Outside My Brooklyn Window

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Here's a technique I learned from Steve Garfield: don't be afraid to post your experiments with video!

This silly clip is shot out my window using the video function on my digital camera.

It is an old camera. It doesn't have sound and can only record a few seconds of video, but I wanted to experiment. Enjoy!

Online Media vs. Offline Media

According to a story on Yahoo News, Google doesn't believe that television should fear the threat that the Internet poses to more tradtional media. "We're computer scientists,"said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, "We're not brilliant storytellers or content creators."

Currently, television producers are concerned that video sharing sites like You Tube could cut into their marketshare, but Google pooh-poohs it. "[T]here are social reasons that will cause both mediums to survive," says Mayer.

However, both television execs and Google execs have a common interest in turning online video in profits. The challenge is for network execs to take their content to "new, and rapidly evolving, delivery formats." Google merely wants to be "one of the players providing that platform."

This is more evidence for a trend that is clearly developing as an increasing amount of video content is being delivered through the Internet. Big media players are going to start producing content for the web, and the online shows that will attain the most popularity will have the biggest budgets, so they will look very much like television. That will not be good.

The Hardcore Show #2

Well, here's another episode of The Hardcore Show, something I'll try and produce on a weekly basis. It's more a nostalgic enterprise for me than anything else, giving me the chance to dig through my past and see what I can come up with. I had presumed I had grown out of a lot of this music, but as I pull the old music of the racks or download the tunes from the Internet, I'm finding that I still enjoy listening to the stuff. In fact, some of the music still inspires me in the same way it did when I was first listening to it...now over 20 years ago. I don't know if anybody reading this and listening today's show will have the same experience, but I hope so.

Click this link to listen.

Anthemic Pop Wonder - How Great Was Hüsker Dü
Youth Brigade - Sink With California
Big Boys - Hollywood Swinging
Minutemen - Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs
Embrace - Give Me Back
Billy Bragg - Saturday Boy
Negativland - Four Fingers
Einstürzende Neubauten - Sand
Laibach - Sympathy for the Devil

Lazy Literacy in an Electronic Age

Sigh. In response to Michael Skube's excoriation of generation dot.com's poor vocabulary and reading habits, twenty-something David Andrukonis attempts to defend himself and his generation.

To Skube's assertion that his students don't even know the meaning of the word "ramshackle," Andrukonis writes: "I didn’t know [what ramshackle means] either. But a few mouse clicks later, now I do." Apparently, Andrukonis assumes that it's fine not to know $10 words like "ramshackle" because he can Google them.

"Today’s young people don’t suffer from illiteracy;" he continues, "they just suffer from e-literacy. We can’t spell and we don’t know synonyms because there’s less need to know. What smart person would devote hours to learning words that can be accessed at the click of a button?"

And to Skube's assertion that young people use the word "novel" to describe any book, non-fiction and fiction alike, Andrukonis writes: "Skube implores today’s young people to reverse the wheel of time and start living as their parents did, buying hard-bound dictionaries and reading lots of novels. That’s a way of life I wouldn’t wish on anyone - except my parents."

I am 15 years older than David Andrukonis, yet I willingly admit to turning to Google in the way I used to open a dictionary. I am also a poor speller and frequently lean on spell check in the same way I used to have to look up words in a "20-pound decaying tome" and check on their spelling. However, I am not proud of my poor spelling skills; I do not defiantly flaunt my ignorance as Andrukonis does. To do so is kind of scary.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about new media and how it influences the way people think and perceive the world, the way they gather and synthesize information. People like Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis are very excited about the possibilities inherent in a media that can combine video, text, audio and interactivity. And they're not wrong, I love it too! I think it's fun to watch people like Ze Frank. But I'm increasingly scared that such stuff is going to weaken our culture's appreciation of good writing.

As we incorporate more media online, people are going to take the lazy route, watch the video instead of reading the longer story, download a 5 minute podcast instead of taking the time to understand an event in its context.

A book that belongs under the belt of a lot of these new media theorists (one they don't seem to have read) is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. In it, Postman says that most forms of video communication are better suited to entertainment. He says that we tend not to learn anything from television news because, in medium and format, it is simply entertainment. The thing is, television news cloaks itself in credibility, but still tries to deliver complex stories in soundbites. In a presidential debate, for example, a candidate gets only about 2 minutes to express his views on an issue. What can be well-discussed in 2 minutes?

