Haunted Screens

Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon

Mark — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:11:12 -0500

For fans of Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo, immerse yourself in obsessive Hawksian analysis at a ten day critical Hawks fest in blog form. This round is devoted to early Hawks, most of which is unavailable on DVD, but Bit-Torrentible. It's an interesting use of the blog form, especially if you've never seen or participated in one of these before:

Kevin Kelly on Screen Ubiquity

Mark — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:23:15 -0500

Wired maverick Kevin Kelly has an interesting essay in this week's Times magazine:

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

Read the rest here.

Haunted Screens (Laurel & Hardy edition)

Mark — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:05:47 -0500

Here's a wonderfully obsessive example of Haunted Screens in action. A Dutch guy uses computers to recreate a city block in Culver City (part of L.A.) the way it was back in the 20s.

I lived in Los Angeles for almost 15 years. It's still one of my favorite places in the world. As a film lover, I tracked down buildings and locations from all my favorite stuff -- from Preston Sturges's house (still there, though it was moved from its original location because of the construction of the 101) to Charlie Chaplin's original movie studio (now a recording studio).

This is as lovely, albeit small, a piece of computer forensics -- peeling back the false front of the present to reveal the ghosts beneath -- as I've seen lately.

Computer Geeks are the new Mad Men

Mark — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:07:34 -0400

I just noticed this odd fact. Computer programmer seems to be the the new default job for aspiring novelists. The number two bestseller on the Times fiction list this morning is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It was number one a week or two ago,thanks in part to it's choice as an Oprah Pick, and has been on the list for 18 weeks. This is Wroblewski's first novel. He's 48, and has been a software engineer for 25 years. His techie resume, which you can read here, is pretty hardcore. He says that writing software "teaches you a lot about building big intellectual structures and keeping them in your head, trying to figure out how they work, and understanding that they can work in one area and break in another. It's a good discipline for writing novels." What's funny is that he's not the first literary writer I've run into this past year with a tech background. Austin Grossman's great first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, came out in paperback this year. (Wired reviewed it here.) Austin used to be a video game designer. Then there's Karl Iagnemma, whose first novel, The Expeditions, came out in January. He's a robotics researcher at MIT. And, of ocurse, the godfather of techie novelists is Neal Stephenson, whose Anathem is also on the bestseller list right now. (Wired profiled him last month.) Stephenson, need I remind you, knows how to program, and once wrote a small book called, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line. Okay, so what does this mean? I have no idea. There was a period when every lawyer seemed to have an unfinished legal thriller in his briefcase. And years ago, future literary geniuses worked in advertising (Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Carey). Now the Ken Cosgroves of the world are computer geeks. Is it an economic thing? Or has the nature of literature changed?

Do first-person shooters make you smarter?

Mark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:48:44 -0400

I have a soft spot for the Call of Duty video games. I'm not a fanatical participant. (In fact, I'm an infrequent and pathetic player of COD 3 only.) I'm a fan because because video games like Call of Duty, the Medal of Honor series, and Battlefield: 1942 got my son interested in military history, which in turn got him interested in all kinds of history. In this particular case, video games made him smarter.

His education started in the 6th grade, with him digging online to learn more about the equipment that soldiers used in World War II. He wanted to know about the guns he was using in the games. Then he got interested in squad tactics and specific campaigns, like the Normandy invasion. He began reading Stephen Ambrose's books about WWII, and eventually read most of them. He watched Band of Brothers on DVD. (The HBO series, based on an Ambrose bestseller and produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, was a huge influence on the

style of all the WWII first-person shooters, so it was natural that a game fan was led back to the original films.) To learn more about the battle of Stalingrad (which is featured in Battlefield: 1942 and the first Call of Duty), he read Antony Beevor's Stalingrad, along with Vasily Grossman's A Writer at War (that's him in the photo). That led to a deeper interest in European and American history which is still blossoming. Suddenly, I had a kid who was devouring lengthy, adult-level books and had become interested in huge swathes of world history. All because of a bunch of video shoot-'em-ups!

