NPR looks back at the pioneering music blogs, many of which began a decade ago.  Jesus this makes me feel old.

Here’s a thought: If you’re going to do an article about the changing face of sports column writing four-years late with the angle being a mini-profile of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, arguably America’s favorite columnist (and New York Times #1 best-selling non-fiction author), you should probably be much more thorough on both subjects than the New York Times cared to be.

I don’t know what to say about this remake of a very good, very influential movie, other than to say you could see it coming with blinders on and it looks like utter crap.

Okay, okay. The movie itself doesn’t look bad, but that trailer. My god. I’m no rocket scientist but what is up with the Limp Bizkit score and the movie’s tagline: “Titans Will Clash”? The movie is called Clash of the Titans and the best the marketing department could come up with as a slogan/tagline is titans will clash. Jesus H. Christ someone should be fed to the guillotine.

Also? Is Sam Worthington the real deal or is he just the latest in a string of Hollywood male leads they are really trying to jam down my throat. It was hard to tell with the latest Terminator, but we’ll get a really good look with Avatar and now this. Still, if anyone has seen Somersault then you know the guy is capable of delivering a nuanced and subtle acting performance.

The Wall Street Journal sits down with author Cormac McCarthy on the eve of his novel The Road having its movie adaptation in theaters.  I know next to nothing of the man and author, save for his bleak and nihilistic view of life through his novels, but I wish to know him better after reading this.

“I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person,” he says.  “I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.”

The entire interview is filled with fantastic chestnuts ready to be opened.

Go figure that the mainstream media wouldn’t provide an ample description of what the Bart Stupak Amendment is all about and that a little old blog would.  This is hardly surprising, but always disappointing when it happens.  And only reinforces the notion that the MSM isn’t muckraking enough.

Huh, well I’ll be damned.  “In 1999, writer Orhan Pamuk bought a three story building in Istanbul to interact as a museum with his new novel, “Museum of Innocence,” a first of its kind of this application.  He hired an architect, Ihsan Bilgin, before he started the novel to transform the building into a museum where the novel and the museum criss cross each other in a love story between Kemal and Fusun, the main characters. In an autobiographical story, Kemal obsessively collects every object Fusun touches, in remembrance of their complex history into the Museum he builts… After nine years, both Book (Turkish and German print at this time) and the Museum are available.” 

Basically, the guy wrote a fictional book about a musuem that collects objects representing a love story and then went out and physically created the musuem in real life.  I somehow love this idea as a method of storytelling. 

As the author himself has said, “The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.” [via]

Mo Tkacik tackles the conundrum that is Malcolm Gladwell. 

In that case, perhaps Gladwell’s intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell’s articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector’s rigged “star system” as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he’s whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

It’s a long and thorough piece that is certainly worth reading if you’ve ever given 15-minutes of your lifetime drunkenly debating the merits of Gladwell just before closing time at a seedy bar.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about the tragedy at Fort Hood yesterday except that the media’s handling of the event (blaming PTSD when he’d never been to combat, forcing events to fit into their narrative, the thinly veiled notion that he’s actually a terrorist or that jihadists have infiltrated the military) has been specious at best and at worst yet another reason to never watch network news. 

Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

What’s better than one Slave Leia?  How about two catching some rays.  Kottke came across this photo of Carrie Fisher and her stunt double napping during the Tatooine shoot in Return of the Jedi. Enjoy!  But just know that I’m going to need a moment or two to catch my breath.  [via]

V has been the one show I was hoping would redeem this lackluster fall television season.  It is, afterall, based on a popular (cultish?) NBC science fiction show from the early 80s about lizard creations pretending to be humans with nefarious plans for our planet and population. 

It seems like an excellent premise to be reimagined with better effects and acting and more weighty themes to explore.  Why then, did I feel ho-hum about the show after last night’s premiere?

You can read plenty of recaps elsewhere, but suffice it to say there’s a lot going on.  The FX look up to snuff, the acting is all pretty darn good (how could it not be with Elizabeth Mitchell, Alan Tudyk, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Scott Wolff, and Monica Baccarin) for a network television show and the themes are not disimilar from the recent Battlestar Galactica remake (religion, terrorism, identity, etc.). 

There were huge problems with the pilot episodes’s story arc: 1) the humans just accept the aliens with open arms, 2) the exposition/backstory is clumsily handled, 3) two of the main characters easily figure out that the lizard aliens are up to no good, 4) it’s too clean and polished.

Still, none of those complaints are what I’m having difficulty wrapping my brain around this morning.  I’ve never watched a show so anti-progressive as I did the one last night. 

And I’m not alone.  Both Time’s excellent James Poniewozik and Chicago Tribune reviewer Glenn Garvin made note of this: a telegenic messiah from a foreign and alien place comes to the United States with the promise of hope and change offers our citizens science, technology and — gasp! – universal health care. 

Make no mistake, the Obama parallel/allegory here is downright unnerving.  It’s so blatent I really thought some combination of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were show runners. 

Chew on this basic plot:  charismatic, attractive newcomers win the adulation of America’s youth with the promise of hope & change; they manipulate the braindead media and promise universal healthcare, but a group of real Americans are saavy to their evil (fascist?) hidden identity/agenda and will work to prevent the destruction of humanity. 

It would have been refreshing, or still can be, if the lizard aliens turn out to be the saviors of the human race.  But alas, I don’t think that will be the case.  And yet, and yet, I’m still going to tune in because there’s enough decent story threads that the show has my interest.

Once again, it’s time for National Novel Writing Month, the annual event where participants challenge themselves to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

I’ve been wanting to participate for a few years now, but just haven’t made the effort.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this year either, even though it’s not too late to sign up. 

“Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap,” the website warns. “And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. … To build without tearing down.”

For most people, the hardest thing is just having the gumption to plow ahead without worrying about the quality.  It’s just about getting that first draft done.  Afterall, all great writing happens during re-writing.

There are parties afterwards and it always seems like there’s a great community of participants.  I’m thinking next year my first novel will make an excellent birthday present to myself.  It sounds daunting, writing a novel in one month’s time, but if you pace yourself 50,000 words is only about 125-150 pages.  Five pages a day — no problemo!  Right? Right?

Cory Doctorow has just released his latest novel “Makers”, “a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet.”

Here’s where to find print versions of the book for sale and an electronic version can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

I loved his previous novel, Little Brother, which was my first exposure to his fiction work.  Can’t wait to print off a copy of the PDF to read!

“The story is told through seven songs, each a brief glimpse into the world of our protagonist on his journey from bored night watchman to twisted, horrific cannibal. These glimpses are often poetic and obtuse, only obliquely fitting the narrative structure, so my recap / review is only one perspective on how to interpret these songs. No matter how you interpret them, though, they add up to a pretty chilling scifi horror narrative.”

I’m stupified as to how John Vanderslice and The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle) released a seven-song EP with a horror/sci-fi bent to it (the central thrust of the album concern organ harvesting colonies on the moon) and I just found out about it today.  Turns out it was a tour-only affair on vinyl and is no longer available, though with half an effort you can surely find it.