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Saturday, March 08, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 VII Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks White is founder of Full Circle Associates and has been researching and practicing online facilitation since 1996. Levin is in charge of strategic marketing and product planning for SocialText. Lebkowsky, founder of Polycot Consulting, has been involved in online communities since 1990. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion: Lebkowsky: The thing with online communities is that they work really well for conversation and exchanging knowledge to some extent, but when it comes to actually getting something done, it's a little more difficult. One of the things we've been doing is giving some thought to how these things work, what their real value is, and whether you can transcend geography. Traditionally we've said that the real value of online communities in business is that you can bring people together online. It's a different way of working together. It's more agile. You can add layers of connectivity. You're building networks that are big and multi-dimensional. However, this can bring challenges. The one we're probably most familiar with is the control challenge. It's not hierarchical. Everything goes flat. White: I see networks as a container. It's moveable and squishy. It kid of floats out there. If I had to play charades and give a physical representation of a network, I would be stumped. There's some point of gravity in a network that's a node where things can happen and groups can form. When I look at a network as a group, there's a whole. But when I look at it as a whole, it gets squishy. One of the amazing things about networks is their ability to contain and facilitate reciprocity. Everything can be flowing in the same direction, or everything can be flowing in different directions. I want to share with you what happened to me in Central Asia. I got an email from a guy who'd seen something I'd written on my Web site. He told me that he'd been given the job to build online communities in post-Soviet Union republics. We entered into a dialog and came up with a plan to look at the power of the network. We introduced what online interaction can do. The next phase of our our work was to set up a face-to-face interaction. Two of the guys involved were using Hotmail to arrange informal prisoner exchanges. They legitimized the relationships that they had online. There was no network before. We pulled the people together to create the network. Recognizing that this medium allowed them to cross the physical boundaries that they weren't allowed to cross helped them realize that this medium had potential. Some people were catalysts and were willing to take leadership. The Internet can have power even in a highly disconnected community. They didn't really trust the aysnchronous tools at first. But the synchronous tools like instant messaging gave them the sense that they weren't alone when they really needed help. It hasn't supplanted face to face, but it's really expanded what they can do in their countries. Levin: You said something interesting when we were preparing about how the people used the network in a way that was consistent with the hierarchical nature of how they worked otherwise. White: This medium allows power to spread out to members of the network. One of the things we started with was building groups through networking. Then we moved into facilitating. We were very severely limited by bandwidth. We tried to move people outside of email to make visible the work of the group. Email is very one to one. We used WebCrossing and IM, and we let people use any language they were comfortable using. Helping people move their ideas about processes from offline to online was really useful. We need to make our patterns explicit so we can move them online. Lebkowsky: Adina has been working with her own company SocialText to build their network. Levin: Nancy talked a little bit apologetically about the simplicity about the tools that the teams were working with. Part of the tradition of groupware is to build a complicated set of tools. If you look at what people have used over the years, even in the orgs that have a lot of money, people use email more than anything else. The simple tools often work the best. I also want to talk about the idea of how groups form out of a network. SocialText grew out of a group of people who met through a quasi-professional network. That group is a networking group that doesn't have any particular goal or purpose. But a member sent a message to the group about a business opportunity that involved using blogs within corporations. Blogs are the simplest way for an individual to publish online. We also looked at how people could use Wikis. Wikis are one of the simplest way to collaborate online. We run SocialText using the tools that we're researching for our clients. The place I worked before, Vignette, was a very whiteboard-centric culture. People would take turns writing on the wall, and by the end of the meeting, we'd have made a decision, and the writing would be on the wall. The Wiki enables us to collaborate on just-in-time documents wherever we might be. We're also able to have a living library of what we're working on. Part of the point here isn't one specific tool but that there's a set of processes you can use for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. We see a set of concentric circles around SocialText. There are the employees. We have a board of advisors. Then there's a broader community with which we use the SocialText Workspace to keep in touch with people. That broader network is extremely valuable. Your closest network you already know -- and already know what they're thinking. If you want new ideas, you need to look at the broader network. Lebkowsky: There's not so much competition as there is collaboration. White: When you all work in the same building, you get to think the same way. When your organization lives in network, there's more creative abrasion. Lebkowsky: Clay Shirky wrote a piece in which he talked about the A list of bloggers. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a group of bloggers that everyone reads and the others sink to the bottom? White: Bloggers for president! Lebkowsky: Joichi Ito also wrote a paper about emergent democracy to start talking about how bloggers relate to each other. At some point, there was going to be a teleconference, a telephone call. I don't really get excited about teleconferences. You get the audio cues, but I want to type at people. What Adina's people came up with was a Happening, a multimodal event that was a combination of the teleconference, a chat space, and a voting or polling tool involving green, yellow, and red cards. A lot of times, you never have a sense of whether people are there or paying attention. We knew just was going on. If someone stopped doing their cards, you got the sense that they were paying attention to something else. We also established a Wiki, where we could plant things and store things after the fact. I even transcribed the telephone call because I'd taped it. We also used QuickTopic. QuickTopic is a very cool little tool that allows you to start a little discussion thread ad hoc. It also involves a document review tool. You can post documents, and people can comment on them. It was almost more effective than the Wiki because it was easier to keep track of comments. The Emergent Democracy paper was written. It's in version 1.2. But we haven't continued to work. There's not much activity on the mailing list. People have gotten distracted. And there's the question about emergent leadership. Joi was kind of the emergent leadership, but he turned his attention elsewhere. White: We haven't quite figured out how to take that vision and translate worker bee energy online. There's a thing we struggle with offline, and when we put it online, the warts become apparent. Lebkowsky: If we're only going to have a democracy of clueful intelligent people who communicate well online, that's not going to work. White: It depends on how you define heirarchy. There's a question of consistent standards. Are we attracted to this environment because we want to take ownership of our work and other people don't? Corollary: Blogging About Blogging LII Earlier this month, Anil Dash offered an interesting commentary on Project Blogger that considers the positive aspects as well as the negative. It's one of the first balanced analyses I've seen. Kudos. South by Southwest 2003 VI Dana Robinson: User Not Found Robinson is online community manager for a nonprofit called Starbright that provides media-based products to seriously ill children. She is currently developing a Web site devoted to the death of online friends. Here is a rough transcript of the discussion: Nobody else wanted to be on a panel about dying and death, so it's just me. When we talk about experiencing the death of our online friends, we have to go into it believing that these friends are real and legitimate. I don't want to go into the whole Ripper/IRC/Webcam suicide thing. While it's unclear whether what he did was suicide, the fact is he did die. He took huge doses of Methadone and Oxycontin while he was on a Webcam and on IRC. There was a huge debate whether it was a suicide or whether he was just being dumb with drugs. I'm also not trained to treat grieving. I'm wanting to learn from you as much as I want you to learn from the conversation. I decided to do this project not because I'm gothic. Although I do wear black and have black hair. It started back in 1994. I was using a Telnet-based, Mud-like chat system. I became friends with this guy David who was chronically ill. He was popular within the community, and one day he just stopped coming in. One guy called his parents, and they told him that he had passed away. He wanted the Mud to know that he'd passed away, but his parents didn't know who to call. I decided to write an essay about it for a journalism class, and I called a bunch of sociologists. They didn't even know what email was so I couldn't do the project. Two years ago I started talking to this guy in Chicago named Timothy. He was 34 and had cystic fibrosis. We talked on the phone a few times, and then he stopped answering his phone. Then the phone number went away. I wondered what was going on. Online, relationships can be anonymous. You can know a lot about someone, but you might not know how to reach them in real life. Then I got interested in the topic again because of the work I do for Starbright. We hook terminally sick kids up online. Not a lot of kids living with sickle cell [anemia] live in Iowa. Online, they can find other kids with sickle cell, talk online, and feel like they're not alone. One of the kids we got really close with was Bianca. She was dealing with her third bout of cancer, and she'd call us every day to talk to our staff. She was online 7-8 hours every day. When she passed away, I didn't really think I'd feel emotionally invested in one of our users. Her mother told us that my boss and I were in her last thoughts. It was really, really rough. Our relationships are really getting more intense online, and we need to know more about how to deal with death. User Not Found is my site where I post essays while I'm doing research. The killing off of the persona is another thing I'm looking into. There aren't a lot of people doing this research. There's nothing that's been written. So it's really weird. In doing my