Chozen Bays, Buddhadharma, Fall 2002

If you work for a magazine and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

Digesting the Daily VIII
Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.

MTV correspondent battles stereotypes, bad music
Asian American dishes on celebrities, making it big, in front of crowd of 200
(Jan. 14, 2003)

A paper monopoly
Norris Bookstore is where NU gets its texts -- but what happens if service falls short?
(Jan. 16, 2003)

How Norris cornered the market
(Jan. 16, 2003)

TV star visits As-Am class
Actor Shin tells class about difficulties of getting minority roles in television
(Jan. 16, 2003)

Lord of the lingo
NU library employee has mastered the mystical tongue central to Tolkien's trilogy
(Jan. 17, 2003)

Pick-A-Prof posts profs' grade history on the Web
Site already in place at 50 universities; NU has no plans to go beyond CTEC
(Jan. 17, 2003)

Double trouble
Rumor that Olsen twins will attend NY proves false but funny
(Jan. 29, 2003)

Weekend detention to the Daily's editorial team for thinking that Janeane Garofalo's stand-up appearance on campus was worth so much ink. The Jan. 17, 2003 edition of the Daily features two (2) feature stories about the show, taking up about half of the front page (both with jumps inside). Sure, the pieces are theoretically different. Raksha Varma reports on Garofalo's act, and Jennifer Leopoldt interviews the comedian by phone. But the two stories might have worked much better if combined into one story -- and perhaps included in one of the paper's two feature sections. Access doesn't warrant so much coverage, and unless it's a hella slow news day in Evanston, you wasted a front page. Janeane's great, but she's not all that.

If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

Corollary: The Blogging of Business
Ev points something out about AlwaysOn that I didn't catch on to. By hooking AlwaysOn's membership database into Salesforce.com, AlwaysOn is able to offer advertisers and sponsors real-time access to the users' demographics. Ev read the service's privacy statement, which I failed to do -- I usually just breeze on by stuff like that -- and it indicates that AlwaysOn will only share aggregate information to third parties, not the individual user data that Salesforce.com affords. "Sounds like a blatant violation," Ev concludes.

Music to My Eyes IX
Liz Enthusiasm's new "Stakeout!" video for local synthpop band Freezepop is perfect for Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!

Workaday World XVII
L'esprit d'elevator:

Fellow passenger: Bitter out there!
Me: Cold, today.
Fellow passenger: Just booked a ticket to Myrtle Beach. In April.
Me: Two months away!
Fellow passenger: If only I can make it.
Me: Count down those days.

Yes, Media Dieticians, it's cold in Boss Town today. Seems much colder than 17 degrees. Sheesh.

North End Moment XXXIII
I just saw a dark blue delivery van with the URL big.express.com printed on the passenger side door. No Web site exists at that URL. What's the point?

Blogging About Blogging XLIX
Sorry to be so blog-specific today, but that's the way the ball bounces some days. Meg's got a new game going. Blog Logic brings the online community together to discuss why they blog. Andcetera. I just signed up, and posts to date address, well, the value of blogs and online communities.

Thanks to Doc Searls.

Media Meet Space IV
My colleague Dan Cederholm went to Dave Winer's live blogging session at Harvard on Tuesday night so I didn't have to. Dan Bricklin took photos. Other folks wrote about it, too.

I kinda wish I'd have gone.

Comics and Community VII
Savant's Kyle Rivest has declared March 3 Read a Comic Book in Public Day. Here are his guidelines:

The comic book you read has to be in pamphlet format.

Locally made mini-comics are encouraged, but not required.

Only one comic book.

If you make your own comics, it has to be someone else's book that you read.

It has to be in a public place where people can actually see you.

It must be a book you enjoy and would be willing to recommend to a complete stranger.

Right on, Kyle. Here's to March 3!

Thanks to Bookslut.

The Blogging of Business
Fortune's David Kirkpatrick wrote this week about the new AlwaysOn insiders' network for "chiefs, geeks, investors, boosters and wonks." Created by Upside and Red Herring founder Tony Perkins, AlwaysOn is billed as a "spontaneous and uncensored arena" in which members can share their business experience, ideas, and insight.

