The One Question I'm Really Stuck On

If there's one question I could pursue for the rest of my life, it is "How do references in media work?"

What I am looking for is some explanation of how one piece of media refers to another piece of media that is as comprehensive as, say, an explanation of how molecules bond chemically to one another.

Here are some of my unresolved questions about references:

What makes a specific moment or scene in a movie or T.V. show likely to be referred to by other media?

How does being referred to often correspond with the quality of a work?

How does it correspond to the significance of that work? For example, is being referred to often what defines a piece of media as important?

Here's why I think references in media are a big deal. (Note that this is not necessarily why I think you should think this is big deal.)

In college, I had access to a big media library, and I spent a lot of time tracking down the works that I heard referred to the most often and watching them. It was how I decided what to watch. As T.V. watching strategies go, it was pretty successful. I watched a lot of good stuff and figured out what people were talking about. Call this the beta version of a true reference sorter.

Second, references are what are currently driving the internet. Google, arguably the lasting achievement of mankind for this decade, is based on an algorithm that places the things people refer to front and center in any search.

Third, it is only a matter of time before all of television is catalogued, and all references are searchable. If you want an idea of what I'm talking about, look here. The referenced by page of an imdb entry is basically a primitive first draft of what will be a comprehensive database of when anything is cited by anything else.

Searchable video may be a ways off, but Google has already made images searchable and books are next - at some point, it will move past YouTube and start cataloging all the television that's ever been shown.

Fourth, references are both central to American dialogue and our one best shot at understanding the future of the world.

Fifth, ???, Profit! If you can figure out, and I mean prove scientifically and not just "have an instinct for," what will capture the world's attention and be referenced in the future, you have a shot at building it before anyone else. Bam, the ever-elusive corporate-produced viral video. Or maybe a way to get a message of art, hope or love out. You know - whatever.

I am especially interested in the idea of creating new systems of references that cross cultures. I know a fair amount about U.S. T.V. and next to nothing about T.V. from everywhere else. If we can rank all television in importance based on how often it's referred to in other work, I can watch the ten things everyone in Argentina has already seen and be able to carry on an insider conversation with someone there without doing three years of groundwork.

Or I could try to understand what people in Nebraska are watching. Or people in 1978.

You know.

Whatever.

ribble's Brief Foray in to 2012

I starting writing this post in mid-October, when I was checking Electoral-Vote.com three times a day. Even then, for those of us closely following prediction sites, it was looking like a landslide - (this Politico article [link via E-V] presents some of the many theories on why the press didn't see it that way, but it's all sour grapes now I suppose.)

So I'm thinking: what can I, an intelligent but unexceptional political observer, predict about the future (say, 2012) without doing any research? Could I, for example, predict who will be THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?!?!?!*

No.

But here are some guesses about who the Republicans could put up to run against Obama, a little bit of no-research handicapping, and then a sort of general statement that dismisses the whole exercise as pointless.


* I am writing a lot of things IN CAPS because I am reading the new JOHN HODGMAN and he does that a lot.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (Cal.)
Arnold has what David Bornstein might call a "small-big" problem - he would probably do pretty well if he ran for president, but it would be illegal.

Yes, you have to be born in the United States to run for president, and it would take nothing short of a constitutional amendment for him to be able to run. There is an "Amend For Arnold" movement out there which I refuse to google but I imagine has lost some momentum in the last three years or so.

So why mention him? Well, I like the idea of an amendment that allows someone born outside the U.S. to immigrate and run for President. Back when only white men could be President, maybe it didn't matter, but in this modern world, why not open things up to Americans with international backgrounds or funny accents?

It might be difficult to pull this off while my side is in control of things in D.C. just because the other guys already have their guy in mind, but I'll I'm saying is - Madeleine Albright 2016. Maybe at 79, she'd have to be at the bottom of the ticket, but come on. That would be awesome.

Leaving that aside - I almost feel like Schwarzenegger is too good a politician to take a show in 2012.

National name recognition, a carefully cultivated position as a moderate, awesome 1st lady, governor of some place (it doesn't super matter where you're governor of if you're running for president), and maybe even able to win California if he doesn't screw anything serious up in the next however long - this guy has too good a shot to try to run against a popular president with a high approval rating running for re-election. That's a sucker's bet. Look for a new Amend for Arnold movement around 2013 or 2014 anticipating a 2016 Arnold for President campaign.


Palin
Ugh. When CNN isn't talking about Obama's dog, they're talking about McCain's people calling Palin an idiot. And when they aren't talking about that, they're talking about Palin 2012.

It kind of makes sense to put these two ideas together if you assume running as a Republican in 2012 is a sucker's bet and Palin's some sort of sucker.

But I don't think Palin is the idiot we've been lead to believe. I certainly don't buy these anonymous campaign aids saying she didn't know Africa was a continent and couldn't name the countries in North America, and shame on Fox News, Jack Cafferty and whoever else for repeating it.

(Reminder to journalists: these McCain staffers were the same people making shit up about Obama.)

Sitting in her hotel lobby, Palin looked a lot smarter talking to the press than she ever did before. Now she has two years to get her act together on national and international issues instead of two months. She may surprise us.

Okay, that said, Palin represents a certain identity for the Republican party that I don't think is any longer tremendously effective or even very electable.

Maybe it's liberal wishful thinking, but I think if anyone's at the wheel for Republicans after they've had a chance to regroup, they'll start thinking of themselves as a pro-capitalist (as opposed to pro-business), more technocratic party that believes in climate change and puts results ahead of culture wars.

Absolutely none of that describes Palin.


Gov. Bobby Jindal (La.)

Young, fashionably non-white, willing to take charge of a place in trouble, from a state that had earned a reputation as nigh-ungovernable before he showed up, governor of anywhere and ready to make an argument on where the GOP should be going, Jindal is a serious guy with a serious shot at the nomination.


Gov. Jim Pawlenty (Minn.) or any of these other governors you hear about

Governors generally beat senators in presidential elections, but presidents tend to beat challengers. These guys are where the media is looking for the GOP's great white hope, if you'll excuse the term. Look for at least two governors to join the early hunt against Palin 2012.

REMINDER: I am not being more specific because I have not done ANY RESEARCH.


Alan Keyes (Illinois or wherever)

Alan Keyes is the perpetual African-American Republican candidate for president who no one takes seriously (or maybe this last time he ran as an independent or something? I am flying without a net here, people.) Last time Keyes was noticed by anybody: when he ran against Obama for Senate in Ill. after the original guy dropped out due to being corrupt or something.

Look for Keyes's name on your ballot on Nov. 6, 2012, and expect to be surprised to see it there because you have not really heard anything about him, and then to forget all about it by the time you leave your polling place.


Newt Gingrich

I am a diligent watcher of Stephanopoulos, where former house speaker and former kind of a jerk Newt Gingrich made occasional appearances on the round table.

From where I was sitting, Gingrich was coming across as a sort of lapsed elder statesman - he'd had his shot, been around, still knew the score for the most part, but could sort of do his thing as a commentator because no one really thought he'd be getting back in to politics (see Carter, Gore, Ayers, etc.)

So maybe a month ago, Gingrich was on and giving it pretty hard to the McCain people. Specifically, he was making a lot of anti-Obama arguments much more strongly and starkly than McCain had been doing it. Gingrich was sounding a lot less like a guy spending his retirement writing book reviews on the internet and a lot more like, well, like Rush Limbaugh.

