Please note that as of February 9th 2009, this blog has been incorporated into the main Pajamas Media site and new posts can be found here. While the main Ed Driscoll.com URL will automatically redirect there, the old RSS feed won't; but its successor can be found here, as well as the new URL. Please adjust your bookmarks and aggregation pages accordingly.
Thank you for your continued readership,
Ed
I was on the Breitbart.tv B-Cast earlier today discussing the future of online video, as well as the current difficulty in making Internet advertising revenues work. Tune in here to watch.
The lead item has nothing to do with the future of multimedia, but it's quite a moo-ving story in its own right...
Dr. Melissa Clouthier takes the pulse of the MSM, with some assistance from Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media's "Edgelings" tech blog, and a little video help from your humble narrator himself.
And speaking of a troubled MSM, Newsbusters reports that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has declared Chapter 11. Its best-known journalist in the new world of the Blogosphere and Satellite Radio directs us to this piece in the Minnesota Post for some additional details of the Strib's bankruptcy and what may be to come. (But not before including a sublime screen capture from A Night To Remember, taken at the apex between iceberg and eternity.)
Related: "Your MSM Moment of Zen."
Danny Glover rounds up his choices; here's an excerpt:
3) Burning Down The House: When conservatives create videos that strike a chord with the public, they often become the target for copyright-infringement "takedown notices" at YouTube.I can certainly relate to that; you can watch the rest of our videos here, including the Hillary 3:00 AM mash-up from March that the McCain Campaign eventually copied.
Danny also links to an interview with the anonymous maker of this awesome video, which was referenced in our recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video.
One reader emailed that he wasn't able to view my "In Dodd We Trust?" video earlier in the week apparently because of bandwidth issues. If you've had similar problems, that video is now up on my YouTube page. (The higher res, higher bandwidth version is still available here.)
And if you received a DV camera in your stocking today and want to put it to work, I have an article that recently went live on Videomaker magazine's Website on the rudiments of videoblogging titled "Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog."
Welcome viewers and listeners of Cam Edwards of NRA News--you can watch the video comparing and contrasting two very different television news reports of elderly vets attacked that we were discussing right here.
Silicon Graffiti means great video...in any language!
In between Thanksgiving preparations, The Wide Awake Cafe has some thoughts about my recent Silicon Graffiti video and Peter Wood's Bee In The Mouth thesis.
For subscribers of PJTV, I was on this afternoon discussing the leftwing think tanks that the incoming Obama administration is drawing upon for both ideas and manpower, and the Nice Deb blog has a nice post on the story, here.
I also mentioned my excursion last week on the National Review to PJTV host Joe Hicks; fellow blogger and cruise attendee Kabuki Village has some great posts describing her own take on the cruise and the NR gang.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Insert obligatory "I'm Troy McClure, you may remember me from..." reference here, in hopes of winning back readership with ironic pop culture reference, since you've been offline for a week. Or make an even more ironic nested pop culture reference in the form of a completely unnecessary "Editor's Note", instead.]
Nina and I spent the week on the National Review post-election cruise. We departed Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday, and island hopped our way through Grand Turk Island, San Juan, St. Thomas, and Half Moon Cay before returning to Florida earlier today. (I'm actually still in D-FW airport as I write this. Hopefully I'm not jinxing my flight home by posting it too soon.)
As Jack Fowler, NR's publisher, noted during the first night's reception less than a week after the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, you've never seen a group of more cheerful and upbeat depressed people. Among the 700 or so(!) attendees, bitter clingers were in remarkably short supply.
The copious amounts of Hennessy flowing during the cigar and cognac nights didn't hurt.
Some random observations, in no particular order:
- Fowler and Kathryn Jean Lopez are the hardest working publishers and editors in the word of new media outside of the immediate Pajamas Media organization.
- As Jonah Goldberg noted during one of the comedy nights, Mark Steyn is an agent of SPECTRE, apparently complete with a secret underground laboratory hidden miles below the verdant hills of New Hampshire.
- On the other hand, I doubt Blofeld issued many Christmas CDs.
- Rumors that Jonah wore his Star Fleet dress uniform to the first formal night are completely unsubstantiated. Or that he shouted "GENERAL ORDER 24, SCOTTY!" upon sight of St. Thomas.
- Scientists at Toastmasters will long be debating the power of the John O' Sullivan Maneuver (as named by Jim Geraghty) in public speechifying. If your audience is 85 to 99 percent conservative in its makeup, invoking seemingly unplanned praise of Sarah Palin is guaranteed to generate thunderous applause.
- Mitt Romney has the Hair of The Gods.
- As does Byron York.
- I'm worried that the man who wore his kilt to both formal nights is a closet Arlen Specter fan.
- Rob Long is officially the only conservative male in the United States to cop to taking yoga classes.
- Jay Nordlinger is as cheerful as his columns.
- David Fredoso is as intense as his.
- It's 3:00 in the morning. There's a public address system on the ship. What's the last thing you want to hear? John Mercer, the Trevor Howard-sound-a-like ship's captain casually announcing that one of the boilers had caught on fire. Fortunately, it was rapidly extinguished, but not before at least one passenger started wondering where he'd packed his sort of idealized version of the complete Renaissance man costume if we needed to hit the lifeboats quickly.
- Speaking of obscure Monty Python references, it was great to see the proprietor of Castle Argghhh onboard.
- When the boat returns to Florida, don't try getting off the boat without your room key card--or you'll risk winding up inside the jail in "Midnight Express."
- You'd think that the newest, sleekest ship in the Holland-America fleet would have an Internet connection more reliable than two coconuts and a string purchased from the San Juan Safeway. But you'd be wrong.
- Finally, to everyone who mentioned during the cruise that they've seen my blog or my videos, Thank You.
Just received my copy of the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains my Camcorder Buyer's Guide 2008--complete with a cameo appearance by James Lileks, fresh off documenting hecklers at the GOP convention for the Strib.
(For what to aim those camcorders at--besides protests and hecklers--click here.)
On Tuesday night, I hosted a virtual round-table discussion with the PJM Political all-stars: Steve Green, James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, and Jennifer Rubin. Tune in here for their immediate thoughts on the 2008 presidential election and President Elect Obama.
Just on via telephone with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV, and I'll be on (with both pictures and sound!) PJTV at about 10:00 PM Eastern.
Both my prerecorded Silicon Graffiti video blog and PJTV, Pajamas' live Internet TV coverage out of L.A. use virtual sets, and this new article of mine at Videomaker magazine explains how they work. (This demo reel for Adobe's Ultra 2 product is a pretty good video intro in and of itself.)
Of course, first you need a green screen--but that's a topic I explored at Videomaker last year.
It's been a while since I've posted at Blogcritics, but I have some initial impressions over there of the beta version of Adobe CS4, focusing on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, all of which have some spiffy new features. I hope to follow-up with the final release version in the not too distant future.
Ramesh Ponnuru looks at "The Curse of the Senate:"
One of the reasons sitting senators don't become president is that they get used to talking in an insider shorthand that is incomprehensible to most people. McCain exhibited that trait a few times last night. Obama doesn't seem to have contracted Senate-itis, perhaps because he has hardly been there.I agree--and that was a question I brought up during yesterday's post-debate podcast over at PJM Political, which if you haven't heard it
Steve Green was under the weather Wednesday (hence no drunkblogging). And while I could never replace Steve's sybaritic savoir-faire, I guest-hosted (in addition to the usual production efforts) tonight's PJM Political podcast postmortem of the final 2008 presidential debate. My guests include James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, and Jennifer Rubin.
"Since I had the misfortune to become ensnared in the Canadian 'human rights' racket, I've come to appreciate more and more the comment one fellow left on an Internet post somewhere or other, remarking that he was in favour of free speech, because the alternatives 'were just too weird.'"
That's a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn's article-length introduction to Pete Vere and Kathy Shaidle's new book, The Tyranny of Nice, on Canada's "Human Rights Commissions", and their patented show trials to purge all doubleplusungood thoughtcrime from Airstrip Canada.
How weird do those trials get? And could similar such weirdness be coming to the US? Tune in to my 40-minute long interview with Kathy and Pete over at Pajamas Media.
For a sneak preview of today's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, check out the podcast of the blogger round-table recorded immediately after Tuesday night's debate, featuring:
- PJM Political host Steve Green--fresh off his usual soiree into debate drunkblogging, plus:
- James Lileks.
- Glenn Reynolds.
- Jennifer Rubin.
- Produced by your humble narrator and multimedia maven.
While this weekend's edition of the annual Blog World Expo was all about the ongoing revolution in electronic media, Mr. Gutenberg's pioneering analog blog format isn't going away anytime soon, of course--which is a good thing in my book. (Hey look--a pun!) While Barnes & Noble had a large display in the convention hall selling several existing books on blogging and new media, there were two new books of note discussed at Blog World:
Austin Bay gave me the galleys of his upcoming Fourth Edition to A Quick And Dirty Guide To War--right after Steve Green was done holding up the book, Brian Lamb Booknotes-style, during his interview with Austin for PJM Political on XM and PJTV on, err, PJTV. This is a sprawling (the galleys are over 600 pages) overview of the current wars of the world, and what could come in the future, written by two authors who also review what they accurately predicted--which was quite a bit--over 20 years ago. (Here's the Amazon link to an earlier edition of the book; the new edition is scheduled to hit the streets later this year.)
At the start of the month, I had interviewed Scott Ott for PJM Political. Scott is the proprietor of, and chief satirist in residence at Scrappleface, on the floor of the Republican convention (while Joe Lieberman was performing his sound check on stage in the background). He's contributed a chapter on politics and journalism (Scott, not Joe) for the upcoming book titled, The New Media Frontier, edited by John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton, whom I interviewed on Sunday at Blog World. Their book, featuring an introduction from Hugh Hewitt, debuts at the end of the month. My very early first take? If you can picture a book aimed at Christian Americans that combines Hugh Hewitt's Blog book with some of the broad 3000 mile "medium is the message" overview that Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have provided, you get a sense of The New Media Frontier. I'd even suggest it to the non-religious, who can skip the more proselytizing chapters, for a pretty nifty look at the ability to use the Internet to build broad social networks and virtual communities.
Finally, speaking of books, Stephen Michael Kellat of a Website geared towards libraries and librarians stopped by the booth and interviewed Steve and I about Pajamas Media and PJTV as part of their weekly podcast. I haven't a clue why a library-oriented podcast wanted to talk to us, but hey, we were there and happy to talk to anyone who stopped by, including those who stuck a mic and digital recorder in front of us.
Tune in here to listen; Steve and I appear about 15 minutes into the show, which requires no iPod--or library card!--to hear.
(And click here to see a slide show featuring about a babillion photos of the exhibitors (including Pajamas) and the weekend's events.)
Well, out of control of old media, that is. In the Washington Times, Matthew Sheffield explains, "Candidates use Web for cheap, edgy ads". Your friend and humble narrator is mentioned here, right after Matthew discusses McCain's "The One" ad, which pokes fun at a certain obscure young Chicago community organizer's rapid rise to the dizzying heights Hollywood stardom:
Besides demonstrating how the Web can be cost-effective, "The One" phenomenon is illustrative of another way the Internet has become useful for the presidential campaigns: helping them spot organic political themes that they can help develop into larger ones. The inspiration behind the ad is straight out of the conservative blogosphere where it has proven enormously popular with center-right readers long dissatisfied with the elite press' love affair with Mr. Obama.Matthew was of course instrumental in organizing the sprawling Newsbusters blog. He emailed me yesterday afternoon alerting me that the above article would be online today, and asked me if I was in St. Paul. I wrote back that indeed I was--and was immediately following him on C-Span in this online video shot on Wednesday.That inspiration isn't restricted to just online ads, either. Just this week, the McCain camp released an ad that looked astonishingly similar to a parody ad created by blogger Ed Driscoll, which combined Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's famous "3 AM" ad with a second segment telling viewers that Mr. McCain also could be relied upon to respond to a crisis situation.
