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Chris Gulker, 1951-2010

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I know some of you have been following, as I have, the posts by Web pioneer Chris Gulker about his illness over the past couple years. Over the summer, Chris told us that there was nothing more to be done about his brain tumor, and he proceeded to settle his online affairs in the same thoughtful and careful way he seemed to approach everything he did. He died last night. Of course, you can read about it on his blog.

It’s a trip we’ll all take sooner or later, but few of us venture to do so as publicly as Chris did. His posts chronicling his state of mind and health in recent months and weeks have been graceful and courageous.

I wasn’t a close friend of Chris’s, but I tried to keep up with him over the years, because I owed him a great debt (which I talked with him about last year): he is more responsible than any other individual for turning me on to the Web fairly early, and the Web has been at the center of my work ever since.

In September or October of 1994 Chris showed me the Electric Examiner, the SF Examiner’s Web playground that he ran off a Sun server sitting in an empty hallway behind the Examiner’s press room. I said, “This is cool. I’ve heard HTML isn’t that hard — can I, like, do something here?” He told me that, if I knew FTP, I could just download an HTML guide and be off and running. I already had Internet access through the WELL, so that’s what I did. And he was right: It really was easy! Anyone could do it. I got excited about that, and I’m still excited. A few weeks later the Examiner staff went on strike and I had the chance to use that HTML knowledge as part of the San Francisco Free Press effort. Soon after that I built my first personal website, and within a year I’d left the Examiner (as Chris had) and moved to the Web.

Chris went on to a long career at Apple and Adobe. He was also a top-notch photographer, and one of the very early bloggers. Rudolf Ammann’s article traces some of his very significant role. Rudolf (with a tiny assist from me and some others) also built a Wikipedia page about Chris. He will be missed by me and many, many others.

Here’s Dave Winer’s post about Chris’s passing.

UPDATE: Here’s a full obit for Chris at InMenlo. And Rudolf Ammann has a page with lots of other links to reminiscences and articles about Chris.

Heather Gold’s “Unpresenting”

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Right before we left for an idyllic last-gasp-of-summer week on the north coast, I took a day-long Unpresenting workshop with Heather Gold, and I want to recommend it highly and enthusiastically to anyone interested in making their public appearances more engaging, lively, and memorable.

Photo by Carlo de Marchis

Gold is a standup comic, solo performer, Web person and, more recently, promoter of the idea of “tummeling” — the art (descended to us from the dim Borscht Belt past) of breaking the ice for a crowd, warming people up to one another so that a comfortable conversation can flow. “Unpresenting” is her name for a style of public speaking that’s less about imparting information (“I am the expert and am here to tell you X, Y and Z”) and more about opening conversation (“Let’s talk about this stuff — I think X and Y — what do you think?”).

You know the old saying about conferences that what happens in the room is a lot less interesting than what happens in the hall outside? Gold’s workshop provides a roadmap for transforming the room into something more like that hallway.

Some of Gold’s advice is practical, veteran-performers’ tips (like scanning your crowd, particularly at its edges, to keep people feeling included). Some of it is more of a simple challenge to understand what it is that people want to get out of a public event. If it’s just your information they’re after, why not just give them a book or a blog post? If it’s more of your in-person gestalt — a sense of who you are, what you’re like, how you move, and what you sound like, not just what you think — then a looser, more conversational mode will provide that a lot more efficiently than a podium-bound recital or (even worse) PowerPoint bullet lists.

As a former theater critic I’ve always been extra conscious of the preciousness of public time. When anyone gives me ten minutes or an hour in front of a crowd I want to make sure I use it well. And so I’ve always spent a ton of time preparing talks, often writing them out (I am, after all, a writer — that’s where I’m comfortable and confident!), so I can feel I’ve done my best to provide listeners with something of value.

Gold got me thinking about different kinds of value I might have been neglecting. I don’t think my presentations are going to change completely, but I’m definitely planning on playing around with more loosely structured and open-ended formats: less lecture, more conversation. And if you get a chance to learn about unpresenting with Heather, grab it!

RIP John Mortimer

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I was sad to read of the recent death of John Mortimer — playwright, author, bon vivant and barrister. Here’s the story of my own extremely distant connection with him.

I never had much luck applying for internships in college. Part of it was, I’m sure, the times (the late ’70s and early ’80s were almost as brutal a time in publishing as the present) and part of it was my own belief that self-promotion was uncool and my talents spoke for themselves. But my junior year I did finally land an internship reporting and writing for the American Lawyer monthly — something I now recognize as a startup company led by a young journalist named Steven Brill. My heart lay in writing arts criticism, but I had a good head for investigative reporting and I knew a little about the law, so I took the job and got a few clips, and got to know a colorful (and incredibly talented) gang of future luminaries like Jim Cramer, Jill Abramson, James Stewart, Connie Bruck and many others.

