You Got Yr Link Bomb: Better late than never (for me and America)

Image via WikipediaYou Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

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My apologies for not getting this up sooner. Football and theater stopped me. In any event, here are the stories that caught my eye this week.

• As much as we worship the godfathers of punk/hardcore/indie rock/what have you, it is not a good time to be Greg Ginn. All the '80s i-rockers hate him, and he's basically become a crazy cat lady in Texas. And he hasn't even made the SST or New Alliance back catalog digital. The major benefit of the Guardian's story on SST and the former Black Flag guitarist was that we finally got to report on the Minutemen on Prefix. I had been waiting for that for months.
• Not only did Al Gore officially join the Twitterverse, he came up with some bold new strategies for Web 2.0. What gets lost in all the "I invented the Internet talk" was what the original comment actually was meant to imply: Al Gore was one of the prime movers and shakers in Congress who made the internet happen. It's only natural he'd take to social media so swimmingly.
• David Cromer, Chicago theater hotshot, will see his status in the larger American theater world upgraded after a glowing New York Times profile by Charles Isherwood. One of the biggest lapses in my four years at Chicago was missing Cromer's Our Town. It still pains me to this day that I missed it, and it diminishes my authority on Chicago theater. Trying to graduate was no excuse. Anyway, you'd think after his stunningly brilliant work on the Adding Machine that he would have gotten the attention he needed without a NYT profile. This is long overdue.
• Bullies are wired to be bullies, says a recent fMRI study. This is not just shadenfreude, or lack of empathy, it's a fundamental relishing in seeing nerds take punishment. Of course, rather than being an up to date neuropsychology enthusiast after graduation, I find out about this study in the nerdcore blog io9. I'll defend cognitive neuroscience studies probably more than I should, considering I spent my entire senior thesis dismantling one. Still though, compared to what they considered "chemistry" in the 18th century, fMRIs and EEGs ain't bad.
• What the hell will wonks do after the election? NY Mag's Intelligencer offers some suggestions, but they seem wholly insufficient. The Daily Show mocked potential coverage of the future Obama puppy, but it proved wholly portentious. In short, few things will get the interwebs off like a combination of Obama and puppies. On a side note, I'm surprise the media hasn't latched on to Obama's "mutt like me" comment as much as they have Berlusconi's "even tanned" joke. Is this a sign the media won't touch Obama on race?
• Finally, if you don't plan on having sex for the next few months, you may want to watch this series of videos from a rapper/stripper named Ecstasy, rapping about seducing plus sized women on Queens public access television. I can't tell whether these clips are deeply disturbing or hilarious; the fact that they get an endorsement from Porter Mason, the genius behind the webcomic Bassist Wanted, is probably a good sign.
  

The Wall Street Journal turns into the Onion

Pint-Size Politicians Channel McCain, Obama in School Elections:'Change' Factors Big in Tykes' Talking Points; A Third-Grader's Economic Platform [Wall Street Journal]

Alana Taylor died for new media's sins

Let's hope she's resurrected with one of the many new media jobs she will be offered.

In case you haven't been following the story, Alana Taylor has been at the center of a prime recent controversy that has exposed the generational divide between purveyors of old and new media. A junior at NYU journalism school and blogger on the social media blog Mashable, she posted on PBS's MediaShift blog about how much old media was still left in her supposed New Media class, and how she was shocked to be the only blogger in the class. When I first read the post, I find it to be prescient and entirely benign. She didn't swear at her professor, nor did she even mention the professor by name. Nonetheless, a relatively massive controversy ensued. She was banned from blogging on the class by her professor, and received tons of hate mail (probably by the same people who lambast the internet for allowing more hateful rhetoric). She also received a heroine's welcome among some newer media types, and was offered multiple media jobs in a time when few are being offered to anyone.

Some will inevitably see this as social climbing, but as a member of Taylor's generation, I'm pretty sure Taylor didn't write the post to start controversy. She probably simply meant to be informative, as the post was to eyes tuned into this discussion. Instead, the controversy was started by the old media types who hate this sort of thing. Now she's a hero of the blogosphere, and her point has been proven. Good job, print journalists, enjoy your welfare check 3 years from now.

I was surprised, however, to find that the forum posts on Mediabistro were almost unilaterally against Taylor. I figured on an internet forum there would be at some supporting her, but the forums are paradoxically dominated by old media types. The paranoid in me was wondering whether this was a Lee Siegel situation, but I didn't post that, and then saw that the posters all had multiple posts under their belts. It would have just validated the old media types, anyway. Here's what I did end up saying:

I personally am shocked by the uniformity of the response on this discussion board, and this uniformity seems completely out of character for a website dedicated seriously thinking about the media. I am a member Taylor's generation (and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's posted so far who is), and from my perspective, what she has done is completely innocuous to the NYU teacher and a fair assessment of where j-school stands.