It's highly likely this will continue to happen, Mr. Driscoll told me in an e-mail.
"While a campaign still has to spend large sums of money buying advertising time on TV, as the older generation still glued almost exclusively to the television tube begins to fade away, watch for the Web to continue to grow in power as the political advertising venue," he said.
He's exactly right. It's simply a matter of time.
Somehow the caffeine, adrenaline, brain and mouth were all wired correctly together last night to give a full-tilt promotional boogie for PJTV in the booth when a C-Span cameraman appeared to discuss bloggers at the convention. I'm on right after Matthew Sheffield:
You can watch the interview that Glenn Reynolds, Roger Simon and I did with Jerry Seib of the Wall Street Journal yesterday from the convention hall right here. Among the topics discussed were several questions I asked Jerry regarding John McCain and his YouTube operation.
Capt. Ed writes:
CNN reports that the thankfully moderate impact of Hurricane Gustav will mean that the Republican convention will get back to business. At this point, they have no article with specifics, but apparently their sources indicate that the Gustav-imposed restrictions on campaigning in St. Paul will be lifted. The schedule will return to normal, and the speakers originally slated to speak tonight will do so.As for Monday's events, you can watch a full recap on PJTV for free, several segments of which feature yours truly.
Maximum Pajamhadeen Roger L. Simon did a Herculean effort supervising the Army of Davids it takes behind the scenes to make PJTV's ability to debut live on location (which I'm not sure if a traditional TV network ever tried). He then switched seamlessly into host mode--and even blogged about it in the midst of the action:
How was it? Well, to be honest, in sixties parlance, it was a trip. There I was (only 75% befuddled) sitting in the high director's chair passing the baton to Cindy McCain and Laura Bush on stage, trying to sound suitably solemn about the hurricane and glad I was on with Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and James Lileks - all gentlemen who know how to move their mouths... because let me tell you you run out of ideas fast. This is especially true because, as the world knows, this is a convention in temporary postponement. Luckily for us we are only streaming about three hours today. Coming up... some intereviews I did with American Carol director David Zucker and Jon Voight (who plays George Washington in the film). These guys are members of the Friends of Abe (FoA), a Hollywood organization started by Gary Sinise for the folks in the entertainment industry who think the battle against Islamic facism might actually be worth fighting. This org was supposed to be hush-hush but the cat has now gotten far out of the bag. (Yes, I'm member - though we don't have cards.), so Zucker and I talk about it. Anyway.... tune in on our convention coverage and let us know what you think. But be gentle, dear reader.Roger's being remarkably modest. It was difficult to get a sense of how the complete package looked to viewers from the snippets I saw on various monitors in the booth. But Nina and I watched a good hour of the coverage late last night back in the hotel room, and the finished product, which includes not just the remote from Minneapolis, but also the virtual studio back in L.A., a video feed from the convention floor, and several pre-recorded segments, looks incredibly smooth for an opening night's effort.
Austin Bay interviews Steve Green, Glenn Reynolds, Jennifer Rubin, and--live from Denver International Airport--James Lileks. In a half-hour interview recorded by yours truly earlier today, they look back at the then just recently announced Sarah Palin pick by John McCain, Barack Obama's speech last night, and the gestalt of the Democratic Convention in Denver.
This BBC article, which starts breathlessly, "Hollywood is on the verge of breaking into an entirely new virtual world", really isn't all that surprising; Arthur C. Clarke was writing about "synthetic thespians" over 20 years ago.
Though why not start with musicians first? The MTV/YouTube small-screen format has to be a lot more visually forgiving than a 40-feet movie screen, and an all digital, all synthetic singer seems like a logical progression from today's formula pop stars, as I wrote four years ago for Tech Central Station.
...And you're Ed: Interview Michelle Malkin about her run-in with a crazed 9/11 "truther" for this week's edition of PJM Political--and then talk to Roger L. Simon about PJTV--Pajamas' new online TV service. Both on this week's edition of
(Note: No Bird Porn or High Fructose Corn Syrup was harmed in the making of this podcast.)
Don't tell MADD (I don't need the spam), but I made the Drunk Report with this post. I have no idea what the Drunk Report is except that it's like the Drudge Report, but with an additional 80 proof, an extra half-once of vermouth, and only a mild hangover the next morning.
I'll get back to you on that last item.
Amanda Shea King has some thoughts on my recent Silicon Graffiti video: "Ed Driscoll And The Media's Schetoma."
Karl of Protein Wisdom links to my interview on PJM Political this past week with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men series; there's an interesting debate on the show's aesthetics and writing going on under the post in the comment section.
Before going on vacation, John Hawkins of Right Wing News often asks guest bloggers to sit-in, and contribute new posts to his expansive, long-running Website. He very kindly asked me to be one of his guest bloggers today, and I tried to pick a few of the best of my posts from the last month to contribute there, which you can view by starting here and scrolling down to the schedule of guest bloggers.
Ten days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight, to slightly paraphrase Dave Dudley, not to mention the Flying Burrito Brothers at a far worse road gig than I just returned from.
Watch for regular blogging to resume Friday. And the podcast version of this week's edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, featuring James Taranto, Chris Muir, Frank Martin (sans Sigourney, unfortunately), and host Bill Bradley, to go live on the newly revised Pajamas site tomorrow as well.
We were mentioned yesterday by James Taranto in his Best of the Web Today column at the Wall Street Journal, which is certainly a nice way to kick off our sixth anniversary in the Blogosphere. Scroll down to Taranto's item on Gloria Steinem's huge Gucci-in-the-mouth gaffe regarding Senator McCain's service in Vietnam, and his link to our post from Monday, which contrasts Steinem's remarks on McCain with her thoughts four years ago on another Senator who also, by the way, served in Vietnam.
Or as Mark Hemingway puts it at NRO, Hillary needs Steinem's endorsement "Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle".
Update: Related thoughts from Michelle Malkin.
Having recorded God-only-knows how many telephone interviews in the past three years, I wrote some tips on how to get a decent telephone recording for Videomaker magazine. These suggestions work whether you're using the interview for an audio podcast, or for video.
Blade Runner junkies may enjoy my review of the final final cut (we hope!) of the film, over at Pajamas Media.
Well, not exactly. But scroll to about 44 minutes into the latest episode of Breitbart TV's B-Cast to hear us name-checked, in our regards to our recent PJM Political interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker.
You watched their show, seen their clips from the candidates--now hear how they do it, their thoughts on the YouTube phenomenon and the role DIY video will play in the 2008 presidential channel, as Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV sit down with me for a 15-minute audio interview recorded live at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas.
Found via Instapundit, the New York Times' spin-off paper, The International Herald Tribune notes that the "Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business":
As Hollywood digs in for a second week of a strike, the screenwriters might want to send a few angry picketers over to Will Smith's place. Or Steven Spielberg's.Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something...And maybe the studio executives should think about joining them on the line.
As it turns out, the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.
That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.
Austin Bay's latest Blog Week In Review podcast is now online; it features Austin's interview (which I produced) of Heather Mac Donald and Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute. They discuss their new book, co-authored along with PajamasXxpress blogger Victor Davis Hanson, The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's.
Heather and Steve discuss why immigration, legal and otherwise has dominated the news, its role in the War On Terror, and the kerfuffle over Hillary's drivers license gaffe during the Democrats' debate last week in Philadelphia.
While the Internet has certainly made distribution of music and video much simpler, CDs and DVDs aren’t going away anytime soon, which is a good thing for all sorts of reasons in my book. (Books--another legacy media that's not likely to away anytime soon!) And I have some times on protecting and repairing those discs online at Videomaker as well.
I have a piece online at Videomaker today with some thoughts on how to choose which online video distribution sites are right for you, such as YouTube, Brightcove, Motionbox, etc. It's built around a fun interview I had this past summer with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, veteran television journalists who left Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV to become partners with Andrew Breitbart to form his Breitbart.TV division.
Why yes, that is a Blog World Expo button on our sidebar, and thank you for noticing! See you in Vegas in less than a month!
Variety: "Peter Greenaway says cinema is dead":
Famously uncompromising British helmer Peter Greenaway declared cinema officially dead but said interactive forms of filmmaking offered exciting new possibilities.Far be it from your humble narrator to argue with him.
Jack D. Lail uses my "Atlas Mugged" article as a jumping off point to explore the future of blogs actually run by newpapers, including a great quote from this Gawker article:
Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They're organizing by form, not by content. (The Times does a better job, both promoting blog posts on the front page and integrating each blog's content into existing sections.)Indeed. Here's how to do it right, which, needless to say, has everything to do with the blog's editor than the paper itself, though it would require some work to translate some of the blog's elements to one that was devoted to more serious topics, such as a blog covering the police or fire beat, which would seem a natural for the medium.Readers just don't come to a newspaper's website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what "form" it's in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don't.
If you missed the links from Glenn Reynolds and James Lileks, the podcast version of PJM Political on XM satellite radio is now available online at Pajamas HQ.
Why yes, that is me on XM Satellite Radio, interviewing Michael Barone and Jonah Goldberg, on Pajamas' new hour-long show, PJM Political, in-between producing the show. It's been an absolutely insane month assembling all of the elements of the show but needless to say, I hope you'll tune-in each week, on XM's channel #130, the POTUS '08 network. This week, we feature:
Update: The XM show and yours truly is mentioned briefly at about 5:50 into the above interview with Roger and Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters and Blog Talk Radio, which will be one of the sources of content for the XM show.
Michael Ledeen joins Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss his new--and remarkably timely--book.
With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.
For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:
One of the elements of the Blogosphere that’s often a feature, not a bug--especially in retrospect--is that if you don’t write about something fast enough, somebody else will. And often he’ll come up with a better take than you would. So for a quick summary of Saturday’s event, I urge to stop on by Jeremayakovka’s blog for his thoughts on Blog*Fest*West, our gathering in San Francisco this past Saturday. And note the photo in which I appear to have Karl Rove’s mind-control rays, or maybe simply frickin’ lasers--really, is that too much for me to ask for, people?--burning through my eyeglasses. (Or maybe I’m just eyeing the Guinness.)
I will add though, that in addition to my co-conspirators, Cinnamon Stillwell and my wife Nina (who organizes parties the way that von Braun plans moon landings), the handful of major league hitters who bravely signed up for this test flight were a particularly nifty line-up.
There was Roger Simon, the co-founder of Pajamas Media, who attended along with two of his trusted lieutenants, Neil Spolin and Aaron Thies. Joanne Jacobs, who virtually invented education-themed blogging in early-2001. And Mickey Kaus, whose pioneering Kausfiles Blog/E-Zine is what inspired Glenn Reynolds to start blogging. Which in turn, chances are, inspired your blogging--or at least blog reading--addiction. Combined, you’ve got a pretty good running start towards assembling the folks who originally brought you the center-right side of the Blogosphere in the days immediately after 9/11, in one room.
Blogging, like most forms of writing, is a solitary task--which in a way, makes perfect sense. No matter how big your readership, it’s purely a one-on-one relationship with each individual reader, whether it’s via the printed page or the page click. But it’s great to get out and mingle with others in your field. I’ve been to a few previous blogger gatherings, including a Denver Blogger Bash in 2004, early conspiratorial neo-pajama-con planning in the mountains over looking Silicon Valley, the subsequent November 2005 wild & crazy pre-launch party in the bowels of the Seagram Building, and the actual launch of Pajamas the next day high atop Manhattan in the Rainbow Room.
But ever since I started blogging in early 2002, I’ve been on the lookout for something like what we eventually dubbed Blog*Fest*West out here. Fortunately, so have lots of other folks, and it’s a safe bet that Saturday is merely the first of an ongoing series of get-togethers. Needless to say, we’ll let you know when the next one is happening--and hope you can drop by for a handshake. And maybe some Guinness.
I was surprised to see a couple of interesting responses to my Superbad post on Saturday, (thanks no doubt to Jules Crittenden's link), which I quickly knocked out as I was heading out to Blog*Fest*West (and more on that, later).