Online video programing is no different because it comes to you through your computer. Advocates will tell you that the web is different, not confined by the restrictions that hem in traditional media, but talk to kids like David Andrukonis and I'll bet you'll find attention spans even shorter than 2 minutes.

New Media, this is your audience, or at least your future audience.

This Web 2.0 stuff is just another way of entertaining ourselves, of passing the time by consuming content that doesn't challenge the consumer intellectually. "[I]f novel reading is down among college students," writes Andrukonis in all seriousness, "it’s only because they’re spending time on activities like Facebook."

To write about Web 2.0 as if it were a the New Enlightenment is to lack a healthy skepticism.

Nothing's in our culture is really changing because we're just turning today's web into tomorrow's television. Like TV, RSS, rivers of news, podcasts, online video, social networking, are all symptoms of what Kierkegaard called the Aesthetic Stage of human development, the stage in which human beings use all manner of distractions to keep ourselves from realizing that we are in despair. It is in this stage that we do anything to keep ourselves from having to dig deeply into our souls and realize that life, and all it contains, is essentially meaningless, and that we'd better do something about it before we die.

Personally, I'd like to do more with my life than watch a few hundred videos online.

Mythbusters: Bush Reads 60 Books

The president and Karl Rove are engaged in a book-reading competition, and Bush is supposedly winning with 60 books as opposed to Rove's paltry 50. Here's a partial list. Do you believe the president? Bob Cesca doesn't.

Brave News World

Here's a depressing article in The Economist about the decline of newspapers. I'll have more to say later, but dig this quote:

Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic. On the internet [...] they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities—the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments [...] “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.

Research shows that people want do know how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening. People don't even want news.

Recently, Robert Scoble wrote that he thinks the future of journalism lies in teaching journalists more than writing skills to tell a story. In his mind, such a multimedia approach will enhance news storytelling, bring more depth to Internet-based news sources. He's clearly an optimist.

In Scoble's vision, news consumers are noble seekers who want more depth to their news, when in reality the are pleasure seekers. If Scoble's vision of news is realized, we will not end up with is not enhanced news coverage, but wall-to-wall entertainment. One step closer to Aldous Huxley's vision of a pleasure-soaked and anesthetized world state.

CNN: Shameless Self Promotion

Earlier this month I blogged about CNN's fear-mongering In the Footsteps of Bin Laden "documentary." Today on CNN's front page, their top story concerns the results of a CNN-conduducted poll indicating that "three-fourths [of poll respondents] said they believe Osama bin Laden is planning another significant attack against the United States." This is front page news on the same day that CNN's Bin Laden program premieres. I ask you, is this news? Or does CNN just want us to watch their crappy show?

Cooking in the Brooklyn Kitchen #1

In this episode, I make a vegetarian sandwich with caramelized onions, artichoke, marinated zucchini, sautéed tofu and shitake mushroom. It’s good, and not hard to make. Music is by Cab Calloway and Slim & Slam.

Writers of the World, Unite!

Scoble writes that "[t]he skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text," insisting that journalists will need to know how to "capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web." Now, he's not necessarily wrong, video and such can probably enhance a story, it's just that I don't like the deprecation of writing as a crucial basis for any kind of journalism.

In Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” he derides video as a poor medium for conveying information, claiming that it is better suited for entertainment. This book was written in the 1980s, so he is writing solely about television, but it still applies. In Postman's view, most television news is entertainment because it fails to communicate any real information to the consumer.

You can't help but see this vacuity in your eventing news broadcast. TV news is a video-based news source is that presents 'news' as detached and contextless chunks of digestible content, it doesn't have capability to tell a rich story. The war in Iraq, for example, is reduced to accounts of car bombings and death statistics, but there's no real analysis meaning there, no examination of the deeper story. But we get to see the pictures. We're just not told much about what those pictures mean.

The problem with video as an integrated part of a journalists job is that journalists will come to overly depend on it, they will become lazier writers, and the profession will continue to deteriorate. If we're not careful, online journalism will be the same as TV journalism...complete crap.