research I've found that online communities in a couple of different ways. They may keep the account up so nobody else can use that ID. And if there are profiles, they may keep the profile available, maybe marking it with a RIP and the years they were alive. They might also set up memorial pages, living obituaries that talk about what they did, how they remembered. And a lot of the gaming communities may have annual memorial events where they have their own little events where they have a memorial avatar. They put down their weapons, come to a central meeting place, and mourn the loss of one of their users. And some online communities don't do anything. They take no action. And that's unfortunate. With Starbright, we need to be careful. You can't step on parents' toes. Some parents want their children to learn about death in a more controlled way. We're looking into having some sort of a memorial garden that would be online as well offline. They could plant a virtual tree online and write some words about their friend who died. And we could send them a packet of seeds so they could plant a real tree of their own. At my job, we handle the taboos around death by making jokes around it. That can be even worse. If we don't make jokes, there's no way we can make it through our days. People need to start talking about this and having these sorts of conversations. Clearly it's an issue. The more we interact with people online, experiences like this will become more and more relevant. Now more and more people are accepting the fact that the friendships are legitimate. They have real feelings of grief and mourning. They feel like these feelings aren't legitimate. I would argue the opposite. You probably know them better because you have this veil of anonymity. It may be more impactful if the friends are online. Some ISPs have policies in place where they require proof of death certificates. It's hit or miss company to company. Now let's talk about the online cries for help and the community's responsibility to react to those cries for help. Sometimes the intent is not to die but to get some attention. In one instance, a woman took too many pills to be well, and a community member called 911. They tracked down her phone number and were able to get their in time. Brad Fitzpatrick: I'm Brad from LiveJournal. I had to deal with a lot of those emails saying there had to be a way we could track her down. We were able to get her address from a payment she'd made via check or something like that. The community was able to rally together and were interested in saving her. If you read the chat transcripts from Ripper on IRC, people thought he was fooling around and didn't really want to kill himself. As he was passing out, people started saying maybe they should call someone. If they'd called somebody, they could have sent someone over quite easily. They had ways of getting ahold of him. But because of their not gettign involved stance, he ended up dying. Is it overstepping the bounds of the online relationship to bring in the authorities? One of the problems is the hoaxes that have been covered. Because of all the publicized hoaxes, people don't take real situations seriously. The reality is that there aren't many hoaxes. There are more realities than hoaxes. Community managers have a responsibility to investigate further. In the community that I manage, if a kid even mentions suicide, we call their parents and bring in a specialist. Cory Doctorow: When Google wrote its algorithm for what comes up when you type suicide, they put a lot of thought into it. Right now, the top results are suicide hotlines. But sometimes, when the algorithms aren't working right, it's pages of people telling each other how to kill themselves. Matt Haughey: It's interesting that when attempts are visible -- there's a Webcam -- they're taken more seriously because you can actually see it happen. How Americans deal with death is so unhealthy compared to a lot of cultures. And how children deal with death compared to adults is even more different. Children deal with death so healthily. Everyone could learn a lot by talking to these kids. Paul Bausch: I think it was in the Tipping Point, but if someone dies because they committed suicide and newspapers put it on the front page, it can be seen as permission to kill yourself. If you over-memorialize kids, and kids view suicide as a way to escape from their illness, you have to be careful how kids take those memorials. You don't want to over-romanticize it. Another thing I'd like to talk about is when people who aren't really that active in a community die and the community rises up to recognize them. On Fark, there was a guy who didn't post much at all, but when he died in a car accident, the community rose up. There were so many posts about this kid, and nobody knew him. It made me start thinking: Does a person's usage in a given community correlate with how the death is received. Do accoladed users receive more memorials? I think that's how it happens in communities. The community feels a definite impact from that loss. But it's sort of disappointed when someone who's not a big user passes away. Question:I think it's important to look at the quality of someone's activity. Some people might not post much, but they post well. Smaller users can make deeper connections with individuals, but it impacts the community in a different way. Active users impact the entire community. On Starbright world, the kids are much more willing to talk about it than the adults are willing to ask them to talk about it. Adults kind of present barriers where there don't need to be barriers. If you thought that one of your online friends died, how far would you go? Where would you draw the line between doing your own personal research and overstepping the bounds to impose on someone's privacy? Would you contact the family? When we contacted David's family in 1994, most families would have been closed to being contacted by strangers in their time of grieving. For you, as a person, to be able to move on, you kind of have to know what's going on. There's a service called Died Online. You register. And you choose the increments on which you check in on the site. If you fail to check in twice based on your increments, the service contacts people you've listed to let them know that you haven't checked in for awhile and they might want to check in with you. For my job, we're working in prevention as well as what to do if it's already happened. It's tough. You have to take it on a situation by situation basis. It's hard to come up with a protocol that you'd follow consistently because if you know the individual. It can be different in every case. Only now are we even really at a point where we can have these conversations. Things change so rapidly. Maybe a year from now we'll have this conversation and it will be totally different. Brad Fitzpatrick: Whenever someone dies on LiveJournal, and it's happened maybe a dozen times now, the last post will get hundreds of comments. That's one of the healthier things I've seen. It's grieving. It's sharing. And it brings the community together so people don't have to deal with it themselves. The only deaths I've experienced have been online. Friends, family. I've only experienced death online. That might be why I'm so interested in this. South by Southwest 2003 V David Weinberger: Why the Web Matters Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a contributor to World of Ends, and author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Here is a rough transcript of Weinberger's remarks: The Web does matter. Every time you hear somebody say, "The bubble is over," what they're really saying is that the Internet doesn't matter. They're just wrong. I want to go through seven or eight ways in which the Web really matters. The first is that I have 10 times as many friends than I used to have. There are 100 times as many people than I knew before. There are 1,000 times as many people that I can call. Every imaginable interest has its spot on the Web. Anybody can find a set of people who are interested in the same sorts of things. We take for granted that we can get more information about anything. If you don't like Cheerios and their marketing messages, there's a world out there online that can give you a perspective and the information that you're looking for. Truth doesn't have to have the voice stripped out of it. That link is gone. It's not just happening in Web logs. It's happening in the adult journalism world, too. Every day I get a link to stuff that matters to me. And it comes from young people who are 18 steps removed from me. When I was growing up, to learn meant to be on a one-to-one relationship with a book. When my kids are on a computer using a word processor, they have nine IM sessions going, and they're working together. The teachers probably think it's cheating. It's not. It's learning. The Web matters because if you're a 13 year old in Hong Kong or a 12 year old in Florence, you take it for granted that you can speak and the world will listen. I grew up believing that the world consisted of countries separated by borders. The Web matters. I don't know why people dismiss it. They want to take something that's impressive and make it dull. The Web is like Michael Jackson. The more you see and the more you know, it gets weirder and weirder. The weirdest thing about the Web is its success. What is the Web for? 600 million people don't know what it's for. Something big is happening. It's weird because we're looking at a 2-D screen, yet we talk about it as though it's spatial. The Web is also familiar. But what does the Web remind of us? The spoiler here is that there's a default philosophy. What does it mean to be a human among other humans? We live in an age of deep alienation. Our ideas of what it means to be a human are deeply out of whack with the way we live our lives. Your understanding of what you are determines who you are. My motto for today is: Our attraction to the Web is proportional to the depth of our alienation. I'm going to look at this in two ways. The first has to do with Ray Kurzweil's "Age of the Spiritual Machine." If we can move ourselves into silicon, we can escape our bodies. There's nothing magical about silicon. It's just fast and cheap. What if we didn't do it with computers. What if we did it with beer cans? I was in a wheat field last summer. Take the motions of the wind and the movement of animals. If you kept track of left-leaning stalks as off and right-leaning as on, there's Ray again. It's an odd idea that we can take brain states, model them in another material, and have something that resembles human consciousness. Why spend so much time knocking the highly intelligent doer of good deeds Raymond Kurzweil? We're really alienated in our beliefs if we think this makes any amount of sense. Has anyone worked for an organization whose tag line was "We deliver the right information to the right people at the right time"? The idea that good input leads to good outcomes is fine if you're a robot. What does making a decision consist of? It consists of making a decision which inputs to make sense of. We had the causality backwards. We're not software. We've got time backwards. What I want to suggest is that that's not the way information appears on the Web, and that that's extremely appealing to us. How does information look on the Web? Most commercial Web sites are valueless marketing crap. When I was looking for a washer and a drier, I googled Kenmore, Maytag, and discussion, and I