What I’ve Been Reading: The San Francisco Panorama (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 33)

January 29, 2010


What I’ve Read:
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue #33 (The San Francisco Panorama) – Dave Eggers (editor)

The San Francisco PanoramaYou know, sometimes McSweeney’s can get a little too cute. Ask the poor souls who subscribed to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and ended up with the “Pretending It’s a Pile of Mail” issue. Or the “Three Books in One Connected by Magnets” issue. Or the “Who We Should Invade Next Parody” issue. And while I love the Quarterly Concern and would defend it to death, you’d be right if you assumed McSweeney’s focused on the package more than the writing.

Sometimes. You’d be right sometimes.

So, yeah. Of course McSweeney’s would be presenting Issue 33 as a newspaper. A real newspaper, on newsprint, with journalists and newsy things. Of course they would. That’s what they do. See the above paragraph. The one that talks about being too cute.

To say I was a little skeptical, despite McSweeney’s consistent track record of great writing, is an understatement. This could have failed miserably. This could have been a waste of a Quarterly Concern.

Oops.

Turns out this idea was absolutely fantastic. I stand corrected.

Printed on oversized, thick newsprint, the Panorama is a beautifully designed “new-newspaper” prototype, filled with in-depth reporting and high-dollar contributors. Originally designed to show what newspapers could be, the viability of a 120-page newspaper (not including a 96-page Panorama Book Review and 112-page Panorama Magazine) with 218 contributors seems rather low. The ten-section/two-magazine publication cost $80,000 in editorial costs, with a unit cost of $7.98.

It sells for $16. One issue. $16. A bargain compared to the typical Quarterly Concern hardcover price, but still – seemingly expensive for a newspaper. Even as a weekly publication, its life would be cut short by penny-pinching subscribers and lack of mainstream coverage.

But let’s be honest. This isn’t just a newspaper. Dave Eggers, editor and McSweeney’s chief, understands this. He understands that this is a special edition, that this test is more than just a prototype, but also a tribute to the craft of newspapering.

And it’s beautiful. It’s easily one of the coolest things I’ve ever read. I can’t recommend it enough – especially for those who have grown tired of their local paper (those not lucky enough to get a real one like the New York Times or Washington Post or even Minneapolis Star Tribune) but still miss the feel of those oversized pages, those hyper-timely articles, those “can’t miss” moments and random-yet-brilliant Style pages.

So all I can say is this: get this, if you have a chance. It’s pretty great.

- - -

And now, A list of the best things in the San Francisco Panorama (not including the Panorama Magazine or the entire Panorama Book Review, both of which I haven’t even finished reading.)

• “The Tragedy of Mendocino” by Jesse Nathan, about California’s Emerald Triangle and its hidden and environmentally dangerous marijuana trade.

• “Golden State: Transition Basketball” by Free Darko

• “On the World Series” by Stephen King (including a fantastic retro Converse ad on the back page)

• “Living With a Yellow Dwarf” monster two-page infographic on the unusually quiet solar cycle

• The Death Cab for Cutie infographic

• Let’s face it: EVERY infographic

• “Can a Paper Mill Save a Forest?” by Nicholson Baker, about the possibility that digital information may be harder on the environment than paper

• “KPOO,” by Chinaka Hodge, on San Francisco’s long running independent radio station, KPOO

• The Comics (which, on their own, retail for $10) including Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and Erik Larsen

• “The End, The End, The End, Etcetera,” by China Mieville, about the overabundance of movies about the apocalypse

• “The Desperate Art of DVD Covers,” by Moze Halperin, on the difference between marketing and art as it relates to film posters and their respective DVD covers

• “I Participate in TV Studio Audiences,” by Kevin Collier, a mini-memoir about jumping from studio audience to studio audience, from Maury to Paula Deen.

• The Food Section, which includes stories like “Water: A Road Trip” by Lisa M. Hamilton, about once-fertile California farmland now rendered useless thanks to a drougt-imposed restriction on aquaduct water; “Lambchetta in 58 Steps” by Ryan Farr, on knowing, slaughtering and cooking a lamb from beginning to end; and “Roadkill Stew” by L. E. Leone, on hitting a deer – and then cooking it.

Tags: Books, Journalism, Literature, What I've Been Reading |

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Three Lists about Traveling to St. Cloud, Minnesota

January 28, 2010


Things that fly by on a four-hour trip to St. Cloud, Minnesota.