Jeff Jarvis, The Advertiser's Friend

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis writes about an AdAge article that argues that blogs, podcasts and RSS still have a long way to go before obtaining the reach of traditional media. They trot out a bevy of statistics to prove a point that's not altogether surprising, given the fact that much of this new media has only been in the mainstream public consciousness for a couple of years. In his one short paragraph, Jarvis works himself up into something of a tizzy, which seems more self-defensive than logical. He writes: "Advertising Age has an amazingly story — amazingly bad — trying to assure advertisers that they don’t need to worry their not-so-little heads about all this digital stuff they hear." He goes onto warn advertisers to ignore new media at their own peril. Personally, I don't think that AdAge is saying that advertisers should ignore this new media, it's just saying not to buy into the hype. (In full disclosure, I work for AdAge's sister publication BtoB Magazine, though I am not a writer there.)

Joe Coleman Exhibition

YeeHaw! The great and quite possibly mad artist, Joe Coleman , is about to show a new collection of paintings at the Jack Tilton Gallery right here in NYC. The show will run from September 7 through October 4.

I love Coleman's insanely detailed work and can't wait to see the show. The opening reception is scheduled for 6-9 p.m on September 7 and I want to go. Truthfully, Coleman scares me a little, but I think just being in the presence of such an intense personality would be pretty exciting.

Mark Flips Me Off

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It's not his fault. I think he feels a little uncomfortable on camera.

The Hardcore Show

Here's my first music show. I don't know if you care about the hardcore punk and "alternative" music from the 80s, but it really doesn't matter to me. I've decided to put together some of the music that influenced me and try to cobble it together into a show. It won't be exclusively hardcore punk, you might hear some Tom Waits or some hippie shit from the early or late 60s, but for lack of a better name, let's call it "The Hardcore Show." I intend it to be music that represents who I am. As if you could possibly care.

Click this link to listen.

Track list:

Anthemic Pop Wonder - How Great Was Husker Du
Minutemen - History Lessson (Part II)
The Pogues - The Sick Bed of Cuchulain
X - Los Angeles
Toy Dolls - Nellie the Elephant
The Vandals - Mohawk Town
Meat Puppets - Look at the Rain
Fugazi - Bad Mouth
Bad Brains - Pay to Cum
Minor Threat - Salad Days

Is CNN Promoting Fear?

I was invited to see the 'premiere' of CNN's In the Footsteps of Bin Laden this week with a crowd of media wonks and and administration toadies (Iraq war cheerleader Judy Miller was in the audience). At the pre-party, CNN's beauty queen Paula Zahn accidentally stepped on my toe with her high heel and disingenuously apologized, touching my shoulder and smiling at me with her perfect teeth, "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said and turned away just as fast to a group of suits which happened to include the new editor-in-chief of Time magazine. Three days earlier, I had just purchased the shoes I was wearing ($120, a tremendous amount of money for me) and was kind of protective of my expensive new footwear. Paula's shoes probably cost 3x that.

Despite the star-studded hoopla, it became quite evident that In the Footsteps of Bin Laden was little more than a run-of-the-mill TV news program when the room darkened and the show began. Two hours long and expensively-produced, the show featured reporter Christiane Amanpour who scored some good interviews with Bin Laden's early friends and teachers who, for the most part, described him as a "shy, quiet boy" who didn't seem capable of orchestrating the horrible events of September 11. Interesting? Relevant? Perhaps, but such interviews are pretty much equivalent to a local reporter who interviews a serial killer's neighbor.

To get to my point, the show seemed to have a double motive. While purporting to be a clear and unbiased view of Bin Laden's life, it was anything but. Through dramatic music, sensationalized storytelling, gratuitous use of 9/11 imagery, and obvious innuendo, the Amanpour told us that Bin Laden was plotting new attacks on America, horrific attacks of an unimaginable scale. The program ended with a picture of New York City shrouded in the smoke of September 11th, as if to say: "You aint seen nothing yet."

To me, this is exactly the kind of programming that stokes fear that makes people feel vulnerable to attack and less likely to question the administration’s motives behind its wars and civil rights violations. It makes me feel like CNN sits snugly inside the administration’s pocket and, with known collaborators like Judy Miller in the audience (who was thanked from the stage, no less), it doesn’t look very good for our supposedly fair-minded media.

Updates to the Photo Gallery

On Saturday, E and and walked around Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was a heck of a walk. My feet still hurt. And on Sunday evening we went out with M & M. There's 18 new pictures in the gallery.

Geriatric1927

Here is one of the true greats: a gentleman named Peter, a widower who lives alone in the country in the middle of England. He's been posting to YouTube under the name Geriatric1927 and telling the story of his life. Here he is talking about his "marriage and early struggles."

