Before going on vacation, John Hawkins of Right Wing News often asks guest bloggers to sit-in, and contribute new posts to his expansive, long-running Website. He very kindly asked me to be one of his guest bloggers today, and I tried to pick a few of the best of my posts from the last month to contribute there, which you can view by starting here and scrolling down to the schedule of guest bloggers.
Ten days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight, to slightly paraphrase Dave Dudley, not to mention the Flying Burrito Brothers at a far worse road gig than I just returned from.
Watch for regular blogging to resume Friday. And the podcast version of this week's edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, featuring James Taranto, Chris Muir, Frank Martin (sans Sigourney, unfortunately), and host Bill Bradley, to go live on the newly revised Pajamas site tomorrow as well.
We were mentioned yesterday by James Taranto in his Best of the Web Today column at the Wall Street Journal, which is certainly a nice way to kick off our sixth anniversary in the Blogosphere. Scroll down to Taranto's item on Gloria Steinem's huge Gucci-in-the-mouth gaffe regarding Senator McCain's service in Vietnam, and his link to our post from Monday, which contrasts Steinem's remarks on McCain with her thoughts four years ago on another Senator who also, by the way, served in Vietnam.
Or as Mark Hemingway puts it at NRO, Hillary needs Steinem's endorsement "Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle".
Update: Related thoughts from Michelle Malkin.
Having recorded God-only-knows how many telephone interviews in the past three years, I wrote some tips on how to get a decent telephone recording for Videomaker magazine. These suggestions work whether you're using the interview for an audio podcast, or for video.
Blade Runner junkies may enjoy my review of the final final cut (we hope!) of the film, over at Pajamas Media.
Well, not exactly. But scroll to about 44 minutes into the latest episode of Breitbart TV's B-Cast to hear us name-checked, in our regards to our recent PJM Political interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker.
You watched their show, seen their clips from the candidates--now hear how they do it, their thoughts on the YouTube phenomenon and the role DIY video will play in the 2008 presidential channel, as Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV sit down with me for a 15-minute audio interview recorded live at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas.
Found via Instapundit, the New York Times' spin-off paper, The International Herald Tribune notes that the "Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business":
As Hollywood digs in for a second week of a strike, the screenwriters might want to send a few angry picketers over to Will Smith's place. Or Steven Spielberg's.Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something...And maybe the studio executives should think about joining them on the line.
As it turns out, the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.
That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.
Austin Bay's latest Blog Week In Review podcast is now online; it features Austin's interview (which I produced) of Heather Mac Donald and Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute. They discuss their new book, co-authored along with PajamasXxpress blogger Victor Davis Hanson, The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's.
Heather and Steve discuss why immigration, legal and otherwise has dominated the news, its role in the War On Terror, and the kerfuffle over Hillary's drivers license gaffe during the Democrats' debate last week in Philadelphia.
While the Internet has certainly made distribution of music and video much simpler, CDs and DVDs aren’t going away anytime soon, which is a good thing for all sorts of reasons in my book. (Books--another legacy media that's not likely to away anytime soon!) And I have some times on protecting and repairing those discs online at Videomaker as well.
I have a piece online at Videomaker today with some thoughts on how to choose which online video distribution sites are right for you, such as YouTube, Brightcove, Motionbox, etc. It's built around a fun interview I had this past summer with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans, veteran television journalists who left Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV to become partners with Andrew Breitbart to form his Breitbart.TV division.
Why yes, that is a Blog World Expo button on our sidebar, and thank you for noticing! See you in Vegas in less than a month!
Variety: "Peter Greenaway says cinema is dead":
Famously uncompromising British helmer Peter Greenaway declared cinema officially dead but said interactive forms of filmmaking offered exciting new possibilities.Far be it from your humble narrator to argue with him.