• Snow-packed hills
• Local Hardee’s franchises
• Universities I’ve attended
• Available bladder room
• Cities named after legendary Native Americans
• Trucks that don’t look like they should be running at all, let alone on a highway going 55 miles per hour
• Cenex stations

Things that fly by on a four-minute drive down Division Street in St. Cloud, Minnesota

• Patience
• Your life, before your eyes
• Red Lobster

Things that DO NOT fly by on a four-hour trip to St. Cloud, Minnesota

• Time

Tags: On..., The Top..., Travel |

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RT @UserName Tweets are real content, you guys #srsly

January 26, 2010


The following post touches on three things: Twitter, overreaction and a tidy little moral.

On Twitter, and its Place as Serious Content

There are two schools of thought on the validity of Twitter’s content. One school sees Twitter comments as banal, throwaway lines, not worthy of archiving or protecting. They’re the bottom of the barrel, resting comfortably next to Facebook updates and MySpace pages.

The other understands that Twitter continues to serve as a micro-microblog. There may only be 140 characters, but that limit doesn’t downplay the merit of the thought. In other words: you say it in 140 characters or 140 paragraphs – there’s no difference in the hierarchy of importance.

Those that tweet about breakfast are in the first group. Those that spend time crafting brilliant non-sequiturs are in the second. Those that pooh-pooh Twitter as a waste of time are in the first. Those that see Twitter’s value as a depository for new information are in the second.

I’m in the second group.

Which is why I get so upset when a tweet is mishandled. My tweet. My words. My thoughts.

My Overreaction

See, it was cold outside. It was snowing. It was a blizzard; as in, the snow was blowing sideways. And I could have said this. I could have said, on Twitter, “THE SNOW IS BLOWING SIDEWAYS,” and gotten on with my life.

I didn’t. Because I’m in that second group of Twitter users. Instead, I wrote this.

Not high on the LULZ Meter, but still, better than just saying “THE SNOW IS BLOWING SIDEWAYS.”

I continued on with my day. And then, I was re-tweeted.

A subtle change – and a change made in good faith – but enough of a change to upset the timing, lose the sarcasm and render my former tweet spayed and neutered. Just like that, my mood went black. Tired of being nice, I respond with this passive aggressive gem.

I felt better. For a while.

And Here’s Why I’m a Cranky Twitter User

If I write a blog post and someone wants to link back to it, I expect to be quoted accurately. Not out of context. I expect that what I say will be represented just as well on someone else’s blog as it is on my own – in fact, maybe even more so, since my work is being passed along with additional helpful comments attached.

I expect this because it’s what should be done. It’s what you do in print. It’s what you do at newspapers and magazines. It’s what you do when you’re blogging. It’s good, clean attribution.

On Twitter, however, things are still rolling like the Wild West. Tweets are seen as a thought, not a carefully worded message. That I wrote my original in a certain tone, with specific punctuation, isn’t taken into consideration. After all – it’s just a tweet, and it’s free to be passed along, truncated to allow for a RT and a hashtag and attribution even though, if you think about it, the tweet no longer represents what I said in the first place.

It’s why I don’t care for re-tweeting “with comments,” and why I rarely do it.

I’ve since apologized for the passive aggressiveness. The person who RTed me didn’t mean harm. It’s just that the perception of Twitter as a playground for creative content is still in its infant stages. And, thanks to its ever-expanding use, it may never reach that point.

Which is too bad. One spin through the old Favrd (now Favstar, I guess) community is enough to see the promise that Twitter holds in the form of one-line, creatively penned tweets, as valuable as any long form blog post or magazine article, whether for information, humor or truth.

Until that day, I’ll be over here, fighting for Twitter standards and burning bridges I never knew existed.

Tags: Annoyances, Technology, Words, Writing |

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What I’ve Been Reading - Furthering Education

January 25, 2010


What I’ve Read:
On Writing – Stephen King
Content Strategy for the Web – Kristina Halvorson
The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett

On WritingSelf-improvement is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Okay. Just kidding. I don’t actually know how much money the industry makes. One thing’s for sure: it’s got a monopoly on annoyance and self-importance, and if you could put a price on those two traits I’m sure the industry would be somewhere in the multi-billions. AMIRITE?

I prefer my self-improvement to be self-driven. And for me, it often is.

It’s driven by a nagging feeling that I’m quickly being driven in to obsolescence by content mills and marketing directors who feel they can cut corners by writing their own copy. Driven by the knowledge that getting published requires an insane amount of collaboration between luck and circumstance, not to mention an actual amount of talent. Driven by the demons of self-doubt. By a writer’s constant sense of impending failure. By whatever it is that drives writers to write whatever it is they write.

So sometimes I read books about writing. And, because I like the Web and writing for the Web and learning about the Web and adding skills and adding to the multi-billion dollar self-improvement industry, I read books about things that aren’t writing.

