sippey.com

great piece from william powhida

2009-07-14T13:04:59-07:00

From the Laugh it Off show at the Walter Maciel Gallery (see?) in L.A.

the difference between strategy and tactics

2009-07-14T07:38:42-07:00

“It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy,” a former intelligence official said. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?”

An intelligence official on the secret plan to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders, in the New York Times.

the arch

2009-07-13T22:59:47-07:00

I grew up just outside St. Louis, and even though I haven't been back in years I love what they've done with the Busch Stadium grass for the All Star game.

The combo of Busch Stadium and the Arch reminds me of the great series of photographs that Joel Meyerowitz made of St. Louis. Here's one of them that lived in our house (as a poster reproduction) for years...

Here's Meyerowitz on the Arch...

Every city has a celebrated monument that sets it apart; a tower or cathedral, a square or park. St. Louis has the Arch. I found it deeply moving, profound. There were days when, standing beneath the Arch, I felt I knew the power of the pyramids. It was restorative, contemplative. It was more than a technological marvel or a symbol. It was pure form, the beauty of mathematics, a drawing on the heavens, perfect pitch. It was constant and it was never the same. Light and color made their way over its surface. I have seen the Arch change from a white you could not look at to black in broad daylight. I have seen it disappear, reflect like a mirror, and turn pink, sometimes all in one day. I remember mountains doing that. Standing beside it, one sees human scale diminish as when a figure stands at the ocean's edge. It contains the space that cathedrals aspire to. You feel it most when you submit to it.

And the Arch View Cafeteria? I think it was part of the Title Guaranty building, which was razed in 1983. Here's a streetview of the location today.

a twist in the fairey case

2009-07-13T17:59:10-07:00

The AmLaw Daily reports that freelance photographer Mannie Garcia -- the man behind the photo that became the Shepard Fairey / Barack Obama "HOPE" poster -- has filed a memorandum of law to intervene in the suit filed by the Associated Press. Garcia's claiming that he owns the copyright on those images, since he wasn't actually an employee of the AP at the time.

You can read the entire memo in support of Mr. Garcia's motion to intervene, but here's a relevant snippet / screenshot:

Oh, and Garcia is represented by none other than Boies, Schiller & Flexner. This is getting very, very interesting.

friday the only day that counts?

2009-07-13T15:12:22-07:00

In the context of Bruno, Transformers, Up and The Hangover, The Wrap has a piece up about how the virulent nature of social media is changing movie marketing. Here's the relevant gem:

The net effect, some studio executives say, is that a marketing spend that used to take a movie through the weekend now only really takes a studio through Friday evening, east coast time.

I don't entirely buy the argument that a marketing spend is only good through Friday; I imagine that a spend on launch hype for a flick will carry through to DVD / rental / online income in addition to ticket spend in theaters. But social media has to be having a massive impact on the half life of each marketing dollar.

And one small note -- I don't recall see a single ad for Up the weekend of its release...

b'eau pal from the yes men

2009-07-13T13:39:51-07:00

Five years ago The Yes Men temporarily knocked a couple of billion dollars off of Dow Chemical's market cap by hoaxing the BBC into this interview, where they claimed that Dow would take responsibility for the 1984 Bhopal disaster. (Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001.)

Today, the Yes Men attempted a special delivery of a new brand of bottled water -- "B'eau Pal" to Dow Chemical's London office.

Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated. ... The attractive yet toxic product, developed by the Bhopal Medical Appeal and the Yes Men with pro-bono help from top London creative design firm Kennedy Monk, highlights Dow's continued refusal to take responsibility for the disaster.

And because nothing shall go under-documented, here's the making-of video re. the design of the bottle...

the first couple to have their relationship skewered by the new york review of ideas

2009-07-13T11:14:05-07:00

Inside the theater, Taylor a slim, tall 29-year-old with large brown eyes accentuated by straight bangs, is fielding questions from the audience. A man in his 20s raises his hand. “Don’t you think that only people with a background in philosophy will get this movie?” he asks skeptically. “Do you really think it has something to offer people who aren’t already schooled in this stuff?”

Taylor tells me later she has heard this reaction before. Taylor doesn’t look the least bit fazed. “You know, the only people who ever ask that are academics who have PhDs and like to think that only they hold the key for understanding the material on screen.” After the Q&A, the man’s girlfriend approaches Taylor quietly. “You’re right about him,” she says, “he just got his PhD.”

From The New York Review of Ideas' piece on Astra Taylor's new documentary Examined Life. Emphasis mine.

home movie reconstructions

2009-07-11T12:13:15-07:00

Of all of them, I particularly loved this one. (Via Waxy.)

lefsetz on perez & warner

2009-07-11T12:09:45-07:00

It’s an American story. Guy stumbles on to business idea, perfects it and rides the glory all the way to..?