At first, I just assumed that Newt had been politicized by the election just like everyone else. But when I was writing out my notes for this list, it occurred to me that maybe Gingrich was looking ahead, positioning himself for a run at 2012.

Gingrich is a return to the past, but he's still got a nationally recognized name, and there are those who think that what McCain did wrong was not being ENOUGH of a 1998-style Republican. Without doing any research, I'd take a chance and rank Gingrich among them.

I would not be surprised to hear about Gingrich taking a shot in 2012, but I'll be even less surprised when the media starts mentioning it a few years from now.


Why It Was Especially Dumb to Spend a Month Writing This

Here's a big secret that ought to be conventional wisdom: Obama is going to win reelection in 2012 no matter who runs against him. Here's why:

1) Incumbents tend to be re-elected.


2) The stronger challengers will wait for 2016.

Biden has said he won't run, meaning the Republicans will have a lot of the advantages in 2016 that Democrats had this year - basically, an open field against an incumbent party. Smart contenders will bide their time. The 2008 field will be taking their last shot before they're too old to compete.


3) Obama probably won't screw up in either his governing or in campaigning.

The most opinionated Republican commentators have adapted this very annoying "just you wait - you'll see we were right when Obama starts screwing up slash being a liberal terrorist" sort of attitude since the election. Fact is, Obama probably won't screw up.

The most persuasive evidence I see for this is how Obama ran his campaign. My mom was volunteering for the man in New Mexico. One week she came up to Brooklyn to visit, and there happened to be an article in the Times about an Obama campaign office in Pennsylvania or someplace. Mom said she recognized almost everything described in the office from her own Obama campaign office.

That sort of national consistency takes a master administrator. If you don't want to take Mom's word for it, check it this last word from FiveThirtyEight's On the Road series. It's almost enough to make you pity McCain - that guy was out organized from start to finish.

Obama is someone who learns from his mistakes and corrects them. Here's how Clinton won reelection: he never announced he was running and he started campaigning early for the time (like, two years before the actual election). Obama knows this. He will do these things.


4) Either the economic crisis will be resolved and Obama will be able to take credit for it, or it won't be resolved and the electorate will look to the Democratic party to fix it.

Reelections generally have more to do with the economy than anything else - it's the biggest reason Clinton won in 1996.

I believe that if anyone can solve this thing, it's our man Obama. But maybe he won't, or no one could - no matter.

The American electorate tends to favor Republicans on national security and Democrats on the economy. It's the number one reason Obama won this time out. Even if the economy is as screwed or more screwed than it is now, if Obama looks like he takes it seriously (and he will), he'll win reelection.

Don't buy it? Take 2004 as an example. That year was a national security election. The country was in deep trouble in two wars.

The American electorate still thought Bush was the only one who could be trusted with a national security crisis. It didn't matter that Bush was the one who had gotten us in to that mess in the first place - Americans trust Republicans with national security and Democrats with the economy, full stop.

Windmill City

I am fascinated by the future of the New York City skyline. I love trying to imagine how the city will look 20 years from now. There's a lot of interesting, idealistic ideas out there right now - the 2nd Avenue subway line, the Orwellian-designated Freedom Tower, the Fulton Street Transit Center, Moynihan Station (named for the guy who didn't want us to knock down the old one in the first place), the Highline, Hudson Yards - I even got suckered in to proselytizing the Brooklyn Nets stadium complex before Ratzinger and the Bush recession made a liar out of me.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I-Here) gave a bit of a boost to all us budding architectural futurists last night when he announced a plan to create wind farms right here in New York City that would provide a tenth of the city's power. No small fête indeed, and my initial impression is that Bloomberg is getting set to mess up another major initiative in the exact same way as his last two.

In his first term, Bloomberg championed a new Manhattan arena in the Hudson Yards as part of his New York 2012 campaign to bring the Olympic Games to New York City. Bloomberg went wrong there by pushing too hard, announcing a major initiative without first negotiating the details with the people of the City and, more importantly, the big three power brokers in Albany - the Governor, Senate Majority Leader and Assembly Speaker.

New York real estate is very complicated, and this was no different. I wasn't the only one who was uncomfortable with the idea of such a large project with such relatively limited uses on such a large plot of land in an area of Manhattan that desperately needs a well-measured revival.

Even those that supported the initiative could not have been surprised that Bloomberg was just not able to push it through without Albany's approval. The stadium died, a lot of Bloomberg's political capital went wasted, the Hudson Yards went into the lengthy process of negotiation which was probably inevitable and the games went to London. Strike one.

Then came Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. Now, unlike the Jets stadium, this one was something I supported. What people saw when congestion pricing went in to effect in London was that nobody was sure about it, and then it happened, and then everybody loved it.

Now, there's a lot to be said for making a city more pedestrian-friendly and more petrolium-unfriendly. Unfortunately, Bloomberg once again put himself in a position where he couldn't get around to saying it. In fact, Bloomberg failure to get the people on his side before trying to get the plan passed was just one of the tactical mistakes that he ended up making for the second time.

Once again, we were reading about interest groups with pretty understandable concerns who didn't feel like they'd had all their questions answered by the Bloomberg administration. This time, they were local Manhattan car owners who were used to parking on their own streets, advocacy groups concerned that the new fees would would be discriminatory against lower-income workers, and those living just outside the then-96th St. toll border wondering if this meant everyone would be parking in their neighborhood.

Just like the Hell Kitchen residents who would have been most affected by the Jets stadium, this group deserved to have their questions answered or at least discussed. So did Albany. But, once again, Bloomberg had forced the issue too soon.

In what was probably his biggest mistake, Bloomberg had timed the announcement of his initiative so that Albany would have to pass it to qualify for a $500 Million (!) dollar subsidy from the Federal goverment for Congestion Pricing to have any chance of really happening. Albany Democrats refused to put the proposal to vote, essentially giving it a pocket veto.

As congestion pricing was failing, Bloomberg's tactics and his troubles were starting too fell a little too familiar. Now, I like Bloomberg - I'd bet, for example, that we'll ultimately end up seeing his school programs as successful. And I don't think you need to like him to see how much the office of the mayor can change the character of this city. Guiliani proved New York could be a better place, and Bloomberg proved the mayor could make New York City a better place without being an asshole.

But, although Guiliani's arguably fascist style and Bloomberg's corporate CEO decision maker style have both proved to be, on balance, more effective then simply being a cog in the New York City Democratic machine, simply going ahead with something and assuming that everyone is going to agree with you, and agree with you on your schedule, will only get you so far. Specifically, it is not good enough to make you president of the United States. What's more, it hasn't worked out for Governors too well, either. To move up to bigger things, you've got to be able to compromise.

Now Bloomberg has a new initiative that sounds great, but is big and complicated and involves a lot of interest groups pulling in different directions. What's more, he once again hasn't quite left himself enough time to get it done, although this time in may not be his fault - Bloomberg's second and final term ends in less than a year and a half.

If there's one thing that makes me optimistic about Bloomberg's wind power proposal, it's that it is not front page news, it's front-of-section news. If Bloomberg isn't staking his future on this proposal like he has in the past, that means that there's room for all parties involved to compromise. It even seems from the Times article that Bloomberg is taking the complicated nature of these negotiations in to account, seeing himself as just getting the ball rolling.

Ultimately, though, alternative power farming is going to depend on the man himself. If Bloomberg's learned the lessons of the mistakes he's made in the past, he has the potential to leave an environmental legacy that New Yorkers can just make out off their beaches and on their skyscrapers and be proud of. Otherwise, we'll once again just have to wait for someone who knows both how to lead and how to listen.