In terms of those books about writing (and I’ve read a few – see: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and Elements of Style Illustrated by Strunk and White), Stephen King’s On Writing is easily the best. For real.

It’s easy to pass Stephen King off as mass-market pulp purveyor – the type of tripe you find on the stands at the airport – but, come on. The dude’s a very good writer.

How can you tell? Easy: he wrote an entertaining book on writing. As in, I’d recommend it to people who aren’t writers. I’d recommend it to writers who feel they’re too cool for Stephen King.

Elements of User ExperienceThe book actually splits itself into two parts: one part life story, one part “how to write.” The two play off of each other rather well – the “how to write” part driving his life story, the life story giving a human quality to his “how to write” part. Some things you’ll learn: how to edit, how to drink a lot and recover, how to forget a large part of your career thanks to alcoholism, how to stop over-explaining, how to hole up and just write, how to have a near death experience, how to start your own newspaper as a grade-schooler, how to submit stories and expect nothing, how to be humble, how to understand that writing fiction is about as scientific as Intelligent Design.

Sure, it was inspiring. So inspiring that I took all of the lessons and jumped headfirst into another field: User Experience. And, once I had finished that, I jumped headfirst into yet another field: Content Strategy. (Which, I now realize, takes the craft of writing (featured in King’s On Writing) and applies it to the Web by way of User Experience. So, really, everything came full circle and this trio of books made perfect sense without making perfect sense at all.)

Content Strategy for the WebA bunch of other people can discuss Elements of User Experience better than I am able to. And I’ve already touched on Content Strategy for the Web – or, at least, my newfound interest in the field. The books themselves don’t matter that much when it comes to a “What I’ve Been Reading” post; in fact, the three books featured serve as one entry, one stage in my life when I understood that I needed to become better at something and I accepted all available resources to make it happen.

Kerrie bought me On Writing for my birthday. Knowing that I’m always three days away from finally starting a short story, she may have figured it would serve as a kick start. Instead, it made me more introspective, pushing me toward redefining what I want my writing career to be.

It may not have made me a better writer – just as the other books may not have made me a better Web person – but it did help me focus on simply being a writer, for better or worse.

Tags: Books, Content Strategy, Education, Literature, Technology, What I've Been Reading, Writing |

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BMOWP Classic Album: Chocolate and Cheese

January 21, 2010


Chocolate and CheeseChocolate and Cheese by Ween

Thirteen months ago, I wrote my first book proposal – a proposal for writing about Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese. It as an open call for proposals for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.

I looked back at it yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised. It was good, if you don’t mind my boldness. And it’s wasting away, just sitting there on my computer. So I’m posting part of it. Specifically, my two-page description of why Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese is worth considering on a critical level.

Bear with me. It’s long.

Why Chocolate and Cheese?

There is a fine line between ridiculous and brilliant.

Skirting that line is dangerous. It takes an unwavering skill, and it can’t be done without full awareness of the limits of human understanding. By working that line, an artist risks lapsing into irrelevance, forced into parody without being given a chance at redemption. Or, the emotions seem false, as if they were fighting for a joke that never materialized. As they say – drama is easy. It’s comedy that’s hard.

But when the two mesh perfectly – when the line has been pushed right to the edge, where it sits balanced like a paper football at the edge of a school lunch table – there’s magic. There’s happiness. There’s the revelation that music can be both inspiring and hilarious. That an album can make you rethink the boundaries of the acceptable. That deconstructing the typical can be just as brilliant as The Beatles, or Bob Dylan, or Radiohead.

There are some obvious examples of success along that line. Frank Zappa. Captain Beefheart. Certain songs off of The White Album. They trap convention and refuse to let it out, openly mocking the heretofore accepted standards. They make wonderful music by reworking the definition of music.

In the 90s, no band was able to do that better than Ween.

And no album was better at doing that than Chocolate and Cheese.

The Case for Chocolate and Cheese

Part serious tribute album, part rollicking parody of, well, everything, Chocolate and Cheese reaches across the entire spectrum of music, with Dean and Gene Ween grasping at every possible inspiration to craft an album that not only mimics convention, but shatters it.

Is it an important album? That depends on who you talk to. Can it be written about? Yes. Convincingly. Without a doubt.

Ween isn’t simply a novelty act. They are serious musicians – artists who taught themselves to play, throwing themselves into their awfulness with the air of prodigies. They didn’t have the skills – but they had a passion for ideas, and those ideas fought for approval on their early albums. Their brilliance was masked by shredded chords, childish lyrics and simple weirdness.

And then, in the span of a couple of years, everything seemed to click.

The response was a series of albums that defied the boundaries of music, the best being their first major label debut: Chocolate and Cheese.