Jack D. Lail uses my "Atlas Mugged" article as a jumping off point to explore the future of blogs actually run by newpapers, including a great quote from this Gawker article:
Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They're organizing by form, not by content. (The Times does a better job, both promoting blog posts on the front page and integrating each blog's content into existing sections.)Indeed. Here's how to do it right, which, needless to say, has everything to do with the blog's editor than the paper itself, though it would require some work to translate some of the blog's elements to one that was devoted to more serious topics, such as a blog covering the police or fire beat, which would seem a natural for the medium.Readers just don't come to a newspaper's website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what "form" it's in. Old newspaper editors may think blogs are some crazy different variety of publication; readers don't.
If you missed the links from Glenn Reynolds and James Lileks, the podcast version of PJM Political on XM satellite radio is now available online at Pajamas HQ.
Why yes, that is me on XM Satellite Radio, interviewing Michael Barone and Jonah Goldberg, on Pajamas' new hour-long show, PJM Political, in-between producing the show. It's been an absolutely insane month assembling all of the elements of the show but needless to say, I hope you'll tune-in each week, on XM's channel #130, the POTUS '08 network. This week, we feature:
Update: The XM show and yours truly is mentioned briefly at about 5:50 into the above interview with Roger and Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters and Blog Talk Radio, which will be one of the sources of content for the XM show.
Michael Ledeen joins Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss his new--and remarkably timely--book.
With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.
For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series:
One of the elements of the Blogosphere that’s often a feature, not a bug--especially in retrospect--is that if you don’t write about something fast enough, somebody else will. And often he’ll come up with a better take than you would. So for a quick summary of Saturday’s event, I urge to stop on by Jeremayakovka’s blog for his thoughts on Blog*Fest*West, our gathering in San Francisco this past Saturday. And note the photo in which I appear to have Karl Rove’s mind-control rays, or maybe simply frickin’ lasers--really, is that too much for me to ask for, people?--burning through my eyeglasses. (Or maybe I’m just eyeing the Guinness.)
I will add though, that in addition to my co-conspirators, Cinnamon Stillwell and my wife Nina (who organizes parties the way that von Braun plans moon landings), the handful of major league hitters who bravely signed up for this test flight were a particularly nifty line-up.
There was Roger Simon, the co-founder of Pajamas Media, who attended along with two of his trusted lieutenants, Neil Spolin and Aaron Thies. Joanne Jacobs, who virtually invented education-themed blogging in early-2001. And Mickey Kaus, whose pioneering Kausfiles Blog/E-Zine is what inspired Glenn Reynolds to start blogging. Which in turn, chances are, inspired your blogging--or at least blog reading--addiction. Combined, you’ve got a pretty good running start towards assembling the folks who originally brought you the center-right side of the Blogosphere in the days immediately after 9/11, in one room.
Blogging, like most forms of writing, is a solitary task--which in a way, makes perfect sense. No matter how big your readership, it’s purely a one-on-one relationship with each individual reader, whether it’s via the printed page or the page click. But it’s great to get out and mingle with others in your field. I’ve been to a few previous blogger gatherings, including a Denver Blogger Bash in 2004, early conspiratorial neo-pajama-con planning in the mountains over looking Silicon Valley, the subsequent November 2005 wild & crazy pre-launch party in the bowels of the Seagram Building, and the actual launch of Pajamas the next day high atop Manhattan in the Rainbow Room.
But ever since I started blogging in early 2002, I’ve been on the lookout for something like what we eventually dubbed Blog*Fest*West out here. Fortunately, so have lots of other folks, and it’s a safe bet that Saturday is merely the first of an ongoing series of get-togethers. Needless to say, we’ll let you know when the next one is happening--and hope you can drop by for a handshake. And maybe some Guinness.
I was surprised to see a couple of interesting responses to my Superbad post on Saturday, (thanks no doubt to Jules Crittenden's link), which I quickly knocked out as I was heading out to Blog*Fest*West (and more on that, later).