The Gibson Expense Account Fantasy

I read William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country, in the week of Aug. 22, 2007. I know the exact date because that was when I saw this interview with Gibson in The Onion A/V Club.

Once I realized Gibson had a new book out, I immediately bought it and read it. I didn't even finish reading the interview.

Why is William Gibson so important? The way I always introduce a conversation about Gibson is to explain that he invented the term "cyberspace," which those of you over 25 or so might remember as important in the early (pre-Google-ish) internet.

More importantly then the term, of course, is the concept. Early on, we thought of our online universe as what Gibson calls the "goggles and gloves school of virtual reality." (See Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers, Disclosure, blah blah blah).

The idea of such a space, and Gibson speaks to this quite well in his A/V interview, was fundamental to gelling the idea of the internet for the people who went ahead and invented it.

So Gibson created the then science fiction concept that led to the defining real-world innovation of our generation, and all this in just his first novel, Neuromancer. Since Neuromancer, Gibson has published eight novels and a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome

Except for Difference Engine, I've read them all, and a couple of patterns have jumped out at me. First, and I think this is extremely telling, Gibson's most recent novels, Spook Country and the excellent Pattern Recognition, are not science fiction. At least, they are set in the present time and use pretty much the technology of the day.

I like this a lot, because it is further evidence that you and I are living in the future. I've always had this idea that you can take common tropes from sci-fi and fantasy and translate them directly through analogy in to today's world.

For example, no one I know is actually a vampire, but we all know people who live off others' life energy in a different way - sap others' will, drain their money without giving any reward, stuff like that. Take a vampire, forget the blood and the sleeping in coffins, and you've got a certain type of lawyer or a Hollywood agent. Take it one step further, and you could translate Interview With a Vampire in to a pretty good Hollywood morality tale.

Gibson's science fiction no longer has to be science fiction. No one's making commercial flights in Low Earth Orbit, but with a fall in barriers to travel and cheap airfare abroad, we are pretty much travelling like we're in LEO space craft anyway.

No one's using goggles and gloves, but we're all using handheld global communications and informations devices, and even the occasional wireless modem. There aren't any actual aliens around, but with globalization and international markets, you can take walk to another neighborhood in New York and feel like you're on another planet. So we're living a version of Gibson's future already.

(By the way, if you need evidence that Gibson had this figured out way before I did, protagonist of Neuromancer: "Case." Protagonist of Pattern Recognition: "Cayce.")

The other thing that raised my interest by running across Gibson's various books is that, despite their obvious differences in subject and time period, Gibson's novels tend to share a lot of themes and a lot of plot devices.

I could talk about Gibson's grand themes, his take on technology, how art and communications are bringing people together or keeping them apart, how globalisation and consumerism are both creating needless goods and generating a global market or audience for the truly heartfelt art among us, and other large and grandiose ideas, but

1) you'd really do better to read Pattern Recognition, take a look the discussion on Gibson's blog, and form your own ideas,
2) I'm sure somebody else has done a much better job with this already, and
3) this blog isn't about addressing the thematic basis of our own world, it's about making tiny and carefully argued points about obscure media really well, and also sometimes posting pictures of legos.

I'll turn my effusive rant, then, to Gibson's favorite plot devices. First, Gibson loves the MacGuffin, and I love Gibson's MacGuffins right back. Neuromancer had Case chasing a word, Pattern Recognition had Cayce after an author, in Spook Country everyone's after a box, All Tomorrow's Parties they are chasing a world-shifting event. Gibson never leaves out a good MacGuffin.

Gibson's heros, however, tend to be ordinary in the global scheme of things, even down on their luck: drug addicts, the neurotic, a journalist, nothing-special hackers.

So you need a way for hero to chase MacGuffin. Enter the rich patron. In Neuromancer, this part is played by a criminally ambitious AI. In the recent books, the part is played by an overly ambitious Belgian advertising billionaire.

I love how you can see the traces of Gibson's imagined future of yesteryear translated in to his imagined present of today. For example, Wintergreen, the AI in Neuromancer, is built around the principal of not knowing the word that will unlock his abilities, so as better to keep him from comitting the dangerous Turring fete of making himself smarter (there is even a "Turring Police" that foil these AI's attempts to enrich themselves with deadly force).

Analogously, our Belgian advertising billionaire's character is first described as being centered on the idea that he can see nothing funny about his own name. That name: Hubertus Bigend.

(Incidentally, I am convinced that this latest Gibson cycle will eventually be referred to as the "Bigend Trilogy.")

So we have the rich and powerful patron to move the ordinary but somehow unique protagonist on a series of plot crucial and exciting tasks that Gibson obviously researched extensively and so is able to excitingly dismiss in throw away plot points like over-written message board posts about obscure footage, buying antique computing technology of the 1970s and spoofing black ICE with a data packet disguised as an ordinary accounting request.

Still, we need a means to an end, a way to get our hero from point A to point B, a way of giving these unique but ordinary people the power of the patron with out their necessarily understanding the intricacies of how it is used, and to overcome ordinary, plot-encumbring obstacles like airfare and walking-around money.

Which brings me to the final of the puzzle, the part of the post where I move from the obscure stuff you, the gentle reader, may not be able to make sense of even if you've read all this shit and on to the one, simple idea I probably could have laid out in the beginning if I wasn't so excited about writing everything inbetween then and now.

I speak of course of the semi-all-powerful, high-credit limit and no-questions asked expense account.

The escapist dream of living in a future where everything from Boston to Atlanta is all part of the same dirty and underlit urban sprawl has absolutely nothing on the fantasy of an unlimited, no-questions asked expense account.

God I love the idea of this expense account. Stay in a posh hotel, call the company travel agent to get booked on a first-class flight to Japan that very same day, and buy yourself that obscure Japanese-made WWII replicant American fighter jacket that comes up all the time, right now, today, no questions asked, and absolutely guilt-free.

In the real world, travelling on an expense account is never like this. The closest I've come personally is taking care of tasks as a PA on a commercial (budgets on commercials are really high - once I was sent out on an ordinary run and ended up taking four thousand dollars in cash across town for the production coordinator's petty cash).

Even then, I felt a little guilty about spending the production's money, and I'd never do it unnecessarily (although I've met many PAs who have no problem doing this). Receipts had to be accounted for. Efficiency is valued. You need to call your key for approval.

More often, of course, I was managing expenses on a shoot of my own, inevitably low-budget to begin with, and expenses that I have to manage are so frought with worry that there's really no point in comparing them to a fantasy expense account at all.

Friends of mine who travel on the expense account of a big company tell me it's fun at first and then almost immediately loses its appeal. I mean, you can only eat foie gras and steak so many meals of the day before you're sick of it and fat.

Worse, some people I know come to depend on their expense account, so that they get to a point where they couldn't feed themselves if they quit their jobs or stopped working through two or three meal times a day. Who wants to spend every waking moment trapped in opulence?

Gibson expense account are great not just because of the resources they deliver, but because they are truly justified and guilt-free. They are appointed for a specific purpose, something the expense account provider can provide that only the expense account recipient can do, and inevitably something important, even world-changing, and (in the best novels), something that is also of singular importance to the protagonist.

That's what makes the Gibson expense account such a fantasy: not the money, but the ability to navigate obstacles with a singularity of power and purpose that each of us can envy.