John Mortimer

John Mortimer

I wrote stories about lawyers and law firms, but I really wanted to write about playwrights and artists. So when I started freelancing full time after graduation I pitched the editors at American Lawyer with ideas for pieces about the occasional overlap cases — people like Louis Auchincloss and John Mortimer. In 1982 Mortimer’s wonderful autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage had just come out in the US, and Mortimer was doing interviews in NY, so I got to meet him. He decided that our interview should take place at Maxwell’s Plum, the legendary but by then (to me) tacky East Side cafe and singles bar, because he’d once set a scene in a story there but had never actually set foot inside. So the tape of my otherwise delightful interview with this drily charming subject was rendered nearly untranscribeable by the loud chatter of the surrounding wannabe-socialite gaggle. At that stage of my career I was still sometimes intimidated by the prospect of interviewing writers I admired; Mortimer was the kind of conversationalist who got me over that generously and quickly. The American Lawyer piece from 1982 isn’t online but a second interview I did with him years later, at Salon, still is.

Here’s Charles McGrath’s Times appreciation. McGrath, like nearly every other obit writer, reminds us of Mortimer’s label as a “champagne socialist,” one that he embraced. He may have lived just long enough to see its utility return for a new era of cheerful crusading on the left.

Friends’ books: Laura Miller, Mike Sragow tomes

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I want to note new books released by two friends and former colleagues, both of which are just out, neither of which I have yet read, both of which I am fully expecting to delight in.

Readers of Salon and the New York Times Book Review know Laura Miller’s critical writing by its wisdom, range, power and clarity. Her new book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, is her first (she also edited Salon’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors). It’s an unusual combination of personal memoir and literary criticism that is about, among other things, Narnia, childhood imagination, memory and the power of stories. I was always more of a Tolkien guy than a Narnian; I think by the time I got to Lewis’s books their Christian subtexts did not look “sub” at all to me, and I found the whole thing an exercise in crude allegory. But if anyone can make me understand their power, I imagine it will be Laura. If you read this excerpt from the book recently posted at Salon, you’ll see why. (Here’s Laura’s website for the book.)

My professional path has crossed multiple times with Mike Sragow’s: He’s now the movie critic for the Baltimore Sun. When I met him he was the movie critic and editor for the Boston Phoenix, where he encouraged me to write about movies (I’d limited myself to theater and books). Then we worked together at the SF Examiner, and again at Salon. For me, he has always been the best kind of mentor; for his readers, he has always been an incisive, insightful and deeply knowledgeable critic.

Mike’s new book, his first (he also edited a couple of anthologies for the National Society of Film Critics), is Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master — a biography of the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, whose reputation and swashbuckling life story have long been neglected. Here’s a Wall Street Journal review by Peter Bogdanovich, who calls the book “evocative, layered, engaged, graceful and compelling”; here’s another review of it from today’s N.Y. Times.

I can’t wait to read both of these books — soon as I’m done poring over edits on my own…

Internet garbage dump? What Weizenbaum really said

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Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently. Running through all the obits was a quote that seemed to summarize this computing pioneer’s critical perspective on technology:

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they can sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

This line appeared in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Valleywag. Caught my eye, too.

The original quotation was in a New York Times article from 1999. But it’s not the whole story.

Weizenbaum wrote a letter to the Times after the article appeared:

I did say that, but I went on to say, “There are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.”

Amazing what a little context can do!

Interestingly, although Weizenbaum’s critique of computing centers on the limitations of algorithmic problem-solving, it was Google’s pattern-matching prowess that unearthed this connection for me. I’d never have found it on my own.

Weizenbaum, whose family fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s, was right to urge us not to discount the value of the human compass in navigating our lives, and not to abdicate our judgment to machines. But I think he might have been a little too ready to dismiss the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls.

Fool for a CTO

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This past summer I paid a happy visit to the Motley Fool — in downtown Alexandria, just across the river from D.C. proper — to meet the technical team there and give a talk on Dreaming in Code.

I was pretty impressed with the people I met and the lively atmosphere at the company — unpretentious but serious about the important stuff. Anyway, the Fool is now looking for a new CTO. I know from experience that that’s a tough position to fill, but maybe one of you reading this is interested — or knows someone who’d be. More info here.