Here's an even older Hollywood formula than horny teenager movies like Superbad, as the New York Times notes:
Few narratives in American popular culture have proved as durably resonant — or as endlessly adaptable — as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the tale of a planetary takeover by extraterrestrial seed pods that replicate and replace sleeping humans. Originally a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, this paranoid fable has now cloned itself several times over, spawning four movies in five decades. Tapping into themes of individualism and conformity, personal freedom and social control, the idea of soulless “pod people” has become an all-encompassing metaphor that finds a sociopolitical relevance whatever the period.Indeed it would, as Fox News' Roger Friedman writes:The “Invasion” films add up to a veritable catalog of anxieties that have plagued the American psyche in the last half-century. Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie, the first and still the most Rorschach-like, emerged from a national climate of Red scare hysteria and from a Hollywood traumatized by the blacklist. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update, also called “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” relocated its ground zero from small-town California to a post-utopian San Francisco where summer-of-love idealism had curdled into a Me Decade morass of cultish psychobabble.
Abel Ferrara’s “Body Snatchers” (1993), which followed an election season thick with talk of “family values,” zeroes in on the domestic sphere. Set on a military base in the South, it also includes explicit references to the recently concluded Operation Desert Storm.
The fourth version, called “The Invasion” and opening Friday, appears to adhere to the outline while adding a few bells and whistles. (The film has not yet been screened for the press.) Starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (best known for the 2005 Hitler biopic “Downfall”), the film would seem to have an abundance of current qualms to exploit, from new pandemics and terror threats to extreme makeovers and genetic engineering.
Still, it would be quite a feat if the new “Invasion” musters even a fraction of the original’s ambiguous power.
No matter how much money she’s being guaranteed for movies these days, Nicole Kidman had better start thinking twice about her legacy as an actress.Time to start cutting up the prints to make guitar picks, boys. Not to mention working on story ideas that aren't remakes of decades old projects.Her new one, "The Invasion," opened Friday and bombed quite brilliantly. It took in a little less than $2 million. The price for this disaster? Over $100 million. And even though it co-stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig, nothing can make "The Invasion" into a hit.
What’s worse is, no one wanted even to see it in theatres. At boxofficemojo.com, a poll among subscribers showed almost no interest in "The Invasion."
Of course, the marketing didn’t help. The movie looked like "The Stepford Wives II," another Kidman disaster. And in many of the ads, Craig’s name wasn’t even mentioned. It was just Nicole Kidman, looking beautiful, running among dead eyed weirdos.
The public smelled a rat, Warner Bros. punted, and the rest is history.
Update: More at Libertas.
OK, now that headline is definitely hyperbole to get your attention. But as the New York Sun notes:
Fifteen years ago, the notion that an amateur filmmaker could write, shoot, edit, and project a professional-grade film in only 48 hours would have been a near-impossible thought. But times change quickly, and for the 2007 filmmaker, in the age of Final Cut Pro and YouTube, the idea is a challenge rather than an impracticality.For our thoughts on adding a professional sheen to your slightly smaller scale video productions, click here.
Update: In City Journal, John Robb explores the flip side of the Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids" meme:
Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past.Robb's article is titled, "The Coming Urban Terror", which also dovetails into Mark Steyn's latest essay.
If you're in San Francisco on Saturday* and can part with a couple of sawbucks or so--stop on by!
But please, take a moment to RSVP here, first:
* Or you're willing to commit a heresy so abominable, even Torquemada would blush...
Two recent articles of mine set the wayback machine to the early 1960s:
Knot up a skinny tie, don your mohair suit and Weejuns, pop on some Sinatra or Miles' Kind of Blue, and check them out!
It's not quite Tarkenton meets Staubach, Dylan meets Lennon, Prince meets Morris Day, or an even better Minneapolis-themed metaphor that's eluding me, but James Lileks is interviewed by Pajamas' own Austin Bay on this week's Blog Week In Review podcast to discuss the current state of the New, New Journalism.
Tune in here--no iPod required; virtually any computer with broadband can stream an MP3 file.
Related: Maybe Brian Williams should take a listen!
In this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay gets Jeff Goldstein and Neo-Neocon's thoughts on Live Earth: "Rockstars For Whatever".
And speaking of Live Earth, Tim Blair writes that the party to fight global cooling continues!