Earworms

"Earworms" is the English translation of a German word that means "songs that get stuck in your head." I like this name - reminds me of something that happens in a Star Trek movie.

I keep track of my Earworms in an iTunes playlist. The rule (and you've got to be strict about this) is that these songs must have no reason to enter my brain or must stay there much longer than they can be of any use.

They do not have to be any good.

I believe that I have by now found all of them. I present my earworms here, in the order they've occured to me over the years, from oldest to newest. From a meta perspective, that means this blog entry represents over two years of work and no more than thirty minutes of work simultaneous.

Cantaloop
Us3

Can You Get To That
Funkadelic

Handcuffs
Parliament

Run on
Moby

Bigger
Propellerheads

Praise You
Fatboy Slim

Dirty Harry
Gorillaz

Feel Good Inc.
Gorillaz

Satan Is My Motor
Cake

Zak and Sara
Ben Folds

It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career
Belle & Sebastian

The Bird That You Can't See
Apples In Stereo

Chewing Gum
Annie

Cities
Phish

The 50 States Song (Live)
Sufjan Stevens

She'z in Control
Chromeo

She Don't Use Jelly
Ben Folds Five

Alpha Beta Gaga
Air

19-2000
Gorillaz

Am I Black Enough For You?
Billy Paul

Mr. Blue Sky
Electric Light Orchestra

Jacksonville
Sufjan Stevens

Crazy
Gnarls Barkley

Up for the Down Stroke
Parliament

Hollaback Girl
Gwen Stefani

Rocketman
Elton John

Y Control
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

My Humps
Black Eyed Peas

All Night Disco Party
Brakes

DARE
Gorillaz

Freezepop Forever
Freezepop

Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
The Arcade Fire

I Turn My Camera On
Spoon

The Man In Me
Bob Dylan

Picture Book
The Kinks

Make Money
Jr Mafia featuring Lil Kim & Biggie Small

99 Problems (Produced By Rick Rubin)
Jay-Z

After Hours
The Velvet Underground

Christmas Time is Here (vocal)
Charlie Brown Christmas

Seven Nation Army
The White Stripes

Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk
Parliament

Girls
Beastie Boys

Appletree
Erykah Badu

Do You Remember Walter?
The Kinks

Tyrone
Erykah Badu

Sister Christian
Night Ranger

Touch The Sky
Kanye West

Road to Nowhere
Talking Heads

Lefty Loosey
They Might Be Giants

Demon Days
Gorillaz

Don't Get Lost In Heaven
Gorillaz

Where Do They Make Balloons?
They Might Be Giants

Good Time
Leroy

Over And Over
Hot Chip

Take Your Mama
Scissor Sisters

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Daft Punk

Crescendolls
Daft Punk

My Doorbell
The White Stripes

Waiting For The Bus
Violent Femmes

The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill
The Beatles

Flight of the Conchords theme song
Flight of the Conchords

The Night Chicago Died
Paper Lace

Fantasy
Mariah Carey

Hooray for Hollywood
Rosemary Clooney

Caravan
Duke Ellington

I'm Easy Like Sunday Morning
Lionel Ritchie & The Commodores

Genius of Love
Tom Tom Club

Alternate Route To Vulcan Street
Super Furry Animals

Sidewalk Serfer Girl
Super Furry Animals

Fun With iTunes Ratings

I've been having a great time rating my music on iTunes.

I have been Apple-loyal since the IIc. Apple is easy to love because their software is versatile and accomodating - everyone can use it in his or her own way. It's like how Maxis (Sim City) used to say that they didn't build games, they built toys. There's only one way to play soccer, but there's a million ways to play with a ball.

I had been conciously avoiding the My Rating feature in iTunes - don't know why exactly, maybe because I thought it was the sort of thing I'd need to go all out with. I tend to never throw anything away. As a result, I have a lot of brilliant music, a lot of crap music, and a good amount of decent stuff that I am just so over.

Rating all the music in my iTunes library was going to be a long-term project. I didn't want to leave it half-done or just rate a few songs, because it only seemed liked song rating would be useful if I rated all the music I listen to.

But I think what was really holding me back was that I hadn't settled on a consistent system to use to rate my music.

It doesn't exactly define the eon, but we are living in the greatest age of personalized rating in history. Aside from this new iTunes habit of mine, I most regularly rate on Netflix and on my TiVo. I also watch a maybe a hundred short films a year for First Sundays, which I sort in to the categories of Show, Maybe and Reject.

Over my many years of rating shit, I've decided it's important to decide on a consistent criteria and stick with it. If I'd rated my music without a consistent system, the results would be worse than useless, because once I'd finally settled on a system I'd have to bring all my old ratings up to date with the new criteria and then there would be a terrible mix of the old system and the new system and it'd be a right mess.

I take this sort of thing pretty seriously.

For First Sundays, I rate by what I can in good concious show on the screen to our audience. For example, we reject a lot of good films that are not comedies because we are a short comedy film festival. Other stuff, especially stuff we're on the fence about, we reject because of length.

On the TiVo, I try to rate based on what I will actually watch since I leave TiVo suggestions on and it takes my ratings pretty seriously.

The Wire is the best show on TV and arguably of all time, but there's no point in watching it piecemeal - there's just too many plotlines to keep straight, for one thing. The Wire really demands to be watched on DVD or one eagerly anticipated week at a time. The Wire gets one thumb up.

Futurama, though, I will watch at any time. Futurama gets three thumbs up.

Netflix is where I really go crazy. Netflix has basically become the central data stronghold for everything I think about movies. I suspect I have this in common with many Americans, but at this point I am paying my $13.99 a month not for my two movies at a time, but to keep track of all the movies I've seen and all the movies I want to see. Netflix gets my honest, subjective opinion about every movie I've seen.

Because it's uses an out-of-five system, I decided it was useful to think about iTunes ratings in terms of video game review t.v. show X-Play's out-of-five rating system.

I used to be hooked on X-Play, not because I play a lot of video games, but because I respect a good bit of video game criticism. It's like I'm Tom Townsend for the digital age.

I also decided to base my ratings on how I felt at that moment - not on the song's greater significance in the music world, not on how I liked it when I was 8, but how I felt right then. I could always change my ratings, after all, unlike, say, my Netflix ratings, which I was probably never going to look at again.

With this as my basis, may I present my out-of-five iTunes rating system. I will give my examples in Beatles songs because, although we may all have differing opinions on which Beatles songs are preferable to others, everyone in the world knows all Beatles songs by heart, just like we have all tasted Coca-Cola.

1 of 5
Intolerable.
Beatles Songs With This Rating: Yesterday, Down in Cuba, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

2 of 5
Barely tolerable.
Beatles Songs With This Rating: Here There and Everywhere, Piggies, All My Loving

3 of 5
Indifferent.
Beatles Songs With This Rating: Something, Drive My Car, Revolution 9, Glass Onion

4 of 5
Good.
Beatles Songs With This Rating: I Am the Walrus, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Dear Prudence

5 of 5
Fucking amazing.
Beatles Songs With This Rating: Lady Madonna, Hello Goodbye, You Never Give Me Your Money

I thought long and hard about the distinction between 4 of 5 and 5 of 5. Finally, I decided that a 5 of 5 song was one that made want to loudly sing along with despite usually being on the subway at the time. Call it the Paper Lace test.

(This whole entry may be an excuse to post that last link, by the way).

Rating things is strangely gratifying.