Ostensibly combining business reportage and blogging, AlwaysOn strikes me instead as a business news service with comment and discussion tools. Organizing material in more than 10 categories, including the Always On Generation, Real-Time Economy, and the tumble-weed town of the Underground Web (perhaps indicating the site creators' limited knowledge of independent net culture), the site is currently relatively quiet, despite a growing membership roster. While Perkins' 10 commandments are praise-worthy, I'm not convinced the service, albeit young, deserves Kirkpatrick's praise and hype.

Instead of representing the "Ebay-ization of media," AlwaysOn strikes me as a business-oriented Electric Minds as it was at launch. There's site manager-created content -- and member commentary and discussion. That discussion is bolstered by a robust membership directory, complete with contact information, which will further member interaction off site. But Perkins' use of the word "blog" is worrisome. Perkins calls the site's editorial entries "blogs." He also calls member comments and discussion posts blogs. But as newsworthy as blogs have been and will be, AlwaysOn includes extremely limited self-authoring tools. I cannot find a way to add my own entry, much less a dedicated personal blogging space.

In the end, if all we're doing is responding to what others have published or written, the success of something like AlwaysOn will rest squarely on two things: the value of its staff's editorial content -- and the personalities and participation of the people reading that content.

But is AlwaysOn blogging? I'm not so sure.

From the In Box: Comics and Conversation III
You are the first person to "IM'erview" me -- and although my work is not particularly your tea of choice, you manage to be respectful of it rather than slandering. Very appropiate. Regardless, thanks for the free press.

My 13-page story in NEW THING: Identity -- I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BEARD SMOKES -- does carry a resemblance to the type of dialogue displayed in LEGAL ACTION and Studygroup -- but in place of sheer SHOCK HUMOR VALUE (and that is all that BEARD AND BABY BROTHER and SUPERCAT CUM are) I made a poignant TRUE-TO-MY-LIFE  tale of young love gone fucked diagnol-wise. Of all the comics I've done so far, it is the one that counts for a more mature/intellectual readership. You might even like it. -- Victor Cayro

Music to My Eyes VIII
I just met Erich Thaler, a former member of the now-defunct Boston hard-rock band Stompbox. Now an employee of the Sir Speedy copy shop in the Scotch & Sirloin building, Erich has a degree in music synthesis and used to work for a large-format color printer. We discussed the difference between print production and copy shop work, what it was like to sign with a label in the early '90s, the experience of touring with a band, and the enjoyment inherent in live music.

"For every band that makes it, there are hundreds that got one shot with a label," Erich says. "I know plenty of people who slug it out into their 40's. The music industry is so youth-oriented that they're not going to sign anyone over 20. I need to find a job that'll support me into my 50's, you know?"

Before Stompbox disbanded, they released a couple of 7-inches, put out a self-released record on Wonderdrug (which also included them on a compilation, and put out two albums with a major affiliated with Columbia and Sony. Now Erich works in a copy shop located in a low-traffic part of town. Were it not for the businesses in the Scotch & Sirloin building and across the street toward North Station, the copy shop would probably disband, too.

Weather Report IX
The sun just broke the top of the Casa Maria apartment building behind the Scotch & Sirloin building, illuminating the swirl of falling snow outside my office window. Absolutely beautiful.

Call Me
While eating lunch at the 'Rang not long ago, I heard the pleasing strains of my Green Day ring tone as someone called me on my cell. Glad I didn't put down my BLT to take the call, because I just listened to a voicemail from someone in the 978 who thought my name was Dave, that I was going to buy a condo in North Redding, and that I was interested in getting some financing. It is not, I am not, and I am not.

Now, I don't get a lot of wrong number calls on my cell, but the Ethicist reader in me wonders whether I'm now responsible to call the fellow back and set him straight that he didn't actually leave a message for Dave. What if Dave doesn't get the financing for the condo purchase because I got this voicemail?

Debate over. I just returned the call.

Media Diet: Hi. I just got a voicemail from this number from someone who was calling about condo financing, and I wanted to let you know it was a wrong number.
Receptionist: Do you know who called?
Media Diet: All I know is that they were calling some guy named Dave and that the condo is in North Redding. They didn't leave their name.
Receptionist: Oh, I wouldn't even know where to begin if you don't know who called.
Media Diet: Well, I just thought you should know. I didn't want this guy to lose the opportunity because of a wrong number, you know?
Receptionist: Oh, well, thanks for calling.
Media Diet: I tried.

