Category: Uncategorized

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“One of the Only Barriers of People Publishing is People Have to Type. What if That Goes Away?”

I have one of the new iPads. For both my email and Twitter, I’m able to talk into it and get speech to text (with Dragonfly voice-recognition software). It’s become more and more efficacious, which is great and convenient. If you start to think — one of the only barriers of people publishing is people have to type. What if that goes away? Just a huge explosion. Instead of going on the phone and talking about prom night, we’re either at or near a place where they can speak it in their phone and it’ll appear in text. What if people don’t have to type to get it into there? Does that make what we do more or less valuable? There’s more for us to sift through. But we’re the signal in the noise, and it’ll make us more valuable. I’m fairly democratic in my impulses. I don’t want more crap out there, but I think the fact that I need to type my thoughts means I share less of them.

– New York Times journalist, David Carr.

(I have to admit, I have thought about speech recognition software as a way to speed up my writing process many times. I am terrible at typing, somewhat ironically for a professional writer; what keeps me away from using any kind of speech recognition is the fact that I’m convinced my accent will prove so confusing to it that I’ll likely spend more time correcting transcription errors.)

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“It’s A World of We’re All In This Together And A World of It’s All Just A Game, Isn’t It?”

The most amazing and telltale thing about the conversation is not Jason Frazer’s nerve in initiating it, but his blase assumption that it would be alright. It’s another sign of how deeply he, and huge parts of the modern entertainment world, have internalized a set of values in which all parts of the business – and in particular the artists, the tabloids and the paparazzi – have more in common with each other than anyone else outside their world, and in which, despite occasional tensions, they recognize their common interests. It’s a world of we’re all in this together and a world of it’s all just a game, isn’t it? A world of gloss and desperation where fame and money are the only lubricants, and the only goals. In this new pop world, the tabloids and the paparazzi are no longer an ancillary nuisance that comes with success, they are your co-workers in the celebrity corporation, and you are expected to recognize and acknowledge them as such.

– Chris Heath, from Feel: Robbie Williams.

There’s a comic book editor who shall remain unnamed to avoid his seemingly unstoppable Google search who, on social media and message boards and comment threads and now, it seems, in print, can’t stop himself from baiting comic journalists and critics who’ve said anything other than blanket plaudits; he’ll jump in, perceiving personal slights where there aren’t any and throwing out award-winning examples of passive aggression in response, instead of actually addressing what’s being said (I’ve been the… target, which isn’t really the right word, of his ire more than once, but I generally fail to get mad enough, which I think ruins it slightly for him).

The oddest thing about him, though, is his insistence when challenged on his behavior that he’s just having fun and people should stop taking him so seriously. Every time I see that, I think that he’s misjudged the room, so to speak; that what he thinks is happening and what is actually happening are so amazingly different that there’s something wrong, somewhere. Then, this weekend, I read the above passage and thought, Ohhhhh. That’s what he’s thinking.

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Ebony and Ivory, Live Together In Perfect Har-Mon-Eeee

I’ve been thinking about Jaime Hernandez’ art a lot, lately. Like all good-thinking people, I’m a massive fan of his work, especially the way his cartoon simplicity is mixed with the naturalness of his character acting, but lately I’ve been hooked on the design of his panels, and the smart way he balances solid blacks and whites on the page. Hernandez is a master.

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“Remember The First Person Through The Wall Always Gets Hurt”

You’ll meet a lot of people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re talking about. In 1970 a CBS executive famously said that there were four things that we would never, ever see on television: a divorced person, a Jewish person, a person living in New York City and a man with a moustache. By 1980, every show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.

– From Aaron Sorkin’s commencement address at Syracuse University, May 13 2012. I love that last part even more than I love it when people point out that nobody knows anything, really.

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The Joys of Flop Sweat

I’m in a period of work where I feel like I’m continually beginning new gigs and taking nervous first steps with new clients or outlets, which is… continually nervewracking? I was having a conversation the other day about the fact that I’m not even finding the time to enjoy the fact of my new outlets (and one of them in particular is very sweet, considering), because I’m too busy feeling nervous about whether or not what I’m doing is going to be liked by the people footing the bills and the wider audience beyond that. It’s the opposite of familiarity breeding contempt; the lack of familiarity breeding anxiety, over and over again.

(This update brought to you by getting really good notes on a story for a new outlet that I think is going live tomorrow, and the resultant relief quickly followed by “Okay, so how do I actually make those changes?” and “Is ‘that was a fun read’ code for ‘It sucks’?”)

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So This Is The Aftermath

Less than 24 hours after I’d attempted to make this cake, this was all that remained. In my defense – and Kate’s, for that matter – we weren’t alone in eating it as quickly as possible; we’d taken it to a neighborhood dinner pretty much as soon as it was out of the oven, with me all nervous and worried that it would taste horrible (Banana and ginger cake? With dark brown sugar? And with me making it for the first time and not having had a chance to taste it before we served it… Oh, the nerves), but it was, as you can see, a success. Thankfully, no-one reported feeling the onset of dessert-based food poisoning the next day.

(Posted because I made cookies for a friends’ get-together last night, and was worried that no-one would like them – Or that baking cookies was a lame thing to do in the first place – and, lo and behold, they were all gone within an hour.)

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“Jim, I Hope I Don’t Have To Listen To This Again”

I thought it would encounter difficulties,” says John Fry, with delicious understatement, down the phone from Ardent Studios in Memphis, which he founded in 1959. “I thought people would find it so unconventional and so unfriendly that we would have difficulties.” He’s remembering 1975, when Ardent’s promotions man, John King, and Jim Dickinson were visiting the major labels trying to sell a new album that had been recorded at Ardent and produced by Dickinson. “Jim used all his contacts – and he had some high-level ones, as did John. One of his friends at a large label said: ‘Jim, I find this music very disturbing.’ Another guy said to him: ‘Jim, I hope I don’t have to listen to this again.'” No one wanted the third album by the Memphis group Big Star, until it crept out in two markedly different versions on tiny labels in the UK and the US in 1978.

The Guardian has a great piece about Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star, one of my favorite albums in the whole wide world. Go read.