It feels great just to get bad songs out of the way. It's like when I read Moby Dick - I wrote notes in the margin so that next time I read it, I can skip to the good stuff. Now I get to skip the bad songs on my favorite albums without having to think about it.

I've also found that my new smart playlist of music rated 5 of 5 is great for building playlists. I start with what I've already decided is the best stuff and find the things that go together. Because of this, I sometimes think of rating new stuff as mining for new materials for my playlists.

Because I'm listening to music with a set of objectives, and because I'm making a point of listening to everything I'm rating above a 1 of 5 at least once, and I've been listening to a lot of music I haven't listened to in ages. I now have a "Haven't Listened to in Awhile" playlist for songs I've rated above 3 of 5 that I haven't listened to in the past two years.

Rating is most gratifying when I'm going through the songs of bands with a large and diverse repetoire - bands like The Beatles, or They Might Be Giants. Bands like these have songs I love and songs I love to hate.

Watching myself settle in to this new project has revealed to me some wider implications. We know that harnassing millions of opinions is a pretty good way to sort the good stuff from the crap. But that means our votes are one among millions. Why do people like rating things so much?

Rating things from our couch is easier than, say, going to the polls, sure, but I think it's more than that.

I remember hearing that one of the most effective methods the Japanese used to gather information in their POW camps was to just give prisoners a pad of paper and a pencil and gather up what they'd written at the end of day (God knows if it's true, but I'm trying to make a point here). Or, to site another example, I am not the only person writing a blog entry today that less than twenty people will read.

People have a natural tendency to want to express their opinions, and we love to feel like our opinions are heard, even if only by ourselves.

Random Access Culture

Alternate Title:
Schoolhouse Rock [Slash] The World as We Know It

About eight months ago, I was hanging out with some of my cousin the revolutionary's friends when the conversation turned to Schoolhouse Rock.

"Have you watched them?" Codename Judy asked a friend. "They're musicals about things like conjunctions, or how a bill becomes a law. They're really funny. You should take a look."

I realized that Codename Judy was talking about YouTube.

Now, my cousin graduated this month, three years after I graduated. In demographic terms, that makes us both upstanding members of Generation Y, but, in college terms, that puts my cousin and his friends about a generation away from me. Which is to say, MCTR spent the majority of his college years in a post-YouTube world, and I spent the majority of mine in a pre-YouTube world.


A sociological rule of thumb is that technology invented before you were a certain age is commonplace and to be taken for granted, technology invented in your adult life is kind of cool and something you may be able to make a living at, and technology invented later in your life is foreign, alien, not to be trusted and certainly not worth understanding.

I had one of my post-take-it-for-granted moments during this conversation.

Schoolhouse Rock is plausibly timeless in that it's catchy or educational no matter when you watch it, but ultimately it's a very iconic relic of the 1970s.

Up until now that meant that you had to either live through the '70s or go out of your way to watch Schoolhouse Rock. Now, you can watch it any time. Go ahead. It's right here.


Of course, it's not just Schoolhouse Rock. For the first time in history, we can experience the detritus (or at least the recorded television detritus) of any previous culture at any time. Which would mean I just went a long way to demonstrate a very simple point if it weren't for this fact's odd and far-reaching implications.


Like We Even Needed Another Victory For Postmodernism

I took a U.S. television history course at my high-pedigree school and we had a section on post-modernism.

For those of you who haven't been to college (or who have been to college but somehow avoided the idea of post-modernism, presumably by taking a lot of bio classes), postmodernism is the idea that in the present day, there is somehow so much information that we can't reliably run down a definition of anything. Or that there's so much change in the modern day that in a way you can't expect anything to go unchanged. Or it's a breakdown between the signifier and the signified. Or it's something else.

There's a million definitions of postmodernism (which is one of the most post-modern things about it, as my professor was fond of saying without irony). In television history, it's significant because no two people ever have the same experience with television, so there's no common understanding of what it is, or what it means, or its history.


Obviously, YouTube has some important implications here beyond the citizen journalism stuff you can go explore somewhere else, because for the first time we can access these obscure or outdated things whenever we want.

It's a direction television has been moving towards for awhile (rise of DVRs, etc.) I don't want to go in to it too much because there is, by definition, no end to how far you can take the idea of an increasingly postmodern world.


Culture as a Tap and Not a Resevoir

If everyone can access different aspects of culture at any time, maybe we need to think about culture differently, as more of a utility and less as a resource.

Take jokes. In the past, if someone (a comedian, say) made a reference to something, you either got it or you didn't. Humor was time and culture sensitive.


It still is, but now, if we hear a reference we don't understand, we can just google it. We might not get a joke quick enough to laugh, but we may get it the next time.

Take, for example, John McCain's comment (in a blogger conference call, significantly) that his Republican primary opponent Mitch Romney’s immigration plan might be to “get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard."

I was watching Stephanopoulos, and a panelist pointed out that the brilliance of that comment was that in referenced no less than two Romney campaign flaps in addition to his the actual point about immigration, leading everyone who talks about the comment to also explain those references in full and so spend a lot more time talking about Romney's problems than McCain had to.

Remember how I was talking last week about how eidetic memory is the ultimate modern superpower? Maybe we don't really need it.


In the imminent future when all Americans can google whatever they want from their personal cell phones, what's the point of retaining information at all? Information changes all the time. What the best schools have already learned is that they need to teach understanding, techniques for learning, and a way to evaluate the relative value information much more than they need to convey the information itself.

It's one difference I also notice between my generation and older ones. We seem to have an almost instinctual understanding of the kind of information on the internet.

It isn't instinct, of course, it's experience - we search casually all the time - but I'm so conditioned to it that it's strange to watch my parents look for information without the internet. It's like another world - a world before google. [via Absurd Notions]


Brangelina: Another Drawback to Random Access

Another weird thing is that there's also a leak factor here. Random access means that bullshit information is written right next to good information, and that characteristic holds true just as well for culture as it does for computers.


Example: around when Teti lambasted me for not knowing offhand the definition of DRM, I just some stupid idea that I ought to be reading the big blogs. Anyway, as a New Yorker, I decided one of the significant ones was Gawker.

Anyway, after a few months, I just had to give Gawker up. I had been trying to figure out why I knew more celebrity gossip than I had at any previous time in my life, and I realized as I clicked back through whatever the hell was going on with Lindsay Lohan at the time that Gawker was probably why.

I was never trying to seek out information on celebrity marriages. I was casually following some series of references and it just happened to me. I still feel like I can't get away from it - I know that Brad is having trouble with Angelina. It's just that this useless, waste of time information is sandwiched next to the good information, like the copy of The Economist next to US Weekly at a newsstand.


I Am Next to You

Okay, I'm coming up on my last point, and it involves a little geography lesson.


Manhattan is an island. Horizontal space is limited. This means that, where in a city like San Antonio, we would build out in to ever-expanding borders, in New York everyone built up.

As a result, New York has always had a lot of people living in a geographically small space that was easy to get around. This led to a thriving regional specialty in all things niche.

Let's say that one in 1,000 people is interested in anime in 1995. In San Antonio (pop. 1,000,000), that's 1,000 people spread all over the city. In New York (pop. 8,000,000), there's not only 7,000 more people interested in anime, they are in a much smaller geographical area, and it's much easier for them to get to an anime store.

So when I came to New York for one of the first times to visit my friend Josh, he introduced me to a bunch of anime that it turned out was really interesting, and which I never would have heard about if it wasn't for my trip to the city.