Dave, I hope you find the financing you need to buy the condo of your dreams. I did my best.

In the Cards
Ever wonder who writes Hallmark cards -- and how? The Washington Post Magazine's Jason puts pen to paper to take a look at Hallmark's creative process and the value of emotional content. It's a solid exploration of what makes greeting cards work, but I'm kind of glad I don't work in the Masculine Relative Birthday department.

Thanks to Pure Content.

Big Brother Is Watching XI
Sometimes, Big Brother isn't so big. A former Boston College student has been indicted for installing a key-logging device that kept tabs on more than 100 campus computers and accessing personnel and student databases.

Thanks to EvHead.

Corollary: Hiking History III
Brad, a founding member of the Boston World Explorers' Foundation, has put up his photographs from our inaugural expedition last month. Trivia tidbit: The Flying Cloud is not just the name of a ship built by Donald McKay. It's also the name of one of today's water taxis! We saw it from the pier shortly after reaching the McKay monument.

Boston World Explorers' Foundation
I've been researching the second expedition for the Boston World Explorers' Foundation, and I'm thinking that if the weather cooperates, it might be nice to get out and about this Saturday or Sunday.

Based on my reading and research, it might be interesting to explore the Beacon Hill area of the city, sticking to the section bounded by Beacon, Bowdoin, Cambridge, and Charles streets. Historically home to Boston's early African-American population, the neighborhood once included Underground Railroad stops, radical discussion salons, a long-gone reservoir complex, and the Charles Street Jail.

The walk will also feature Boston's first home-owners' association, one of the city's narrowest streets, and other architectural and historical highlights.

If you'd like to be in on this second expedition, let me know what day works best for you. We'll see what comes together!

Rock Shows of Note LIV
Last week was way too active on the nightlife and show-going scene. This week needs to be much quieter. That said, I did take in some excellent music over the last five nights. Wednesday night found me at the Druid on Inman Square, where I caught up with Sarah and some of her friends to see Paddy Soul, Eric Saulnier, and Martin Finke. Sonier works sound at the Abbey, so a lot of the Abbey staff was there to support him. We didn't stick around to see Finke, but I enjoyed the first two solo guitar singer-songwriter sets. Seems like music at the Druid is picking up.

Thursday night found me at the Choppin' Block near Northeastern for the Mister Records CD release party. While I wasn't too impressed by Shark Mountain, I quite enjoyed the sets by Plunge Into Death, Tunnel of Love, and Cathy Cathodic. Having met some co-workers for drinks after leaving the office -- and before taking the E line to Brigham's Circle -- the night got rather long and late, and I recall making eyes at a red-haired girl with dreadlocks.



She was at the 71 Sunbeam show Saturday at TT the Bear's, too, oddly enough. I made a point not to be so creepy this time. Not sure why I found her so captivating Thursday. In any event, Neil came up from Connecticut for the show, the band's first in Boston since he moved back there for school. And their shows in Brooklyn and Providence seem to have helped them find a new confidence and presence. Quite an impressive set, despite the low mix on Jeremy's xylophone solo. And the band has a new fan! There was a fellow standing right up in front, dancing, taking digital photos, and air drumming for much of the show. I'm glad 71 Sunbeam has been able to continue despite half the band's relocation to Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Sally Crewe, who usually plays with the Sudden Moves, performed a solo set that was enjoyable but seemingly unappreciated by the crowd. It's hard to play solo at TT's unless you're on the other side, and as Crewe's set progressed, the crowd on the floor diminished and conversation increased. Laguardia followed, but by then, I was on the other side hanging out with Neil catching up. Like Thursday, Saturday got long and late, with me heading to Shay's to meet up with Dan, Fitz, Nick, and Jenn. Dana, who waitresses at Shay's, plays in the Signal, another local band. We ended the night at Charlie's, where we hung out upstairs -- and where I saw Natalie Portman.

All in all, not a bad week for music, but a bad week for sleep.

Thanks to Media Dietician Vincent Scorziello for the research assistance.

