My friend, the movie critic David Edelstein, has been writing wonderfully alive and intelligent pieces for Slate from its very beginning in 1996. That makes him a true Web old-timer. (He’s also on NPR’s Fresh Air.) But today the news broke that he is leaving Slate for Adam Moss’s revamped New York magazine, which will begin featuring his reviews beginning in January. Congratulations to David — the Web’s loss is New York’s gain, and those of us beyond the five boroughs now have one strong reason to point our browsers to nymag.com.
All your Google Base are belong to — whom?
Like many others, I have been trying to figure out what Google Base is all about. Plainly most of the world sees it as a repository for classified ads, and thereby competition to both old-school businesses (newspapers etc.) and newer Web enterprises like Craigslist.
But it also seems to be intended as a way for people to pump large quantities of any information at all directly into the Google searchstream. Since Google is where so many of us go first when we’re looking for stuff, Google seems to be saying, give us your information directly so others can find it.
In some ways this is the ultimate “Web 2.0” play — just open up the gates to a world of users “information,” see what they put in, and make it accessible.
But I’ve now spent some time on the Google Base Help and FAQ pages and I still can’t really figure out the answers to some basic questions. Like: If I post a whole lot of material and then want to remove it in bulk, can I? Can I export stuff as easily as I import it? How does Google Base know who I am and that I am who I say I am? Is there an open interface that allows other services access to the information in Google Base the way they would have access to it if it were published on my own Web site? And so on. Maybe if I were using Google Base these questions would be easier to answer. But really, this product could have used some better framing, and perhaps some better thinking.
I’m all for experiments in moving the Web forward toward its programmable destiny, and it could be that Google Base’s structure and openness will emerge more clearly and favorably over time. Right now, I am uncomfortable with what Google Base seems to be all about — piling tons of information into containers owned and operated by a company that is less than fully transparent. I’d rather see a world in which a myriad of individual, independent content providers (i.e., Web users, i.e., people) publish stuff, and then mark it up with discoverable tags and XML annotations that allow Google and other third parties to organize and use that stuff in cool ways. In the latter scenario, I remain closer to what I’m publishing, I can reorganize it as necessary and control its fate more easily, and there’s a plainer connection between who I am and what is connected to my name.
Crunch, fuzz, twang
I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.
I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.
Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”
I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.
In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:
| The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there. |
CPB rots from the head
It seems that the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the now disgraced Kenneth Tomlinson, may have been up to something else beyond his now well-documented effort to swing public broadcasting to the right. In that campaign, Tomlinson took the CPB, which was created to be a firebreak against politicization of public media, and tried to turn it into a sort of Political Correctness Bureau to promote Bush administration policies and attempt to punish its critics.
It seem that, in addition to this bit of partisanship, Tomlinson may also have been busy pursuing that other favorite activity of the Republican power elite — funneling public money into private pockets. The details are outrageous enough — for instance, there’s a $400,000 severance package for one official carefully structured to avoid public disclosure. Now an audit has Tomlinson’s successors squirming. (Details from the Times are here.)
What strikes me, though, is how the whole scandal is a win/win sort of thing for the right, no matter how it turns out, since conservatives don’t really believe in the idea of public broadcasting anyway and would be happy to see it vanish in a puff of free-market dust. If Tomlinson’s meddling achieved its goal by slanting coverage, well, mission accomplished; if he got caught, that would just discredit the whole enterprise. If Republican appointees manage to reward their pals, great; if they get caught, well, gee, public broadcasting has become a sinkhole of corruption — let’s shut it down!
We are so deep into the universe of foxes staffing the henhouse that this stuff is almost making sense.
Withdrawal method
I want to do my little bit to combat the latest big lie from the Bush administration and its allies in Congress, which is that their opponents advocate an immediate precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. Their furious attacks have been in response to Congressman Jack Murtha’s call for a new policy last week. The Congressional Republicans did their very best, with their stunt of a withdrawal resolution on Friday, to muddy the waters and leave the American public with the idea that Murtha just wants to ship home the entire U.S. force tomorrow.
The truth is that Murtha is a conservative hawk of a Democrat who is known as a staunch advocate of the military that he (unlike the leaders of the Executive Branch) served in and fought under. Best as anyone can tell, his surprising and unusual change of heart arose mostly from his concern for the welfare of both individual soldiers and of the entire U.S. military. The guy has sources and connections in the Pentagon, and when he talks about how urgently we need a new plan, you can bet that this is what he is hearing from inside the armed forces.