By concentrating a large market on an island, New York allowed specialty vendors to thrive - which helped increase interest, which spurred the sellers, etc.

Result: New York has consistently been one of the few places in the world where you can pretty much buy anything at any price. And, more than that, it concentrated a community of like-minded people in to a space where they had greater access to each other.

The point is that the internet has lowered our barriers to entry to particular cultures or interests to just time and search capabilities. The niche thrives on the internet. We can find support for a particular cause, like-minded people or markets for niche products almost without any effort.

Random Access ribbles
Whenever I get to the end of one of my Big, Long Essays That Take Forever to Write I feel like I've taken a lot of trouble to explain something very simple.


There would be no way to give this kind of an explanation without the internet - just look at the number of links in this post alone. I'd still be thinking about these things, but the reason I like this medium so much is that I don't have to explain all my references, ideas and examples completely because I can just link to the appropriate information.

In a way (and once again, this is by no means a new idea) this means that we each have access to an entirely new medium to express ourselves. But it also means that there is no end to the depths of the trivial we can explore (for example, after this I fully intend to write about either Manu Ginobili, the weather or my cat.)

It would be one thing if I were spurring the country to a new national debate, but I suspect no one reads these things, but Johnny took his blog, arguably just a series of rants on National Ice-cream Day, and turned it in to a job at The Daily Show, so maybe there's hope for me yet.

Maybe I should send Gawker a resume...

ribble's Superpowers

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the question a man my age must inevitably face: if I had a single superpower, what would it be?

For a long time, I was thinking flight. Then I read a Real Life comic where a fan points out that everyone chooses flight - it's a cop-out answer.

Then a question on the everybody votes channel, "Which would you rather have: invincibility or telepathy?," got me thinking in a different direction.

We all know that Claire Bennett is just so much cooler than Matt Parkman. However, whether I look back at my life or think about my future, I can imagine a lot more circumstances in which telepathy would be useful than invincibility.


When you think about it, an average person could interact with thirty people a day who want something, but he is unlikely to be shot even once in a lifetime. Invincibility could let us do a lot of stuff no one else can do, like rush in to a burning building, but the potential of telepathy is limitless.

Here's the thing: telepathy is possible. Or, at least, some people can understand what someone's feeling (and surmise what he is thinking) just by looking at his face. It's not even outside the realm of possibility for you and me.

For years, a researcher named Paul Ekman has been researching the human face and how to understand it (I first read about him in this Malcolm Gladwell article). Ekman trains people to read faces - he even publishes a CD-ROM that purports to teach people how to do it (doesn't run on Mac, so I can't yet say for sure if it does).

I keep coming back to this idea, which I've tried to explain before but never to my satisfaction, that conventions of fiction, especially fantasy, are possible in the real world if only one imagines them in a slightly different way. I keep trying to get to it in my (fiction) writing, but I've never quite pulled it off.


Five years ago, I wrote out a list of these conventions or cliches - things like aliens, time travel, vampires - and tried to think about their equivalent in the real world.

Take aliens. An alien is a transplant from a totally foreign culture, operating by a set of rules that may make sense somewhere else but don't fit in here. In my script, the alien is an immigrant. He is brutal and ruthless, but not out of any particular malice - they just do things differently in the dimension where he comes from.

Or time travel. Time travel means that you can witness and influence events of the past or future. In our world, we can witness the past by reading or learning about it and influence it by changing the popular view of what events occurred or what influence they had.

I believe that we are also moving towards an ability to predict the future but, imporantly, only if we interprete it more in the psychohistory sense than in the more outdated prophetic vision sense. Techniques like prediction markets are harnessing very accessible technologies to make seeing the future closer to reality. Exciting stuff.


And vampires? Vampires are people who suck the lifeblood out of someone in order to survive. I'm not naming names, but I've struggled with vampires my whole life.

It's easy to get off track with this stuff, but what I'm getting at is that abilities, cliches, fictions that were outside the boundaries of thought even thirty years ago are now achievable or even commonplace. Incredible powers or freedoms, things like instant communications, are ours for the taking.

Once again, I've built a blog entry into a treatise on the powers of man, and all without answering my original question.

After thinking about the challenges I face in my daily life and what it means to be a superpowered person in the world that we live in, I'd take total recall. How about you?

Three Movies in Three Weeks: A Multitude of Sins Part 1

In which I decide to make a movie.

While pre-production for "Proud Mary" was getting under way, I was taking on some new responsibilities at First Sundays, the monthly short comedy film festival that I'd been screening movies for since about a year back.

One of my new responsibilities was to produce a film each month for the next month's festival.

First Sundays shows about an hour and a half of short comedy on the first sunday of each month. At the end of each month's show, brave members of the audience tick a box at the bottom of their ballots to enter their names in a drawing. The winning audience member gets to star in a film for the next month. The audience then suggests a title.

I had starred in an audience film in November, "Smooth Milkshake," (which, look at that, is now online), and I'd produced maybe three projects, only one of which made people angry at me, and then there was some stuff I'd done at school, and I hadn't really found anyone else to do it and I'd just finished reading Rebel Without a Crew.

Long story short, I decided to direct the March for April audience film myself.

The title I got was "A Multitude of Sins," and my actor was a tall, gorgeous North Carolina import and male housekeeper named Vaughn. We talked at the afterparty about the various sins we'd committed, and I came up with an idea.

Now, before I went in to the show to find out my title and actor, I knew I wanted to do a few things. I knew I wanted someone to get hit by a truck because I had gotten hit by a truck outside my apartment and that's the kind of experience that sticks with you. And I knew I wanted a lot of movement and action and a lot of plot crammed in to my six minutes, almost a breakneck pace.

And then I didn't want to have to ask anyone else for help.

My script was about a Texan who falls in love with his cousin and follows her to New York City, but then it turns out she's a lesbian and he ends up with the girl reporter who's better for him because they're not related.

About midway through writing the script, I figured out that the real love triangle was between the Texan, his cousin and his truck.

I also worked in a lot of ideas from my conversations with Vaughn - living in a closet, moving to New York City from the south and falling in love with the place, etc.

Now, at this point in my career, I considered myself an expert on thinking on a budget. The key, as any good independent film director will tell you, are using the resources you already have available to you. For example, before Victor writes a movie, he has everyone on the cast and crew write out the locations they can get access to. Very smart.

I thought Codename Bronco had a truck I could use, so I felt comfortable using that in the script. I had a Southerner, and he made himself available any time he wasn't working, so I could drag him all over the city. I had my beautiful actresses who I thought would be down for this sort of thing. I set everything during the day because I didn't have any lights and I wasn't sure if we would be able to see anything if I shot at night.

Then I had myself - I hadn't exactly directed before, but I'd been successful at organizing these things, and I felt confident that if I kept my crew as small and mobile as possible (i.e., it was just me), I could handle the logistics of the shoot.

What I didn't have was a lot of time. I wrote the script within four days of meeting Vaughn, but I agonized it for about a week after that because it seemed like such a dumb idea, just because of that problem.

I mean, the script was fine - a little weird, a little funny, very strong story arc - but I had lots of locations and people getting knocked down by killer trucks and lots of odd little moments that, all together, made things pretty complicated. So I sent it to Jay.

Jay asked me if I was crazy. He said it was way too complicated. He admitted that I might be able to do it if I had a truck and all the locations in the script, but, yeah, he still thought I was crazy.