Here's an even older Hollywood formula than horny teenager movies like Superbad, as the New York Times notes:
Few narratives in American popular culture have proved as durably resonant — or as endlessly adaptable — as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the tale of a planetary takeover by extraterrestrial seed pods that replicate and replace sleeping humans. Originally a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, this paranoid fable has now cloned itself several times over, spawning four movies in five decades. Tapping into themes of individualism and conformity, personal freedom and social control, the idea of soulless “pod people” has become an all-encompassing metaphor that finds a sociopolitical relevance whatever the period.Indeed it would, as Fox News' Roger Friedman writes:The “Invasion” films add up to a veritable catalog of anxieties that have plagued the American psyche in the last half-century. Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie, the first and still the most Rorschach-like, emerged from a national climate of Red scare hysteria and from a Hollywood traumatized by the blacklist. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update, also called “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” relocated its ground zero from small-town California to a post-utopian San Francisco where summer-of-love idealism had curdled into a Me Decade morass of cultish psychobabble.
Abel Ferrara’s “Body Snatchers” (1993), which followed an election season thick with talk of “family values,” zeroes in on the domestic sphere. Set on a military base in the South, it also includes explicit references to the recently concluded Operation Desert Storm.
The fourth version, called “The Invasion” and opening Friday, appears to adhere to the outline while adding a few bells and whistles. (The film has not yet been screened for the press.) Starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (best known for the 2005 Hitler biopic “Downfall”), the film would seem to have an abundance of current qualms to exploit, from new pandemics and terror threats to extreme makeovers and genetic engineering.
Still, it would be quite a feat if the new “Invasion” musters even a fraction of the original’s ambiguous power.
No matter how much money she’s being guaranteed for movies these days, Nicole Kidman had better start thinking twice about her legacy as an actress.Time to start cutting up the prints to make guitar picks, boys. Not to mention working on story ideas that aren't remakes of decades old projects.Her new one, "The Invasion," opened Friday and bombed quite brilliantly. It took in a little less than $2 million. The price for this disaster? Over $100 million. And even though it co-stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig, nothing can make "The Invasion" into a hit.
What’s worse is, no one wanted even to see it in theatres. At boxofficemojo.com, a poll among subscribers showed almost no interest in "The Invasion."
Of course, the marketing didn’t help. The movie looked like "The Stepford Wives II," another Kidman disaster. And in many of the ads, Craig’s name wasn’t even mentioned. It was just Nicole Kidman, looking beautiful, running among dead eyed weirdos.
The public smelled a rat, Warner Bros. punted, and the rest is history.
Update: More at Libertas.
OK, now that headline is definitely hyperbole to get your attention. But as the New York Sun notes:
Fifteen years ago, the notion that an amateur filmmaker could write, shoot, edit, and project a professional-grade film in only 48 hours would have been a near-impossible thought. But times change quickly, and for the 2007 filmmaker, in the age of Final Cut Pro and YouTube, the idea is a challenge rather than an impracticality.For our thoughts on adding a professional sheen to your slightly smaller scale video productions, click here.
Update: In City Journal, John Robb explores the flip side of the Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids" meme:
Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past.Robb's article is titled, "The Coming Urban Terror", which also dovetails into Mark Steyn's latest essay.
If you're in San Francisco on Saturday* and can part with a couple of sawbucks or so--stop on by!
But please, take a moment to RSVP here, first:
* Or you're willing to commit a heresy so abominable, even Torquemada would blush...
Two recent articles of mine set the wayback machine to the early 1960s:
Knot up a skinny tie, don your mohair suit and Weejuns, pop on some Sinatra or Miles' Kind of Blue, and check them out!
It's not quite Tarkenton meets Staubach, Dylan meets Lennon, Prince meets Morris Day, or an even better Minneapolis-themed metaphor that's eluding me, but James Lileks is interviewed by Pajamas' own Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss the current state of the New, New Journalism.
Tune in here--no iPod required; virtually any computer with broadband can stream an MP3 file.
Related: Maybe Brian Williams should take a listen!
In this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay gets Jeff Goldstein and Neo-Neocon's thoughts on Live Earth: "Rockstars For Whatever".
And speaking of Live Earth, Tim Blair writes that the party to fight global cooling continues!
After getting some background on Breitbart.tv for an upcoming article, I realized that its proprietor (who’s also been Matt Drudge’s Sancho Panza for over a decade) would be a perfect guest for Pajamas’ Blog Week In Review. Fortunately, Austin Bay agreed, and the result is a great, fast-moving show. If you're curious about where online journalism is headed, and why it's been eating old media's lunch for the last decade, this is the podcast for you!
(No iPod--or even iPhone--needed; virtually any computer with a broadband connection can tune in and listen.)
The L.A. Times sycophantically compares Michael Moore to Orson Welles--something I also did, in a much less favorable light, two years ago.
Austin Bay interviews Thom Shanker, Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times in this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, over at the Pajamas Media mothership.
Austin Bay interviews Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in the latest Blog Week In Review, online now at Pajamas HQ.
Some assorted recent reviews of mine on the 'Net and dead tree:
If you haven't heard it yet, Austin Bay's lengthy and informative interview of Dr. David Kilcullen, the senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calling into Pajamas HQ from Baghdad, is a must-listen. And don't miss Austin's latest syndicated column, which expands on Dr. Kilcullen's thoughts.
Austin Bay was particularly keen to interview Daniel Drezner on his new book All Politics is Global for the latest Blog Week In Review podcast. You can hear the results here--as Pajamas HQ notes, "Get out your notebooks and pay close attention to this one. There’s a lot to learn".
With Star Wars' 30th anniversary this month, I have a review of J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars, over at Blogcritics. If you saw the film five or ten times on its opening run, this thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated book will bring back a flood of memories.
Blog Week In Review is celebrating its first anniversary with three quarters of its original line-up: Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds, and Tammy Bruce. (Sadly, Eric Umansky had a scheduling conflict, but promises to return sometime this summer.)
From my point of view in the producer's chair, I think the sound quality on this one is the best yet; I've been very fortunate to have the time to experiment and fine-tune things. So please have a listen, here.
This is pretty cool--via Execupundit, I just discovered that my TCS Daily profile of Robin Aitken's Can We Trust The BBC has been linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, under this blurb:
The BBC: cool and objective in its regard for the news and issues of the day. It reports, you decide – uh, just like Fox News...Whatever you think of them, it's difficult to imagine the typical Fox pundit sounding quite this condescending while purporting to conduct an "objective" interview with a prominent world figure.
Update: Power Line has a look back at Churchill's (often rather negative) thoughts regarding the BBC of the 1930s and '40s.
"160Mbps downloads move closer for US cable customers"--that's something that Internet2 has been working on since the mid-1990s. See my article about them from a few years ago at Tech Central Station.
Hey, you got television on my Website! Hey, you got Web content on my television!
At TCS Daily, I explain how the Tory British Web/Video convergence has managed to put all of the New Media pieces together, making them the model for future multimedia Websites.
While the intricacies of British politics may be somewhat off-putting to the average American viewer tuning in for the first time from across the pond, the convergence of media is very much the message here. Expect somebody smart in the US (on one side of the aisle or the other) to emulate 18 Doughty Street's combination of long-form C-Span-style video programming and "traditional" Web articles and blogging in the not-too-distant future.
Over at CE Pro, the trade publication for custom home theater installers, I have an article on 64-bit computing. The video above explains the concept in terms of audio, but the same concepts apply to video production as well. Think Hot Air, 18 Doughty Street, or the next multimedia site is going to take advantage of the near unlimited RAM that 64-bit computing promises in the coming years to help shape their content?
Me too. Which is why this number is only going to shrink--and the resultant hysterical reactions from Old Media will only increase in concurrent response.
Five years ago, when I covered Internet2 for TCS Daily, I forgot to add a key WARNING! NO SMOKING ON THE NEW 'NET! disclaimer, and for that, I'd like to apologize.
Welcome Jules Crittenden readers clicking in through the blog's homepage! The post you're looking for on Rudy and Rosie is here; today's blogging will occur under this post.
A bunch of longform articles I've been working on over the past few months seemed to have reached simultaneous fruitition this week. So all of a sudden, like Visa, we're everywhere you want to be:
Home Electronics? The cover story of the May/June issue of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine is my piece on "Eight Easy Ways To Update Your Home Theater
Music? I have a piece on electronic harmonizers in the April issue of Computer Music. It's out now in England, and will be available next month in the US. Here's the Blogcritics product review from last fall which inspired it, to hold you over.
High Fashion? In the latest issue of Classic Style, I have a piece on Apparel Arts, the 1930s and '40s menswear magazine that birthed not only Esquire but GQ, and continues to inspire designers such as Ralph Lauren and (especially) Alan Flusser to this day.
At the moment, those are all strictly "dead tree" articles. But here are a couple of online items:
Media Bias? Thanks to the InstaPundit, you've probably already seen this.
Podcasting? I produced the latest Blog Week In Review for Pajamas, in which Austin Bay interviews The Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez on the state of the hot war in Iraq and the increasingly heating up one against Iran.
Be on the look out for all of the above at your favorite newsseller and/or Internet. And tell 'em we sent you!
Clive Davis writes:
Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.
And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.
Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.
Austin Bay asked me to guest host the Pajamas Media "Blog Week In Review" podcast this week, so I interviewed Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and on-air personality who left the network and has written a new book, very much in the vein of Bernard Goldberg's books on American media bias, titled Can We Trust The BBC. I tried to aim the questions towards an American perspective on the topic, but then, how could I not? Aitken also discussed in depth the BBC's biases regarding Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. Regular readers of this blog won't exactly be shocked where the BBC comes down on these issues, but for those who still hold out a belief that the BBC is entirely objective, its an eye-opener.
I also asked Robin if this was still flying on the walls of his former workplace.
It's a 20 minute long podcast (no iPod required--any computer with broadband and a soundcard can play an MP3 file), so please tune in and listen.
This week's Sanity Squad podcast on Pajamas Media had all sorts of loud clicks, pops and other elements of digital distortion scattered throughout it. Fortunately, through the help of Cakewalk Sonar and its editing tools, and the Bias SoundSoap Pro noise-reduction plug-in, I was able to make it at least listenable--so please take a listen.
Fascinating topic as well, discussing the psychological aspects of the Iranian capture of 15 British sailors.
Want to get into digital video? Over at Blogcritics, I review three books that make a fine introduction to medium cool.
The latest Blog In Review is online:
The anti-liberal message of The anti-liberal message of identitarianism and collective thought are on the table for this week’s podcast. Are the two sides of the political spectrum existing in parallel realities with their own facts and narratives? Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein, Neo-neocon, and host Austin Bay find the whole mess doubleplusungood. Ed Driscoll produces.Click here to listen!
The latest Blog In Review podcast is online at Pajamas HQ:
The world’s longest horse race is underway for the American Presidency. On Blog Week to discuss it are Glenn Reynolds, and author and screenwriter Katy Wright of American Thinker. Glenn and Katy disagree on whether the unusual length of the campaign season represents an important political fight or an exhuasting and wasteful marathon for voters and candidatesDon't miss it!The panel also tackles the plight of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soleman and what his case means for the future of free speach and the internet in the Middle East. Austin Bay hosts and asks the questions. Ed Driscoll produces. Brought to you by Volvo USA.
In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.
It's Radio Free Ed! I'm turning the tables and hosting Blog Week In Review this week, interviewing Austin Bay and Adam Bellow. Tune in here.
Over at TCS Daily, I have a profile of Austin Bay and his new pamphlet, Embrace The Suck.
Dude, it's back! The return of Pajamas Media's Blog Week In Review podcast:
Eric Umansky and Glenn Reynolds exchange views on the “shake out” in Web 2.0 start-ups and President Bush’s State of the Union Speech. Are Google and Yahoo gobbling up the Web? Find out. Austin Bay hosts and asks the questions. Ed Driscoll produces. Eric and Austin also discuss the benefits of civilian universal national service.Tune in here.Brought to you by Volvo USA.
