Video footage in front of Chase bank. Occupation of the financial district is ongoing!
There Are People Protesting in San Francesco Right Now! Occupy Wall Street! Occupy the financial District!
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Category Archives: culture
I Love to Hate LA
As a resident of Northern California I take on the proud tradition of hating Los Angeles. There are many reasons to hate LA. It’s filthy. It’s superficial. The rats and roaches breed in abundance. The weather is hot and filled with foul smog but the ocean is still too fucking cold to dip a toe in. They put concertina wire around the freeway to keep out the graffiti artists. It’s nothing but mini malls and freeways from end to end. Traffic, traffic, traffic, that never seems to end with nothing of interest to look at but maybe some palm trees that aren’t native to the region in the first place. But who cares about that, no one is from LA, not really, people go there to fail at big dreams. It’s a fucking desert; the only things that truly belong there are tumbleweeds and rocks.
I first decided I hated LA long before I ever lived on the West Coast. In Hollywood I saw a bunch of homeless punks holding signs that said “Photos with freaks $5.” I thought, these punk describe this place: everything is a commodity. Even the punks here are superficial: anarchist on the outside, capitalist on the inside. Further exposure only increased my disdain. Did you know that old Hollywood is in disrepair? They have so much land that instead of reviving it, they just built a new Hollywood further down the road. That’s how people in LA think. No appreciation for history or tradition, even when it’s for the thing that made their city a destination in the first place. Why fix up that dirty old hole where countless movie stars made their mark? Why bother? In their minds, newer is better.
But it occurs to me now that I take too much pleasure in my hatred. Truly, I love to hate LA. They are so counter to everything that Northern California stands for that we can hold them up like a gleaming beacon in opposition to our NorCal selves. When Stephen Merritt sings:
See them on their big bright screen
tan and blonde and seventeen
Eating nonfood keeps them mean
but they’re young forever
If they must grow up
they marry dukes and earls
I hate California girls
I can take comfort in my suspicion that everything he describes is SoCal. LA is the Yin to our Yang. We declare what we are by pointing South and exclaiming that that is what we are not.
If you don’t live on the West Coast, perhaps you are unaware of this rivalry. You may associate all of California with New York and Vermont and the stereotype of the liberal elitist. It’s true that we embrace our liberalism and drink lattes and eat tofu. But when Midwesterners accuse the left coast of being shallow, when they say we’re obsessed with fashion and celebrity, San Francisco replies, “Oh, no–you’re thinking of our sister, Los Angeles.”
Not only do I love to hate LA, I shockingly discover that I am proud to have this den of iniquity within the borders of my great state. Because Hollywood is worshiped by the rest of the country. In some ways LA is like Texas–all the worst things about American culture, and proud of it. The Texans are proud of being big and conservative while LA is proud of fast cars, big budgets, new money, fake tits and tans. Though the rest of the US wants to roll their eye’s at NorCal’s dirty hippies chowing down on government subsidized organic produce, it’s a plain fact that those same Americans are in love with California’s nether regions. They read celebrity gossip on their lunch breaks and talk about TV at the water cooler. They blog about all that goes into making the next summer blockbuster. Children suckled on the teat of Teen Beat grow up to gawk at paparazzi photos in People. If LA were wiped off the map tomorrow, this celebrity-obsessed country would have little to talk about besides Saturday night football.
Of course, we NorCal types want nothing to do with all that. We watch more TV than we admit, and the stuff we see on the big picture is described as “films” which we scrutinize for underlying social messages. But I do like that the culture of California is subtly distilled in a nation raised by television. I love that The Lost Boys setting of Santa Carla is actually the NorCal town, Santa Cruz. I love that the Sunnydale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is most likely based on the Bay’s Sunnyvale. I laughed when Lafayette on True Blood slept under thick velvet blankets. In Louisiana he would bake snuggling under a blanket like that but leave it to a set dresser in LA to think they know what hot weather is. I don’t want Americans to be obsessed with the fake lives of fake people. I moved here to get away from all that. But I get the best of both worlds. I’ve escaped the monster, but the place they keep it chained is a one-hour puddle-jumper flight away.