I’m not sure.

via lefsetz.com

every other year we say "we'll go next time"

2009-07-10T12:56:20-07:00

The Big Picture has a great set of photos of The Venice Biennale.

a tropicana followup

2009-07-09T20:24:54-07:00

A quick followup on February's post re. the Tropicana repackaging debacle. A few weeks ago my eight year old daughter and I were in the local grocery store and when she passed the o.j. section there were some cartons of Tropicana with the new packaging -- the ones that I thought had been recalled...the ones with the screwtop that looks and feels like an orange.

"Oh my God, Dad!" she shouted. "Check this out! The top! Of this orange juice! It's like an orange! That's so cool!"

I just wanted to squeeze her tight.

federer moments

2009-07-08T21:56:11-07:00

Peter Bodo of Tennis.com on the current gold-piped, perfectly coiffed branding of Roger Federer...

This matters because Federer is not only a great tennis player, he's the great tennis player, holding the game aloft on his shoulders like a modern-day Atlas. And the extent to which he's checked off on creating a specific image undermines the degree to which he transcends image, for the sharper the image, the more likely it is put off as well as attract. We're still different people with different tastes, values and aspirations, and the further you drift from pure performance and personal conduct (as well as the norm in your peer group), the less representative you become.

But it is about the tennis, of course. And because I'm still reading Infinite Jest (on the iPhone's Kindle reader, no less, screen by screen by screen), here's a recognizable sliver of DFW on RF:

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

There were more than a few Federer Moments in the Sunday final; all of them contributed to those destroyed tears in Roddick's eyes at the end of the match...that look on his face that said as plain as day "I am never going to make it through him, am I."

countercrunch

2009-07-08T19:44:11-07:00

Dan Lyons as Fake Steve is a great counter to all the ~~blog post republishing~~ news that Google is developing the operating system to end all operating systems.

Point two: Who in their right mind thinks the world needs yet another desktop operating system? The hacks who are foaming at the mouth about this big threat to Microsoft are the very same halfwits who a couple years back were declaring that the desktop OS was dead, Windows Vista would be the last one ever made, Apple shouldn't bother making any more versions of OS X, blah blah. Now they're saying nope, the world does need more operating systems, especially ones like this that are designed to work extra super specially well on computers that are hooked up to the Internet. Whatever that means.

Also worth reading for points one, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. But especially five.

let's play a game of "spot the irony"

2009-07-02T14:25:12-07:00

From Techcrunch's story about the new Facebook iPhone app. Can you spot the irony?

Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, "3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code."

what if the williams sisters had attended enfield?

2009-07-02T12:28:00-07:00

From Peter Bodo's Tennis World blog.

One of the themes emerging from this edition of the Championships is that the Williamses may have gotten better with age, even as they've had to struggle with (or simply endure) waning motivation as the siren song of "normal" life has lured them toward the shoals of inconsistency. The girls may not be as reliably destructive as they once were, but when they paint on their game faces, they may be playing the best tennis either of them has ever conjured up. This may not be true at all tournaments, either, but if you're going to pick one event at which to go medieval on your rivals, this one would be it.

I'm in the middle of re-reading Infinite Jest, and so I can't help but be obsessed with tennis lately, and look at everything through the lens of Enfield Tennis Academy. The Williams sisters :: The Incandenza brothers as Richard Williams :: Himself? (Yeah, on second thought, maybe not.)

a little google in my spotlight?

2009-06-23T16:35:54-07:00

I'm very much enjoying iPhone 3.0 and my new 3GS. The new hardware is a great upgrade (faster, smoother, more directionally correct), and there are small details in the new software that are useful and delightful (like locations in the missed call screen).

I haven't built a habit of searching on the phone, though, despite the very clever swipe-to-go-left UI placement of Spotlight. I don't have enough content on the phone to make search worthwhile, and the "normal" mode of navigation through each of the individual apps (Contacts, Mail, iPod, etc.) works well enough (for me). I think I'd be swiping left a lot more if they included a little Google in my Spotlight.

Spotlight should still search my phone first of course. But then it should kick off a Google query, pulling in suggest results in as close to real time as a wifi or 3G connection can allow. And then let me preview small snippets of results (optimized in a mobile / "local" context -- phone numbers, links to locations, definitions, etc.) before launching either a full search (or the result itself) in Safari.

