Not to get too Internet on you, but I just downloaded Napster, which lets me cruise the Net for tunes of every stripe, and play them right there on my
computer. Well, anything that keeps me from actual work. But think of the vast variety of music out there, and the weird demand for it-- Napster, a
shareware application, proved so popular at Indiana University's Bloomington campus, for example, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, that students were taking up as much as 50 percent of the school's bandwidth downloading tunes instead of chemistry notes.
Well, Napster and school worked it out-- Napster arranged it that a first search for songs does it on the hard drives of computers tied to Internet2, a new high-speed Internet network that connects about 200 educational institutions. So, apparently, the quest for popular music has become so deep, and so impassioned, that it takes not one but TWO Internets to bring it to us--if we want to do some actual work, that is. Well, what is this music? It used to be simple, when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was pretty much "How much is that doggy in the window?" or whatever tune Dean Martin would warble in the Martin and Lewis pictures, and I was always out getting popcorn anyway, you know? Add a few show tunes, polka, truckdriving songs, piano lessons, and that was pretty much about it, for the cultural experience, where I grew up. Then I became aware of jazz, folk, and rock and roll, thanks to the Columbia Record Club. But then jazz became subdivided-- Dixieland, bebop, big band,
whatever.
Folk and rock fused into folk rock, and then acid rock, and jazz and rock became soul, r and b, hip hop, rap, urban-- which is a synonym for "black"-- then disco, house, acid house, heavy metal, world music, fifties rock, classic rock, oldies but goodies, surf rock, punk rock, tech rock, reggae, salsa, mambos, tangos, tex mex, classical, and pop, I mean Brit pop, teen pop, soft pop, Modern pop, Christian pop, Broadway, and New Age and or women's music. Good grief. No wonder we're downloading everything in sight. We have no idea what's going
on.
Throw in N Synch 98 Degrees Back Street Boys Christine Aquilera, Britney,
B Witched-- friends, we are ripe for another Elvis. OR at least something that can't be found on Napster. We're using up bandwidth here, kids. Let's listen responsibly. This has been a public service message from Ian Shoales. Who's looking for those rarities from The Refreshments, if anybody wants to post them. Great band. I gotta go.
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A rather exciting thing happened along the way to our becoming one with everything. Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL, which happens to own many cable systems in the US had a dispute with Walt Disney Corp, around the issue of money.
One of the issues was that Disney wanted Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL to agree to carry the Disney Channel as basic cable rather than a premium service. But Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL thought that the Disney Channel was too expensive. ABC, owned by Disney, charged that Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL played favorites with channels it owns, like the Cartoon Network.
Well, one thing led to another, and in certain markets, you know where you are, last month, all Disney content was knocked off the air by Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL. Much hay has been made of this, with Time formerly Life Warner soon to be AOL looking the worst in the contest, and Disney ABC whatever looking like Pluto after a scolding by Mickey, kind of cute, pathetic, and adorable. What was America deprived of as a result of this brouhaha? Well, Regis Philbin mainly.
Now, a lot of fuss has been made about the merger mania in the United States, and how that bodes ill or fair for the future of the country. What I want to know is: if Regis Philbin's insanely popular game show went off the air tomorrow forever, would any of us weep, lose any sleep, or even be irritated longer than five minutes? So what are we afraid of? Let 'em have the Internet, television, and all means of communication. Maybe we'll start talking to each other again. Maybe. I gotta go.
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I just red in Red Herring that a new b to b e-zine and web site is "hurling unheard of wads of cash at journalists." According to Red Herring sources, line56.com offered upwards of 160,000 dollar salaries to three writers from FORTUNE Magazine to work for them. This outfit also tried to poach writers from UPSIDE, WIRED, FORBES, PC WEEK, LOS ANGELES BUSINESS JOURNAL, and MACWORLD. Line 56 dot com, by the way, takes its name from the 56th line of Shakespeare's HAMLET, "to be or not to be." B to B. I guess. Get it?
Now, wretched scribes have been mining data for years down in the hole, no food, no water, sub minimum wages, spotting trends so we don't have to, and receiving nothing in return but the gratitude of the American people. Why business reporters report on business rather than go into business I don't know. From the kindness of their hearts I guess. They're like unto monks, really. But now they're worth their weight in gold. Have these b to bs given any thought to the effect sudden wealth will have on these writers? I think not.
It's like
giving candy to a baby, or a winning lottery ticket to a homeless
person. It's irresponsible, really. Now, I'm not really a journalist,
though I have appeared in journals. When's this new money dawn gonna
shine on me? You want informed opinions? Well, okay, I can't offer you
that. But random bile, undirected rage, a vast sea of bitterness, it can
be yours, at a fraction of what you're paying now. Say half. Eighty
thousand a year, I'm yours. It's a bargain really. I gotta go.
