July 2011
52 posts
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Flavorwire » Get to Know the 2011 Man Booker Prize... →
Looking for some beach reading? The Longlist for the Man Booker Prize just came out and Flavorpill has a slide show on all the nominees.
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Music is My Bag →
Someone reposted on Tumblr this memoir of music and misery that ran in Harper’s in 2000 by my friend Meghan Daum, now an LA Times columnist. Music is SO not her bag, but boy, you can sure understand why in reading the piece. Great and piercing piece about the music geek subculture, where “this one time at band camp…” probably never ever happens in real life.
tetw:
by...
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Download: The Month In Music, July 2011 →
NPR puts together a free batch of 10 downloads of cool music from eMusic for the month. Some nice things here. And you can’t beat the price.
nprmusic:
Summer music takes on almost as many forms as summer itself: There’s music for the beach, music for sticky nights at home, music to blare through boom boxes on city streets, and on and on. Consequently, a July-themed playlist can...
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Netflix unclear on the concept....
Okay, a few days ago I converted my Netflix service from 3 DVDs and unlimited streaming. Given how I’ve consumed their offerings (through my Xbox almost exclusively for months) and given the new price hike, it was a simple decision. The new plan takes effect on Aug. 1, i.e., five days.
I have seven days to mail back the DVDs I still had. Which I did yesterday. And today, they’re...
spiegelman: "Understanding the streets of Los... →
latimes:
spiegelman:
Santa Monica Boulevard runs north of Wilshire for most of the city. But they change places in Beverly Hills. For the rest of the way Santa Monica Boulevard runs south of Wilshire.
Continue reading some excellent L.A. road advice at Eric Spiegelman’s Tumblr. And check out all those comments, too, for more info.
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Urban Demographics: Parking Rates Worldwide →
Think you pay too much for parking in LA? Check out this review of monthly parking rates worldwide. Los Angeles actually looks pretty good, certainly compared to London, where walking might be the better option, absent a CEO-sized salary. But it looks good compared to other major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Boston (what, they have parking there, not just double-parking in the middle of...
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Write Place, Write Time →
Cool Tumblr feed for writer-lovers….it’s all about the places where writers write. Maybe there’s too much meta-writing on Tumblr, but I do like this little peek into other people’s creative spaces.
Mine tend to be wherever I put my laptop down, perhaps a vagabond vestige a) of my journalist past and b) my consultant present.
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Artist Reception/Event on Friday at Outpost
Bring your canned food and spare change! Make a (small) artistic and communitarian statement at Outpost this Friday. Here’s the release that just went out.
Artist Reception for Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros Friday, July 29, 6-9 pm Transformer Display for Community Fundraising: Version 2 Opens Friday, July 29 with a reception from 6-9pm; On view through September 10, 2011 at...
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Flipboard and Condé Nast Partner in Brand Ads Deal... →
I like the outlines of this deal a lot: an old-school, high-quality publisher that’s been busily exploring online opportunities partners with creators of an app whose design sensibility is easily the equal of the old-line publisher’s fabulous titles. They’ll figure out advertising splits and push the great content out in a new form factor. Lots of upside here, very little...
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Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explains Why... →
Some great brain bombs here from Roger McNamee, a big investor who also plays in a band. His extremely bullish views on HTML5 and the iPad are spot on, I think, and will shape a LOT of what the Net and online experiences look like for the next several years.
Here’s a big number: Microsoft went from controlling 95 percent of Net-connected devices to less than 50 percent in just THREE YEARS.
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Cowboys & Aliens: Film Review - The Hollywood... →
The Hollywood Reporter gives this mashup from a 2006 graphic novel a very solid thumbs up. I’m very much looking forward to this movie, as is my son, who declared one of only two big action pics this summer that he was eagerly awaiting. Should be a very interesting film.
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Milo Greene and Grouplove at the Hammer with KCRW →
Spent Thursday evening at the KCRW-Hammer Museum free rock show, featuring opening act Milo Greene (the link above is to a KCRW stream of one of their terrific songs from last night) and the rather well-matched main act, the quite popular Grouplove.
I say well matched because both bands are quintets, both feature a sometime-lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who is female and both make...
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Apple's Cash Stash: WSJ →
Wall Street Journal reports on the renewed questions about Apple’s mammoth stash of cash on hand, now a whopping $76 billion. As the Journal points out, this is more than the gross domestic product of 126 NATIONS.
Shareholders are grousing for a dividend or perhaps a share buyback (because shares running at more than $300 apiece are obviously grossly undervalued).
From what I understand...
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“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate...”
– Extremely amusing, especially if you saw “The Social Network” scene where the Winklevii importune the Summers character to intercede, and he tells them they’re pretty much idiots.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, giving his take on the Winklevoss twins. As dramatized in...
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OS X Lion Launches, Reveals Its Mobile Inspiration →
Apple launches its newest take on its operating system, Lion, with a ton of features that merge the traditional desktop computer approach that Apple pioneered with many of the gesture/app/cloud-computing features of mobile/iOS 5 that, um, Apple also pioneered, at least in many cases.
At $29, it’s a “no-brainer” upgrade, the review says. Hard to resist at that price, though I...
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Spotify's Media Metrics: How Much Attention Did... →
A useful analysis of the Spotify launch and its online buzz, which the company is banking on to drive penetration of the US market.