I looked at my script again. My instincts were the same as Jay's. I thought about starting over - the current script was too ambitious for an audience film, with the crazy running all over the city and the story arcs and everything, but I decided that this was just my writing style, and I didn't want to just scrap the whole script.

I looked at my script again. There wasn't any particular part of the script I didn't think was beyond my abilities to do on my own. It was just the confluence of all these little moving parts that could prove to be too much, like how ninjas can kill you with 1,000 paper cuts.

Like a good producer, I started breaking down the script. I divided it in to four different categories of things I could shoot together. It didn't look impossible when I did it that way. At some point, I decided to go ahead with the script I had.

Terrible, Terrible Movies

Mission Impossible II inspired this little gem. All in all, over 300 hours of my life that I will never get back.

Last updated 10/21/07

2 Days in the Valley

A.I. Artificial Intelligence
American History X
Anger Management
Antz
Arsenic and Old Lace
Austin Powers: Goldmember

Bad Boys
Bamboozled
Barb Wire
Batman Forever
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Beverly Hills Cop III
The Big Chill
Big Fish
Bio-Dome
The Birds
Black Sheep
Blade
Blade II
Blow
Blues Brothers 2000
Bowfinger
Breaking Up
Broken Arrow
Bringing Down the House
But I'm a Cheerleader

Cabin Boy
Chelsea Walls
Chocolat
City of Angels
The Cooler
Cop and a Half
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

D2: The Mighty Ducks
Dancing at the Blue Iguana
Daredevil
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Thunder
De-Lovely
Death Becomes Her
Deep Impact
Desperately Seeking Susan
Die Another Day
Dirty Dancing
Dirty Harry
The Distinguished Gentleman
Down to Earth
Dr. Dolittle 2
Duplex

Enemy of the State
Entrapment
Existenz
Eyes Wide Shut

Finding Forrester
The Firm
First Knight
Forget Paris
From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money
From Here to Eternity

Galaxy Quest
The General's Daughter
Gods and Monsters
The Golden Child
Gone in 60 Second
Gone With the Wind
Yeah, that's right - Gone With the Wind
Gothika
Grumpier Old Men

Heavy Weights
Highlander
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Hollywood Ending
House of 1,000 Corpses

Independence Day
Intolerable Cruelty

Johnny Mnemonic
Jury Duty
Just Cause

King Ralph
Kingpin
A Knight's Tale

L'Auberge Espagnole
The Ladykillers (2004)
Lawnmower Man
Legally Blonde
Legend
Lethal Weapon
The Librarian
Lord of War
Lost in Space
Love Potion No. 9
Lucky Number Slevin

Mafia!
Major League
Man on Fire
The Man Who Wasn't There
The Mask of Zorro
The Matrix Revolutions
Meet Joe Black
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible II
Muppets From Space
Music From Another Room
Mystery Men

Natural Born Killers
The Negotiator
The Net
Network
Never Been Kissed

Ocean's Twelve
The Odd Couple (1968)
An Officer and a Gentleman
Old School
Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Patch Adams
The Phantom Menace
The Pillow Book
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Plan Nine From Outer Space
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Platoon
Play It Again, Sam
Point of No Return
Poison Ivy
Popeye
The Postman
Predator
Practical Magic

The Quick and the Dead
Quills

Radio
Real Women Have Curves
The Road to Perdition
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Roger & Me
Roll Bounce
Route 666
The Rugrats Movie
Runaway Bride
Runaway Jury
The Running Man

Saw
Seabiscuit
Serendipity
Serial Mom
Shane
Silent Movie
Sixteen Candles
The Sixth Sense
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Sling Blade
Small Time Crooks
Something's Gotta Give
The Sound of Music
Spanglish
Spice Girls
Spy Games
Spy Kids
Starman
Summer of Sam
The Sure Thing
Syriana

Talladega Nights
The Terminal
Thank You for Smoking
There's Something About Mary
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
Three Kings
Tommy Boy
Top Gun
Total Recall
Traffic
True Romance
Two Weeks Notice

Velvet Goldmine
A Very Brady Sequel
The Virgin Suicides

Waterworld
What About Bob?
Where the Buffalo Roam
While You Were Sleeping
Wild Things
Wild Wild West
The World is Not Enough

X-Men
X-Men II

ribble's Weather

It is snowing again in New York City. Some lady told me it was Winter's last gasp, but I'm accustomed to Winter turning a last gasp in to a horrid downpour of freezing-cold pain.

I read yesterday about a Chicago janitor who wrote a 16,000 page book. He thought that the weather was God's domain and humanity had no business trying to predict it. He kept an extensive journal of yesterday's predictions matched against what the weather actually was.

Weather may be God's domain, but man is responsible for doing what he can to survive it.

Rain
I have written before about the weather in Wales. In summary, it is almost always raining, but not in any decisive way. It's more than a drizzle but nothing bold enough to be a downpour, which I always considered wishy-washy and annoying.

Rain in Wales was always accompanied by a deeply bitter wind that went though your clothes and skin and straight through to your soul. A section of my soul will always be frostbitten by my time in Wales.


I had a Welsh girlfriend at school, and she was the one who taught me how to be comfortable in the rain.

When it starts to rain and we are without an umbrella, most of us tend to hunch over and lift our shoulders, as if we are sheltering a baby strapped to the front of our chests, although we rarely are.

My Welsh girlfriend pointed out that this reflex was pointless. The rain will hit us at the same rate, and no particularly important body part is being sheltered.

By relaxing my shoulders and standing up straight, I found that, although I wasn't staying any drier, I at least felt better about my situation.

Heat and Humidity
Some people, often people from Southern states, think of Texas as having a dry heat. It does not; it's humid as all fuck. In San Antonio, I usually attribute this to a river running through the city, but the San Antonio River is a lot smaller than San Antonio - it doesn't seem like it could do all that on its own.

Another family member has a theory involving swimming pools.


The heat in Texas is awful. At some point, it becomes impossible to function. You cannot walk from your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned big box store without sobbing in pain and exhaustion until you eventually give up.

Growing up in Texas, I learned two good strategies for dealing with the heat. Second, there is a particular way to stick to the shadows outdoors. Walk on the shady side of the street. Stand in the shadow of a street sign while you wait at the corner. Do anything to keep even a portion of the sun away.

But first, don't go outdoors in the first place. San Antonio has an excellent cooling infrastructure. It is where I developed my weaknesses for central air and ceiling fans. It is also where I developed my instinct for hiding inside whenever it gets pretty out.

Some people prefer heat, some cold. I will take heat over cold any day of the week. I mean, this city is all pavement, and it does get hot, but I cannot tell you the number of times that I've rolled out of bed already sweating, suffered many of the symptoms of heat exhaustion on the one-block walk to the subway, and ended up dehydrated and half dead in Hell's Kitchen and still said, quite truthfully, that it still wasn't as bad as the heat in Texas.

Cold and Snow
Once, in Wales, a friend recorded my reading a short piece about the cold in New York for a project she was doing on accents. I liked it so much, I gave her two readings - my standard, post-television American, and my best Brooklynese. My favorite line was "New Yorkers deal with the cold in two ways - they dress for it, and they talk about it."

Because it never snowed and rarely froze in San Antonio (once every three years when it does freeze, they have to shut down the whole city because everyone drives their trucks off the highway), I gained my first real experience with cold and snow at my high-pedigree college in the frozen North of these United States.