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In January I received a notice in the mail informing me that I had five thousand fully vested shares in an online business for whom I had done a lot of freelance work over the years. Now, I had been told at a party a year and a half ago that this was going to happen, but since this online business, which shall remain nameless, stopped using me, so to speak, shortly after that conversation,
I chalked it up as, you know, another Hollywood tale. But there it was, in black and white.
Having no experience in these matters, I called an acquaintance who'd given up on show business, the Internet, and all things even vaguely people-related to become a financial manager. He examined the documents and pronounced them genuine. He advised me to cash them in. They were worth around 7 bucks a share. After taxes, I'd still have a cool twenty to twenty five thousand dollars. Mailbox money! All right.
But how to cash them in? Well, my acquaintance told me to contact human resources at this nameless online business. I e-mailed human resources. Two days later, I was told to make contact with a certain stock brokerage firm. I went to this certain stock brokerage firm's very confusing web site, and eventually came up with a number to call. After two days of voice mail hell, I was told I needed to make contact with the online business's "captive broker." I was so enraptured by the image of a captive broker, it took me another two days to call him, or it, I suppose. I talked to a real person, who'd never heard of the online business to which the brokerage was supposedly captive. This person said they'd get back to me. Two days later I was given another name, inside this brokerage. I called that extension, and was transferred to a very confused woman. I told her I wanted to cash in my shares. She told me she'd get back to me. Excited, I checked how my stock was doing. It had plummeted to 2 bucks a share. It's been going on three months now, and she still hasn't called me back.
But it doesn't matter. I'm not selling until it creeps back up to four. That's my final offer. I love playing the market. I gotta go.
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Against my better judgment, I downloaded an MP3 of the emenem dr dre hit, YOU FORGOT ABOUT DRE. I'd heard the song on the radio a couple of times, and wanted to know if the lyrics said what I thought they said. Okay, I'm not familiar with the finer points of rap, and that whole rap culture thing. I'm one of the few urban white guys in America not totally enamored of rap music, though I have seen enough urban white guys trying to act black to last a life time. If you haven't heard this tune, it consists of Dr. Dre ragging the listener about, I don't know, something, interspersed with Eminem chattering in his helium voice about, I don't know, something. It's very catchy!
Essentially, Dr. Dre feels like he's not getting his dues from his peers. He taught them everything they know, apparently, and now they're not giving him
respect.
Actual lyric: "If you don't like me, blow me."
Well, as a marketing strategy, this is a new one on me, but I guess in the rap world, it brings in listeners by the bucketload. Dr. Dre's belligerent baritone interspersed with the nervous chipmunk ramblings of Eminem make a strangely irresistible combination. As Eminem says in the chorus, "Nowadays everybody wanna talk, but nothin comes out when they move their lips, just a bunch a gibberish, "motherf*****s act like you forgot about Dre."
I'm sorry. I too am guilty of forgetting about Dre. I'll do my best to pay full attention in the future. Scout's honor. If anybody deserves another platinum plaque, it's gotta be Dre.
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Ian Shoales. I heard on the radio that the service economy is having a little bit of trouble these days. Because most of today's young people are flocking to the stock options, bright lights (fluorescent), and the well-appointed cubicles of the dotcom world, it's getting more and more difficult for restaurants to find waiters, bus boys, delivery people, and cooks. I understand that some pizza chains are actually flying in young people from Russia and putting them to work wrangling meat and cheese, as a kind of summer apprenticeship, I guess, getting them used to the way capitalism works.
Maybe they're more savvy than I am. I don't get it. I mean, now you can go on the Internet, click on a site, and have pizza delivered to your door, in about an hour. Think of the long hours that have gone into developing the interfaces for these web sites, the people who maintain them, the marketing people who get pizzapizza dot com firmly embedded in the backbrain of America, the venture capitalists who sprinkle money on the ebusiness, like flakes of mozzarella on a steaming pie. It's kind of amazing really-- but we can't find anybody to make or deliver the pie! Imagine this-- a store front, teams of salespeople, banks of phones, a gleaming logo, and nothing in the store.
On the Internet, it may not matter. Remember a few months back, when Stephen King posted a story on the Internet, and something over half a million people downloaded it. It was big news. But in all the news stories about the phenomenon, none of them mentioned the story itself. What was it about? Was it any good? Who cares? It was Stephen King and it was the Internet-- that was the news. What the two produced-- well, it's just pizza. And on the Internet, the idea of pizza is so much more important than pizza itself. We used to laugh at people who think the emperor is wearing clothes, well, on the Internet, near as I can tell, people are getting excited about the icons of fully clothed sultans, and there might not even be an emperor behind the virtual curtain, naked or not. I gotta go.
