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Josh Kornbluth’s new show

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A long long time ago, I saw Spalding Gray perform Swimming To Cambodia and many of his other monologues. One favorite bit was his account of being rejected for a part on some hack TV show. As the casting agent told him, there was one problem — a moment when a certain look passed over his face that could only be described as…thought.

If you like to see the expression of thought on TV, I think you’re going to like The Josh Kornbluth Show. I watched my old friend’s new interview show on KQED TV for the first time tonight. (If, like me, you missed the debut show Monday night, with Rita Moreno, they’re replaying it Friday at 10:30 p.m., and apparently a bunch of other times.)

As we watched Josh talk with Sen. Barbara Boxer about her new novel, my wife said, “Look, he’s still got the notebook in his back pocket!” Sure enough, the spine of a reporter’s pad was plainly, if minutely, visible on screen.

I smiled. Ages ago, when Josh was starting out in comedy and solo performance, I’d suggested that he carry a pad around so he could capture random ideas. (It’s a good idea for anyone who expects to create stuff.) Reporter’s notebooks are the best combination of capacity and pocket-fit. I became Josh’s supplier for many years. I don’t know where he gets them now; in the old days they were hard to find outside of newsrooms, but they seem more generally available today, online and from office-supplies warehouses. (The Long Tail delivers access to the Long Notebook!)

I can imagine virtually any TV producer I’ve ever met advising the host of the show: Lose the notebook! Maybe its presence on screen was an oversight, but I’d like to think that it is instead an indication of the show’s determination to present Josh, and his guests, in all the happy untidiness of our real lives.

If I remember correctly, I offered my “carry a notebook” advice to Josh around the same time that I had the enormously fun (though also nail-biting, for reasons that will become clear) experience of performing on a live radio show with him, broadcast regularly on the MIT station, WMBR. The show, titled The Urban Happiness Radio Hour, was an eclectic combination of humor, skits and music, loosely inspired by The Prairie Home Companion but with a Josh spin of mid-80s indie hip, Red Diaper Babyism, insane puns and self-deprecating neurosis. I was one anchor of a small voice-acting troupe. Our job of enacting Josh’s skits was complicated by Josh’s habit of writing the scripts, literally, up to the last few minutes before we went on the air. In certain cases, our performances had the spontaneity and verve of first readings because…they were first readings.

From what I’m reading on the blog for Josh’s new show, his current producer is running a much tighter ship. But one of the cool things about the Josh Kornbluth Show is that Josh and KQED clearly want it to feel a little raw, a bit rough; there’s nothing amateurish about it, but it’s utterly un-slick. It’s a world away from Urban Happiness — but not a galaxy away.

Friends like these…

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Some of my friends are up to good things.

Chad Dickerson, who was the chief force behind moving Salon into the modern age of computing back in 1998-99, and from whom I learned a great deal about technology and its management, is leaving his gig as InfoWorld’s CTO to take up a position at Yahoo, which is apparently opening a new research enterprise of some kind right here in Berkeley. Many congratulations to him.

Greg Costikyan, who I knew long before there was a Web, has posted the slides to a recent talk he gave titled “Death to the Games Industry. (Long Live Games.)” It’s a tour of the debased state of game development in an era of ballooning production budgets and distribution chokeholds, along with a call for a new model for developing games and a new “Indie Gaming” aesthetic. I have zilch time these days to keep up with the world of gaming, but reading Greg keeps me feeling at least a little clued in.

David Edelstein, a movie critic whose work has dazzled, provoked and enlightened me since we hung out together in the (long since renovated but then delightfully dingy) halls of the Harvard Crimson, is interviewed here on rockcritics.com. You can read David’s stuff all the time in Slate, and you can hear him every week on Fresh Air, but this is a more rambling personal conversation that feels a little like having a beer with David, something I don’t get to do often enough now that we live on opposite ends of the continent.

And, finally, Josh Kornbluth — hilarious monologist, oboist, mathematician manque and my former bandmate — will be hosting his very own interview show on KQED public television here in San Francisco starting this September 12. I might actually need to turn on the TV. (One of these years I will actually need to buy a new set; the one I’m using now was purchased 20 years ago with “scrip” from my job at the Boston Phoenix, which was an odd program the little paper had of letting employees take their pay in the form of heavy discounts on advertisers’ merchandise. Something tells me the technology has advanced since then.)

Book of Jobs

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“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. “

Steve Jobs’ recent commencement speech is really worth reading in full. It gets about as close to the bone, and the truth, as we could expect from a technology CEO, or anyone else.

I find it very hard to reconcile the awareness contained in these words with the reality of the executive pettiness that Jobs’ Apple keeps displaying (suing bloggers, banning publishers from its stores, and so on). But then smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications.