got this site, which is extremely ugly. But I found exactly the model I was looking for. I posted a question, and within a couple of hours, a guy named Jim replied. Jim wouldn't lie to me. If I went into Sears to look at a Kenmore, the salespeople wouldn't tell me about the buzzer being too lous. On the Web, it's contextual. There's a physicist of lint hanging out on the Web waiting to answer someone's questions. What do we get out of this knowledge? Smarter customers? That's not really the goal here. Knowledge used to be fat and chewy. Over time, that evolved into a quest for certainty. We started looking for the certain and knowable based on the statements themselves. That's the skinniest approach to knowledge. We've become anorexic in our knowledge. We've also become a cult of precision. That helps explain our obsession with bits. What's really important is that atoms and the analog world are messy and sloppy, and bits and the digital world are extremely sharp and precise. We're missing ambiguity. The world is not precise. The Web is the counter to the overly precise world of bits. We also seem to have the idea that the world is perfectly precise and that's it's just our measuring devices are lacking. If I ask you what's real, you're going to give me a rock. A rock doesn't change. It changes very, very slowly. If I were to say to you that three rocks make up a triangle, you would say the rocks were more real. If you move the rocks, the triangle goes away, but the rocks remain. The triangle is dependent, and dependence is weak. Our default philosophy is individualism, but without groups, we cannot be individuals. Individuals don't come first. We only become individuals because of gifts from groups. Relationships among humans are not obvious, but they are on the Web because relationships are links. Here's Doc Searls. Here's his blogroll. To be on the Web means to be linked. The Web is made up of links. Would you rather be well linked or well read? You often hear about the abundance of the Web. 20 billion pages, 100 billion links. I can't find an attribution for the 20 billion pages, and I made up the 100 billion. But it's not about the abundance, it's about the generosity. The people who made the Web, and the people who make the pages. The Web's architecture is about links. Every time I put a link on my page, I'm telling people to go somewhere else. Every link is an expression of selflessness. The Web is an architecture of generosity. When are humans at our best? We're at our best when we're out of ourselves and involved with others. When we're being generous. That's reflected inevitably in the Web. Every time we're on the Web, we're engaged in that. What does the Web remind us of? It reminds us of our selves, and of ourselves at our best. Friday, March 07, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 IV Richard Stallman: Copyright Vs. Community in the Age of the Computer Networks Stallman was introduced in part by SXSW Interactive Event Director Hugh Forrest, who said that this was the first-ever programming event scheduled on the opening Friday night of SXSW Interactive. In the spirit of Stallman's work with the Free Software Foundation, the event was also SXSW Interactive's first free event. (The audience applauded at this point.) As former editor of The Austin Challenger, Forrest also introduced Doug Barnes, formerly of The Spark, The Hot Spot, and The Austin Weekly, and now on the board of EFF Austin. Barnes, then, introduced Stallman. Putting the Free in Freedom This talk is not about free software. In 1983, I reached the conclusion that for people to use computers freely, they needed to have access to free software and be able to use it freely. You should have the freedom to use software once you've got a copy. There are three freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program. Freedom 1 is the freedom to help yourself by studying the program and changing it to suit your needs. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor by giving them a copy of the software. Freedom 3 is the freedom to help build your community by working together to build that software. Cooks use recipes and have the same freedoms in using recipes. If you tell a cook that they can't change a recipe, they would probably be outraged. Some people say: Can these ideas extend to anything? What about tables and microphones and cars? That's a silly question. There are no copiers for tables and microphones and cars. It's a moot point. The only way to make more physical objects is to build more. But what about the freedom to modify? If you buy this microphone, you are free to modify it. If you buy a chair, you're free to modify it. You can weld on more legs, saw them off. Our freedoms are restricted by copyright law. Should people feel a reason to obey? The history of copyright is connected with the history of copying technology. The basic principles of ethics can't be reached by changes in technology. But when we consider ethical questions, we judge alternatives based on their consequences. Change the context, and the same alternatives may have different consequences. The History of Reproduction Back in the '70s, it was fashionable to say that computers were causing problems for copyright. I would rather say that copyright causes problems for computers. In the ancient world, the copying of books was done with a pen. This technology had certain consequences. Any reader could do it. If you could read and write, you could copy a book just about as well as anybody else. There was no economy of scale. Making 10 copies of the same book took 10 times as long. Books were copied wherever there were copies. There was no centralization. There was also no need for all copies to be identical. There was no gulf between writing a book and copying one. Writing a commentary was a useful thing to do. Writing a compendium was also appreciated and considered worthy. As far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the ancient world. Then there was an advance in copying technology. The printing press made copying more efficient but not uniformly so. It takes a lot of work to set the type and comparatively little work to make many copies from that type. There was far more economy of scale. Another change was that you needed to have a printing press and type, which was fairly expensive and unusual material. Not everybody could make copies. This centralized the copies of any given book. Printing did not entirely replace hand copying. Very rich people and very poor people continued making copies by hand. The Advent of Copyright Most of the copies, however, were made by printing. Copyright came along with the printing press. Italy in the 1500s was apparently the first place there was copyright. You could go to the ruler and ask for a monopoly on printing a work. Rulers liked giving our monopolies. The nature of printing press technology had certain consequences for copyright. It was understood to only affect publication. Not copying. It was an industrial regulation. It restricted something only specialized businesses could do. It didn't restrict readers. It was painless, relatively easy to enforce, and arguably beneficial. Copyright in England started out as a sort of a monopoly system for publishers that was relatively harmful. Then it was reformed and rewarded to authors. In the Constitution, there was thought given to copyright being an entitlement for authors. But what came out was a very different idea. It doesn't say that authors are entitled to exclusive use. It doesn't even say that there would be exclusive use. It just says that Congress should benefit progress. Any benefit for the authors is just a means to that end. The Price That You Trade The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you. Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal. That's the rational thing for the public to do. We need to hold onto the parts of the freedom we want to use and give up freedoms we can't use. That's what our federal government would do if it were democratic and representative of our interests. We have government of the people by the flunkies for the corporations. Our freedoms are being taken away to empower corporations. What's Going Wrong Copyright used to last 14 years. It's been extended over and over in the last century. The publishers have figured out a way to disregard what the Constitution says. If they keep on extending it, it's in effect perpetual copyright on the installment plan. Any given work is supposed to enter the public domain on a certain date. But their plan is for no work to enter the public domain ever again. They pay Congress to give it to them 20 years at a time. In 1998, they passed the Mickey Mouse copyright act. It was basically to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain, and it was basically bought by Disney. It's actually called the Sonny Bono copyright act. Sonny Bono was a member of the Church of Scientology and a member of Congress. The Church of Scientology actively sues people based on infringement of copyright laws. The movie companies were saying that 75 years wasn't long enough. This is just something paid legislators can use to do what they're getting paid to do. Another dimension of copyright is how much it covers. There are freedoms we have as readers. But they're freedoms publishers want to take away from us. You may have bought a used book. You may have lent a book to a friend. You may have bought a book anonymously using cash. You may have borrowed a book from the library. Or you may have owned a book for many years, reading it several times. All of this adds up to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's why the people who make DVD's want to insert ads that you have to watch. They don't want you to know how DVD's work. Linux programmers wrote a program so you can play these encoded DVD's. The right to play the DVD is lawful in this country, but using this software -- even linking to the software -- is illegal. They're doing the same thing with e-books. And the record companies are doing the same thing with their fake CD's. They look like CD's, but they can't be played on your computer. In one European country, they can't call them CD's because they don't meet the minimum standards. Companies like this -- like EMI -- deserve to go broke. I hope you will help to make the record companies go out of business. There's nothing wrong with making records per se, but this infringement on our rights needs to be punished. Companies as arrogant as this do not deserve to exist. A New Copyright Model There's no reason why copyright should be the same for all kinds of work. If copyright policy is considered uniform, they can pick whichever narrow little area seems to justify copyright restrictions and then apply them uniformly. We also need to look at the various dimensions of copyright such as length of time. Most books are out of print in just a few years. They're remaindered after 18 months. A 10-year copyright would be perfectly adequate. People usually assume that authors love publishers and that copyright benefits them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Another dimension is what copyright covers. I have three basic categories of works, and they're not distinguished by media: functional works, documentaries and representational works, and artistic and aesthetic works. Functional works are things that you use. Computer programs and recipes. Manuals and textbooks. Functional works should be free. When people are using this information, they may be able to improve