If you paid attention to what Murtha actually proposed last week (this Slate piece by Fred Kaplan offers a good recap) you know that he didn’t say, “Let’s get out now” — he said, essentially “Let’s get out within six months, moving our troops to a position outside of Iraq, from which they can continue to strike and to influence events without being sitting ducks for suicide bombers.”
That might or might not be a smart plan, but it is at least a plan. The central complaint that most Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have with the administration is that there’s no plan in sight. Murtha says that the American public is far ahead of the politicians — the people have already made up their minds, the war is a failure. This friend of the military’s response is, let’s get out in an orderly fashion while there’s still a chance of keeping the U.S. military from completely imploding under the pressure of multiple deployments, inadequate equipment, and, most of all, a nonexistent strategy.
Given that we actually do need that military at this moment in history — since there is this other little war still underway, against the people who, unlike Saddam Hussein, really did attack us on 9/11 — it might behoove us to pay some respectful attention to the congressman from Pennsylvania, instead of smearing him.
Open sores media
There’s plenty of room under the sun for all sorts of experiments in putting blogs together into new kinds of media products. It looked like Pajamas Media was going to be one more, with maybe something of a conservative leaning, but enough variety to not be a pure party-line effort.
Then they went and changed their name to Open Source Media, which has two problems: (1) Somebody else — Chris Lydon’s experiment in blogging-fueled radio — was already using the name. (So, for that matter, were JD Lasica and co.) (2) As far as I can tell, the outfit actually has less than nothing to do with open source media, open source software, or open source anything. It’s a blog network, and not even an open one.
Right now, the chief distinguishing trait of Open Source Media is that they’ve got a paid staff of editors who try to keep up with the news by writing little introduction paragraphs according to the following formula: First, provide a news lead; second, state that “Bloggers reacted quickly!” or “Bloggers weighed in!” Which is, you know, never going to be a stop-the-presses sort of observation.
Pajama people, this is going to get very old very quickly. And you’ll never do it as quickly or usefully as Memeorandum, anyway. Just lead with the blog posts themselves and you’ll feel much better in the morning.
Congress’s new low
The coverage over the weekend will presumably make this crystal clear — but, well, maybe not, given how absurdly bad the media record on Iraq for the past three years has been. So let me try to shed one small light on the matter — there will, I hope, be many others, and brighter.
Here is the sequence of events leading up to Friday night’s despicably wacky Bizarro World vote in Congress:
(1) John Murtha, a respected Democratic congressmen, called, earlier this week, for an American pullout from Iraq within six months. Murtha is a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran and a longtime supporter of the military — and of the Iraq war; his position seemed motivated chiefly by sorrow and outrage that the U.S. armed forces have been placed in an impossible position by the Bush administration’s policies.
(2) The Republican response to Murtha was to accuse him of cowardice and of aiding al-Qaida.
(3) Today, Republicans in Congress proposed and, with no debate, forced a vote on a bill calling for the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. That is not at all what Murtha, who said U.S. forces should leave “at the earliest practicable date,” advocated. It is plainly quite opposite to what the people who proposed the bill want, either. (Isn’t there some sort of parliamentary rule that says that if you propose and sponsor a bill you have to, like, vote for it? Maybe not, but there should be!)
The bill was proposed by the Republicans expressly to discredit Murtha, only they didn’t have the guts or the decency to write a bill that accurately reflected the congressman’s position; they had to misrepresent it, just as their party had to misrepresent the facts to persuade the American people to support this war in the first place.
The bill was not only what Democrats called it — a stunt; it was a deeply dishonest abuse of our legislative process. This seems to be what we have to look forward to from a Republican Party that is losing its grip on the levers of state, with right-wingers and moderates falling out and both trying to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and an administration that is coming apart at the seams, leaking corruption and criminality.
Americans and Iraqis are continuing to die every day thanks to decisions our government made two and a half years ago. Whether you support or oppose the war, whether you agree or disagree with Murtha, you may, perhaps, share my sense of disgust at today’s tableaux of congressional theater of the absurd. We have crossed some new Rubicon into a realm where the old “politics of personal destruction” has been accelerated by tossing the ballast of simple logic overboard. It’s okay, now, to propose bills that stand for the opposite of what you believe in, just as long as you think they might help you win back a few points in the polls.