Heilemann on Lessig

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For starters, don’t miss the amazing piece John Heilemann contributed to New York magazine this week, which tells the saga of a lawsuit about child molestation at a famous choir school in Princeton, New Jersey. The lead lawyer was also a victim; his name is well known to the world that pays attention to the intersection of technology and law: Lawrence Lessig.

A Web birthday

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Dave Winer just turned 50. Here’s a happy birthday to send his way.

I first met Dave over a decade ago at one of Sylvia Paull‘s digital salon gatherings. I didn’t know what to make of him but he was clearly smart and creative, as well as argumentative. I crossed paths with him again in the days of the San Francisco Free Press, when he pitched in with some code to help us post our stories during the newspaper strike. I joined his DaveNet mailing list and read his Wired column. In 1999, after I wrote about blogs (before we called them that), he came to visit us at Salon and urged us to start using his new Manila software, but we’d just built our own content management system and couldn’t face trying to integrate a whole different platform. Then Dave started writing about something called RSS, and at first I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Later I did.

I think I’ve been reading Dave’s stuff longer than I’ve read anyone else online, watching as he developed new ideas in full public glare, made mistakes and made history. At first, there was something unique about a software developer stepping forward and saying, “I’m tired of journalists messing up my story — I’m going to tell it my way.” Now there are thousands of programmers doing the same thing; the Web hums with their conversations. As I work on my book I’m tuning in to a lot of them, amazed at how much understanding is unfolding in this abstruse and hitherto cloistered field — and how great an example the programmers are setting for other groups going down the same road. I don’t think these conversations would be happening in quite the same way without Winer’s difficult, challenging, inspired example.

Burning down the games

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I’m trying to be really, really good and hunker down on my book work, so I didn’t make any effort to check in at the Game Developers’ Conference even though it was right here in San Francisco, and now I’m kicking myself, because it appears that two of my favorite thinkers on the subject — my old friend Greg Costikyan, and Brenda Laurel, whose “Computers as Theater” was pivotal in shifting the course of my career — delivered blistering rants today at a panel there. I don’t know if the event will ever be more thoroughly documented, but in the meantime, these notes will do [link via BoingBoing]. Here are choice excerpts:

 

Costikyan: How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here, right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love.

Laurel: GTA [Grand Theft Auto] I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some of Brenda Laurel’s talk drew from material in her essay here on “New Boys.”

Random links and plugs

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## Mitch Kapor’s talk at Web 2.0 — a call to technologists to help propel a new populist reform movement — deserves much wider circulation beyond the conference hall: “We’re thinking a lot about the election just a few short weeks away. No matter who wins, I believe the kind of fundamental change we need to repair a damaged system will not come from the political establishment of either party. It must come from a popular reform movement, one which is heavily Internet-based, and comprised of a broad cross section of the American people.” Kapor has posted the full text
 over at Of By and For. Alternet has a good interview with Kapor as well.

## William Gibson is blogging again. He explains his return to the fray: “Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succinctly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln. And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, ‘At times, to be silent is to lie.’ ” [via Tim Jarrett]

## Real Live Preacher’s book is out! It’s been a great gift to read this Texan preacher-turned-blogger’s moving tales from the pulpit and beyond here on Salon blogs. Now new stories and some of the best of the Web stuff is collected between hard covers. Check it out. (You can buy it at the Preacher’s favorite San Antonio independent boookseller.)

## “Joshtoberfest” in the Bay Area: Josh Kornbluth’s got a new movie of his autobiographical monologue “Red Diaper Baby” opening at the Mill Valley Film Festival and then at two theaters. And his great and timely monologue, “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” returns for a new production at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. More details here. Josh — who I’m proud to count as a longtime friend — is certainly one of the funniest people alive, and he has held tight over the years to his artistic compass, his political bearings and his remarkable impromptu punning ability. “Red Diaper Baby” is where you will, for instance, find Josh’s priceless joke about Communist economics: “We’ve learned from history that it’s very important after feudalism to stop in capitalism before moving on to socialism — because that’s where you get your appliances.”

## Alex Cohen’s Underground Clips site is an interesting and increasingly valuable experiment in fair-use-based posting of politically relevant video clips.

## I’m experimenting with this new bullet-point style. I used to use one that was an image, and that seems like overkill. I want to maintain ASCII purity. I’ll probably keep, uh, iterating.

Ronald Reagan vs. the Evil Empire

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Did Ronald Reagan singlehandedly defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War? You’d think so, based on the tidal waves of adulatory coverage following his death. My old friend Jim Hershberg has spent much of his career as a historian specializing in the Cold War era, digging up important info from the archives of the former Soviet satellites, and he says, in this great Washington Post piece:

 

…For the media and Reagan’s hagiographers to give the 40th president all the credit is like saying a late-inning relief pitcher had “won” a baseball game without mentioning the starting pitcher, the closer or the teammates who scored the runs that gave the team its lead.

Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter.

Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev…

Read the rest.