it. If we give up the copyright bargain, would these works be written? We have half a million volunteers working on free software. We're starting to venture into other functional works as well. The Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world. In the second category, works that represent the views of people, to change them is to misrepresent somebody's thoughts. There's no social imperative to publish modified versions of the works. You might envision a modified copyright that allows commercial reproduction of the works verbatim and nothing else. The third category is aesthetic or artistic works. For these kinds of works, the hard problem is modification. These works have integrity and modification can destroy that integrity. Shakespeare took the plots of his plays from other plays. If copyright law existed then, they would have been illegal. We consider them masterpieces. For novels, maybe you can't make them better. Another issue is Internet music sharing. We should simply legalize it now. The musicians and the public would be better off. Record labels treat musicians like dirt. The contracts that they impose on musicians are extremely cruel. When you buy a commercial CD, you fail to support the musicians. Concerts are how musicians make money. I want music that's made by artisans, not in factories. Getting rid of the Hype Industrial Complex and moving toward Internet music sharing is one way to get there. Instead of having a public relations campaign saying that sharing is piracy -- sharing is like attacking a ship, which goes against human nature -- we could have a public relations campaign saying, "Have you sent $1 to your favorite band today?" South by Southwest 2003 III Just got back from dinner at Curra's with Ben and Laurie. The chicken mole enchiladas were wonderful, and I topped dinner off with a bottle of Shiner. Shiner Bock is one of my favorite beers, and it's not widely available outside of Texas. Tonight, our waiter tried to discourage me from having a Shiner so I could have a Newcastle of all things. Newcastle, I can get anywhere. Shiner? Austin.   Over dinner, we talked about the small-world and microstar nature of the self-publishing and Web communities, the importance of politics and urban planning, why people think Ben's a jerk, and the future of Ben's So New Media empire. I gave Ben the origami globe that came in the SXSW gear bag, and I decided that I might need to be less dependent on the 15 bus if I want to see everyone I want to see while I'm in town. In 30 minutes, Richard Stallman. I need to go upstairs to find a seat and a power plug. My battery just edged into the red. Music to My Eyes XII The fellow who just sold me a large cafe latte for $3.50 has never been further northeast than Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But so far during South by Southwest, he's met people as far away from Austin as Boston (me), Philadelphia, and New Zealand. In October, he'll go to New York City for his honeymoon. Turns out that Mr. Coffee is also in a band, the Austin-based space rock band Spacetruck. I'll have to check out the MP3's later, but it seems that Mr. Coffee plays bass. And, to add to your small world file, it appears that one of the women my friend Rick works with at Akins High School is the mother of Jordan, drummer for the Boston band Fooled by April. Can't go far enough to escape bands from Boss Town! They're playing SXSW at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Fox & Hound. Check 'em out if you're here, not there. South by Southwest 2003 II For Austinites, a Harry Knowles sighting might be of relatively little import. But being from Boston, not Austin, I just had my first Web celeb fan moment, when I spotted the Ain't It Cool News founder sitting at a table near the registration area. Always a kick, almost more fun than sitting near Lyle Lovett at the Alamo. South by Southwest 2003 I'm at the Austin Convention Center, with time to kill before South by Southwest Interactive officially begins at 7:30. Escaping the heavy snow in Boston, I was delayed getting out of Boston and finally arrived in town around 9 last night, catching a cab to Rick and Melissa's new house in Highland. I met their dog Dudley, and we stayed up a little catching up. This morning, I caught the 15 bus downtown, getting off a hair too soon and walking down Trinity from 15th to the convention center. I registered, caught lunch at B.D. Riley's on Sixth, and got organized for the days ahead. The rain here has ended, and it's absolutely beautiful. Sunny, warm. In a couple of hours, I'll meet Ben Brown for dinner in South Austin before coming back here for Richard Stallman's talk. Hello, Austin. I've missed you. Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Event-o-Dex XLI No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash You are invited to the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash, the first in a series of occasional Boston-area blogger get-togethers. Instead of sitting at our computers for 24 hours blogging about nothing to raise money for charity, instead of buying a plane ticket to Las Vegas for a conference featuring people you don't know and may never see again, and instead of worrying about whether your personal Web work makes you anti-social or depressed, come on out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash and meet scads of local bloggers. You've read their words. Now meet them live and in person! We're inviting hundreds of Boston-area bloggers and Web writers, and you can freely transmit this invitation yourself. Who's invited initially? Readers of Media Diet, the blog run by co-organizer Heath Row; members of Boston Blogs, a project managed by co-organizer Shannon Okey, and participants in the Bostonites Unite! Web ring. The Cambridgeport Saloon is a wonderful little bar between Central Square and MIT in Cambridge. Within easy walking distance from the Central Square T stop, the saloon sports video games (Golden Tee and Radikal Bikers, last we checked), pinball machines, a great juke box, pool tables, and darts. The bar also has history! Originally called Father's Fore, the bar has been in operation at least since the mid-'70s. Be a part of history. Get in on the ground floor. Belly up to the bar and come out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash. And spread word. (Apologies for those Boston-area bloggers too young to attend an event at a bar. We'll try to find all-ages venues for future Boston Blog Bashes, and, absolutely anyone and everyone is encouraged to convene their own blog gatherings.) Music to My Ears XXIX Knowing that I'm heading to Aus-Town tomorrow, a co-worker brought in a CD by one her friend's bands, Kissinger. I'm listening to their "Charm" CD right now, and it's relatively interesting hard rock. Unfortunately, they're not playing while I'm in the area, but their Web site sports MP3's, music videos, and multimedia slideshows featuring photos taken at shows, including one at the Fort Worth International Raceway -- and the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Not totally my cup of tea, but well done, and presented with a clear sense of humor. I bet they're fun live. Conferences and Community III I leave for SXSW Interactive tomorrow afternoon, and I'm getting excited. It'll be nice to go back to Austin, where I almost moved in 2000. And I'm looking forward to catching up with a lot of friends I haven't seen for awhile. Depending on the wireless network and other Net access on site and at my host's house, I hope to file frequent SXSW panel and speaker updates while at the conference. If that doesn't happen, Media Diet might be quiet until mid-next week. While I always hope to update Media Diet while traveling, if I don't, that doesn't mean that Media Diet is dead (long live Media Diet!). It just means that it's resting. Corollary: Technofetishism XXVII Sigh. Chris' car got hit while it was parked in front of a building. I'm here until 7 and walking to band practice anyway. I learned this via email. Blogging About Blogging LII Say what you will about Richards Interactive's Project Blogger and its marketing move into the blogosphere, but I just filled out their application survey. We'll see whether Media Diet's 150 unique visitors a day and content mix passes muster -- and what the experience is like. It's official: Media Diet is selling out. I can always stop participating in the project if I'm chosen, no? Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust III According to the New York Post's Keith Kelly, Jungle Media, publisher of MBA Jungle and JD Jungle is experiencing a series of top-level editorial exits. Three editors in almost as many weeks. It's clear that Jungle Media publishes stepping-stone magazines, in terms of staff as well as readers, as once you get your MBA or JD, the magazines are less relevant. The exiting editors have ended up at Popular Science, New York, and Ski. All steps up. Thanks to I Want Media. Technofetishism XXVII In this ever-online, always-connected, widely distributed world of communications, it's good to know that there are still gaps in the system -- and steps that people can take to cross the voids. Earlier today, I emailed a couple of my bandmates to inquire about getting a ride to Anchormen practice tonight. I did so on my laptop, using Eudora. Minutes ago, my cell phone beeped, indicating that I'd gotten an SMS. It was Chris, saying he could give me a lift. I replied via SMS, but I wonder: Does Chris get his email on his phone? Did he read my email and then decide that replying via SMS was more expedient? It was kind of nice not to get an email in response. Gaps to cross, voids to fill, steps to take. North End Moment XXXV I found this wallet photo from a junior high or high school formal dance this morning on the pavement in the back alley. It was face up, beaming at the grey skies of Boston, image surface speckled with the light rain we're getting this morning.  Oh, to be young and in love. She looks so pleased with herself: her dress, her hair. He looks so pleased to be with her. His suit is no match for her dress, and do you think he's almost hiding behind her so he doesn't look so wide? I don't know. What I do know is that if he really loved her, and she him, the photo wouldn't have found its way to the gutters behind the Scotch & Sirloin building. Just a little bittersweet welcome to the North End today. Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Digesting the Daily IX Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians. Alderman champions struggling Evanston skate park Proposed budget calls for park to close; some say sport is bigger than baseball (Feb. 18, 2003) Twisted logic behind library's bizarre design (Feb. 19, 2003) Hip living The Co-op has picked up a reputation as a "hippie commune," but tenants just call it home (Feb. 24, 2003) Weekend detention to Kellogg student Brady Busch, who was arrested Feb. 21 for pushing, grabbing, and insulting a female officer of the Evanston Police Department. Charged with battery, Busch reportedly shoved the officer, who was checking IDs, from behind so he could get past her. "Get out of the way, b-tch," he said. When arrested, the Kellogg student said, "F-ck you." Dude. You go to the Kellogg School of Management. What kind of business person do you want to be? What kind will you be? The kind that bruises the arms of police officers just so you can get into a bar? I am not impressed. Shame on you. From the In Box: From the Reading Pile XVII Thanks for the review on the "Nowhere Fast" deal. I have something for you to review further. I say that Jesus Christ rose from the dead 2000 years ago, and that the resrrection of Jesus Christ is an undeniable fact. What is your review on that? -- Simon Woodstock I would say that while I was raised Christian and read the Bible nearly every day, I don't think that the Bible is infallible. And that I would much rather concentrate on living in line with Christian morals and values than debating over theological-historical particulars. Live the change I want to make, I guess. The original manuscripts of the Bible are proven to be infallible. Besides the biblical account of the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, there is much evidence from first century non Christian historians that support the resurrection of Jesus Christ as well (i.e Pliny, Tacitus, Josephus etc.) The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most historically verifiable event in all of ancient history. Besides this, the Bible claims that Jesus is in fact God in the flesh. If a book claims that somebody is God, and they are in fact not God, that book is no source for any type of moral guidelines. That book would have to be considered to be the biggest lie of all history, and thus of no moral worth. The Bible is infallible. The Bible claims that Jesus is God. Jesus rose from the dead, proving once and for all that this was so. The resurrection is not a theological/historical particular. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is either the most crucial event of all time, or it is absolutely nothing at all. I respect any conclusion that you make, and I also respect you as a person, even if we disagree. Your review please. Monday, March 03, 2003