Maybe that’s why Los Angeles is most appealing to me when it is falling apart. It is only pretty when it’s seedy, when there’s a patina covering all that glamor. LA is only likeable viewed through the lens of David Lynch or distorted through the Raveonettes grungy guitars. Only when the swimming pools and shopping malls are empty and covered in spray paint will a new America be ready to be born.
Getting published: See Yourself in Print #1
Because books are my bread and butter folks occasionally ask me how they might get into the business of being a writer. There are a lot of things you can do to get your polished prose in the hands of booksellers. Note that this isn't about self-publishing, but getting your book printed the old fashioned way.
This Week's Tip to Becoming A Bad-Ass Author: Establish Yourself as An Expert
The more you can do to convince the publisher that you're an authority in that area, the easier it will be for them to sell you to Barnes & Noble.
The simplest way to do this is to start a blog. A lot of potential author's worry about "giving away" too much info on a blog, so that there is nothing left for their book. Unless you write poetry, this is a non-issue and obsessing over it only looks unprofessional. It turns out people have no problem buying a book that reproduces the content of a blog they can read online for free. Go figure. And if consumers will buy it, somewhere there's a publisher who will publish it. Sites like Stuff White People Like, XKCD, and the Oatmeal don't worry about giving away too much. Of course, once you're a blogger you have to start worrying about SEO and keeping up with other people's blogs and all kinds of HTML nonsense that has fuck all to do with writing your manifesto. Starting a blog is in some ways like joining a virtual, global community. If you're not interested in the existing community that exists around the glockenspiel, why would you expect anyone to read your potential book, Stop, Drop and Glock: How the Glockenspiel Will Set Your Roof on Fire? So while it is a lot of work, that work is seeding potential fans of your obsession (It is an obsession, right? If not, why bother?). Another way to establish expertise is to write guest posts on other people's blogs, or articles for local newspapers. However, this is easier to set up if you already have a blog in the first place. Otherwise, what can you point them to that shows you have something to say on the subject? Local organizing can be useful as well, but remember publishers are looking to sell your book all over the country. A monthly meet-up of thirty people isn't going to impress Simon & Schuster. Building expertise is less true with fiction, but it is still true. Many writers now are experimenting with keeping up a blog about their process. This can include research notes, advice, and inspiration. There are sites like Urbis.com where writers upload pieces of their draft to be critcized by other writers. This is another way of joining communities and building a fan base. This seems like a lot of work, doesn't it? It is. But if you've chosen your subject matter wisely it turns out to be just another way to immerse yourself in a subject you are passionate about.30 Years of MTV: The MTV is dead, long live the MTV
August 1st marks 30 years since MTV went on the air. Many young people today may look at what the station has become and wonder, so what?
Every American I know who grew up in in the eighties has a little hole in their heart for what happened to MTV. It’s similar to the way one might remember a clever acquaintance who fell to addiction. They shake their heads, bite their knuckles and look wistful. Whether the thing MTV was hooked on was reality programming itself or the ratings boost it provided, I can’t say, but lost it is. I remember in my teens I would stay up late to record Matt Pinfield on 120 Minutes, because by the mid-nineties the only time they played music videos was in the middle of the night.
But in the heyday of MTV, you could watch videos any time, day or night. What was so great about it was probably all the things the executives behind the scenes hated. The VJs were unscripted; there was little product placement. I have an MTV t-shirt that my mom won from the station in the eighties, when they would do giveaways as if they were just another station on the radio. You could pick it up on your radio, too. Even as a tween I had an inkling that their slot in the TV Guide which said nothing but “Music Videos” for six hours couldn’t be a dream for the person who sells their advertising. But that authentic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience was a fine fit for rock and roll: that ever changing, never planning, tumultuous beast. Rock and roll never sounded better followed by “We’ll be right back after these messages.”
The funny thing is, the way people watched MTV didn’t really change. The people who watch reality shows are the types to use the telly as background noise. MTV was perfect for that: no plot, no characters that would distract you for more than four minutes. Everything they were showing would show again in several hours. It was all that made cable wonderful and terrible. With MTV on, mom could balance her checkbook and I could do my homework. Hell, MTV probably invented the idea of using the idiot box for background noise.