Thanks to Amanda for pointing it out. It seems that Peter has received a great deal of attention from the media regarding the sudden popularity of his YouTube posts, but doesn't want anything to do with it. What's important to him is the relationships he's building online and the ability to communicate with his fellow human beings, on his own terms. I think its one of the greatest things I've ever seen. What are you going to be doing when you're 80 years old?

The Real Elsinore

Man, I want to go to Denmark. This short flim clip shows you the real town of Elsinore where they actually stage Shakespeare's Hamlet in the castle where the historical Hamlet actually lived. I couldn't imagine anything cooler for a Lit-major geek like me.

Transponder

Andrew Baron announces a new website, transponder.net, which will be a "visual entry point into the world of physical computing." I'm kind of excited about it.

I have been thinking about robotics and little machines ever since getting to know my friend Bill Tremblay, an artist and robot maker, whose own Web site is currently inactive (damn him).

When I was in college I found this little shop in Pasadena, California that sold all sorts of little motors and electronic switches. I had no idea what to do with any of it, but bought a whole bunch of them anyway. They sat in a shoebox for years before I sold them at a garage sale. I'd really like to make something that moves on its own.

Truth is "The Stranger"

Not sure if you have noticed this one or not, but President George Bush recently listed The Stranger by Albert Camus as one of the books he's read on his summer vacation. Slate muses about the possible "geopolitical literary misinterpretation" of Bush's choice of a book in which the main character remorselessly kills an Arab on a sandy beach.

When asked about Bush's choice, press secretary Tony Snow said Bush "found it an interesting book and a quick read. I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism."

If I could dismiss the doubt that Bush actually chose The Stranger as his summer reading, I think his choice demonstrates some insight into the Bush brain. Somewhere, deep inside, Bush probably feels a kinship with Mersault, the books emotionless, regret-free hero.

In Bush, we have a man that lives without regret, that won't admit to mistakes, and is propelled along by the current of his questionable decisions. In the Slate article, John Dickenson wonders if Bush may have identified with The Stranger due to its "themes of angst, anxiety, and dread." But, if I remember the book correctly, Mersault feels none of those things. He's been shut down by anxiety, an emotional cripple who might want to feel something but cannot. For a man with a personal war that has killed thousands of Arabs, such an emotional state would be the only way he could sleep at night.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers

It seems to be a few years old, but this clip really makes me smile. I like to think of it as an art attack, a group of art terrorists spontaneously imposing their vision beauty on the everyday. I wish all terrorists would use art as a weapon.

The New Cyberwars

As you probably already know, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad has his own blog. However, O'Rielly's LinuxDev Center reports that if you have an Israeli IP address, the site "sends you a little gift, a cyberattack in the form of a virus or trojan (reports vary) designed to exploit an Internet Explorer vulnerability."

No Tech Phobia

Scoble mentions his fear that airlines will take away his electronic equipment on flights. "Gosh, what will I need to do? Read a book?" he writes. "Next someone will figure out how to turn paper into some sort of weapon." I know what he's saying, but couldn't you say that books already are weapons? In the history of the world, words have killed more men than bombs. Ideology, religion and dogma have motivated many men to do some horrible, horrible things.

Updates to the Photo Gallery

We went for a walk around Cobble Hill, Brooklyn on Saturday. On Sunday we went to B&H Photo and then I came home via Williamsburg while E went to Macy's for a bit. Check out the photo gallery for some updates.

Self-Portrait

This short is composed of approximately 200 still pictures shot with my digital camera. I layered in the music and sequenced the pictures in Sony Vegas Studio. The tune is "Search" by the Minutemen from their first record, The Punch Line. The Minutemen wrote great short songs because they didn't fully understand how to write a verse/chorus/bridge arrangement. They played what they considered the working class rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival, but infused their songs with funk rythyms because they couldn't make out CCR's bass and could only hear a strong bass line in funk songs. In the end they come up with something totally original. I think it's that innocence that made punk rock so great, just a bunch of kids who started playing music that they could call their own and, in many cases, it turned out to be revolutionary.

First Video Post: Faces of New York

Walking around the streets of NYC you see hundreds of advertisements staring back at you. Most of the time I don't really want to buy the products that these advertisements are trying to convince me to buy. Still, the things are so pervasive you can't help but think about them. I paired a bunch of them with a Woody Guthrie song. Guthrie wrote "This Land is Your Land" as a reaction to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" which he loathed as unrealistic and complacent. It's a great song. And as an American, it's my song.

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