I don't think this was a "whoops, we just didn't think about it" omission from Apple...after all, this is something both the T-Mobile G1 and the Palm Pre feature prominently in their UIs. Instead, I wonder if there were business and/or user experience reasons holding back the feature. On the business side, there's not an insignificant revenue opportunity associated with occupying the default search slot on the iPhone. And from a user experience perspective, you can bet that Apple will want to make the results from the web feel as natural as results from your phone. Google, of course, is already the default in Safari, so if I were Apple I'd be negotiating for a combination of equal or better terms and a more integrated user experience (richer search API set) for Spotlight.

I'm hoping something like this shows up in a 3.x release. I'd use it all the time.

Update (Jun 24 2009): This is what I'm talking about. From the press release about the newly announced HTC Hero:

HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

Apple can't be leaving this one alone...

a city of (automotive) sound

2009-05-13T09:32:08-07:00

Dan Hill at City of Sound uses the Economist story on the "danger" of the silent Prius[1] as the starting point for a mind-bogglingly fantastic post on automobile noise in cities.

Cities should not be quiet, or only replete with so-called ‘natural’ sounds - whatever that means post-nature, and post-industrialisation - but the urban soundscape is something that could use a little more room for manouevre, dynamically. To be clear, I'm not averse to cars or car noise. Some car noises are hugely appealing. It’s just best experienced as a distinct note and timbre in a richer, more dynamic city symphony, as opposed to the pervasive ambient roar of thousands of combustion engines. This latter has a totalising suppressing effect on urban sound, akin to the scourge of overusing the compressor in contemporary music production. If everything is loud, nothing is.

Go read the whole thing -- it's as if his entire history as a blogger has been leading up to this one post. The illustrations are pitch-perfect, there are some (literally) fantastic ideas about creating new sounds in cities, and some wonderful touches like this...

In that respect, [car] sounds can be considered as something special too. We can more fully appreciate the throaty purr of a 1969 Ferrari Daytona or the brawny roar of a 3.5 litre 1978 Ford Capri or the lawnmower rattle of a 2CV or the saucy throb of an old DS, lifting skirts and all, just as we’ll always appreciate the sizzle and hiss of tyres on wet road.

[1] FWIW, as a Prius owner, the only pedestrians I've come close to hitting are the ones who happen to be wearing white earbuds while stepping out into the street without looking.

lost and lostpedia

2009-04-30T17:06:25-07:00

The folks at Lostpedia have a great interview with Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, the producers of Lost. I just loooove the fact that the writers / producers of the show actually rely on Lostpedia every once in a while for information about their own show...

You know, obviously one of the questions that Carlton and I get asked very often is like “Is there a Lost Bible that has all the details of the show? Is there a database?”, and our answer to that question is “Yeah we have this guy named Gregg Nations, who is the keeper of all the information”, but there is also a website that is like Wikipedia, that is sort of fan aggregated, that has sort of every little detail about the show ... When we've visited the site we are incredibly impressed with sort of the level of detail. There are occasions where we basically say “What was Juliet's husband's first name?”, and if Gregg is not sitting in his office we will log into Lostpedia to get that answer.

One of my favorite meta-discussions with fellow Lost fans is debating just how much the show's arc has been pre-determined by the producers and writing team, and how much they're making it up as they go along. And yesterday a few of us at the office realized -- if the Lost producers are relying on Lostpedia for information about their own show...is there an opportunity for Lostpedia to hack some misinformation into the show itself? And if that happened, would that information then become Lost canon, which would mean that Lostpedia then needs to treat their misinformation as real information?

Thinking through a self-referential hack like that hurts my head...it's almost like trying to figure out how time travel works.

bart swingers

2009-04-28T12:30:13-07:00

swings on BART, originally uploaded by y3rdua.

A great shot from a local take on Caroline Woolard's Swing on the Subway piece from 2006. There's a Flickr pool in case it happens again... As the kids say, [this is good].

live by the sword, die by the sword

2009-04-27T17:49:52-07:00

So I've been slowly making my way through Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica (I'm a laggard), but for whatever reason didn't buy the entire season at once through iTunes, instead purchasing the episodes a la carte either from my laptop or from the AppleTV at home when I had a chance to watch another ep.

Until last night, when Season 2 disappeared from their catalog. I'm sure there's some crazy contractual reason why this happened, but now I'm stuck with one of two options. I can either buy the entire DVD set for the season, which means I'll have paid for the season one and a half times. Or I ~~steal~~ borrow the remaining episodes from a friendly neighbor in order to make my way through the season.

Live by the sword, die by the sword: I bought into the Apple digital media ecosystem, and probably shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens. At the same time, the fact that what was there yesterday, available for purchase, isn't there today makes very little sense to me. Paging Chris Anderson: wasn't this supposed to be the land of infinite shelf space?