For the past few months, I've been having a lot of fun playing with Roland's VG-88 guitar modeling system. It's a pedal board loaded with 260 different patches that a guitar player can dial through, much like a keyboard synthesizer player. Want your guitar to sound like a nylon string classical guitar? An acoustic or electric 12-string guitar? Jimmy Page's Les Paul? Eric Clapton's Stratocaster? A guitar synthesizer? All those tones are in there, and many more.
The product has been out for a while, but just for the heck of it, I knocked off a lengthy review for Blogcritics, which you can read by clicking here.
You've heard us discuss many of these items over the years in various posts, and/or Blogcritics reviews. If you're looking for some gift ideas for Christmas, look no further...
Read More »
The Bush administration warned Wednesday against threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites, and discounted the need for a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in space.Considering how much of the world's communication is carried via satellite, it's far from an idle concern. Heck, when I interviewed Alvin Toffler immediately after 9/11, he was discussing the threat back then.
Ed Driscoll.com: Five years into the future! Err, sometimes, at least.
Update: More here.
The latest Blog Week In Review podcast is now online:
Panelists Tammy Bruce and Glenn Reynolds discuss—what else—the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Neither finds the report encouraging.Click here to listen.Also discussed is whether America remains the most optimal place to do business.
Finally, the panelists, along with regular host and moderator Austin Bay, predict the upcoming week’s top stories.
Ed Driscoll produces.
He's the mystery man of the hour (well, half-hour, actually) on this week's Blog Week In Review, with Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, and host Austin Bay.
At the beginning of last August, Ace of Spades brilliantly predicted the scandals involving Jamil Hussein, and his immediate predecessor, Adnan Hajj, Reuters' bumbling would-be fauxtographer:
The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.Click on this week's podcast to explore the latest development in the MSM's faux journalism from the Middle East.And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"
Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.
The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses, and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.
I have a lengthy review of the latest incarnation of Cakewalk's Sonar PC-based multitrack recording program, over at Blogcritics.
Near the end of the piece, I tried to give a brief preview of the multimedia of the very near future: 64-bit computing. While Sonar 6 works great with good ol' Windows XP Professional, it's also compatible with the 64-bit version of Windows XP. One big, big advantage of 64-bit computing? Currently, Windows XP supports up to four gigs of RAM.
64-bit Windows supports a whopping 128-gigs of RAM, and the 64-bit computing in general apparently has a theoritical limit of 16 exabytes! (Insert bug-eyed emoticon here.)
Of course, 200 years from now when we're beaming people up and storing their data in the pattern buffers, we'll wonder how mankind got anything done with a pitiful 128-gigs of RAM. But for the next decade or so, that sounds like a potent future for home multimedia creation. Needless to say, though--Hollywood won't be happy.
I truly appreciate the kind words of Hugh Hewitt, who wrote on Tuesday:
New media start-ups looking for new media talent to steal would be well advised to start with Ed Driscoll, who has the best Michael Richards' round-up here.Hugh, the check's in the mail, but I do want to mention that there's a boatload of traditional, long-form, dead tree writing in the past, present and future, besides the blog, podcast, and online stuff.
But those new media start-ups looking for talent to steal--or at least commission--are welcome to email, by clicking here.
In a post yesterday, I noted that we can't count out the MSM and its power. But the new media is making remarkable strides. In the latest Blog Week In Review, Austin Bay interviews fellow Pajamahadeenites Andrew Marcus and Richard Miniter on their use of tiny videocams to cover the midterms. And Miniter in particular discusses covering Washington--where the mindset concerning the Internet is very much like Larry King's--for an online new agency.
Some bleeding edge high-tech home music stuff over at Blogcritics, where I have a lengthy review of two harmonizer plug-ins for PC-based recording. The first is Audio Damage's Discord4, which recreates the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer (remember Bowie's "Fame...fame...fame...fame...fame swirling up and down in pitch? That was the Eventide Harmonizer). The second is TC-Helicon's sophisticated Harmony4, which is specifically designed for vocals and create up to four independent lines of harmony from a single vocal.
For the latest Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay was going to quote from a segment from my night-of-the-election post near the start of the show, and then called to ask me shortly before taping the show if I wanted to read it myself. Why not? So in addition to the usual production duties, I also have a cameo apperance, before some exceptional, immediately-after-the-election thoughts from Glenn Reynolds, Eric Umansky, and Austin himself.
Blogcritics has undergone a dramatic facelift. Click here for the new look; click here to peruse my occasional contributions to the site, which date back to its humble start back in 2002--a millennia in Blogosphere time!
My TCS Daily piece on Hollywood's implosion was excerpted in the Washington Times' "Culture Briefs" section today.
And from the omega to the alpha: the electronic hobbyist magazine Nuts & Volts is running a "Tribute to the Tube" this month, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the vacuum tube. As part of that, they asked me to write a profile of David Sarnoff, the man who launched commercial radio in the 1920s, before starting a television network of the same name a couple of decades later, called NBC. The article isn't online, but you can find it at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Via a couple of recent quotes from George Lucas, I toll the funeral bell for the movie industry as we know it, in an article over at TCS Daily.
(Yes, an old school-style article from yours truly with words and everything at TCS, not one of them new-fangled podcasts that I've been specializing in over there as of late)
After putting the finishing touches on the weekly Blog Week In Review show for Pajamas last night, I just appeared on frequent BWIR-panelist Tammy Bruce's radio show to discuss IPTV, Godzilla, Mothra, Vanessa Williams, and Catwoman.
Or something like that! It's all a blur, but it was loads of fun.
I have a few articles online and on dead tree this month that you may enjoy.
Regarding the latter, I have a piece in the Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine on IPTV, a technology being leveraged by phone companies to become players in the arena previously reserved for cable and satellite providers. Initially, it's being sold as a cheaper alternative to digital cable and satellite. But the format's long-range potential could lead to dramatic shifts in how we watch TV. For one, expect to start seeing downloadable YouTube-style TV, err, on your TV. As well as much more narrowcasting video, and... well, read the article for more.
For DIY recording enthusiasts, in the October issue of England's Computer Music magazine, I have an article on step sequencers, arpeggiators, and other electronic instruments that allow you to play one note and get ten. Or 100. Note that in the US, this issue probably streets next month. At least the Borders' chain seems to have a 30 day delay between the issues' cover dates and when they appear in stores.
At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, both of those are strictly "dead tree", but we'll let you know if that changes. As for online material, speaking of DIY music, my podcast interview with The Man From Izotope on audio mastering is also online at Blogcritics. Along with a piece that could be titled, "An Orchestra Of Davids". It's a review of an impressive self-published book on programming orchestral arrangements from MIDI synthesizers.
Sad to say, no Vanessa Williams sightings in any of these pieces, though.
My podcast interview with Mark Steyn on his new book, America Alone, is online at Tech Central Station.
Gateway Pundit and Austin Bay asked me to produce and upload this podcast to Pajamas' Politics Central site with Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) on port security, something which was very much in the news not too long ago.
The new Blog Week In Review is online. Like Ali and Frazier, special guest David Corn and Glenn Reynolds slug it out over PlameGate!
I probably haven't posted much home recording stuff lately, but I have a review of Korg's Digital Legacy Collection, which contains software versions of Korg's M1, the best selling digital synthesizer in history, and its successor, the Wavestation over at Blogcritics. You can click through to hear samples of the M1 in action.
Along with Gerard Van der Leun, Roger Simon sits in, and explains the reason he went into blogging.
But then, it's the reason we all went into blogging, isn't it...?
I had already planned on interviewing promiment bloggers to get their thoughts on Stephen D. Cooper's new book, Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate for TCS Daily. But when the Reuters "Picture Kill" scandal broke via Charles Johnson and his readers, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to focus in on that issue, along with the self-proclaimed oversight role the Blogosphere plays in regards to the self-proclaimed oversight role of the legacy media.
So I was very happy to round-up Charles himself, Glenn Reynolds, and Dean Barnett of Soxblog, HughHewitt.com and The Weekly Standard.com on a conference call to discuss the topic. In other words--don't miss this one.
Update (8/27/06): Bumped to top of page.
I have a podcast interview with Stephen D. Cooper, the author of a new book on the short, but rather potent history of the Blogosphere, titled, Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate, online at TCS Daily.com.
It's the first of a two-part series. The second part features an interview with three rather prominent members of "The Fifth Estate", which you won't want to miss.
Update: Power Line's Scott Johnson also has some thoughts on Professor Cooper's new book.
When the average person thinks of SWAT, chances are, this is what comes to mind. But last month, Radley Balko of the CATO institute issued a blockbuster 100 page report titled "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" and an accompanying interactive map showing the dramatic rise of SWAT teams being deployed for routine police work. He has no beef with SWAT's original purpose: breaking up hostage situations, and the like. But using SWAT to serve warrants and breaking up illegal poker games? That's a different matter.
Don't miss my podcast interview with Radley, online today at TCS Daily.
I have a podcast interview with historian John Lukacs on his new book, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, and its predecessor, The Hitler of History, over at TCS Daily.
Pretty cool: Fortune's "Business Innovation Insider" blog has kind words about my recent TCS podcast with Chris Anderson:
If you're looking to wrap your arms around the key points of the Long Tail theory, check out the new 15-minute podcast with Long Tail author Chris Anderson over at TCS Daily. During the conversation with TCS Daily columnist Ed Driscoll, Chris explains what the shift from mass markets to niche markets means for business organizations and gives various examples throughout history when a changing economic distribution system altered the relationship between "blockbusters" and niche products.For a round-up of additional Long Tail coverage, click here.The Internet is the best example of the Long Tail at work, of course, but the Sears Roebuck catalog of 1896 is another great example. Once the "general store" model of economic distribution gave way to a "centralized warehouse" model of economic distribution powered by the trans-continental railroad, retailers like Sears were able to create massive catalogs of new products. While the 20th century was all about "hits" and "blockbusters," the "infinite shelf space" of the digital age means that the distribution curve is now changing to favor niche products.
The podcast is available as a download from the iTunes music store. It's worth checking out - the Long Tail book is already #24 on Amazon and has been generating a tremendous amount of buzz around the blogosphere.
I have a pretty nifty podcast interview with Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, on his new book, The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, over at TCS Daily. It's a follow-up, or sorts, to a piece I wrote for TCS back in early 2005, which discusses (with Hugh Hewitt) how the Long Tail impacts the Blogosphere. My discussion with Chris expands the Tail's impact to several aspects of pop culture, and the business world.
But it's no substitute for reading Chris's book itself though, which Amazon says is due out on Tuesday. Chris is having a launch party the following day in New York, and he's having a drawing on his site for tickets, if you're in the area and would like to attend.
For your listening pleasure, the latest Pajamas Blog Week In Review is up and ready to go.
Just got back from a weekend jaunt to Las Vegas; watch for postings to resume shortly. And I apologize to anyone whose Internets I haven't answered yet.
The must be my day for podcasting: earlier today, an article I wrote on podcasting for the July issue of CE Pro, the home theater professionals' trade publication went live (subscription may be required). And while I'm in the middle of mixing and editing Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast (which should go live tomorrow, once I finish it and upload it to Pajamas HQ), over at TCS Daily, the first part of my two-part podcast interview with Michael Yon and Chris Muir went live. Click on over!
Look for it go online later today at Pajamas HQ, with another special guest sitting in for Glenn Reynolds this week. (I'm sworn to secrecy on this one...)
While you're waiting for it to go online, to other great audio files to pass the time: Mark Steyn's weekly visit to Hugh Hewitt (which is normally required listening for me on Thursdays, except we were taping the podcast at that time yesterday) and...the return of James Lileks' Diner, back after a fresh tank of bandwidth has been deposited in his account.
Update: It's up. Hey, I could have sworn it was Michelle Malkin who was sitting in yesterday. Apparently though, it was actually The Mommas And The Pappas...