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Ian Shoales. Now, I only go to eBay to see what Happy Meal toys are going for these days-- after all I've got a garage full of the damn things, I figure that's an investment that's bound to pay off sooner rather than later, but I did notice the last time I checked in, among its many offerings, a woman offering to do a made-to-order pornographic video, direct to you, the highest bidder. I thought that was a first.
Kind of like getting your own personalized license plate, only it's a
naked woman instead, and you can't put her on your car.
And I have been following the news. Kids trying to sell their souls
on eBay, yanked, some guy trying to sell some abstract expressionist
masterpiece he claims he had lying around in the garage, yanked, the no
fake in any way raft Elian Gonzalez's Mom used to try to float to Miami,
yanked-- man, when you set the marketplace free, that sucker really
knocks over some furniture doesn't it? So anyway, I've decided I need to
get on this action. I'd like to offer my own non-existent or intangible
items that I can't even claim to own. I love capitalism. Here you go--
The charisma of Al Gore. Bidding starts at a quarter. George W. Bush's
foreign policy knowledge. I dunno. What do you think it's worth? The
sexual allure of bowling shoes. Oooh. The excitement of tournament golf.
Somebody must want that. The taste of television executives. The manners
of rap stars. The real value of dotcoms.
I know, how about the rage of old girlfriends. That I own. I don't understand it, but it's as real as a dime. And it can be yours. Please make me an offer. I gotta go.
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Ian Shoales. Kurt Andersen was one of the
founders of Spy Magazine, one of my favorites back in the late eighties.
Then he moved on to New York Magazine, which I don't read, and wrote a
novel about people very much like himself, called TURN OF THE CENTURY.
Now, all other media avenues apparently exhausted, he has turned to the
Internet. He has a Web company, Powerful Media, launching Inside.com,
which aims to combine what Newsweek calls "savvy" reporting, with a vast
database of, uh, I dunno, something.
Running against the Internet crowd, he plans to charge for content.
What he's going to offer, according to Newsweek, are movie box office
tracking, a listing advertising rates for every teevee show on the air,
and a "cross industry job tracker noting all major comings and goings."
Well, I'd like to say I wish him luck, but you know-- I hate New
York. I hate the way New York has to be not only on top of everything,
but has to charge the rest of us for the privilege of sharing the
information that only New York can offer. I hate their trendy little
restaurants, their stinky exclusive clubs, and their cell phones, and
their traffic, and their scandals, and their newly Disney-fied Times
Square, and their subways, and their taxis, and their smug attitudes--
second only to my own San Francisco, which I'm also growing to hate.
Remember the Street.com? Another arrogant New Yorker, James Cramer,
started that one. He's going down in flames, and I can only react with
glee. What do I really think about New York? One of its big hit plays
this season is a trifle called FULLY COMMITTED, a satire about how hard
it is to get reservations at your favorite restaurant.
I'm not making this up. This play will be coming to San Francisco soon, I understand. I'm sure it will generate a lot of buzz. God, I hate buzz. Get me out of here. I gotta go.
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Why were so many people so upset about the census? The census has been going on every ten years for, I dunno, a hundred years or so, so why do ultraconservatives view it as an invasion of privacy? Especially since we're all anonymous. I guess any kind of
information gathering is, by its nature, evil-- unless a corporation is
doing it.
On the other hand, the commercials for the U.S. Census made it seem
like some kind of 60's left wing operation. Peter Coyote was the voice
over guy, always a surefire indicator that some kind of obscure social
conscience is at work. And the ads featured earnest and urgent native
Americans and African Americans urging us to fill out the census, as if
their very survival was at stake.
All this for one form asking us how many people lived at our house,
or the longer form asking us how many flush toilets we possessed. Well,
all right, I can understand some people refusing utterly to fill out the
form, and other people believing that the results of the census can have
a direct, positive effect on their lives. But what about this? The San
Francisco Chronicle reported in April that many so-called "technology
experts" were upset that there were no questions about computer
ownership or Internet use.
One Magda Escobar, executive director of Plugged In, an East Palo
Alto California group that offers computer training to the
"disadvantaged," said, "I was completely floored when I filled out my
census form and saw that there was no question about technology. It is a
tragic lost opportunity." A tragic lost opportunity. Completely floored.