Thus if you ask anyone over 25 they will say that the golden age for music video was the eighties. Not because the videos were better. No, they were low-budget and jakey as hell. CG wasn’t even a word then. It was a golden age because people actually watched them. Today’s youth may share Internet memes, but back in the day if you met a kid from the other coast you could bond of your shared memories of videos. There is a whole generation of people who can’t hear “Take On Me” without thinking of a cute girl caught in a comic strip. If you’re one of those people, you might think Rick Ocasek has the body of a fly. For better or for worse, Dire Straits is more than a band. They’re also a bunch of singing, animated blue collar workers bitching about rock stars and Sting’s voice harping I want my MTV was the voice of the nation. We all saw it, we all loved it. You could not disconnect the song from the video.
I say for better or for worse, because there was a downside. I’ve often wondered if I would have liked Van Halen’s “Right Here Right Now” if it didn’t have such a kick-ass video. We got this idea that the tiny movie was somehow the musician’s vision, when really the director’s vision usually had very little to do with the conception the artist had when they created the song. The nostalgia we have for music videos is the same we feel for any song, but it’s based on something false, that little three minute story. Wyclef’s “Gone Til November” came out after MTV had fallen to disgrace, so that song will always remind me of Spring Break at Siesta Key. It’s an association I share with only a handful of people but it’s an actual memory of my life. But when we were in love with Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” who can say for sure if it was the song we loved–or the fact that it had one of the most adorable videos of all time? Who can say what that song would mean to us, if it didn’t mean dancing bees? It seems to me to be a song about individuality, but that is the message of the video not the song.
I think we may be embarking upon, if not a Golden Age, than a yet-unnamed new era for music videos. For me it began when the site I use for radio streaming started adding Youtube videos to its search. But I think for most people the preponderance of music video has come about slowly as we have faster Internet connections. Now that two gigs of RAM is a standard, our computers are finally fast enough to manage them. A second factor is the dropping price of hard drive space. While most of us aren’t downloading the videos to keep, cheap disc space means that more video and blogging sites are willing to let us park the videos on their servers. It is easier than ever before for bloggers to post them. If the dastardly censors haven’t gotten there yet, it is often as simple as pasting a YouTube url. Finally, because Youtube is the third most popular site in the world, often when people want to find a song they go to the video site to find it. Either way, more and more people are watching them these days. Big hits like Gaga’s “Telephone” are gaining the collective association the MTV videos of yesteryear commanded.
What’s different this time is that we control the remote on what videos we see. Not only have I seen more videos this year than in the last five combined, they’re videos I would never have dreamed even existed. I would never have thought that anti-establishment punks like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and Operation Ivy made videos. I have delved into the studio recording and music videos that came before MTV. Acts like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Nina Simone, that I have treasured for years now, have videos online just waiting for my discovery. And of course new bands are still using them to promote their new albums. It’s come full circle, as the indie bands of today are using the same low-budget filming techniques, some for budgetary reasons and others to hearken back to the same shared nostalgia of the MTV that is dead and gone. If there had never been an MTV, there wouldn’t be a generation of musicians who think setting their songs to tiny movies is a worthwhile marketing effort. After all, video wasn’t a new idea when MTV came around. It is only because these same musicians were watching MTV while they played with Transformers and ripped the heads off their Barbie dolls that the Britneys and Kanyes create videos costing a million dollars a pop. And the bloggers posting the low-budget masterpieces to their little blogs are like the video jockeys of yesteryear: unpolished, unprofessional. We love them because they’re fans first, in it for the love of the music. So it is that while the zombie of MTV continues to ravish the flesh of washed out celebrities in a never-ceasing voyeurism, its spirit lives on. MTV is the Phoenix, rising from the ashes as Youtube and Vimeo. MTV is the Ouroboros. She has shed her mythical skin and we have emerged, with our own cameras and our own blogs and our own video channels. We no longer need the VJs, we have become the VJs. MTV is dead, long live MTV.
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Some of the essential videos mentioned above after the jump. Next week I’ll be posting some of my favorite videos that I’ve discovered since the fall of MTV.
Comparing Tumblr and Posterous
I wrote a guest post on 40Tech.com comparing Tumblr and Posterous.
Check it out here: http://bit.ly/itr436.
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