Just had another appearance on The Tammy Bruce Show, this time to discuss Chris Anderson's concept of the Long Tail and how it impacts the Blogosphere, which I wrote about a while back for TCS Daily. Anderson's new book is due out early next month; you can order it now though from Amazon, which as I discussed with Tammy, is dramatically impacting the Tail as well.
Watch this space for more coverage on that topic, shortly.
Oh--and for the original T.A.M.I. Show with James Brown, click here. I think I covered the breakup of mass media reasonably well, but unlike James, my Electric Boogaloo is awfully rusty these days.
Futuramb Blog, published in Sweeden, uses my recent TCS Daily podcast interview with Alvin Toffler as a launching point on some thoughts about file sharing. He concludes:
And before you comment on this, yes I suspect that these thoughts are connected to Jeremy Rifkin’s book End of Work which I haven’t read (yet).To paraphrase Pete Gent, don't bother kid, everybody gets unemployed in the end.
"PJM Sydney editor Richard Fernandez joins regulars Tammy Bruce and Eric Umansky in a spirited discussion of Haditha, the Canadian terror arrests and Internet click-through fraud. Moderator Austin Bay comments on Zarqawi’s death." Click here to listen.
We recorded the show yesterday to accomodate everyone's schedule, but Austin recorded an update this morning on Zarqawi's death and its implications for the War On Terror as a whole, which I cut into the top of the show. In the interim, you can read his thoughts on his blog.
Update: The Economist did one heck of a last minute update as well.
Sometime last night, we went over the 1,000,000 visitor mark. I realize that the big boys (Glenn, Charles, Hugh, et al) do these kind of numbers in a week, but I'm very happy--and very grateful to folks like yourself who read this--that our little operation has had a million visitors stop by over the life of this blog, which originally started out in early 2002 kluged together via Blogger templates I hacked up myself, before Stacy Tabb polished things up considerably two years later. The million mark would have happened sooner, of course, if I had employed comments on the blog, but the clean-up work required would have no longer made this site fun.
And it would have happened sooner had my mom not turned off her WebTV box, but that's a whole 'nother story...
This could very well be a historic first: I can't think of another podcast that combines the words "scone" and "nipple ring"--and certainly not within the same sentence, courtesy of special guest (sitting in for Tammy Bruce this week), Jeff Goldstein.
In other words, don't miss this week's Pajamas Blog Week In Review!
Update: Once a closely-guarded secret of anchormen everywhere, Jeff reveals the method of obtaining great-sounding Professional Pundit-Style vocals.
There's much in Alvin and Heidi Toffler's new book, Revolutionary Wealth to reccomend it to regular readers of the Blogosphere, as I explain in my latest TCS Daily article.
And don't miss my recent podcast with Alvin Toffler, also at TCS.
Update: Nick Gillespie of Reason has a review of the Toffler's new book in The New York Times that's also well worth reading.
Sorry for the lack of posts, I'm just editing, mixing down, and uploading the latest Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast. In terms of audio quality, this will be the best one yet--and the panelists definitely came to play as well.
I'll let you know when it's up--or just keep checking the Pajamas motherblog.
Update: Click here--it's now online.
Well, I guess I couldn't have done too badly yesterday--Tammy Bruce emailed today to ask me to appear again on her show tonight to discuss assorted Tofflerian concepts. Look for me around 5:30 PM PDT/8:30 PM EDT; listen online, or via many of these fine stations.
And for my TCS Daily podcast interview with Alvin Toffler, click here.
Greetings from South Jersey!
Nina and I are in town for the weekend to give my father a sort of proper, if belated, Irish Wake at a local restaurant that was a favorite of his. About 30 family and friends are scheduled to arrive there on Saturday.
We spent all of yesterday in airports, airplanes and cars, not getting to the hotel until 2:30 in the morning. But prior to leaving California, I received an email from Tammy Bruce’s producer, wanting me to appear on her radio show on Thursday, to discuss my podcast interview with Alvin Toffler, which went live earlier this week.
I told him that as much as I’d love to (and greatly enjoy Tammy’s contribution to the Pajamas podcasts), I’m flying. Would Friday work?
Friday would work. So we drove to my mom's house, where company is already arriving from afar, and had lunch at 11:30. And then from 12:30 until 1:15 PM Eastern time, I appeared on the Tammy Bruce show. I did a fair amount of radio in the last years of my previous life, but none since, so while I know the behind-the-scene mechanics and understand my role in them, I have no idea how I sounded today to listeners.
How I sounded to me was basically like one long 45 minute cutting edge technology espousing run-on sentence:
ThankyouTammygreattobehere! TofflerpodcastThird Wave, prosumers,Revolutionary Wealth, JohnKennethGalbreath! BlogosphereInstapunditMalkinHot Air,Vblogs! FreelancejournalistNRO, TCS, PC WorldPajamas Media! thanksit’sbeenfun!It’s amazing what adrenaline, flop sweat, and that fear of dead air can do to make sounds come out of a mouth. Fortunately, I didn’t blurt out anything remotely similar to this, so I think the show went well, and the fact that Tammy had me over for something like three segments, including the first segment after the on-the-hour newsbreak, was a good sign that I wasn’t completely bombing.
What made it even more surrealistic was to be doing the show in my old room in my mom’s house, pacing the floor with a cell phone and headset, discussing high tech topics with a national radio show host. On the other hand, that’s one of those Army of Davids/Third Wave sorts of things: as a kid, I daydreamed in that room the standard, hey kids--let's put on a show! sorts of fantasies. This week, I recorded, edited and uploaded a podcast (and wrote a magazine article) from my den in California on Wednesday, and then did a radio show on Friday from old bedroom in New Jersey.
And then afterwards for complete reverse Future and Culture Shock, drove my wife to the local McDonald’s so that she can download email, as that’s one of the few sources of public Wi-Fi in this small town. As opposed to the suburbs of Silicon Valley, where it's practically the law that every restaurant and coffeehouse have Wi-Fi service.
Of course, trying to explain all this to my mom and my late father’s sister is virtually impossible. Internet? Blogs? Wi-Fi? Podcasts? Forgetaboutit! But the radio, of course, they do understand, and I think that was enough to make me look good in their eyes.
More this weekend, time permitting.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Alvin Toffler, the author of 1970's mega-seller, Future Shock, on his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, and his enduring 1980 classic, The Third Wave. My podcast interview is now up, over at TCS Daily.
(Note that no iPod is required; virtually any computer can download and play this MP3 file.)
Update: Blogcritics has a review of Revolutionary Wealth.
Sorry for the lack of posting today--I spent the morning putting the latest "Blog Week In Review" together--Austin Bay, Tammy Bruce, Eric Umansky and special guest Michael Ledeen had a great discussion of topics ranging from gas prices to Tony Snow to Iran to United 93. Click on over to Pajamas HQ to listen in!
Or least one small critter.
I'm sure I'll be alienating Cosmo Goldberg and Jasper Lileks next too...
In his introduction to the published script of Full Metal Jacket, Michael Herr wrote of Stanley Kubrick, "It's nice to get a call from a culture hero, especially when you have so few".
Never got to interview Kubrick, but I just got off the phone after a great 45-minute interview with Alvin Toffler, for a future TCS article and podcast. It was the first time I spoke with him since the week after 9/11, several months before this blog went up.
In 1980's The Third Wave, Toffler predicted so many of the trends that impact the Blogosphere: the break-up of the mass media and the assembly line, the inability of the education system (not to mention government itself) to keep pace with changes in the private sector, and the whole prosumption movement, aka The Army of Davids. His new book, due out next week is Revolutionary Wealth; don't miss it.
Why yes that is me in today's "Day By Day" cartoon. Of course, in those carefree days, we wore our maskies... (Sorry, just channeling lines from a earlier dystopian parable.)
Chris Muir, who draws the Blogosphere favorite "Day By Day" cartoon (and whom I interviewed a few years ago) emailed on Saturday night to tell me that my recent TCS Daily article on video and the Blogosphere inspired his latest satire. Needless to say, I'm thrilled--not to mention utterly astonished and surprised--to be immortalized by Mr. Muir's brilliant pen.
One person who has been absolutely brilliant at spotting trends and extrpolating their consequences into the future has been Alvin Toffler, whom I spoke with in September 2001, less than a week after 9/11. A galley copy of his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, just arrived--look forward to a review of the book, and hopefully a an interview with Toffler as well, in the not-too-distant future.
Also in the mail was a review copy of Cakewalk's new Rapture software synthesizer. Look for a review of that as well.
And speaking of Toffleresque books, I have a review of An Army of Davids, as well as a profile of its author (I think he's a blogger or a law professor, or something like that), over at TCS today.
(Please note that I didn't choose the photo, which makes Glenn look like a bit like he's being grilled by a Senate subcomittee.)
I interviewed documentary video maker/blogger/fellow Pajamas Media colleague Evan Coyne Maloney for my recent TCS Daily piece about the future of video on the Web. Unfortunately, because of the article's structure, I could only use a couple of paragraphs of Evan's detailed responses in the article, so I asked him if he'd mind if I reprinted the rest over at Pajamas Theater 3000, my home theater/home music/home video/home automation technoblog.
For anyone interested in DIY video--whether it's for the Web, DVD, or their own personal archives, there's a wealth of information in Evan's responses.
Update (9/21/06): Article now found here.
Well, more like The Road To Mt. Laurel: I'll be traveling to visit my parents in South Jersey today, posting is going to slow down a bit--although hopefully not stop entirely--this week.
Lots of archives below to scroll through in the meantime--and of course, loads more blogs await via the Pajamas logo on the right.
As a follow-up of sorts to the TCS piece earlier today on video and the Blogosphere, I have a review of Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 video editing program, over at Pajamas Theater 3000. (I wrote about its previous version for PC World last year.)
If you're looking for cheap ($100) software to edit camcorder tapes to upload them to the Web or master them to DVD, this could be a great program to quickly get into the video game.
Why yes, that is my essay on the future of video on the Web and in the Blogosphere, on TCS Daily today. (Big thanks to Evan Coyne Maloney, Glenn Reynolds, Ian Schwartz, Justin Hart, and Slingbox's Brian Jaquet for their quotes and background material.)
Incidentally, here's an important, and utterly non-related tip: if you do decide that video-podcasting is for you, don't choose this jacket as part of your on-screen wardrobe--even Johnny looks a might embarrassed in that rig.
When I was in Washington DC in November for Pajamas Media, I met William Beutler, author of the National Journal's "Blogometer", their daily round-up of the Blogosphere. He asked about doing a profile of me for the site; after haggling over a six-figure sum, and finally cashing my check, it's online today.
Did a product review in PC Magazine give me a bum steer? Possibly--check out my newest post over at Pajamas Theater 3000.
Remember when the funny pages meant "Peanuts" and "The Far Side"? The dramatic weight of cartoons sure carries a much heavier toll these days.
If you'd like some lighter fare, I have reviews of Bruce Springsteen's new Born To Run: 30th Anniversary Edition and Home Theater For Dummies over at Pajamas Theater 3000.
Since everyone seems to have at least one spin-off blog, I figured I might as well launch mine to focus on home theater, and the myriad of hardware and software that goes into it, on a more geek-friendly level than this blog dares to delve into those topics. I'll be posting original content, plus occasionally reprinting articles I've written on the topic for the various consumer electronics magazines I contribute to.
Pajamas Theater 3000 is still in its early phases, and at some point fairly soon, I hope to have a professional designer layout some snazzy new graphics. But there's a fair amount of content up there now.
I'm trying to keep this blog far less politically-oriented than this blog (though not entirely, if only to comment on Hollywood's recent output), but naturally, I hope there will be a fair amount of cross-over audience.
Stop on by today!
John Ruberry, the Illinois-based Marathon Pundit was kind enough to permalink us, writing some prose that was entirely too kind in the process, and we wanted to thank him.
Click over to his fine blog early and often.
I guess it really is worth a thousand words: over at Blogcritics, that's how many I have on the pretty pictures that drove Miami Vice's second season, now out on DVD.