We're both looking forward to Call of Duty: World at War, the new installment out in November. I got a sneak peek recently, and I'm not revealing any state secrets by saying it features, among other things, a group of U.S. marines fighting in the Pacific in late '44, and the Red Army taking Berlin in '45. (Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, which my son started reading recently, is a likely source.) It takes the basic COD formula and adds some new twists, including more explicit violence and some trickier moral issues, especially regarding the treatment of civilians and prisoners. So, not to worry! Google may be making us stupider, but first-person shooters are making up the deficit.

UPDATE: More good news. Gaming promotes civic virtue, too, according to this new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Radical Opacity

Mark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:13:41 -0400

Last year I worked with Clive Thompson on a great piece he did for Wired about "Radical Transparency." In defiance of conventional journalistic practice, he blogged openly about the story as he reported it, and we incorporated input from his blog readers in the final piece, tagging their contributions so readers could see who contributed what. It was an early experiment in magazine transparency that's currently being carried many steps further by my colleagues Jason Tanz and Nancy Miller, who are currently producing an entire feature in full view of readers, posting their editorial meetings, raw notes, emails, rough drafts, and more on our website.

But this month, I was involved with another kind of experiment, one that indulged in radical magazine opacity. I worked with Steven Levy on his piece about Chrome, Google's new browser, and we couldn't even tell most of our own staff about it. Steven was given exclusive advance access to Google's top-secret project under the condition that we tell no one -- including many of our own people -- and release the story (online and in print) only after Google publicly announced it. The cloak-and-dagger stuff seemed worth it, since we were able to offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at how the project came. Though it did get a bit silly at times: I ended up calling our copy chief Agent 99, and she called me Max. There's a more detailed account of the process here.

Orcs!

Mark — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:20:50 -0400

I had never heard of Stan Nicholls, a British author responsible for a trilogy of novels about ... Orcs. I also didn't know that Orcs were not invented by J. R. R. Tolkien, but have been making frequent appearances in fantasy and legend for ages, just like elves and goblins. Orcs are always badasses, but Nicholls apparently gives them their due. (His efforts remind me of the late, great John M. Ford's extraordinary 1984 Klingon novel, The Final Reflection.)

Anyway, I learned all this because Orbit books just published an omnibus paperback edition of the trilogy, appropriately entitled Orcs. They sent me a copy, accompanied by a note from Alex Lencicki, Orbit's incredibly resourceful Marketing and Publicity Director. The card, as you can see here, was short and to the point — the shortest publicity pitch I've ever gotten, in fact, and now my official all-time favorite!

WTF does "Haunted Screens" mean?

Mark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:35:05 -0400

Why does a blog about culture, technology and the Wired world have a name like this?

Part of the explanation is fairly obvious. I live in a world of screens: on LCDs, smartphones, TVs, iPods, and GPS devices. But above all, computer screens. I stare at one all day (several, actually) and part of the night. The Wired world lives in screens.

But there's a personal connection, too. As a kid, I watched more TV than anyone on the planet. Later I was movie mad. I saw everything. (Yes, mad. I saw Dirty Dozen at the Colony Theater in White Plains seven times during its first run, and I had to take a bus to get there each time.) After college, I worked as a film editor and made documentaries. I moved to L.A. and wrote screenplays. And with some of the money from the sale of my first feature script, I bought a first generation Mac. One screen leads to another.

Okay, so why haunted screens?

The simplest explanation is that I once directed a documentary film about a film critic, a movie about movies. The critic was Lotte Eisner and she wrote a book called The Haunted Screen. Her title referred to something very specific (German expressionist film in the 20s) but for me the phrase resonated much more broadly. Especially now.

We think of the Web as a live medium, a mirror of the present, even the future. But just because it's only 5,000 days old (to use Kevin Kelly's succinct formulation), don't be fooled into thinking the Web will be young for ever. It feels like a vast, crackling communications medium. But it's really about storage. It's a universal archive, growing exponentially every day, and pretty soon, all that will be left of the people who made today's blogs and pages and records and emails ... will be their blogs and pages and records and emails.