The Movie I Watched Last Night LIX Fast Company's under a denial-of-service attack, so it's a challenge to work on our Web. I'm usually not this prolific with Media Diet, I promise. I've been trying to be productive at work otherwise, but here I am again. For what it's worth, I've decided that it's not fair game for me to review movies I stumble across on the TV and watch with less than full attention -- "Ford Fairlane" and the 1977 "Island of Dr. Moreau" recently -- so I'm going to stick with movies I rent or watch on DVD. Maybe movies on channels like HBO, but definitely not commercially interrupted movies. Battle Royale Amazing. The concept alone behind this movie is intriguing, but its final execution is quite impressive. Because of an economic collapse and population explosion in the Japan of the future, a law is passed that allows the government to send one class of ninth graders to a deserted island for three days. The students are given weapons, food, and water; are instructed to kill each other; and the survivor at the end gets to return to the mainland. While one would think the plot would establish an unnecessarily gory, Friday the 13th-like slasher film, director Kinji Fukasaku did a brilliant job downplaying the violence, of which there is plenty, and making sure that the characters -- more than 40 at the movie's beginning -- are relatively distinguishable from the next. Takeshi Kitano sings as the subtly unstable former teacher overseeing the whole operation, and concept aside, there are some interesting developments and twists along the way -- including the boys who hack into the military's computer system and the Battle Royale alumnus who plays a role in the most satisfying plot surprise near the end of the movie. If you're a fan of Japanese or Hong Kong action and exploitation films, this is one to see for sure. Dot This is an independently produced mockumentary about a start-up company called Zectek. It's been billed as the Spinal Tap of the dotcom era and hailed by Business 2.0 as more realistic than Startup.com. While it's no Spinal Tap -- and while I've yet to see Startup.com (I just moved it up in my Netflix queue) -- it's an extremely funny, caustic, and biting satire of the Net Economy hype and hyperbole. Combining reality TV-styled footage with one-on-one candid interviews and voice-over news account narrative commenting on Netscape, Yahoo, and Boo.com, the movie slowly reveals the true leadership and character traits of the founders of Zectek, as well as those they hire later. What struck me hardest in this movie is that Zectek was a business founded on nothing: no ideas, no goals, and no business plan. The founders -- all of whom, outside of the technologist, perhaps, were full of hot air -- did everything necessary to run a startup business, from acquiring office space and hiring a receptionist to making T-shirts and raising millions of dollars in venture capital. In the end, the company never did anything, much less make a product or service. It reminded me of the band I was in in junior high. We opened a bank account, designed a logo, and bought sheet music for "Axel F" and "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight," but beyond one half-serious practice in the Methodist church's youth group room, we never did anything. We even researched our band name against existing trademarks, changing our name from Nitecap to Knightcap to avoid future litigation involving a hotel chain. A silly -- and slightly sad -- callback to the heyday of the Net Economy, when you didn't even need a business plan sketched on your cocktail napkin. All you needed was a napkin. Freejack How did this movie ever get made? Based on the Robert Sheckley s-f novel "Immortality Inc.," the film stars Emilio Estevez, of all people, as the protagonist -- and Mick Jagger as the bounty hunter antagonist. The story is pretty basic. Emilio's heroic character is a race-car driver who perishes in a fiery wreck -- and who is sucked into the future to serve as the body for a transplanted mind. The bulk of the movie is a series of Running Man-like chase scenes in which Emilio outpaces Mick; reconnects with his fiancee, played by Rene Russo, who's become a hard-edged business woman since his death; and tries to track down the wealthy business man who took out the bounty in the first place. That person turns out to be Anthony Hopkins' character, Russo's character's mentor and employer -- and outside of a visually stimulating final sequence in which we're drawn into Hopkins' character's preserved mind, the movie is devoid of value or interest. But the movie might be worth watching for the last scenes. And if you dig Sheckley, the movie might satisfy the completist in you. Rock Shows of Note LVI Like the good 30-year-old I am, I stayed in Thursday and Friday nights so I could venture out in the drizzle Saturday for a solid show at the Abbey Lounge. I arrived around 9, about 20 minutes early for the start of the first set, a solo performance by the Brooklyn-based Jennifer O'Connor. O'Connor's been coming up from New York a lot lately, and I was impressed by her emotive singer-songwriter set. More indie rock than folk, her time on stage included several highlights. Her friend Kim joined her for a song on the melodica and played really well for her first time doing so. O'Connor played one of her friend's songs -- a pleasant little number musing about whether animals dream about zoos -- that stuck with me. And she seemed to nail the cover she said she tried to play in town last week -- but screwed up. You can catch her again April 10 at the Kendall Cafe with Eric Saulnier, whom I've mentioned here previously. Next up, Soltero. I last saw them near the end of January, but I didn't really pay much attention. Saturday night, I did. And it was high time. Reminding me of what Papas Fritas might have sounded like in their earliest of days -- if they'd come from the Coctails school of self-taught bash pop -- they delighted with some delicious strained singing, off-key harmonies, and other antics -- such as clapping in the crowd and surprising "woo-hoo" yelps. Incorporating Johnny Cash-like baritone singing, several songs really hit me hard: "The Moment You Said Yes," "Autobahn," and "Fight Song for True Love." Lyrics blend the bittersweet and the banal. And the band had its own cheering section! Two tanktopped women on the left side of the club really whooped it up. Fun on stage, fun on the floor. I'll catch Soltero again. Admittedly, Choo Choo la Rouge was who I was really there to see, however. While I've loved their shows in the past, while I love their CD, and while I'm sheepishly embarrassed that so many of the band members remember my name while all I can muster is Vincent, this show fell a little flat. They opened with a couple of new songs, which were good to hear, but I felt that their older songs were different -- either performed with less passion or slightly rewritten. With the past strength of their choruses and catchy hooks, I'd be surprised and disappointed if the band has expurgated some of my favorite sing-along parts. Maybe they didn't. Maybe my favorite songs just seemed to end too quickly. Lastly, the In Out. Some sad news. They were supposed to have copies of their new CD on hand Saturday night. And the label had even shipped them several boxes of the disc. But some lame jerk stole the boxes from in front of where they'd been delivered, and the band arrived with only a few copies of the record. Now, what kind of person steals packages off of porches and whatnot? That's right, a bad, mean, stupid person. From what I gathered, the band called some local used record stores to warn folks that someone might be trying to sell them, but I shudder to think what fate befell those CD's. Did the thief just trash them? People, please don't steal. Despite that setback and letdown, the band put on a good show. Sure, I wish that they'd push what they do a little further. They are an extremely good Fall-like band, but I can't get past the comparison. They're not a tribute band, but sometimes they sound so much like the Fall that I get confused. I wish they'd grow beyond that focus and make the sound they're chasing a little more their own. Regardless, they had energy. They were relatively fun to watch. And the music is worth listening to. Can't wait until they get more copies of the record. Blogging About Blogging LI Ever wonder where you might fall in the blogging food chain? Thanks to Truth Laid Bear's blogosphere ecosystem project, now you can find out. Corollary: Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust II In a recent AlwaysOn column, Red Herring founder Tony Perkins says that the magazine may be down for now, but it's not out of the swimming yet. Perkins had just penned his editorial for the magazine's 10th anniversary issue when he himself heard the news about the magazine's impending dissolution. The two pieces make an interesting inside look at the last days -- for now, perhaps -- of one of the longer-running technology business magazines. Books Worth a Look XII These are the books I read in February 2003. The Blizzard of '78 by Michael Tougias (On Cape, 2003) Published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Blizzard of '78, which resulted in 27 inches of snow in Boston proper, as well as 54 deaths, hundreds of destroyed homes, and 125 arrests for looting in the city, this book largely comprised photographs documenting the storms impact. The text accompanying the photos is relatively scant and drawn on news accounts and some first-person interviews, and focuses on the storm's progression, its effects on the coastline, snow removal efforts, and the accompanying destruction. Tougias compares the blizzerd to the Blizzard of 1888, which hit hardest further west and wasn't as intense as the Blizzard of '78, providing a useful interesting context. Even more interesting, I read this on the eve of a heavy snowfall this year, a snowfall in which we almost rivaled the Blizzard of '78, in accumulated snow, if not the gale-force winds and destruction. Shades of the 30 inches that fell April 1, 1997, it was a good time to read this book, safely ensconced on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner. Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good. The Bostonians by Henry James (Penguin, 1986) First published in 1886, this classic novel is awesome on several levels. One, as an analysis of political thinking about the North and South just after the Reconstruction, James' portrayals of Basil Ransom, a Mississippi lawyer now living in Boston and New York, is extremely intriguing. Two, James' primary theme is the state of women's rights and social activism. His characters Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor provide wonderful foils and divergent examples of the new woman. And lastly, the novel's setting in Boston offers a lushly detailed snapshot of the city as it was in the late 1870s. James' descriptions of Harvard, the Back Bay, and even Cape Cod make me want to walk around, book in hand, to compare the landmarks as they are today with his imagery. A must read if you live in the Boston area. And the best book I've read in a long time. Pages: 438. Days to read: 9. Rating: Excellent. Boston's North End by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco (Arcadia, 1997) Despite this book's inclusion in Arcadia's Images of America series, Sammarco's visual history of the North End, one of Boston's most historic neighborhoods, doesn't quite hold up the level of excellence established by other volumes in the series. Perhaps because of the range of photographs archived by the North End Branch of the Boston Public Library and Pizzeria Regina (seems they have quite the extensive photography collection!), or perhaps because of the advent of photography, this book is limited primarily to the North End's Italian history. That's fine, but it eclipses the district's African-American and Boston brahmin past to a fault. Most of the pictures and accompanying historical text is of little note, concentrating on churches, businesses, and civic activities organized by the library, but there are a couple of notable aspects here. One, the book ably considers the neighborhood's proximity to the harbor, and there's some good maritime history included. Two, the section of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 helped me accurately the location of the tank that burst, and impressively documents the flood's wake of destruction, as well as the location of the elevated train line once trailing along Commercial Street. Worth getting for that chapter alone, but disappointing otherwise. Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Fair. Boston's Red Line: Bridging the Charles from Alewife to Braintree by Frank Cheney (Arcadia, 2002) I love these Images of America books published by Arcadia Publishing in South Carolina. What a wonderful, wonderful concept. This edition concentrates on one line of the now-MBTA subway and trolley car system. Drawing heavily on photographs, as all of the Arcadia books do, the tome considers the history of transportation from Cambridge to Boston, William Bancroft's role in the construction of the Cambridge Tunnel, the expansion of the subway from Harvard Square to Park Street, rapid transit extension to Mattapan, and the rolling stock used on the Red Line. While many of the photographs aren't that interesting -- I'm not that interested in the cars themselves, much less which civic leaders were present at a dedication ceremony -- the image-driven representation of now-defunct train stations, stations houses, maintenance facilities, and what's replaced them on the urban landscape, offers a nice physical history of public transit in Cambridge and Boston. Pages: 128. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good. Brain Candy: Boost Your Brain Power with Vitamins, Supplements, Drugs, and Other Substances by Theodore Lidsky and Jay Schneider (Fireside, 2001) Written by a brain researcher and a neurology professor, this is as objective a guide as you can get to smart drugs and related substances. Concentrating on nootropics, amino acids, hormones, vitamins, and other substances that affect mental performance and memory, Lidsky and Schneider consider the research done on each substance, their possible benefits, and their risks. Their relatively strict science is highly appreciated. By lending credence primarily to double-blind studies in which a control group was present -- and by considering whether research has been done using healthy adults, not just the elderly or those suffering from Alzheimer's -- the two are able to weigh in on the hype and hyperbole surrounding many substances no approved by the FDA. I've already decided to stop taking choline and start taking piracetam. Useful if you're interested in smart drugs and vitamins. Pages: 236. Days to read: 12. Rating: Good. Con and Cthulu: Uberdub by Matt Howarth (Aeon, 1996) Matt Howarth is one of my favorite comic book artists, and while I've missed most of his single-issue work, I'm always jazzed to come across collections of his miniseries. Featuring a real-life electronic musician, Conrad Schnitzler, and the old one Cthulhu, who's disguised himself as a shoggoth and changed the spelling of his name to hide from the Elder Gods. It's an interesting mix of Savage Henry adventure story, electronic music fandom, and Lovecraftiana. But beyond the story, what I simply adore about Howarth is his artwork. Bridging the styles of the underground comics from the '60s, the first wave of minicomics makers, and the independent comics of today, Howarth's work astounds. Extremely clean yet detailed, his work incorporates some of the best shading and hash-mark drawing I've ever seen. An unsung comics hero. Pages: 80. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good. Deathlands: Skydark Spawn by James Axler (Gold Eagle, 2003) Another of the men's adventure series published monthly by Gold Eagle, a division of Harlequin, this is one of the few series not ghostwritten by mulitple authors. As such, it's relatively true to the original vision of the series, which I first read while a teenager. Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the book details the adventures of a team of survivors. The team comprises stereotypical foils like most adventure team books (including Gold Eagle's former Able Team and Phoenix Force series), a neanderthalic albino, a time-traveling professor sort, and two romantically involved couples. There's also a father-son pairing, shades of Jonny Quest. Not as well-written as the Mack Bolan books, but better penned than the disappointing Destroyer series, this volume involves a factory farm for breeding children that ensnares our adventures -- and is eventually destroyed by them. Sexual festishism, the dangers of inbreeding, and an oddly comic band of mutants that follow a human female as their savior, are all worked into the story, which ends well, if not extremely quickly. I almost thought the book would be continued, but then Axler wrapped everything up in the last 20 pages. These are the Saltines of the book world, a real palette cleanser. Pages: 349. Days to read: 22. Rating: Fair. The Destroyer #131: Unnatural Selection by James Mullaney (Gold Eagle, 2003) Originally created by Warren Murphy and Sapir, this men's adventure series is a counterpoint to Gold Eagle's Mack Bolan series, originally created by Don Pendleton. But it's nowhere near as interesting. The story of Remo Williams and Chiun, two comically paired masters of Sinanju, an uber-martial art, isn't quite in line with what I remember about Williams. Despite the dissatisfying lack of realism in the action scenes, the book has two redeeming features. One, the plot centers on genetics and nanotechnology -- interesting to see how that's rippling through popular culture. Two, there's an extremely silly and stereotypical celebrity cameo including Winona Ryder, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Buffet, and Mike Tyson. Ghost writer Mullaney caricatures them mercilessly. I appreciate the Mack Bolan books much, much more. Page: 347. Days to read: 3. Rating: Poor. Hellblazer: Haunted by Warren Ellis and John Higgins (DC, 2003) Collecting Hellblazer #134-139 from 1999, this is one of the better Hellblazer story arcs, ably written by Ellis. The plot centers on John Constantine's haunting by an old friend, Isabel Bracknell, who was ritually murdered by an Aleister Crowley wannabe. By tracking down and defeating the ambitious dark magician, Constantine is able to release the spirit of Bracknell in the end. Ellis works in several innovative elements to the book. Constantine's magician friend Map wanders the tube tunnels beneath London to keep tabs on the city and its populace. I also enjoyed the recurring characters Sanjay, who sells Constantine his cigarettes; his undead advisors; Haine; and the bad cop Watford. Iconic characters -- and ideas -- might be what Ellis writes best. Pages: 144. Days to read: 1. Rating: Good. Hopping Mad edited by Albert Feldstein (Signet, 1969) Collecting material originally published in Mad magazine in 1964 and 1968, this is one of many anthology paperbacks published by Signet. Despite occasionally awkward layouts given the dimensions of the paperback pages, it's a good look at the magazine's better days. While the Mad books are rarely thematic or cohesive in their content, there are several threads running through the pieces collected here. Two of the most obvious involve comic strips -- Bob Clarke and Frank Jacobs' "Insecurity Is a Pair of Loose Swim Trunks" and "Comics for Publications That Don't Have Comics" -- and marketing -- "The Mad Plan for Fighting the War Against Junk Mail," "Watch That Price with the Asterisk," "The Great Filter Tip Cigarette War," "Fake-Out Record Jackets, and "The Long Range Effects of Products on People." The book also includes some classic artwork from Dave Berg and Don Martin. Pages: 192. Days to read: 2. Rating: Good. From the Reading Pile XVII Bear with Me: A 24-Hour Comic Reminding me slightly of the work of Andy Ristaino and Woodrow Phoenix, this 28-page 24-hour comic was created by Mason between 8:05 p.m., Aug. 15, and 8:04 p.m., Aug. 16, 2001. Drawn in an at-times overly abstract animation-influenced style, the wordless comic tells the tale of a door-to-door salesman who tries to introduce a bear to the pleasures of city living. Mason's slow-paced cinematic timing on pp. 4-5, the Kochalka-like affection on p. 11, and the ending -- p. 24 is basically a mirror of p. 2, only with a change of setting -- indicate that Mason put a lot of thought into his work. Better than most 24-hour comics I've seen, writing wise. But the stark lines and wordless nature of this mini make me wonder what else Mason can do. $2 to Joey Mason, Young American Comics. Deadbeat #5 (November 2002) Sent to me by Matt Johnson, the incarcerated publisher of the zine Poor and Forgotten, Deadbeat is published by his friend Mike S. Clocking in at 40 pages, Deadbeat is a well-printed, amateurishly laid out, stereotypical punk zine. Mike's opening editorial on the foibles of punk fashion neglects the fact that British punk was fashionable from the start. His quick history of the Dead Kennedys is a fun rundown of the band's legal crises and Jello Biafra's political ambitions. The MC5 piece is basically a track-by-track