After getting some background on Breitbart.tv for an upcoming article, I realized that its proprietor (who’s also been Matt Drudge’s Sancho Panza for over a decade) would be a perfect guest for Pajamas’ Blog Week In Review. Fortunately, Austin Bay agreed, and the result is a great, fast-moving show. If you're curious about where online journalism is headed, and why it's been eating old media's lunch for the last decade, this is the podcast for you!
(No iPod--or even iPhone--needed; virtually any computer with a broadband connection can tune in and listen.)
The L.A. Times sycophantically compares Michael Moore to Orson Welles--something I also did, in a much less favorable light, two years ago.
Austin Bay interviews Thom Shanker, Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times in this week's Blog Week In Review podcast, over at the Pajamas Media mothership.
Austin Bay interviews Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in the latest Blog Week In Review, online now at Pajamas HQ.
Some assorted recent reviews of mine on the 'Net and dead tree:
If you haven't heard it yet, Austin Bay's lengthy and informative interview of Dr. David Kilcullen, the senior counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calling into Pajamas HQ from Baghdad, is a must-listen. And don't miss Austin's latest syndicated column, which expands on Dr. Kilcullen's thoughts.
Austin Bay was particularly keen to interview Daniel Drezner on his new book All Politics is Global for the latest Blog Week In Review podcast. You can hear the results here--as Pajamas HQ notes, "Get out your notebooks and pay close attention to this one. There’s a lot to learn".
With Star Wars' 30th anniversary this month, I have a review of J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars, over at Blogcritics. If you saw the film five or ten times on its opening run, this thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated book will bring back a flood of memories.
Blog Week In Review is celebrating its first anniversary with three quarters of its original line-up: Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds, and Tammy Bruce. (Sadly, Eric Umansky had a scheduling conflict, but promises to return sometime this summer.)
From my point of view in the producer's chair, I think the sound quality on this one is the best yet; I've been very fortunate to have the time to experiment and fine-tune things. So please have a listen, here.
This is pretty cool--via Execupundit, I just discovered that my TCS Daily profile of Robin Aitken's Can We Trust The BBC has been linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, under this blurb:
The BBC: cool and objective in its regard for the news and issues of the day. It reports, you decide – uh, just like Fox News...Whatever you think of them, it's difficult to imagine the typical Fox pundit sounding quite this condescending while purporting to conduct an "objective" interview with a prominent world figure.
Update: Power Line has a look back at Churchill's (often rather negative) thoughts regarding the BBC of the 1930s and '40s.
"160Mbps downloads move closer for US cable customers"--that's something that Internet2 has been working on since the mid-1990s. See my article about them from a few years ago at Tech Central Station.
Hey, you got television on my Website! Hey, you got Web content on my television!
At TCS Daily, I explain how the Tory British Web/Video convergence has managed to put all of the New Media pieces together, making them the model for future multimedia Websites.
While the intricacies of British politics may be somewhat off-putting to the average American viewer tuning in for the first time from across the pond, the convergence of media is very much the message here. Expect somebody smart in the US (on one side of the aisle or the other) to emulate 18 Doughty Street's combination of long-form C-Span-style video programming and "traditional" Web articles and blogging in the not-too-distant future.
Over at CE Pro, the trade publication for custom home theater installers, I have an article on 64-bit computing. The video above explains the concept in terms of audio, but the same concepts apply to video production as well. Think Hot Air, 18 Doughty Street, or the next multimedia site is going to take advantage of the near unlimited RAM that 64-bit computing promises in the coming years to help shape their content?
Me too. Which is why this number is only going to shrink--and the resultant hysterical reactions from Old Media will only increase in concurrent response.
Five years ago, when I covered Internet2 for TCS Daily, I forgot to add a key WARNING! NO SMOKING ON THE NEW 'NET! disclaimer, and for that, I'd like to apologize.
Welcome Jules Crittenden readers clicking in through the blog's homepage! The post you're looking for on Rudy and Rosie is here; today's blogging will occur under this post.