“We proposed the bill only because we wanted to vote it down!” may seem like a smart bit of parliamentary jujitsu. It has everything going for it but honesty. Whether or not it wins the Republicans the points they’re after, it’s an affront to the military dead — and to the living soldiers who are still stuck in the field. They, along with Murtha, still understand that this is a mortally serious business, even if the Congressional majority doesn’t.
EFF Drive
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting good fights on the Internet since the early 1990s — it was doing so even before there was a Salon. Most recently the EFF has begun doing important work on behalf of the emerging blogosphere, as complex and confusing issues about bloggers’ rights as citizens and journalists begin to be adjudicated in court.
They’ve got a membership and fundraising drive on right now. If you’re a blogger and want to help out, there are ways you can do so, here. Even if you’re not, think about joining and donating. I just did (that is, I moved beyond thinking about it, and actually did it!).
Time flies when your writing’s fun
Well, I’ve researched and researched, and written and written, and now I must revise and revise. When I actually have a manuscript turned in to my editor — before Thanksgiving, for sure! — I will exhale and write a bit here about the process, and how things have turned out. I should also be blogging a bit more henceforth. Thanks for bearing with me through this hiatus.
In the meantime, I should mention that Salon is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. It’s hard for me to believe that ten years ago I was a disaffected ex-theater critic, technology columnist and fledgling HTML adept making the jump from print to online. I knew it was risky, and the fact that our money-making plans were strictly theoretical made me think, okay, this will be fun for a year or two, then Salon’s likely to go down the tubes and I’ll make a living freelancing.
After a fun year became two, then three, then four, I moved over from my job as technology editor to managing editor, taking on a lot of responsibility for things like budgets and site management. And I began to think, hey, this thing might actually last! Whoops — cue the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The moment I started getting confident, suddenly it really did look for a while like Salon might go down.
But by then I was hooked. I was determined to see it through, as was everyone else who stuck it out, and I put my back into a lot of difficult and creatively unfulfilling work to do my part to help Salon survive. It was only last year that I felt comfortable enough about the company’s stability that I could think about taking a book leave this year without feeling like I was abandoning ship. Things are definitely on the upswing, but, you know, I’m a little wary of feeling too confident. Old wounds and all.
By now you may have seen Gary Kamiya’s history of the site — it’s hilarious, deftly captures much of the heart and soul of Salon through the years, and brought back a torrent of memories for me. My angle on some of the history might have been different: Gary’s less focused than I’d have been on Salon’s place in the evolution of the nascent field of Web publishing; he’s more immersed in consideration of Salon’s place in the general milieu of political and literary journalism. I always worked one step closer than him to the business side of things, and many steps closer to the technical side of things. My version of those aspects of the story may be a little less Stranger in a Strange Land and a little more In the Belly of the Beast.
When I’m a little less written out I may trot out some of those tales. Or maybe I’ll just wait till Salon’s 20th.
For now, as I near my own milestone of a finished book, I toast all my current and former Salon colleagues, and look forward to rejoining them in January. More on that, soon, too.
Hello? Is anyone there?
Holed up writing here as I have been for some time, I was not prepared for my household’s sudden surge of popularity these last few days. The phone has been ringing off the hook! Why, Barbara Boxer called me yesterday, and this afternoon, as I was disentangling a particularly overwrought sentence, the phone rang, and it was Warren Beatty on the line. He was very sorry to interrupt , but he wanted to make sure I would vote against the Schwarzenegger propositions tomorrow.
These recorded phone calls by celebs and pols are scary enough, but now they’re also throwing fever-pitch telephone plays our way. Over the weekend we got barraged by a robocall minidrama three times (one, ironically, was recorded on our answering machine — direct bot-to-bot communication!). It was a tale told by a parent who says he watched his daughter die after she took the morning after pill; she could have lived, maybe, if we only passed a law that said that you can’t get an abortion unless you tell your parents. Or something like that — the sound effects were so aggressive I couldn’t really figure out all the details, and I tried to tune it out. In the handful of amped up seconds this audio spot spat out, there was no way to tell whether it was supposed to be a true story or a dramatization or something else. All that came through was pure anger.
I’m sufficiently insulated from mainstream TV that I have missed out on the worst mutations of political advertising over the last decade. Now they’re coming after me by phone. Yikes! It may be time to go off the analog grid entirely. At least I can delete spam from my email account on my own schedule. Can’t I sit down to dinner without being interrupted by hysterical recordings?