Comics and Conversation III
Last night's Boston Chamber Music Society concert last night snuck up on me, and I ended up staying in to read and write on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner. Planning the itinerary for this weekend's Boston World Explorers' Foundation excursion, I had my hiptop near at hand to research sights and sites on the Web. In the midst of my research, I received an IM from Victor Cayro. Curious about my recent comments about his piece in Studygroup 12 #2, Cayro's IM query turned into a proper IM'erview about why he avoids the small press, how Jessica Abel got him into comics, and life in Dubuque, Iowa. Here's the transcript.

VICTORJULIOCAYRO: You don't really think that my strip was offensive and insensitive, do you?
h3athrow: Memory kicking in... The bathtub strip?
V: bathh tub?
h: I don't have that anthology right here, so id need to refresh what made me say that
V: not, rivalry among siblings
V: my baby
V: my baby brother
V: who is challenged
V: chair challenge
V: Pepsi Challenge
V: RETARDED
V: Study Group number 2
h: Ah. Lemme get it.
V: yes sir
h: yep, pretty insensitive
V: how so
V: immature?
V: poorly illustrated?
V: aww schucks
h: Your portrayal of the retarded guy and the violence inflicted on him. I didn't find the punchline a payoff...
h: Wasnt a funny piece
V: Jessica helped me write the script
V: Jessica Abel
h: Was that where the piece started? You wanted to get to "tard-get"?
V: no, I wanted something to drink
V: and my Brother was looking at me funny
V: because retards have a way of looking at things funny
V: and looking funny
V: it's nature's way really
h: Is your brother really retarded? And you don't think your piece is hurtful?
V: he loves it
V: I make photocopies of the strip for him
h: I suppose all is well, then
V: and colors them with crayolas
V: and defecation
V: NO, I don't have a baby brother
V: When I was 6 yrs old I was traumitized by a severe and profound individual
h: im sorry to hear about that
V: never gotten over it
V: still hurts
V: inside
h: How do you know the studygroup people?
V: Zackary Soto saw my piece in LEGAL action comics
V: and chatted about ghost stories
V: a connection was made
V: and unbreakable bond
V: never made out or anything, be is allot of fun
V: but he, I meant
V: are friends with some of those guys?
V: are you, I meant
V: ?
h: Hung out with souther and sammy a little at ape. A friend is publishing Marc Bell's book
V: I haven't any of those guys, and I never been to the APe before
V: you do the SPX?
h: Not yet
V: its a great show
V: like of big names were there this year
V: I've been doing that show since 99
V: Art Speigleman, Charles Burns, Eddie Campbell, one of those mexican soap opera comics dudes.....
h: How long you been doing comics?
V: Evan Dorkin
V: Dean Haspiel
V: Since I was 19
V: I think
V: so that'd be in 2000
V: but my first published work is GARBAGE
V: Big Book of the &0s
V: DC/VErigo
V: GARBAGE
h: Whatd you do for that?
V: money
V: and the idea of getting published sounded cool
h: Howd you get involved in that project?
V: it had always been my dream to a published comic artist
V: Jessica Abel told me that the place to get a good basic idea of the indie comic world was through a weekend at SPX
V: she was right
V: she introduced me to Jim Higgins
V: who was the editor for the Big Book series at that time
V: he like the stuff had
V: although my old stuff sucks
V: Jim Higgins left DC and published his own book, that I will recommend
V: NEW THING: Identity, you have that?
h: It sounds familiar
V: I have a sensitive 13 page story in there, and Tomer Hanuka of Bipolar has a good story in there
V: everyone in the book couldn't be more different, style wise
h: Sounds good. New Bipolar coming soon, i hear
V: Tomer is a machine
V: hes a decent guy
V: smokes Marlboro light 100's
V: oh yeah, makes good comics
h: You have other stuff out?
V: Legal Action Comics
V: New THing: Identity
V: I'm working on my story for Legal Action Comics 2
V: and just finished a story for a book entitled True POrn
V: that will feature comics by Kochalka, Robyn Chaopman, Ivan Brunettie
V: and a slew of others
V: it will be an adventure
V: Any minis of your own?
V: no, never done a mini
V: don't think I ever will
V: I only want to do things that will see large print run
V: or at more that 5o copies
V: or at least more than 50 copies I mean