At first listen, the album sounds like a label sampler, moving from artist to artist in an effort to raise awareness of minor acts. “There is simply no way these songs are all by the same artist,” you might say.

You’d be wrong. Ween exploded onto the major label scene by acting as creative pirates, stealing genres from unsuspecting musicians and giving life to the idea of emulation as art form. This isn’t “Weird” Al Yankovic – this is true musicianship, from a pair of weirdoes who, beyond all belief, had become virtuosos of both the guitar and the pen.

It’s this question of emulation vs. parody that gives Chocolate and Cheese its topicality. Ween takes parody and turns it into a form of respect. It’s said that artists feel like they’ve made it when “Weird” Al re-writes one of their songs. What must it feel like when Ween takes your style and does it better?

Chocolate and Cheese doesn’t make fun of country, but serenades it. It doesn’t mock Prince-inspired funk, but co-opts it. It reinvents the Spaghetti Western, idolizes fallen heroes and recreates the horrors of childhood illness. It does everything an album is supposed to do – drive emotion, produce memorable music and, most of all, create a feeling of happiness.

Any talk of Chocolate and Cheese has to be done in all seriousness. This album is not a joke album. While it tackles some of music’s most endearing genres, it does so with a healthy respect for the style. And though it’s dedication to John Candy may suggest otherwise, this album is all seriousness. In its own completely unserious way.

While “Push th’ Little Daisies” may have been Ween’s introduction to the world (thanks, Beevis and Butthead) and while Rolling Stone may have passed on giving Chocolate and Cheese a full review or rating (instead, it was paired with Daniel Johnston’s Fun in a short, ill-advised review that proclaimed Johnston’s album the better of the two), make no mistake – this is Ween’s true introduction to the masses.

It’s an album that deserves a chance. And as a book, it deserves its chance as well.

One Final Word

Hey. It’s me. Back from proposal land.

From there, I talked through an outline, justified my lack of a music journalism background, hyped the idea of promoting a book that had boobs on the cover and whatever else I could think of that would make someone take me seriously. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. All I know is that my submission was one of the first cut.

But that cut may not have been as harsh as I first imagined. Ultimately, while my proposal wasn’t accepted, another was. Hank Shteamer, the author of Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches and writer/editor for Time Out New York.

In other words, the Chocolate and Cheese book is going to be written. Luckily for Ween fans, Chocolate and Cheese will indeed get its chance after all.

Tags: From the Moleskin, Music, Writing |

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Pronounced

January 20, 2010


A couple of words I rarely pronounce correctly:

Colombia
I can’t manage to say this word without really emphasizing the “long o” sound. Coh-Lohm-be-ah.

I imagine that’s how people in Colombia say it, and I mimic it, like those people who over emphasize Spanish pronunciation in the midst of an otherwise English sentence (Them: “Oh, sure, I’ll have a margarita, gracias!” Me: “Dude, we’re at Chili’s, not a taqueria in Mexico City.” Them: “Well, pardon moi!” Me: “That’s French, you moron.”)

In all honesty, though, I pronounce it that way so I remember how to spell it. Been burned by the Columbia-When-I-Really-Mean-Colombia mistake a few too many times.

Template
Contrary to what I learned over 16 years of public schooling and seven years of professional work, it’s not “Tem-PLATE.” It’s “TEM-plit.”

Or, at least, that’s what it sounds like when I say it.

This discovery (made over a work meeting when a know-it-all former-journalist named Justin - who I can insult without guilt because he doesn’t read this blog - pointed out our flawed pronunciation and was further vindicated by a stupid, traitorous dictionary) was disappointing.

“TEM-plit” has no character. It’s flat. It’s gross. I like “Tem-PLATE.” It sounds like what it is. A plate of tem.

That is, if by “tem” I actually mean “stuff already done for you, you lazy fart.”

Tags: Words, Writing |

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Go buy the new Dessa album right now. Seriously.

January 19, 2010


Yeah, I already posted some YouTube music recently, but it’s rare that a song can drive me to buy an entire album. Instantly. I mean, as instantly as possible, given the album wasn’t for sale until today, and I first saw this video on Sunday, and, you know, it doesn’t really matter. All I’m saying is that those songs are rare.

Dessa’s “Dixon’s Girl” is one of those songs. Kind-of-I-mean-absolutely-fantastic talent right there, straight out of MPLS and Doomtree.

And if you don’t watch this and immediately buy the album, I have to question your taste.

Don’t take that chance. I SWEAR I’LL DO IT.

(Oh yeah, thanks to Brian Bieber for tipping me off to the video, and, in turn, to the new album.)

Tags: Music, Random YouTube |

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