The ratio of past to present is growing. The online world is becoming a palimpsest, a future archaeological site. The screens we sit in front of are time machines populated by ghosts.

By way of final comment, here's that Nokia ad from last year, called The Fourth Screen:

The new Zune revisionism (it doesn't suck)

Mark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:19:12 -0400

Sounds crazy, I know, but I've been playing with this 8 GB Zune that Microsoft's PR folks gave me . . .

. . . and I like it. It's not just the built-in FM radio, which is a blast to have, or the sheer contrarian perversity of carrying one around in an iPod world; it's the quality of . . . and here's where it gets weird . . . it's the quality of design. Yes! Microsoft design! Both the hardware and the software! Is it really true, or is this just that pesky brain tumor kicking in again?

I like the 8 GB Zune's feel, paticularly it's alternative to the iPod wheel, the big third eye in its middle I call the "stroke" button (instead of twirling it like a wheel, you rub it up and down like, whatever), and the user interface has a distinctive look and feel that doesn't suck at all. But the killer app, I think, is the Zune Marketplace, which is more Rhapsody than iTunes Store. Indeed, there's no division between the "store" and the "player." It's all one app.

Marketplace emphasizes exploration, recommendations, reviews and artist bios, and taste-testing. The subscription plan (all you can download for 14.95 a month) encourages the Rhapsody analogy. Also, the graphic design of the interface is cool. It's casual, a little improvised, with lots of white space and flow.

Despite the name, Marketplace feels designed to help you explore music, not to sell it to you. I also caught a glimpse of the Marketplace upgrade that's due this Fall, and I was even more impressed. The visual design is even better -- is this really Microsoft?! -- and the opportunities for networking with friends are enhanced (I think it does; I only got a quick glimpse).

I feel a little strange about this. But then I found out that David Pogue had a similar response last year. Things have been improving since then, and more's afoot, I'm told, for this Fall. One thing you can say about Microsoft. They don't quit. And thanks to the Xbox360 and now this little Zune, I can no longer rule out the possibility that they are still capable of getting things right . . . eventually.

One thing, however, is stupid and counter-productive. The Zune and its software don't work with Macs. That tells you something, since I don't believe it's a technical or programming issue. It tells you they still don't believe in their own product. They still worry about whether it can go head to head with iTunes . . . and I'm here to tell you it can.

A Book Publishing Fairy Tale

Mark — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:12:48 -0400

Back in May, we ran a story on Leinad Zeraus' self-published techno-thriller, Daemon, that was making a bit of a splash in Silicon Valley circles. Josh McHugh wrote that the book managed to garner some serious cred without benefit of a publisher. The author, who's real name is Daniel Suarez, and who works as an IT consultant in L.A., used the print-on-demand service Lightning Source and sold copies on Amazon. Pretty cool.

But now comes news from Suarez, who just wrote me this email:

In the 30 days following the article, sales went from 1200 to 3500 -- at which point numerous major publishing companies began contacting us. Two weeks ago, Dutton made a very persuasive offer for Daemon and its sequel, and they will be doing a broad release of Daemon in January, 2009 in hard cover. Likewise, foreign rights sales have been brisk.

I just got an advance copy of the new hardcover. He's publishing under his own name this time. And the quotes on the back, from people like Stewart Brand, John Robb, and Craig Newmark are pretty sweet. This story embodies the transitional phase in publishing we're going through right now, where mainstream New York publishers are playing catch-up with what's going on out there in the long-tail world. Another example is the New York Times bestseller, The Shack, a self-published Christian novel. I'll let Daniel Suarez have the last word:

I want to thank you guys again for the article, and while it's true we didn't actually need a major publisher . . . the ability to reach a much broader audience here and abroad is definitely where a major publisher shines. Print-on-demand was pivotal in helping us to prove the market potential for Daemon to the majors and served as a great stepping stone in our case. I'm certain this pattern will become more common as the technology gains acceptance.