Well, I dunno. In my opinion, here is a person who is easily floored. Excuse me, but not asking a question about technology does not qualify as a tragic lost opportunity. It might be an oversight, perhaps, or a miscalculation, or even an issue that nobody outside Silicon Valley gives a flying short form about, but it doesn't even come close to tragic. Let's save that word for Greek plays and plane crashes, shall we? Thank you. I gotta go.
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I was watching MSNBC the other night, not an
activity I recommend to any sentient being, and they were discussing the
recent suicide attempt by Mrs. Marshal Mathers, that is, the wife of
rapper Eminem. He's been in a lot of hot water lately-- his lyrics are
violent, mysogynistic, and dark, say some critics. Others say he's a pop
genius.
I fall somewhere in the middle myself, though he's made me laugh out
loud a couple times, and his schtick of marrying stand-up comedy to rap
is so simple that it borders on genius, in a pop culture marketing kind
of way.
The kind of kill my wife please humor he does is, after all,
tolerated in stand up comedy, and violent fantasies are a necessary
component of rap. Anyway, a pundit was being interviewed on MSNBC-- it
happened to be a feminist pundit, but the gasbag could just as easily
have been George Will. She wondered if there might be some kind of
connection between Eminem's lyrics, which she found appalling, of
course, disturbing, shocking, etc. between his lyrics and his wife's
suicide attempt.
Well. Number one, I don't see how any of this stuff is any of our
goddam business in the first place, number two, to make some kind of
mealy-mouthed connection between a joke-- poor taste or otherwise-- and
an attempt to end life is so specious it provokes jaw-dropping contempt.
I am so tired of this canned self-serving outrage by the
interchangeable smooth-talking moral arbiters that swarm all over our
airwaves. They yammer on about the coarsening of the culture, and the
death of civility, all the while making their nasty little ad hominem
digs at whomever happens to be in their sights on that particular chat
show. They're not against rudeness, they're against rudeness that
doesn't resemble their rudeness. Given a choice between the opinions of
Eminem and these well-dressed tongue-clucking preppies and their perfect
little cocktail hour lives, well, I think you know where I stand. On the side of Slim Shadies everywhere,
imitation or otherwise. I gotta go.
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Ian Shoales. I'm not much of a sports fan. As a
matter of fact, I have no interest in professional sports at all. But a
June article in Salon caught my eye.
Apparently, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETA wants
the Green Bay Packers to change its name. Vegetarian campaign
coordinator Bruce Friedrich wrote a letter to Packers' president Bob
Harlan, suggesting that they change their name to the Green Bay
"Pickers" as in fruit pickers, or the Green Bay "Six-Packers," in
reference to Wisconsin's brewing industries. The name Packers, which the
Packers have had since 1919, is in fact a reference to meat packing, so
PETA may have a point, but, hey-- who cares?
Football and meat packing are synonymous activities as far as I'm
concerned. Sure, they could prove how tough they are by calling
themselves a wussy name like the Pickers, kind of like naming your boy
Sue to toughen him up, but again-- Packers fans call themselves
cheeseheads, willingly. Isn't this a slap in the face to Vegans and the
lactose intolerant? We can only hope.
Still, spurred by this story, I suddenly found myself surrounded by
football stories. The story, for instance, that the new color man for
ABC's Monday Night Football will be Dennis Miller, the caustic comic who
laughs at his own jokes a lot, and does what he calls rants, something
I've been doing for, oh, I don't know twenty years now, and has anybody
ever offered me a cushy job making jokes about football on national
television? No. Okay, I don't know anything about football. I hate
football. That's not the point. The point is, why hire Dennis Miller in
the first place? Is football so dull that it needs punching up?
Apparently, yes. Ratings are dropping for Monday Night Football. But is
bringing a smart aleck wuss to make fun of the proceedings going to
bring those ratings back up? This smart aleck wuss remains doubtful.
I've also heard that football moguls are trying desperately to get
Europeans interested in NFL style football. On NPR I heard that the NFL
is considering miniature cameras in the helmets of quarterbacks and on
referees, to get an in-your-face intimacy of the meatpacking frenzy we
call football, thereby increasing viewership.
And then there's the new mutant sport XFL, which I believe
stands
for extreme football-- kind of a cross between professional football and
professional wrestling. There's a sudden whiff of desperation in
professional
sports, don't you think? Oh sure, there's Tiger Woods. Amazing athlete, the
pundits say, one of the most amazing of the twentieth century. But, folks,
he's a golfer. There's nothing amazing about golf. Watching golf is like
watching somebody change a tire. It's like watching people do jigsaw
puzzles.
But don't get me started. I gotta go.
(hear the realaudio version)
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