Key metric though: even on its biggest buzz day so far, it was still outstripped as a search term by Apple’s iTunes. It’s possible Spotify may actually have to hire a couple of more PR people.
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Feds Arrest 14 ‘Anonymous’ Suspects Over PayPal... →
infoneer-pulse:
Federal agents arrested 14 suspected Anonymous members Tuesday on charges of participating in denial-of-service attacks against online payment service provider PayPal.
Five additional suspects were arrested overseas — one in the United Kingdom and four in the Netherlands — for related crimes. The UK arrest was reportedly of “Tflow”, a former member of the hacker group LulzSec,...
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A Looong Time Ago
According to the Dodger announcers, the last time the Pirates and Indians were in first place in baseball (then in their leagues, now in their divisions) was 90 years ago. Calvin Coolidge was president, I think, but he’s not saying.
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Nyad training regimen is extraordinary
NPR story on 61-year-old Diana Nyad’s training regimen for a planned solo swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys, a journey expected to take 60 hours, points out she’s already done training swims lasting as long as 24 hours! At 61! Remarkable.
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“How about we… u not be fake and like me for me and roll up a blunt”
– From a very amusing if totally stoned proposal from a woman on the slightly unusual dating site “How About We…” The site’s conceit: you’re supposed to suggest dates you’d like to go out on with someone. It’s designed, I think, to be a bit of a window into...
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NeckFace Webvideo premiere in kinda funky place
NeckFace, who created the creepiest installation at the massive MOCA Art in the Streets show (the urban alley at night with a bum and a rat scuttling around), is premiering his web video at, you guessed it, an urban alley tonight.
It starts somewhere around 9 pm, whenever dark arrives. It’ll be at 517 ½ N. Fairfax (alleyway) between Clinton and Rosewood in Hollywood. It’s BYOB,...
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Paste mPlayer :: My Morning Jacket Issue →
Liking what this online version of Paste is offering on a weekly basis. Here in issue 3 they have music from My Morning Jacket and Death Cab for Cutie’s new albums, along with free downloads from several other bands, plus lots of other odds and ends of reviews, columns, video material and more. Very nice.
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OMG! Phrase goes back to 1917 and an intemperate... →
Love this little bit from the History News Network, regarding research by the OED on the first published mention of OMG, the acronym of disbelief and exclamation found all across the IM/text-messaging/Twitter universe these days. It dates back to one “Jacky” Fisher, the flighty First Lord of the Admiralty.
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The Definitive Story About the Most Sophisticated... →
Nifty shoutout from the Atlantic for two important long-form pieces in Wired and Vanity Fair on the Stuxnet virus, a nasty and brilliant little piece of code that almost surely was custom-created to subtly screw up Iran’s nuclear weapons program and delay its development by years. I’ll be reading both stories. Stuxnet is, as the Atlantic writer more or less suggests, the uncomfortably...
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ESA: The Average Gamer is 37 Years Old →
Some four decades after Pong and Atari, are we really surprised when figures like this come out, showing the average “gamer” is actually not a pimply faced teen (though maybe some who was a pimply faced teen 20 years earlier).
Perhaps more surprising is that nearly 3 in 10 gamers are older than 50 (which, ahem, will include me in about five months).
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The PR and marketing implications of Google |... →
Good rundown on implications & opportunities for PR, marketing using Google+. Given the high demand for access initially, it probably will be pretty large, and all reports suggest it’s well integrated in a toolset that everyone uses. So it’ll be pretty difficult to ignore. This gives some ups and downs for the tools.
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Why Mark Zuckerberg’s First Public Response To... →
This TechCrunch piece is so meta it makes my head hurt: Founder of MySpace writes about founder of Facebook being one of first users on Google+.
But I kinda like meta-headaches; the meta-aspirin you have to take totally rocks.
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Paste debuts mPlayer web app →
Paste magazine, which has had a challenging time finding stability, despite its nifty mix of reviews and solid music/movie/culture journalism (with CDs of tunes!) has re-emerged with the mPlayer, an online app-like interface that’s quite well constructed and gives quick access to stories, music downloads and streams of video and audio.
Glad to see them resurfacing, though I’m not...
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Tribune Company ‘Deal From Hell’: A Tale of Greed... →
Ex-LA Times Editor (& fellow Mizzou grad) Jim O’Shea scorches the chuckleheads working under Sam Zell who lined their pockets while dismantling the Tribune Co. and its many highly regarded newspapers.
A key point from Sharon Waxman’s column on the book is detailing the bonuses, i-banker fees and legal fees the company racked up:
“That would be more than enough cash to...
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Brian Eno's puts Rick Holland's poetry to music in... →
Speech as singing…Brian Eno considers the connection in his latest fabulous project. I so love this man’s work in so many different media.
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AP: The man who hunted Osama bin Laden →
Nice piece on the CIA analyst whose dogged focus over years ultimately led to bin Laden’s death. Interesting that his ability with narrative, pulling together diverse strands of information about a target, is credited with helping investigations move forward.
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Tim Rutten: Mark Halperin on MSNBC was just cable... →
A good take on the unfortunate and inevitable impact of turning political journalism into TV entertainment programming.
Halperin’s comment was vulgar enough but hardly the end of the universe. But it’s definitely part of what the “news” channels have lurched toward to drive their minuscule audiences to slightly higher numbers (none of them attracts +1 million viewers these...