Citizen Josh

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Regular readers here know that I count Josh Kornbluth among my very oldest friends. (“Oldest” as in long-term, of course; Josh is only a month or so older than me. Why is English so balky around this?) I’m proud to say I knew Josh before he was “Josh the incredibly funny monologuist” and “Josh the guy who creates those monologues by improvising in front of live audiences” and “Josh the great interviewer on KQED.” I am one of a tiny group of people who is qualified to say, based on personal experience, that Josh is, beyond those things, also a really great copy editor. Or at least he was, way back when; who knows what the decades have done to his punctuation?

Last weekend I attended the opening of Kornbluth’s new show, “Citizen Josh,” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. All Kornbluth’s work is autobiographical, but the new piece goes even further than its predecessors, “Love and Taxes” and “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” in making a visceral connection with public life and the political moment.

The theme is, how can a passive, inward-turning citizen find it in himself to become engaged? The tale includes, among many other things, a college thesis that is a quarter-century overdue; a prematurely born baby rescued by a father’s determination and insight; and a misshapen play structure in a Berkeley park that offers good cell-phone reception, lessons in modern art and a hidden history of radical democracy.

“Citizen Josh” has got all the stuff Kornbluth’s fans have come to expect from one of his performances: stories that loop and twist through what seem like hopelessly overextended digressions only to pull themselves together into beautiful perfect knots; veins of playful, offbeat humor running the length of the 80-minute performance, submerging for a few minutes, then popping back into the light; and a passion for trying to understand just what we are all doing together on this planet. The show is a great chance to see a great talent contending with a great issue. You should see it!
[tags]josh kornbluth, citizen josh, monologues, solo shows, magic theatre[/tags]

Interview: Howard Rheingold

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As an adviser to Jay Rosen’s newassignment.net I thought the best way to help the project, and learn in the process, would be to participate. So I signed up to interview Howard Rheingold for NewAssignment’s Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced inquiry into the nature of crowdsourcing.

The full interview is now posted. I didn’t, in truth, do things a whole lot differently than I’d do them were I conducting the interview for Salon or any other more conventional outlet. What may be less conventional is what happens to this material from here on in. My interview was one of dozens that are now up at the Zero site. The material is going to be somehow shaped by Assignment Zero itself, and also I think for Wired, and it will be fascinating to see how Jay and his staff orchestrate everything. It’s not the pure anarchy of the blogosphere; it’s not the traditional writer/editor pipeline of the old-fashioned newsroom. It’s — something we might be discovering. Or at least learning about.

It was a pleasure talking to Rheingold about the state of the participatory Web. I have always found him far less a starry-eyed idealist or utopian than he is sometimes painted. He’s been thinking about how technology and online social practices “coevolve” longer than virtually anyone else, and his perspective continues to be incisive and challenging. Here’s a choice passage:

Crowdsourcing is a name for something that’s new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it’s going to have that connotation. I’m going to bet that “crowdsourcing” is what most people know it as five years from now. And “non-market-incented commons-based peer production” is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can’t argue with that.

[tags]howard rheingold, technology, crowdsourcing, assignment zero, newassignment.net[/tags]

David Halberstam, RIP

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The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)

I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.

In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.

UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:

William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

[tags]David Halberstam, journalism[/tags]

Kornbluth’s MySpace nightmare

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Josh Kornbluth, the monologuist and KQED host, has posted an account of a Kafkaesque experience with MySpace that should give any operator of an online business pause.

It seems that some malicious person posted a phony profile under Josh’s name, filled the profile page with gross porn, and then sent Josh’s superiors at KQED outraged emails demanding that he be fired. Josh’s posting offers a painfully vivid account of how hard it can be to attempt to communicate directly with a company that has chosen to make itself unavailable to the public.

MySpace’s meteoric rise is legendary, of course (it claims 70 million users these days). The company is in the crosshairs of the online decency brigade, under pressure from its new corporate owners (Rupert Murdoch) to clean up its act and open new revenue streams, and in constant danger of losing whatever buzz it possesses to whichever site is next on the fickle teen radar.

Still: If you’re doing business, you have to make it possible for human beings to get in touch with your company. Online enterprises always want to shunt all communications into online channels, but, you know, if someone was impersonating you, framing you as a perv and then trying to get you fired, you might want a phone number to call, too.

Maybe MySpace hasn’t consciously chosen to make it hard for people to get in touch with it; maybe it’s just overwhelmed by success. Either way, if Josh’s tale is any indication, it seems pretty clear that MySpace has lost control of its pages — and begun what will doubtless be a meteoric slide into a swamp of spam, phony pages and scammy crap.