I was seriously considering J-School after graduation, but everyone who I spoke to said don't go. Most of the responses I got not only mentioned the lack of career doors that J-School would open, but also made the point that going to J-school may actually hurt me in the media job hunt, as publications would see me as a privileged kid looking to pay for media connections.

As someone who's just entered the media profession, one of my greatest strengths is my savviness with new media (I'm on at least 10 social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Digg), and that in part is what landed me my first job. At the same time, there are some older editors who actively hate any and all new media, and would not hire me at all even though they probably need someone like me to stay solvent over the next two years.

The single biggest generational gap between my generation and the ones before me is what we consider private information. Blogging on the details of a class seems completely innocent to people under the age of 25, as would posting a picture of a social gathering on Facebook or publicly blogging about personal relationships (even if in vague terms). To those over 40, however, blogging about the details of the class is an incredibly invasive and outrageous act, which explains most of the subsequent controversy. I am as baffled as to why there is a controversy as I'm sure older j-school professors would be baffled as to why I don't understand.

At the same time, I think Taylor was right to point out just how overhyped our generation's supposed investment in media can be. The vast majority of my friends are not on twitter, and a significant number haven't updated their Facebook profiles in months or years (and I'm probably more likely to have friends who twitter, considering that I flock to people interested in the media). I agree that people need to know how to write, and I've worked hard to keep up my grammar and clarity in an age of instant publishing. But there is a difference between good blogging and good newspaper and magazine writing, and the differences between them become especially pronounced over the generational divide. That there still exists an institution where people pay upwards of $40,000 a year to become educated on media practices that are at least 20 years out of date is particularly pathetic, especially considering that most of the old fogeys who rigidly adhere to those practices will be out of a job soon.

Of course, I started that post with a minor grammar mistake (I forgot commas, boo hoo), so some posters will dismiss me outright. Hopefully enough people will get the point.

Mashable has an excellent (if biased) summary of the brou-ha-ha.

A Million Little Pieces To Finally Be Adapted - As 70 Minute Blank Turquoise Screen

Believe it or not, that's not an Onion headline:

See, Nigel Tomm is an artist who likes to adapt literary properties in his own unique way -- by calling each a "remix" and adding one solid color that remains on screen for roughly 70 minutes or so. No sound, no dialogue, no narration, nothing. Previously, Tomm's done the same thing for Hamlet, The Catcher in the Rye and Waiting for Godot, among others. Here's a bit more description: "Nigel Tomm's film adaptation of James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces" is the transfer of the story to the space of art. Somebody calls it absolute art. Somebody calls it abstract film. Somebody calls it fraud. To have your own opinion you must trust your eyes and experience for yourself the seductive turquoise screen."

And you can buy a piece of A Million Little Pieces for only $19.97 on Amazon.

To be fair, some would argue that a no dialogue adaptation of Waiting for Godot would actually be an improvement. That's something The Onion would cover.

[Cinematical]

Say it ain't so: Did I just accidentally join a cult?

I joined the group Theater Tribe thinking it was simply a collection of theater bloggers around the world. I may not have realized what I was getting myself into. I began to get suspicious when I heard of them promoting their "values." At first I just thought it was the value of promoting theater, but I may have been wrong. Turns out Theater Tribe is almost entirely the creation of Scott Walker of UNC-Asheville who has five sets of values he wants to promote for theater (among them are taking the emphasis away from major cities and to produce more of a collective control. I would like better regional theater, of course, but I still think it's worth it to have a few centralized locations to aim for in the theater world - by that standard, should the film world abolish Hollywood?

Perhaps more discouraging is the emphasis on Daniel Quinn's book beyond civilization. Daniel Quinn authored the Ishmael Trilogy which I have neither read nor heard of until a few days ago. The first Ishmael book was behind the movie Instinct, a movie that, coincidentally came out within a year of Battlefield Earth. And while there are multiple "Ishmael Community" and "Friends of Ishmael" websites, there's a surprising lack of secondary sources, but lots of absolute, seemingly manufactured praise, which is leaving me even more suspicious. It doesn't help that their websites compares themselves to the Ayn Rand Society, and that Wikpedia tells me that Daniel Quinn has been taken up by the "simplicity movement, the anarchist and the Anarcho-primitivism movement." So before I abolish my associations with the Theater Tribe, please tell me: do I have to promote the "Ideas " (capitalization scares me!) to be a member of the group, or can I just discuss theater with a series of serious and diverse thinkers about the subject, not those united under a single set of beliefs. Frankly,I'm reluctant to stay a part of the group even if members tell me I don't have to agree, but just to stop by, which is exactly what the Jehovah's Witnesses tell you. Because if that's the case, to quote Woody Allen via Groucho Marx via Freud, "I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member."