V: I can barely type or think clearly right now, excuse the grammital errors and misspellings
h: No worries. Can i use some of this in media diet? First time someone im'd me bc of a review
V: sure, go for broke
h: Where do you live?
V: although that part about Jessica Abel co writing THE BEARD AND BABY BROTHER comic, that is completely false
V: a joke
V: I live in Dubuque Iowa
h: I thought so
V: ?
V: Why do you say that?
h: That the abel thing was a joke? Didn't seem like jessica...
V: looking me up on the net?
V: Yes, I know it doesn't sound like anything Jessica Abel would even look at(the strip), THAT IS THE JOKE
V: a very small and insignificant joke...
h: Nah, the joke was good
V: regardless, I didn't want her hearing of some website saying that he had anything to do with the creation of the said strip
V: no, why did you figure I lived in Dubuque?
h: I didn't. Our lines crossed.
h: Do you think your clarification of the abel thing is good enough, or do you want that cut entirely?
V: ok, where do you live?
V: If you think that it makes for good media diet, then blow nuts with it
V: it is sort of funny, in a funny way
V: God Bless Jessica Abel
V: you can run that...
V: sincerely though, without her, I wouldn't be in comics
h: I live in boston.
h: Id kinda like to put this up just as a chat transcript...
V: I'd having sex with white trash bitchs and drawing pictures of me jacking off at late night diners on yellowed computer paper and placemats, it would be some Caruso Clown crying cradlebreak type shit
h: Is there much of a comics crew in dubuque?
V: ZILCH
V: just me
V: not really a scene of anything
V: a small music scene, that I'm a part off
h: What do you do?
V: I do all the promotional flyers
V: and great drunk
h: Good bands there?
V: sure, for young kids
h: Are you drunk now?
V: no, I don't really drink that much
V: I used to have problem
V: have A problem
V: but I drink here and there
V: I limit myself to 3 times a month
V: because I am dedicated to my comics
h: Youre 23 now? What do you do in dubuque? (outside of comics)
V: my last girlfriend broke up with me because she though I loved comics more than her cunt
V: I'm 22
V: besides comics? talk to friends, frequent the movie theatre
V: I like Chinese action films
V: I make home videos
V: and NOT JACKASS rip off garbage
V: concerts
V: foot bag
V: cigarette tricks
V: making a difference in young child's life
V: having terrible luck with women
V: I'm sure I leaving something out
V: or something
V: or nothing
V: I don't know anymore
V: how old are you?
V: 26?
h: 29
h: You in school? Have a job?
V: what do you in boston to alleviate strss troubles?
V: I work in a grocery store, and live in a apt by myself
V: its pretty CRAZY!!!
V: you make the big boston bucks?
h: Not really. Work for a magazine, go to shows, sing in a punk band
V: whats you punk band's name?
V: you like Dillinger Four? Boris the Sprinkler? Toys that Kill?
V: Groovey Ghoulies?
V: The EUrchins?
V: those are some that I know
h: The anchormen
V: are MP3s available online?
h: Yep. Anchormen.com . Dillinger 4 and boris are awesome. Good midwestern stuff!
h: What are the best punk bands in iowa?
V: I like them quite a bit, one of my best friends(and neighbors) has played with them before, but I don't know if you have ever heard of them, HOT CARL?
V: I think they are good
V: geez
h: Do they have mp3s up?
V: NO NO NO!!!!
V: geez, as in, let me think geez
V: I can't say who best are
V: Hot Carl is the only one I know that is Iowa nativwe
V: although I did hear a good band not so long ago, but I forgot the name
h: Are you an iowa native?
V: Half Peruvian, born here.
h: Know anything about peruvian comics? I'd be curious...
V: I would be to, but I have never seen one
V: althought there is allot of artists there
V: I want to move there for a year or so
V: been there a couple of times
V: loved it
h: Well, i should go. Ill look for more of your stuff
V: 75 cents for a pack of Marlboros
V: It was nice chatting with you
V: have a great evening
h: Thanks for saying hey
V: any day

After finishing the IM'erview, I checked out his piece in Legal Action Comics. The story's theme and content is similar to that of "The Beard and Baby Brother" in terms of its shock value and language, but it's much better drawn than the Studygroup 12 story. Not quite my bag, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for future work by this iconoclastic Iowan.