I interviewed Andrew Breitbart, co-author of Hollywood Interrupted on what happened to Tinseltown this year. His thoughts and mine are over at Tech Central Station.
Update: Dr. Helen (the InstaWife) writes, "I Love Art--It's the Artists I can't Stand".
Heh--Indeed.
Meanwhile, the Blogfather himself has some thoughts on something I touched on in the article, what Alvin Toffler called the "prosumer" movement, and how it's threatening Hollywood.
Another Update: As I was saying...
A little bonbon for Thanksgiving dessert over at Pajamas Media: my interview with one of my favorite authors: the great James Lileks, who recently wrote Mommy Knows Worst, a whitty, sarcastic piece of boomer-era satire.
(But chances are, you knew that already.)
Update: the appropriately-named Corbusier, blogging at Architecture & Morality, has some additional thoughts on Lileks' books and the concept of creative destruction.
I have a round-up of the Senate GOP meets the Blogosphere confab over at the brand spanking new OSM site, complete with my photo of Sen. George Allen; speaking of photos, RightWing Redux has a shot of your humble narrator blogging away.
(I was going to call this post "Mr. Ed Goes To Washington", but that might send the wrong message to the Nick At Nite/TV Land demographic. More to follow in a bit: I just got into a South Jersey Marriot, as my parents lack broadband--which isn't too surprising, as they pre-date the Nick At Nite/TV Land demographic.)
Update: More thoughts, here.
I interviewed Pajamas Media co-founder Roger L. Simon via cell phone while he was driving home on the L.A. Freeway from Pajamas HQ on Friday night--and thus had plenty of time to talk as the traffic flowed at its typical nightly pace that makes the breakup of Pangea look like the Indy 500. His Pajamas Media profile is now online.
And I somehow managed not to transcribe him in Swahili once...
My latest Pajamas Profile is up: "The Cavalier", the man behind YAYsports! , a wild and woolly sports blog:
We target the 14- to 45-year-old male. We can be a little bit edgy. But quite a few women read the blog, and not every reader is a serious sports junky. I’ve had people say to me via email, ‘I don’t know anything about basketball, but I really like your blog.’ I thought that was kind of cool, but if you’re a hardcore sports fan, there’s going to be layers there that mean more to you.Like Hugh Hewitt, The Cavalier is another Cleveland-obsessed sports fan (hence the Cav's handle).Our motto is “No Scores. No Stats. No In-Depth Analysis”. Because you can find all of that on a thousand other websites out there. We try to find some of the more ‘out there’ things to latch onto and talk about. For example, let’s just say that the recent Carolina Panthers cheerleaders’ story was very good for us. My football writer managed to find some photos of them at team functions, and that was great for traffic. Sometimes we simply take a bizarre quote that an athlete says and just run with it. And over on my section of the site, Kobe Bryant is wearing tights this year, and I’m not sure why, but it interests me. He’s wearing tights under his shorts and nobody is really talking about this, but I’m wondering ... what’s this all about??
Pray for them, given the season the Browns are having.
Greetings from the W Hotel (insert obvious "does Cheney run this franchise as well?!" riffs here) in the heart of Fun City; I arrived last night for Pajamas Week.
And speaking of TV-related headlines, like Leonard Nimoy, I go In Seach of a Smarter Boob Tube in my latest Tech Central Station column....
Sorry for the lack of posting these few days. I've been interviewing some of the folks who make up the new media venture known as Pajamas Media, and drafting their profiles. (If Glenn Reynolds or Roger L. Simon go off on a jag that's written in Swahili or Klingon in their profiles, blame the interviewer, not them...)
Later today, it's off to the City That Never Sleeps for the Pajamas Media launch on Wednesday.
Expect sordid details of on the road mayhem that would make a Led Zeppelin tour sound like Donny & Marie Meet The Ice Capades!
(Especially if by sordid details, you meant visits to MoMA, the Brasserie, Brooks Brothers...)
I have a review of Rikky Rooksby's new How To Write Songs On Keyboards over at Blogcritics.
My review of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's Unledded-No Quarter DVD from last January's Vintage Guitar magazine is now online.
Can get enough Zep? Click here for my Blogcritics interview with engineer Kevin Shirley who mixed the sound for the DVD release (along with the triumphant Led Zeppelin live DVD in 2003).
I have a lengthy review of a new live DVD by The Who, over at Blogcritics.
Over at Blogcritics, I have a look at a new software program which packs tens of thousands of dollars worth of musical synthesizers into a PC for a couple of (pardon the pun) C-notes.
One of the better recent long posts I've written (if I do say so myself...) was August's "The Life And Death Of England's Cities", which used a pair of brilliant essays by British physician/journalist Theodore Dalrymple on the perils of modern architecture as its launching point.
At the time, it was included in one of Willism's periodic "Carnival of the Classiness" Blogosphere round-ups. And it's gotten a new lease on life, via links from one of Dalrymple's chief American publishers, City Journal, which link to it on their home page, and also from The Brothers Judd, who recently included it on their fine blog.
I hadn't heard of All Things Beautiful until I did a vanity Technorati search over the weekend, but I can't help but like any blog that puts me via a single post, in the same company with John Roberts and Cary Grant:
Roberts' dress code is entirely based on Cary Grant in his favorite movie. Therefore, the man clearly has - 'Integrity'Sounds good to me.Number two, he is a born Leader.....of fashion. According to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, we have a welcomed return of the black tailored suit, the very style that Roberts favors.
The subject of American aesthetics (see interesting article by Edward Driscoll), and inherently men's sense of fashion, still largely rests on Integrity. The quality of being honest, and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness. Roberts is known to be a man of integrity: whole, undivided, unimpaired and unified.
The 'Chief Justice Roberts' Look is corporate, commanding, prudent, full of integrity, with a 'touch of heart' discretely worn on your well cut sleeve. My guess is that we will see a lot of dark tailored suits amongst the young Americans who will be driving this trend.
Incidentally, nifty Warhol-esque photo of the blog's hostess on her bio.
I have a review of RGC:Audio (now Cakewalk's) Z3ta+ software synthesizer Z3ta+ (pronounced, "Zeta", for those of us who don't speak fluent l33t sp3@k), over at Blogcritics.
My dad has always been a pious fellow, but he couldn't help making that joking riff on the similar sounding line in the Lord's Prayer from time to time, which I'm sure he heard as a kid, growing up in pre-World War II Yonkers.
It's a phrase that took on new meaning in 1968, when the current version of Penn Station opened, replacing the magnificent original, which stood from 1910 until the mid-1960s, when it was demolished by a cash-starved Pennsylvania Railroad to build its current subterrainian version, and place the current Madison Square Garden and an office tower on its air rights.
The current Penn Station is a horrible, dank place, the absolute nadir of modernism, and blasphemy to the greatness the name implied for decades. But as I explain in my latest Tech Central Station column, across the street, there is, as George Lucas would say, A New Hope...
Four years ago, at about 6:45 AM PST, that's how the day began for my wife and I--and quite possibly, you too. In a Blogosphere retrospective, Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit was kind enough to include this post from the year after, which collects a bunch of items I wrote about 9/11. (When I saw her link, I updated it with a couple of more items, and replaced a couple of previously expired hyperlinks.)
If a writer as great as Virginia Postrel can look back on March 11, 2002 and conclude, "Much of what I wrote on this site six months ago, now seems banal or confused, although I can't say I'd take anything back", then keep similar thoughts in mind when reading my work about that day.
PoliPundit also has a look back on what has changed since that terrible day, and Orrin Judd links to what has become one of the most important and iconic photographs of the day, entirely because of the Blogosphere and other grass roots Websites--and equally entirely despite the best efforts of the legacy media to block it. (The Pajamas Media homepage has a retrospective slideshow of many additional photos. The simple fact that the Blogosphere exists is itself a testiment to 9/11, of course.)
Not everything has changed though. In his speech about the event nine days later, President Bush said, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists". On October 1st, Rudy Giuliani added:
On one side is democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life; on the other is tyranny, arbitrary executions, and mass murder.For many Americans, 9/11 was the end of much moral equivalency when it comes to dealing with evil--but as Roger L. Simon notes, sadly, there's still a fair amount of what Paul Johnson, in Modern Times called moral relativism left in many who should know better.We're right and they're wrong. It's as simple as that.
And by that I mean that America and its allies are right about democracy, about religious, political, and economic freedom.
The terrorists are wrong, and in fact evil, in their mass destruction of human life in the name of addressing alleged injustices.
Update: Speaking of moral relativism, events such as this and this, happening so closely to the anniversary of 9/11, help to define exactly what the term means.
Sharply contrasting the meaning is a decision by Alex Tabarrok.
As I explain in my Blogcritics review of Daniel Duffell's 2005 book, Making Music With Samples, when it comes to making music via computer, we're all hip-hoppers now.
(Me too--don't let the suit and tie fool you.)
I can't say my being asked to appear in the current Pajamas Media profile went exactly like the time that Woody Allen was approached by Smirnoff, back in the mid-1960s to be their "Vodka Man"...
Let me start at the very beginning. I did a vodka ad, that's the first important thing. A big vodka company wanted to do a prestige ad, and they wanted to get Noël Coward originally for it. He was not available, he had acquired the rights to My Fair Lady, and he was removing the music and lyrics, make it back into Pygmalion. They tried to get Laurence Olivier, and Haleloke--they finally got me to do it....In my case, far more begging and pleading was involved, until, miraculously, they agreed to put me online.I'll tell you how they got my name, it was on a list in Eichmann's pocket, when they picked him up. And I'm sitting home, and I'm watching television. I'm watching a special version of Peter Pan on television, starring Kate Smith, and they are having trouble flying her, 'cause the chains keep breaking all the time, y'know. And the phone rings and a voice on the other end says "How would you like to be this year's vodka man?"
And I say "No. I'm an artist, I do not do commercials. I don't pander. I don't drink vodka and if I did, I would not drink your product."
He said "Too bad. It pays fifty thousand dollars."
And I said "Hold on. I'll put Mr. Allen on the phone."
(Incidentally, in his post today, I have no idea who Roger L. Simon is talking about--but since it's some fellow who shares my name, I'll humbly accept his approbation.)
The folks at JP Tools contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing their Journeyman Guitar Tool, a sort of Swiss Army Knife for guitarists, making it relatively painless to change a string during a gig. The result of that exchange is online at Blogcritics.org.
I'd like to share a belated (for reasons discussed here) welcome to readers of Will Franklin's more or less eponymously-titled Willisms, as this post of ours on the horrors of modern architecture was nominated to be part of his latest "Carnival of the Classiness". He's got a great list of posts--be sure to click on over and read them all, including #19, a three word review of Oliver Stone's Alexander that's no doubt entirely correct in its assumptions.
(And greetings from the Chicago American Airlines Admirals Club, where I'm between flights back to the West Coast.)
My review of Downfall, originally written in March when the film playing the art house circuit, is now up on Blogcritics.
I have an interview with Bernard Goldberg up on Tech Central Station. Rather than asking Bernie why he ranked this person or that a certain way in his new book, The 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, I tried to get Goldberg's thoughts on how and why so much of liberalism became so unliberal over the last few decades.
We first interviewed Goldberg last year, for a memorable two-parter that also ran on Tech Central Station. And be sure to read a recent two-part interview that Goldberg had with another Ed--Ed Morrissey.
You might remember the review I wrote in late April when Orson Welles' last movie, F For Fake was released on DVD, and the brief, related blog post that it inspired. The gist of that post was that in a way, Welles' movie could be seen as foreshadowing today's' media-savvy--and media-friendly--hucksters such as Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, and Ward Churchill.
I eventually combined several of those elements into a detailed article, which just went online at The New Partisan. Click on over to read it.