My school had long ago determined that the key to fighting a long winter was large, open spaces with lots of light. When I got to New York, I made a big deal about finding them.

I did okay, but I've still got a serious problem with the heat in my apartment. This is a deal-breaker: by next winter, I'm out of here. Or I'm buying a space heater.

One last thing: I realized when I started thinking about this as my "annual post about the weather" that my blog will be one year old in exactly one week.

I am not sure if it's improved.

ribble's Public New York City

New York is defrosting this week after a short but difficult winter.

When I first moved to New York, I regularly caught myself thinking that any moment someone would come up to me and say "I'm sorry, but you aren't allowed to be here. You need to move back to Texas. NOW."

Living in New York is a tremendous privilege, and one of the reasons why is that is has some of the best parks and public spaces in the world.

Walking around Manhattan yesterday in the first warm-ish weather of the year, I started thinking about what I thought about all the spots I've gotten to know in my time in New York. Here they are, in handy map form. Don't forget to scroll.

My G-G-G-G-G-

EEK asked me in a comment on the last post:

So if you're going to be the voice of our generation, what are you going to say?

The question is a little tongue in cheek, but I think it deserves a serious answer. Or, baring that, a serious exploration of the premise of the question.

I would never be so bold as to choose a single message I think everyone in my generation should hear, and in this inescapably post-modern era, there would really be no way to get a single message out to a generation anyway.

Besides, being the voice of your generation doesn't really work that way. It means that you reflect or embody the force, movement or personality that's somehow shared by everyone in your generation.


I read this wikipedia entry on Generation Y every six months or so. No one has reached even a wikipedia-worthy consensus on what our generation is about.

We know it has something to do with our generation being the first to grow up with (and so take for granted) computers and the internet, we think it has something to do with 9/11 and maybe even the new millenium, but at the moment, that's all we got.

Right now, the most famous people in our generation are actors, athletes and musicians, because those are the things that can make you famous while you're still young. Still, when the most famous person is Britney Spears, you know that there's a lot more substance still to come.

When will we be able to pick a true voice of generation? That depends on what a voice of our generation still means.

I think of voice-of-a-generation types generally as writers, maybe because I am thinking about Jack Kerouac, and I think of writers as starting to find their voice in their 30s.


Of course, if we're talking about a figure we can all unite behind, like a JFK, we may have to wait until we start electing public figures to high office, which wouldn't come until the 2020s at the earliest.

Then if we're talking about a common experience all of us can share, it would have to be something on t.v., the last way to experience a message that it's plausible an entire generation can share (for the record, t.v. viewing numbers make YouTube viewing numbers look silly).

However, t.v. audiences are getting spread over more channels and across more time as TiVo and YouTube allow culture to be random-accessed. Maybe the final time we were all united in a single experience has already happened, during 9/11, but then even 9/11 meant different things to different people.

We'd have to go back, way back, to find a single t.v. experience shared by each person in our generation in the same way. For my part, I'm betting on TMBG's early '90s appearance on Tiny Toons.


Maybe all this theorizing is futile. It's possible that there's no longer any way for a single person or experience to embody a generation.

Remember how you're the person of the year? (If you are reading this post three months from now or you were out of the country for that news cycle, you won't). Time thinks our diffusion of experience means only a diffusion of media can represent who we are.

I think if there's no way for a single person or voice to embody who we are, then that's the only message that makes sense for our generation. There's no longer any way to say the one thing that will unite everyone. The only thing we can do is try to present what's really happening with ourselves and what we see around us, and, if that reflects our generation's experience in some way, they'll find us.

I say, just like your ee, the trick to writing big is to think small. Call it the Tony Wilson model. I've identified one artistic movement, production company equivalents organizing informally and producing lots of content, and one location, New York City, where I think it's happening. I think that could be enough to hang my hat on.

How to Be the Voice of My Generation

Remember how I'm going to be the voice of my generation? I just figured out why.

For months, Codename Bronco, DP on Ballots Over Broadway, has been telling me that between him and his friend, Nice-Guy Gaffer Nat, he has all the equipment to make a movie - or, as he puts it, "we're basically a production company."

Tonight at my friend's art opening, I met the minds behind The Ballad of Roger and Rose, a very interesting, year-and-a-half long web serial that's going online in the next week to month. These kids, Matt and Dan (there's no need to try to keep them straight), are pretty much doing the same thing Codename Bronco and NGG Nat are doing - working with friends who help Matt and Dan on their projects while Matt and Dan work on their friends' projects.

Jay does the same thing. So do Victor and Pat of Therefore Productions. So does The Burg, and it just took their pilot to get them written up in Time or some shit. My friend Matt is trying the same thing with a project called The Fold that's still in pre-production. The Lonely Island turned it in to SNL-worthy success.


It's easy to underestimate the power of the phenomenon of getting together with your friends and making a movie, because it never feels like something professional - for example, Matt and Dan are still in the early, giddy stages of owning their own genuine and legally incorporated company. And, at this stage, it's awfully simple to overestimate it. It would be foolish, for example, to think that the internet has replaced T.V.

I'm only a reasonably connected guy, and the fact that so many people, and, more than that, so many people I know, have casually come to the same conclusions and organized themselves in the exact same way, and especially that these people represent a very diverse range of occupations and filmmaking abilities, it tells me that these informal groups of people working for free are going to be, if not the shape of things to come, at least more than a passing fad.

Back to being the voice of my generation. I have always naturally fallen in to the role of being a small part of a lot of different groups. It's why my birthday parties go so poorly for everyone but me: the people I invite, although they are all very excited about me, almost never get along with my other friends. It's not that they're from different demographics, or regions, cliques, social circles - it's that they're from different universes. I may be just as important to my hipster friend as my friend from the after school program, but there's no chance those two are gonna get tight.


Perfect example. I went up to my high-pedigree school for Homecoming, and one of the first and last stops I made was at the obscure co-ed non-Fraternity house where I was part (although certainly not the leader) of what I would call a core membership. The whole weekend, I was running around campus. I hung out with the people from my animation class, my friends from the theater stuff I did, the people from the school newspaper - all groups that I was not a central member in, but at least a character, a witness, a central participant.

When I went by my house right before we all headed out, I realized that everyone in my house had been there the whole weekend. They had been spending all day in the living room with each other (all night, too, since many of them had been sleeping there.) Nobody had another community. It was a what the fuck moment.

This is sort of an extreme example since my house always ended up being the last bastion for people who had never found a community in the rest of the school. But, still, I did it. It wasn't impossible to be a community member there and somewhere else. And this sort of thing has been happening to me my whole life.

I big, big part of it is that I ask a lot of questions. I'm a lot more comfortable talking about someone else than I am talking about myself - it's why I'm a good journalist. Since most people feel they've connected strongly with another person when they talk about themselves, I've consistently made many close friends.


So I have this talent for being a small part of a lot of different group, and then there's this New York phenomenon where a lot of different groups of friends are each producing these great mounting heaps of media. Then there's this thing where I keep being a bit older and a bit more of a journalist than my peers.

I don't think I'm going to be leading any revolutions, but I could definitely be the Tony Wilson of my generation - not the guy who made it happen, but one of the only ones who was there for the whole thing, who saw it happen, figured it out before the rest of the country and knew everyone who was involved.

It's spurious logic, it certainly isn't definite or even plausible, but, hypothetically, there it is. I could be the voice of my generation. Not bad for a night's brain work - few have ever realized they had a shot.