listening guide to "Kick Out the Jams," accompanied by a discography. There's also a brief piece on Teengenerate, an interview with Death Becomes You, and record reviews. Equal parts local fanzine, personal zine, and punk-rock history lesson, Deadbeat is a worthy effort deserving further development. While slightly naïve and self-analytical like so many young punk zines, Mike's attention to the past shows that he's trying to understand what formed the basis of the music he loves so much. I'd like to see more local scene commentary, however. Mike's quips about emo and skate parks made me grin. Free from Deadbeat, P.O. Box 460106, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33346. Divocorp I'm not quite sure where I picked this up, but I'm quite impressed by Frey's comic work. Artistically, this 40-page minicomic blends the cartoony simplicity of Herge (p. 5, panel 1) with the hyperreal attention to architectural detail of Jeff Zenick (p. 7, panel 3, and p. 33, panel 1). The story, then, is a postmodern mystery. An employee of Divocorp, Ike makes a connection between his employer and a man from the future who came back with a special message. After receiving a mysterious package, a cinematic "dream" in which he kills his boss, and a trip to a rave with the receptionist at work, we are left thinking Ike's swum to his death at sea. Frey's callbacks to earlier story details is extremely impressive, and I'm still not sure whether the murder was a dream, Ike's boss' head isn't in the box, the rave wasn't a ruse, and Natalie the receptionist isn't the author of Ike's death. But it's a wonderful story, and the cartooning is delightful, especially the back and forth on p. 14. Wonderful! I can't wait to see more. Sebastian Frey. Genetic Disorder #16 It's been a couple of years since the previous issue of Genetic Disorder, and now that Larry's no longer running with the Kill Zinesters of Bunnyhop and Ben Is Dead, he's been living in a van, running from the law, and writing for pornographic magazines and Canadian children's TV commercials. This 76-page issue, done up in the old Flipside production style, only comic book-sized, makes me miss those halcyon days of 1996. Zines were kings then! And Larry's long-awaited re-emergence reminds me of what we've lost. I hope he's able to get work for magazines other than Hustler and Barely Legal because Genetic Disorder is one of the best one-man megazines remaining. Even Mommy and I Are One's Jessica Hunley is writing for Flaunt these days. What's in this issue? "Loser's Guide to San Diego" remembers the social club entrepreneurialism of Thad Poppel, who operated a string of sex clubs around San Diego. "Jailbait" is a two-sided telling of Larry's winter formal date with a high-school girl. "Curses" and "Dates from Hell" compiles anecdotes and newspaper reporting about curses and Satanism. "Sacrificial Lambs" continues that theme with a six-page retelling of a mistaken child abuse case in San Diego. "The Seven Days of 'Stache" and "Reader (Phone) Matches" looks at the underside of dating culture and telephone personal ads, pairing actual ads with the phone recordings and voicemails left by callers in response. And "The Skulls of Punk Rock," perhaps one of the best features in the issue, serves up more than 25 band logos that incorporate the skull. Beautiful. Larry's an extremely journalistic zine publisher, and I really appreciate his blend of seamy local history, prankish narcissism, and popcult commentary. And you know what? I met Larry briefly at the Kill Zinesters tour stop at Jacque's in Boston. I even asked him if he were a Satanist. I might be the guy he mentions in the introduction to "Curses." But then again, maybe I'm not. $4 to Larry, P.O. Box 15237, San Diego, CA 92175. Go Metric #16 (Winter 2002-2003) Today is a day of zine connections as I sit on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner, it seems. Were I Mike Faloon, I'd map them all, later correcting and reprinting the chart. But I'm not. Yet, here they are. Mike is friends with Jef, drummer in the Anchormen. I last saw Mike at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, and I first met Jef at the Kill Zinesters stop in Boston. I also met Larry of Genetic Disorder there. Larry reviewed Razorcake in Genetic Disorder #16, which I just reviewed. There's a Rev. Norb and Maddy Tight Pants! column in Razorcake #12, which I also just reviewed. Norb and Maddy also contribute work in Go Metric this go. I've traded letters with Maddy, and Norb's from Wisconsin, my home state. Oh, and Jef drew the cover for this issue of Go Metric. Small freakin' zine world. And Go Metric? Big freakin' zine. If you only send for one zine mentioned in this Media Diet entry, make it this one. Mike compares Ben Weasel's "Fidatevi" to Yes' "Tales from Topographic Oceans;" interviews documentarian Russ Forster about his look at tribute bands, "Tributary;" provides a listeners' guide to the Figgs' "Slow Charm;" interviews Young Fresh Fellows' Scott McCaughey about his project with Wilco; discusses cultural engineering with s-f author Jim Munroe; appreciates Captain Underpants creator Dave Pilkey; and reviews 101 records. In the meantime, Brian Cogan remembers Joe Strummer, David Cawley details the history of Godzilla, Rev. Norb takes on the pratfalls and promise of the Spider-Man movie, Maddy compares the Boys to the Dead Boys, and Frank Leone reports on the state of punk rock in Japan. Arguably, this is the best issue of Go Metric yet. Mike's embrace of movies and books is extremely welcome, as long as he continues to broadcast in Indulge-o-phonica and participate in the Tuned to Itself Publishing Cooperative. Luckily, Go Metric's popcult obsessions are worth sharing. $2 to Mike Faloon, 15A South Bedford Road, Pound Round, NY 10576. An Inside Job #2 (November 2002) This collection of dream comics by the pseudonymous Hob is produced in an extremely appealing envelope-sized format. The four-page "Who What Where" is a pencil-shaded assortment of dreamland scene setters. The other pieces -- "Up to Date," "Hosted," Down Time," and "The Action" -- are more simple in their line work and much more involved in their storytelling. My favorites are "Hosted," which features the line, "It's the kind of life where you can get away with a lot, if you're quiet;" and "The Action," the longest selection. "The Action" recounts a dream about a party, a back-of-van orgy, and jealousy. I'm not the biggest fan of dream comics, but Bishop's artwork is extremely clean and emotive, and the stories here are interesting enough. I look forward to more non-dream comics. $2 to Eli Bishop, Graphesthesia, P.O. Box 420596, San Francisco, CA 94142. A Last Cry for Help #2 Wow. I said not one word to Souther at APE, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I may be comics starstruck. He and Kiersh are two of my favorite comics makers, and this 24-page Crashlander production piloted by Kiersh shows good reason why. I continue to be impressed by how well these two collaborate and connect. Peas in a pod! Their combination of sentimental cartooniness a la Dan Moynihan, the cute brut of Ron Rege, Jr., and occasional process comics astounds. The mini mixes dreaminess with direction, and several elements really hit me hard. The watertower and Pac-Man icons on p. 3 are used to good effect. P. 4's main panel is a dark, introspective counterpart to the goofy strip at the bottom. P. 8 is amazing in its two-part emotional content. And the density and complexity of pp. 13 and 17 is nice to see in addition to the largely simple art. I'm not quite sure how old this is, but trust me, anything these guys do is worth checking out. Consistently creative. $2 to Dave Kiersh, 568 Grandview Ave., 2nd floor, Ridgewood, NY 11385, and Souther Salazar, 106 N. Chester Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106. Mythos Collector #2 (Winter 2002) Heavy on the mythos and light on the collector, this slightly misbilled Lovecraft fanzine doesn't quite live up to its promise. While its editor, Brian Lingard, has tried to differentiate it from other HPL zines such as Crypt of Cthulhu, it's really just more of the same. What we have here are three Lovecraftiana-oriented articles -- an interview with comic book adaptor Steven Philip Jones, the second part of Lingard's Lovecraft comic book price guide, and an auction watch lifted straight from Ebay (and therefore immediately outdated -- and three mythos-inspired short stories. The fiction accounts for more than 20 of the zine's 56 pages, and as far as Lovecraft-inspired writing goes, they aren't really worth the ink. That said, Shawn Scarber's humorous three-page nod is extremely welcome. Get in a get out. Until Lingard truly focuses on collecting Lovecraftiana, this fanzine isn't worth $4 -- or $5 postpaid, as his handwritten carbon copy receipt for me indicates. But as the interview with Jones shows, the idea behind the zine is solid. What's needed now is execution. $5 to Dark Tree Press, P.O. Box 748, Boylston, MA 01505. Nowhere Fast This full-color pamphlet was written by Simon Woodstock, a former professional skateboarder who was active for seven years in the '90s. Now he's found God and a new calling -- evangelizing to the youth set. This eight-page almost-zine, which was largely dismissed by the mainstream skateboarding magazines, outlines Woodstock's self-realization. For the most part, his religious growth stemmed from falling prey to the party lifestyle he engaged in while a pro skateboarder, which caused him to lose focus with his skating. While the pamphlet is full of photos of Woodstock skating, complete with dyed hair and clown suit, it's unclear whether he kept up his skating -- although it seems he couldn't regain and maintain focus without giving up his skating career. While I'm glad Woodstock found renewed meaning in his life, I'm not sure his work with the chapel or this skater-oriented pamphlet will have the evangelical effect he's hoping for. One, very few people in the skateboarding industry will take this seriously. Two, people interested in skateboarding in general will not know who Woodstock is. Now, if Tony Hawk were to come out as a vocal Christian, the church might have something to work with. Regardless, this is an interesting outgrowth of church culture and skateboarding fandom -- and an intriguing parallel to Christian punk rock. It's just a shame that stuff like this always starts with religion and then culture instead of the other way around. Following that path almost always results in watered-down culture. Free from Simon Woodstock, Calvary Chapel, 1175 Hillsdale Ave., San Jose, CA 95118. Razorcake #12 Funny how things run in threes. Last night, before falling asleep, I read the Dillinger 4 interview in this issue of Razorcake, learning that Erik and Paddy grew up in Evanston, Illinois, where I went to college. Then I read a review of Razorcake in Genetic Disorder #16, learning that Razorcake was founded by former active Flipside contributor Todd after Flipside folded. And today, in the Media Diet mailbox, I received a second copy of this 108-page issue of Razorcake. I first purchased this issue at Newbury Comics because of the D4 (the real D4) interview. The second of assumedly two parts, the conversation involved everyone but Bill and touches on drunken shenanigans in Las Vegas, Lane's Ph.D. in clinical psychology, the band's penchant for Motown, punk-rock snobbishness, the Boy Scouts, working class influences, media coverage, and Erik's bar in Minneapolis. It's one of the most wide-ranging and in-depth