What I found interesting when writing it was the element that ties together Sharpton, Moore, and Churchill: The Big Lie that has become an almost entirely accepted method to break into the national scene. It gets the press's attention, launches your national career, and then quickly gets either whitewashed or ignored as the press happily quotes your latest utterances. In a way, Welles' foreshadowed this with his War of the Worlds mock-newscast radio broadcast, and his reaction to it. He simply laughed off the terror it caused amongst the people he viewed as the hicks and rubes in the hinterlands...and, next stop Hollywood and Citizen Kane. (The first line of dialogue Welles speaks in Kane is of course, "Rosebud". But the second is perhaps even more telling: "Don't believe everything you hear on the radio!")
I didn't get into this in the article, but you get the feeling that perhaps that the modern media eventually got jealous of abetting the hucksters, and decided to get into the game themselves. Hence, their willingness, seemingly new-found, to invent their own news to match their worldview, such as CBS's "fake but accurate" RatherGate and Newsweek's retracted "Piss Koran" story, which led to Dick Durbin's recent 15 minutes of fame.
My review of Taschen's tremendous new Stanley Kubrick Archives is now up on Blogcritics.
Temple Stark.com has a list of "Blogcritics Editors' Picks" for the week, one of which was my review of the latest versions of Cakewalk's Project5 and Propellerhead's Reason:
There was a time when I hated synth-pop. It still grinds my teeth on occasion but I've giving up caring because I discovered if I continued I would have no teeth. This is an insight into the instrument that drives most music today. The author plays and knows from whence he speaks on the quality of "Propellerhead's Reason, and its upstart competitor, Cakewalk's Project5."Thanks Temple.
It's purely intuitive, but I've liked synthesizers probably since the early 1970s, when I first heard Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" and all those great Stevie Wonder songs. Still, I've always thought guitar was the most important instrument in rock (which is why I chose to learn how to play it at age 17), but keyboards have given rock much more color and shading than the guitar alone allows. And has created all sorts of unique genres separate from rock--such as the synth-pop that risks wreaking all that destruction on Temple's dental work!
Back in 1998, as part of their 30th anniversary, Reason looked at numerous books on the future written during those past thirty years, to see who got it right, and who--really--got it wrong. (Paging Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Paul Ehrlich to the white courtesy phone, please).
I think you could make a pretty good case that Alvin Toffler's 1980 book, The Third Wave was one of the books that got it right. There's a reason why Newt frequently sited it during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, and why it still holds up fairly well today. It doesn't hurt that Toffler had already written Future Shock in the late 1960s, which--while still enjoyable--was quickly rendered somewhat dated with its atmosphere of sixties' zeitgeist. Toffler wouldn't make that same mistake again with The Third Wave.
Here are my thoughts on Toffler's book, written for an Electronic House magazine subscribers' newsletter, and reprinted here by permission. (The resource links at the end of the post are also from the original newsletter):
Read More »
My review of Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives is online at Tech Central Station, complete with extensive quotes from my recent interview with Brian.
Kenny was not harmed in the writing of the article.
I knocked out a quick review of the new DVD of Night Court's first season for Blogcritics.
My latest Electronic House newsletter looks at the recent release of the first season of Miami Vice on DVD.
Bottom line: dynamite sound and music, but the picture could have been tweaked a bit more. Still, if you loved the series, you know that its first season was its best--and is well worth owning on DVD.
I have a review of Rikky Rooksby's not yet released book, Bruce Springsteen: Songwriting Secrets, over at Blogcritics.
Miles Davis' adoption of jazz/rock fusion in the late 1960s was his most controversial period. He helped invent the genre, but to this day, music critics are still divided as to whether or not the style benefitted him.
I have a review of Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, over at the Weekly Standard's Website. It's a new DVD that looks back at this period, which culminated in Miles and his sidemen going from intimate supper clubs to playing for 500,000 hippies at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in England.
For an earlier look at Miles' adventures in fusion, click here.
In his classic "Chinese Restaurant" episode, Jerry Seinfeld quipped:
"This is bad, you don't know. The chain reaction of calls this is going to set off. New York, Long Island, Florida... It's like the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately, nobody ever disappears."I think this Weblog has its own Seinfeldian triangle going on: today we were mentioned in the Miami Herald, and back in September we were mentioned by The Professor in the Wall Street Journal.
I'm not sure what counts as the third nexus though: maybe this Blogcritics piece which ran in the Staten Island Advance.
Now if I could just get some dinner before Plan Nine From Outer Space starts...
From the home office in San Jose, California, I have a top ten list of blogosphere moments over at Tech Central Station.
Your mileage may--and probably will--vary as far what should have made the list, but hopefully we'll find a few things we agree on.
Update: I accidently left out the name of Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit in item #2 of my article. She and the rest of the members of PoliPundit have a dynamite Weblog, and we apologize for the omission.
Another Update: Glenn Reynolds has linked to my article. Welcome readers who've arrived here from TCS.
Glenn also has a review of Hugh Hewitt's new book, which he describes as "the best book on blogs yet". Read the whole thing, to coin a phrase.
If you're in an '80s sort of mood, put on your Wayfarers and roll up the sleeves of your unconstructed linen sportscoat, and check out my article on the Live Aid concert and its aftermath over at the Weekly Standard.
It goes nicely with (and in fact was inspired by) the recently released ten hour DVD of the event--which makes a great Christmas gift!
Update: Power Line's Scott Johnson (AKA "The Big Trunk") writes:
Ed's companion post linking to his Standard Online column is "Ed is the world, Ed is the children." Ed's post makes me wonder if there is any one of us at Power Line who might be able to fill Ed's shoes in the event of an emergency. I'll meditate on that over the weekend.What can I say? I got very silly when I wrote that headline. Maybe I should try mending my ways Monty Python style:
"The BBC would like to apologize to everyone in the world for that last headline. It was disgusting and bad and thoroughly disobedient and please don't bother to phone up because we know it was very tasteless, but Ed didn't really mean it and he comes from a broken home and has a very unhappy personal life. Anyway, he’s a really very nice person underneath and very warm in the traditional journalistic way and please don't write in either because the BBC is going through an unhappy phase at the moment--what with its father dying and the mortgage and BBC 2 going out with men."OK, scratch that idea...
As James Lileks recently wrote, "The season of nonsectarian joy and fellowship is finally upon us, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Baby Claus Tree".
If you're looking for gift ideas, I have a review of his new book, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s, over at my Electronic House newsletter.
I have a review of Peter Gabriel's new Play DVD over at Blogcritics.
I have a review of the new DVD release highlighting this 1970 concert, over at Blogcritics.
George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian Eno, Mick Fleetwood, Stanley Kubrick and the cast of South Park all meet for swinging postmodern shindig in my latest Blogcritics post.
And you're invited, too!
Well, PC World that is, where I have an article on "HDTV on the Cheap", as well as a couple of computer reviews, in the December issue. They're all online (hence the hyperlinks), but don't let that stop you from picking up a hard copy or three of the magazine.
Over at Blogcritics, I have a first look at The Billboard Illustrated Home Recording Handbook, due out next month.
My latest "Ideas For Every Room" newsletter is online over at Electronic House magazine.
My first look at Cakewalk's flagship PC recording program is online at Blogcritics. Scroll down to near the end of the piece to hear me in action on a tune I recently recorded with the previous version of Sonar.
My latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine is now online.
I have a review of Rikky Rooksby's newest book, Melody: How to Write Great Tunes, over at Blogcritics.
"Ed Driscoll...Best damn blogger of politics and all things natural..and sometimes unnatural".
--Matt Rowe of MusicTAP.net, linking to my Kevin Shirley interview.
Over at Blogcritics, I have a lengthy interview with recording engineer Kevin Shirley discussing his efforts on both the upcoming Unledded DVD featuring Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and last year's magnum opus best selling Led Zeppelin DVD.
Fun stuff if you're a Zep fan as I am!
My latest Electronic House newsletter is online. It features an interview with Adi Kishore of the Yankee Group technology consulting firm on the current state of HDTV.
There won't be any blogging later tonight, because I'm heading off in a little while to the Montalvo Winery in Saratoga to see the Funk Brothers--the surviving members of Motown's crack studio band when the record label was still based in Detroit.
Last year for Blogcritics, I interviewed Allan Slutsky, the writer and producer of Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the heartfelt documentary that reunited them.
A very big thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who mentioned me in his Wall Street Journal article today, titled, "Godzilla vs. the 'Blogosphere':
As blogger Ed Driscoll noted, the Kerry media strategy was geared to the media environment of 1972, where the refusal to carry the story of a few big outlets chummy with the campaign would have been enough to keep things quiet. That didn't work, as the new media were enough to neutralize the media advantage that Kerry's strategy was built around. And that's quite a feat: Unlike the blogosphere's role in toppling Trent Lott, the Cambodia revelations happened not in the face of big media laziness, but in the face of active big-media opposition. (Even now, newspapermen like the Star Tribune's Jim Boyd are criticizing bloggers for covering the story, though without admitting that the bloggers had the facts on their side.)The item that Glenn's referring to can be found here.
The Wall Street Journal today, National Review Online yesterday (it's nice to back there, incidentally, if only for a post)--it's not easy being a media icon!
(It's also not easy being a working journalist: sorry for the lack of posts today, but obviously, the blog has to take a back seat to paying gigs. I was in San Francisco doing in-the-field product reviews for a well-known computer magazine. I'll let you know more when that piece runs.)
My latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine is now online. Kitt from Knight Rider makes a guest appearance.
My latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine looks at the late Jerry Goldsmith's classic film scores.
Last week, I mentioned receiving my review copy of The Adventures of Mixerman. My review of the book is now online at Blogcritics.
Batman has been my favorite comic book character ever since I was a wee youngin'. But--honest!--I don't wear a black cape or utility belt.
(Sheesh--the stuff I have to put up with whenever I leave Gotham City...)
UPDATE: On the other hand, just what was Jeff Goldstein doing with Philip Michael Thomas??
It's been a pretty hectic few days here, and normally, when I want to actually write about something rather simply linking to it, I like a few minutes to think about what I want to say. So I haven't had a chance yet to write about the Denver Blogger Bash on Friday--so let's remedy that.
It was a blast.
I've been online continuously since 1994 (actually, I was also in CompuServe briefly around 1982, but that didn't last very long). And over the past decade, whenever I've had the opportunity, I've tried to meet in person those people whose pixels I've enjoyed reading. So with the help of some frequent flier miles, it was possible to shoot in and out Denver International Airport fairly quickly.
I'm not sure why the Denver area has so many great bloggers around it--but at 1:00 in the morning, while Steve Green was cutting Kim's arguments defending suicide bombers to ribbons, (man I wish I was that articulate after four Martinis) I had an interesting conversation with Darren Copeland's friend about the regional aspects of blogging. I tend to discount them; I'm of the opinion that thanks to the Internet (and especially, thanks to broadband), anybody anywhere who has an opinion can get a Weblog from Blogger or Typepad and get his thoughts online.
But having a community of friends for support and to bounce ideas off of is great. And the Denver crowd certainly seemed pretty unified. What was interesting was comparing the discussions of the bloggers with those who don't blog. Steve noted his exchange with Kim, which was pretty darn heated. And simultaneously, I watched Darren's friend pounding the table as his gave us his opinions. And I'm pretty sure that neither of them have a blog. There's something about knowing that your ideas are going up on the 'Net, and that your friends and acquaintances would be parsing them, adding on to them or rejecting them that makes one choose his or her words very carefully. It's a very different medium from the bully pulpit of a newspaper where the communication is much more one way. (See also: Raines, Howell.)
So I can see where regular gatherings of bloggers would not only keep those who actively do it psyched to continue, it also provides a subtle push for others to join in the fun as well.
Curious, isn't it, that the 'Net, which was supposed to create an global village free of boundaries (that's the mindset if you smoked enough McLuhan, like Wired did) ends up doing a far better job of strengthening regional ties.
Incidentally, this was my first trip to Denver, other than changing planes at DIA. But hopefully it won't be my last. It looks like a great city. And the people in it aren't too shabby, either.