A bunch of longform articles I've been working on over the past few months seemed to have reached simultaneous fruitition this week. So all of a sudden, like Visa, we're everywhere you want to be:
Home Electronics? The cover story of the May/June issue of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine is my piece on "Eight Easy Ways To Update Your Home Theater
Music? I have a piece on electronic harmonizers in the April issue of Computer Music. It's out now in England, and will be available next month in the US. Here's the Blogcritics product review from last fall which inspired it, to hold you over.
High Fashion? In the latest issue of Classic Style, I have a piece on Apparel Arts, the 1930s and '40s menswear magazine that birthed not only Esquire but GQ, and continues to inspire designers such as Ralph Lauren and (especially) Alan Flusser to this day.
At the moment, those are all strictly "dead tree" articles. But here are a couple of online items:
Media Bias? Thanks to the InstaPundit, you've probably already seen this.
Podcasting? I produced the latest Blog Week In Review for Pajamas, in which Austin Bay interviews The Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez on the state of the hot war in Iraq and the increasingly heating up one against Iran.
Be on the look out for all of the above at your favorite newsseller and/or Internet. And tell 'em we sent you!
Clive Davis writes:
Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary. This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet" looked like, more or less, in April 1997.It's sort of along the lines of James Lileks' early Bleats in terms of first generation home-rolled HTML craftsmanship, though much more link-oriented than longform prose.
And incidentally, we celebrated five years worth of blatherifics ourselves last month. Here are some overly exuberant thoughts on the subject a few anniversaries ago.
Update: "The site sure was ugly back then. I think we've grown up a lot in ten years". Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, here's what TownHall.com looked like a decade ago in version 1.0 mode.
Austin Bay asked me to guest host the Pajamas Media "Blog Week In Review" podcast this week, so I interviewed Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and on-air personality who left the network and has written a new book, very much in the vein of Bernard Goldberg's books on American media bias, titled Can We Trust The BBC. I tried to aim the questions towards an American perspective on the topic, but then, how could I not? Aitken also discussed in depth the BBC's biases regarding Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. Regular readers of this blog won't exactly be shocked where the BBC comes down on these issues, but for those who still hold out a belief that the BBC is entirely objective, its an eye-opener.
I also asked Robin if this was still flying on the walls of his former workplace.
It's a 20 minute long podcast (no iPod required--any computer with broadband and a soundcard can play an MP3 file), so please tune in and listen.
This week's Sanity Squad podcast on Pajamas Media had all sorts of loud clicks, pops and other elements of digital distortion scattered throughout it. Fortunately, through the help of Cakewalk Sonar and its editing tools, and the Bias SoundSoap Pro noise-reduction plug-in, I was able to make it at least listenable--so please take a listen.
Fascinating topic as well, discussing the psychological aspects of the Iranian capture of 15 British sailors.
Want to get into digital video? Over at Blogcritics, I review three books that make a fine introduction to medium cool.
The latest Blog In Review is online:
The anti-liberal message of The anti-liberal message of identitarianism and collective thought are on the table for this week’s podcast. Are the two sides of the political spectrum existing in parallel realities with their own facts and narratives? Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein, Neo-neocon, and host Austin Bay find the whole mess doubleplusungood. Ed Driscoll produces.Click here to listen!
The latest Blog In Review podcast is online at Pajamas HQ:
The world’s longest horse race is underway for the American Presidency. On Blog Week to discuss it are Glenn Reynolds, and author and screenwriter Katy Wright of American Thinker. Glenn and Katy disagree on whether the unusual length of the campaign season represents an important political fight or an exhuasting and wasteful marathon for voters and candidatesDon't miss it!The panel also tackles the plight of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soleman and what his case means for the future of free speach and the internet in the Middle East. Austin Bay hosts and asks the questions. Ed Driscoll produces. Brought to you by Volvo USA.
In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.
It's Radio Free Ed! I'm turning the tables and hosting Blog Week In Review this week, interviewing Austin Bay and Adam Bellow. Tune in here.