interviews I've read with the band, and I'd imagine they interview relatively well. Other interviews include Nardwuar the Human Serviette's conversation with New York-based rapper Princess Superstar, the Rattlesnakes, the Arrivals, LA classics the Skulls, and the Spits. About a fourth of the zine is made up of reviews, and the requisite columns lead off the issue. While columns are often my least favorite part of zines, Razorcake includes several notable writers. Rev. Norb's advice column is a typgraphically aggressive, caffeine-addled, and heavily annotated roundup of letters about Ebay, hamsters, and subliminal messages in porn videos. Always worth catching up with Norb in all of his Wisconsinite glory! Former Boston zinester Rich Mackin, who left his job working on the Truth campaign for Arnold Communications to travel cross-country, offers a column about bicycles, Critical Mass, and anarchy. And Maddy, editrix of the cute zine Tight Pants!, lists her top 10 punk rock and non-punk things, some of which include scholarships, D4, Ben Snakepit (with whom I'll hang out at SXSW), grad school, and the Portland Zine Convention. You can guess what side those things fall on. But the magnum opus of the issue might very well be "East L.A. Punk Rock Family Tree," a six-page, flowchart-driven history of what area musicians played in which bands compiled by Jimmy Alvarado. Ranging roughly from 1980 to 2000, the project reminds me of my old hypertext history of the Bay Area punk-rock scene. All in all, Razorcake is just as dense as Flipside ever was (RIP, Flipside), but is eminently more readable to me. Maybe it's because it's less LA-centric. Maybe it's because it seems less cliquey and scene in-jokey. And maybe it's because it combines the familiar and the new -- a welcome read. $3 to Razorcake, P.O. Box 42129, Los Angeles, CA 09942. War Against the Princes This is a photocopied 20-page collection of anti-authoritarian writings by poet and guitarist Doug Saretsky. Written between November 2000 and May 2001, the chapbook is largely inspired by the anti-globalization protests in Ohio. Saretsky lambastes apathetic punk rockers who aren't politically active. He parallels the authoritarianism of high-school hierarchies with the police state. "Black Bandanna" comes across as almost-lyrics to a Dillinger 4 or Propagandhi song. Saretsky also remembers the first time he was arrested for shoplifting and his various moving violations and run-ins with the law. I appreciate the local nature of his poetry -- and I respect the romantic activism surrounding the Transatlantic Business Dialogue at the of 2000 in Ohio -- buy Saretsky's series of "Arrest" poems bother me. Drunk driving is not only illegal -- it's dangerous. Criticize the cops when your direct action is valid, but cop to your own bad decisions, too, OK? Doug Saretsky, Black Hoody Nation, 1970 Westwood Northern Blvd. #5, Cincinnati, OH 45225. Soundtrack: Count the Stars, "Never Be Taken Alive," and Wayne Kramer Presents Beyond Cyberpunk Music to My Ears XXVIII One of my not-too-long ago Ebay impulse buys was a 100-plus cassette collection of mid- to late '80s heavy metal and hard rock music. This is a slightly awkward pairing of reviews of two of those recordings -- I'm not sure whether I'll try to review all of them, but these two fill a particularly soft spot in my heart -- and a long-delayed local record review. Thank you for your patience! Anthrax "I'm the Man" EP (Island, 1987) This multi-faceted and belatedly unfortunately named metal band's jokey rap entreet is a slightly self-aware yet clever parody of what would eventually emerge as a genuine genre -- rap metal or nu metal. By presaging the mixture of rap and metal, poking fun at the malevolent Metallica in the process and playing off the stupidity of one band member, Charlie Benante, the band released this 1987 EP laden with live tracks that should have been relegated to a cassingle of the day. Padding the EP wiith the "censored radio version" in addition to the "def uncensored version" unripe for radio play, as well as a live "extremely def ill uncensored version" represents the worst kind of commercial complicity. The "Among the Living" album brought the band new attention, but did it really attract the demand for this? Anthrax's cover of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," as well as the Dallas-recorded live versions of "Caught in a Mosh" and the Judge Dredd-inspired "I Am the Law" are interesting solely as lively rarities, but "I'm the Man" as a joke song with unintended consequences hardly deserves its own EP. The song, as good as it is, could have easily been a bonus track on the next album. Had Anthrax not stayed with Island, I'd cry contractual obligation. Def Leppard "Pyromania" (Phonogram, 1983) My sister was a big Def Leppard fan, and this was one of the first cassettes I borrowed (stole) from her room. Despite the synthesizer opening to the first AC/DC-inspired track "Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)," the record's not that embarassing. The guitars and vocals are anthemic, and the drums are mixed well. But outside of the video-ready "Photograph," and perhaps "Die Hard the Hunter," the album is relatively boring, given the songs' speed. Leppard's too-long faux-live opening "Stagefright" is interesting, albeit a cliched rock-band concert shill. "Too Late for Love" and "Die Hard the Hunter" close out what might be one of the more promising A sides of an LP, regardless of the slow tempos. The B side, then, starts with the synth-heavy single, "Foolin'." I must admit that I'd forgotten "Rock of Ages," which holds up well despite the flawed drum effects. And then "Action Not Words" happens. All in all, this is an extremely strong album. The synth-swelling "Billy's Got a Gun" is a weak ending, but otherwise, with several solid songs on the record, Def Leppard is able to keep it real 20 years later. The Fleece "Wrecked at Rehearsal" (Teagown, 2002) I have a Fleece T-shirt. It's not made of fleece, and I didn't feel ripped off when I bought it, but there we go. The band sent me this CD about six months ago, just before I left for the 2002 CoF Roadshow, and it's well worth waiting to concentrate on. Thanks for your patience! With the quiet opening to "The Press Release," complete with Papas Fritas-like vocals, albeit out of tune, the band's come a long way from the first time I saw them. Tuneful yet discordant, their earnestness is admirable. And the triumphant head of the song is awesome. Hooray for organ. The second song, "The Vanishing Face," features some Lance Hahn-styled vocals and more triumphant guitars over keyboards. Quite pleasing. The stop and start section preceding the ending is most impressive. The rest of the record continues to impress. The keyboard-tinged Elephant Six-ness of "Perfect Hands" perfectly casts the slightly out-of-tune vocals, shades of Sinkcharmer and Soltero, which I totally appreciate. There are some piano flubs, but they're OK, as the jangly "Everything Has Not Been Discovered" entices rather than discourages. Wrapping up the record, "As You Were" cascades with an almost triumphant guitar proposal leading into a Neutral Milk Hotel-meets-Graham Smith vocal overture that indicates an increasing interest in melodic mention. A fine release, slightly uneven at first, but in the end, impressive. Beautiful, little-known New England pop goodness. Pieces, Particles XIII The following media-related stories recently spotted in print publications might be worth a look. Heads and decks, only. Heads and decks. Books on the Run by Andy Cornell, Punk Planet #46 (November/December 2001) The projet Mobilivre-Bookmobile project builds a bridge between zines and book arts. Caution, Planets Ahead by Sam Hooper Samuels, Smithsonian, March 2003 The world's largest (maybe) 9-planet solar system model goes up along Route 1 in northern Maine Comic Book Collection by Ed Symkus, The Cambridge Tab, Feb. 28, 2003 Zeitgeist reveals true comic superheroes: the artists A Concept in CDs That Offers Profits to Artists, Prized Tracks to Fans by Sean Glennon, The Boston Globe, March 2, 2003 Discs available only at concerts grow in popularity among indie acts A Critic Reading His Critics by Bernard Holland, The New York Times, March 2, 2003 Some letters from readers are very nice, some genuinely instructive. But others are alarmingly vicious. The Crusaders by John Pilger, New Internationalist #333 (April 2001) John Pilger uncovers the hidden history of Western media propaganda. Drawing a Blank by Chris Ziegler, Punk Planet #46 (November/December 2001) DIY comic artists sketch out life in the margins Empires of the Senseless by Katherine Ainger, New Internationalist #333 (April 2001) The media don't just promote globalization -- they're an integral part of the process Fire Your Inner Slave Driver by Joe Robinson, Utne, March-April 2003 Is "work guilt" keeping you from getting most out of life? Going Postal by Sarah Raper Larenaudie, Fashions of the Times, Feb. 23, 2003 When W or Elle puts Gisele on the cover, you can expect a torrent of letters, pro or con. Who would bother? Hitmakers for Hire by Jenny Eliscu, Rolling Stone, March 20, 2003 Writing chart-toppers isn't complicated for the Matrix Hooked on Comics by Mike Miliard, The Boston Phoenix, Feb. 28, 2003 Collector Robert Cronin give fans a glimpse beneath the panels How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly by Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2003 "Smart mobs," text-messaging -- and organizers who think like field commanders. Kaufman on TV by Jason Dove, Chunklet #16 The following lists several of the many pieces of Kaufman footage that I have obtained in the past few years. Some are available as regular or standard releases and some are considered hard to find, rare, out of print or bootlegged. With this trusty key we can categorize most of the Kaufman performance footage that is available. In the process, we can analyze and perhaps begin to understand some of the many facets of this ultimate method actor A More Perfect Union by Linda Frye Burnham, Utne, March-April 2003 A troubled Southern community turns to theater for healing A New Monopoly Earth First, August-September 2001 Large-scale, global anti-capitalism protests putting smaller, local, anti-capitalism protests out of business Sitcoms and the Single Girl by Marcelle Karp, Bust, Summer 2001 These TV gals showed us that you don't need a man, as long as you've got your girls Social Centers by Adam Bregman, Alternative Press Review, Spring 2001 Italy's cultural underground Staging a Comeback by Rick Rothacker, Northwestern, Spring 2003 Richard Geer helps economically depressed towns find their muse -- and their pride -- through community theater. A Star-Studded Kid-Lit Scam by Tracy Mayor, The Boston Globe Magazine, Feb. 23, 2003 What do Spike Lee, Lynne Cheney, and Jerry Seinfeld have in common? Along with other celebrities, they write children's books that shoot to the top of the bestseller list no matter how bad they are. Top 12 Most Luddite Films of All Time Alternative Press Review, Spring 2001 Up Against Wal-Mart by Karen Olsson, Mother Jones, March/April 2003 At the world's largest and most profitable retailer, low wages, unpaid overtime, and union busting are a way of life. Now Wal-Mart workers are fighting back. You Are What You Queue by Craig Tomashoff, The New York Times, March 2, 2003 Our lives and psyches are more public than ever, thanks to Netflix. If you work for a magazine and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left. | |