Back on Wednesday, February 25, I wrote:
THE PASSION: It opens today; the last film to generate this kind of controversy was probably Oliver Stone's JFK (I was going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, until I remembered the angry debates on shows like Nightline that Stone's film generated at the time of its release about its historical accuracy.)In today's review of JFK on The Digital Bits DVD site, Adam Jahnke writes:
Every so often, a film comes along that draws an ideological line in the sand, making it virtually impossible to simply discuss its merits as a motion picture. You cannot address its strengths and weaknesses as a movie without getting into a debate about its subject matter. Currently, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the agent provocateur du jour. I don't imagine Gibson and Oliver Stone would have too much common ground in a political discussion but I can't help but wonder if Gibson solicited Stone's advice on how to deal with the media in the wake of a firestorm of controversy.Apropos of nothing, I'm not sure how well Jahnke's analysis holds up. While critical opinion of the film was often on ideological lines, I'm not sure if viewership was. Somewhere I read that a fair number of its audience were African-Americans and Hispanics--and I'll bet that a fair chunk of both groups don't subscribe to National Review. And Roger Ebert, who last year gave an interview to The Progressive on his leftist views, gave The Passion four stars. Meanwhile William F. Buckley, of whom, rumor has it, gets comped his subscription to the conservative NR, had seriously mixed emotions about the film.
The ideological complexity holds true for JFK as well. I'd say I'm just ever so slightly to the right of Oliver Stone. But I saw JFK, bought the laser disc and later the DVD, and loved the film. Mind you, I think that other than Kennedy's death and LBJ replacing him in the oval office, it's entirely a work of fiction, but it's tense, dramatic and exciting stuff, just as The Manchurian Candidate, another leftwing paranoid fantasy was.
(Incidentally, I passed by the late Clay Shaw's house in New Orleans last week. It's a handsome walled mansion located back and to the left, back and to the left, of Bourbon Street. The conspiracy of men who assassinated JFK--Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Gary Oldham, Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones--were nowhere to be found.)
UPDATE: I hope I'm not sounding like I'm trashing Jahnke's review of Warner's new JFK DVD. He's very good reviewer, and both his article--and apparently the new disc--are actually quite good. However, I'm also not sure if I agree with this comment of Jahnke:
The Kennedy assassination was a turning point for this country and continues to be a lightning rod for controversy to this day. Witness the recent brouhaha over a cable documentary that explicitly tied presidential successor Lyndon Johnson to the assassination (even Stone didn't go quite that far).He didn't? Watching JFK certainly left me with the impression that Stone implicated Johnson in Kennedy's assassination.
I'm back--my wife and our friends and I had a great time in New Orleans. This was my first trip to the South since a few days in Atlanta four or five years ago.
The pluses in New Orleans? Good music, friendly people, great food, great seafood, drive-through daiquiri bars (why yes, you did read that correctly). The D-Day Museum that Stephen Ambrose helped to spearhead is a moving experience, one I'll try to write about in more detail later.
The minuses? Bourbon Street on a Friday night is like being in the middle of Animal House, except that it's an entire street full of drunken louts instead of one small frat house. Seeing flashes of naked boobage is a very big deal for many drunken young American men. Being able to buy black t-shirts with white text that uses the F-word multiple times is apparently a bold and daring move for many Americans of both sexes, as there were numerous stores selling such products. ("F*** you, you f***ing f***" is a particularly hot selling slogan, it seems--sans asterisks, of course. Remember this next someone complains about censorship by the Bush administration.)
While Howard Dean said he wanted to be the president for Confederate flag-waving southern good ol' boys, there are surprisingly few such flags in Louisiana. I counted exactly two: one attached to a flagpole on a house in the middle of nowhere, and the other, a small rolled up flag being carried into the hotel last night by a 40-ish blonde staying at our hotel.
Regular blogging to follow shortly. In the meantime, check out my newest article at Tech Central Station!
I had requested review copies of Apollo 11: Men On The Moon and their upcoming disc on the Saturn V from Spaceflight Films, and while I'll have a more detailed review eventually online, my first impression is that if you're at all a fan of the space program, run, don't walk to your local store (I saw them at Target this past weekend), or buy them online from Amazon.
This is absolute space geek nirvana.
The Apollo 11 package arrived today, apparently, they'll be shipping the review copy of the Saturn V disc as it gets closer to its release.
I was just young enough to not remember firsthand much of the Apollo missions, with the exception of the last one, Apollo-Soyuz. But I certainly devoured lots of books on the subject, as well as the DVDs of For All Mankind and Apollo 13.
But watching Apollo 11: Men On The Moon, I felt like that whole period was right before me. Probably because it was! This set of three DVDs was assembled by a small organization run by Mark Gray, a 20 year TV veteran, whose father was worked as a NASA contractor. The discs are distributed by 20th Century Fox. Gray and his team basically assembled all of the 16mm and 35mm film and video that NASA shot to document the mission, beginning with the incredible footage of the Saturn V being assembled, all the way through to the moon landing. (And to the landing back on Earth, but I haven't gotten that far yet!)
In a way, it really reminds me of the stately pacing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, this is staggering footage of one of the most important events in mankind's history. On the other hand, because it's largely raw and unedited, it sort of reminds you why the Apollo missions quickly lost the interest of the American public: the pace of a lunar spaceflight, given the enormous distances involved, is waaay too slow to be television friendly.
The Saturn V assemblage at the beginning of the film is just astonishing. Seeing the components with men from NASA and Rockwell standing next to them to place them into scale, it's a bit like Mies van der Rohe was asked to make one of his skyscrapers fly: the individual stages of the Saturn are that huge, and the Vehicle Assembly Building they're mated together in is even bigger. And seeing non-stop footage of the tank-treaded platform that hauls the whole thing to the launch pad is equally astonishing: how many skyscrapers move?
This isn't Ron Howard's Hollywood version of Apollo 13, so there are only glimpses of the personalities of the Apollo 11 crew, but it's interesting: watching Neil Armstrong on the ground, he seems to have a slight smirk on his face, a slight cockiness. But hey, if I was a hotshot former X-15 test pilot and Gemini astronaut who was about to become the most famous explorer since Christopher Columbus, I'd probably be a little cocky too. It's also an amazing contrast watching the crew in both their white spacesuits, and their off-duty togs: Buzz Aldrin's powder blue turtleneck and cardigan, and the Ban-Lon short-sleeve sportshirts worn by the other two men are just too much. (It reminds me that in a way, the future--our future--is in the past: the space program should be decades ahead of where it is now. We've wasted so much time piddling around with the Space Shuttle.) The DVD also contains the crew's postflight debriefing, and it's interesting to compare their no-nonsense tone talking among fellow NASA personal with their much more jovial attitude when they knew their statements were being beamed back to Earth for live, worldwide consumption.
After posing for PR photos, the three men then hop into their space capsule atop the Saturn V, and the whole shebang is launched into orbit.
Which is covered by 15 synchronized cameras.
That you can click through and choose with your DVD player's remote control.
The multi-angle function of DVDs is rarely taken advantage of, and this is a tour-de-force of what it can do. Of course, the whole package is a tour-de-force of what DVD can do. I'll have more thoughts later, or when I upload my actual review. But God, I'm loving what I see so far.
If you're a casual fan of the Apollo missions, this in-depth, full immersion treatment may be a bit overwhelming. I'd suggest watching Apollo 13, From The Earth To The Moon, or Criterion's painfully underrated documentary DVD, For All Mankind. But if want to feel like you're actually onboard with Neil, Buzz and Michael, this is your DVD.
(Also on Blogcritics.)
A review I wrote (which helped kill some time whilst in the Frozen Tundra of Washington, DC) of the Frank Zappa all-instrumental set is up on Blogcritics.
My review of Michael Graham's new book is online at Blogcritics.
While I didn't have a Weblog on 9/11, I was just transitioning from writing lots of material on dead tree, to beginning to also write material specifically for the Web. Here's an essay I wrote mostly to have a permanent record of what that day was like for my wife, my friends (one of whom works a block away from the WTC) and myself.
Here's my Alvin Toffler interview from about a week later. It ran in early October in Catholic Exchange.
Here's my essay from National Review Online on the stock market reopening.
Here's my essay from Spintech on how Weblogs came of age on that terrible day.
UPDATE: Here's a transcript of the phone call from "Group Captain Mandrake" that began our day one year ago. Much like the way Stephen Green began his.
9/11/05 Update: Welcome PoliPundit readers. Just to add to the above list, be sure and check out a piece I wrote for Tech Central Station that ran on 9/11/02, on what it was like at Moody's Investors Service (the bond rating firm) on that day the year before, and immediately thereafter. Their offices are only about a block away from the WTC; a friend who works there allowed me to tour them at the beginning of October, 2001, when the area was still cordoned off to the public, and covered with dust, debris and rubble. While the Moody's building itself was unscathed, I'll never forget the inch of light gray dust from the blasts on 9/11, which covered everything inside. More importantly, I'll also never forget seeing the nearby crater of twisted steel and brown mud, its 16-acre size dwarfing the construction equipment moving within and still trying to clean up the aftermath.
Also, this post on "The Copperhead Conjunction" from September 11th of 2003 is well worth revisiting--not for what I wrote, but for the thoughts of the men I linked to, including two named James--Taranto and Lileks.
Besides the Les Paul article, I have a couple of new book reviews posted there:
Gil Evans-Out of the Cool: His Life and Music by Stephanie Stein Crease.
Inside Classic Rock Tracks by Rikky Rooksby.
And don't forget to check out my earlier reviews, if you haven't done so already:
The soundtrack to Superfly by Curtis Mayfield.
The soundtrack to Rollerball by Andre Previn.
Wow, Gil Evans, Les Paul, Curtis Mayfield and Andre Previn--Eclectic 'R' Us!
Sorry for the lack of posting on Monday. But I spent my last full day in New York having lunch with my wife and a friend at the Four Seasons (my very favorite restaurant--there I said it--ever since I was a kid. It doesn't hurt that it was designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, or that the food is pretty good, too), followed by an interview with Les Paul, who's about to celebrate his 87th birthday next week.
To paraphrase Woody Allen's line to Groucho Marx, sorry I won't be able to attend your 87th birthday Les, but I expect you to be at mine!
My profile of Les Paul should appear soon in Catholic Exchange, and the quotes from my interview with him will help to flesh out the article I've been assigned by Vintage Guitar magazine on Gibson's Les Paul Custom electric guitar.
In the meantime, all I can say is that it's always wonderful to talk to a legend--here's a guy who's led several remarkable lives concurrently: he played guitar behind Bing Crosby in the 1940s, had numerous best selling records in the 1950s with his then wife, Mary Ford, and during the same decade, simultaneously help to design what would become (alongside the Fender Stratocaster) the greatest rock and blues electric guitar of all time (just ask Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and Slash of Guns and Roses--they all played a Les Paul at one time or another), and also invented many of the music recording techniques that we take for granted today.
For the past twenty years, Les has played every Monday night in New York--first at a club called Fat Tuesday's, and since the early '90s, a club called the Iridium. Backed by two rhythm guitarists--Lou Pallo on electric (a Les Paul Custom, naturally) and Frank Vignola on acoustic, and Nicki Parrott on stand up bass, Les plays a variety of tunes from the 1940s and 50s--his own hits, plus those of Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other classic composers.
There's a real sense of history here. I can't help but think that the ghosts of great legendary guitarists Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian (Les's development of the electric guitar seemed to have taken off when Christian's voice on the instrument was silenced by an untimely death from tuberculous in the early 1940s), Wes Montgomery (whom Paul knew) and Jimi Hendrix (who once called Paul for advice concerning his Electric Lady studios) are watching overhead as Les plays.
So many lives lived by one man--so much innovation. And so much great music!
Needless to say, I'll let you know when my actual articles about Les and the guitar he designed are available!
UPDATE: I tried to upload a photo of Les from the show, but Blogger's upload function is giving me fits, and I don't have the same FTP flexibility on this laptop that I do on my desktop PC at home. So stand by--I'll post a photo or two when mid-week, when I'm back at EdDriscoll.com Central.
Update: I later gave the article to Blogcritics during its very, very early days. It must have the longest ongoing comments section ever.
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