I’ll be on TXCN in a few minutes to talk about my story for Monday’s front page. It’ll likely repeat throughout the evening.
All good things must come to an end. I’ve decided to shut down the CD Mix of the Month Club. The March trade will be the last.
What began as a lark in November 2001 has grown beyond my wildest dreams. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, 1,342 CDs have been traded in the last five months alone. The site has twice been the Link of the Day at MSN. It’s even been mentioned in the New York Times.
But it’s time. As you might imagine, it can be an incredible pain in the ass to arrange 100-plus CD trades every month. Just printing liner notes and folding them into their CD cases takes hours — not to mention addressing envelopes, matching CDs, licking stamps, maintaining the database, and dealing with dozens of emails a day. The upshot is that I haven’t even had time to listen to any of the mixes I’ve received for months. That doesn’t exactly go with the spirit of the trade.
There are also a few immediate reasons for the shutdown. I’m in a very busy period at work, and that won’t change for a while. And for whatever reason, traders were substantially less generous with financial donations this month than in the past. In a typical month, I break even on cost or else spend only $10 or $20 more than I receive. This month I had to pay about $100 out of my pocket, just to buy postage and supplies. That’s obviously not sustainable.
But honestly, I’d probably be killing it off even if cash was flowing in. It’s just time to do other things.
I have to extend major thanks to three people without whom this would have died off some months ago: Matt, Thomas, and Amanda. Those three volunteered to take over the most time-intensive single task each month, actually burning the CDs. (I’ve got a slooooow burner.)
And major thanks to all the traders out there. I’ve gotten some great music from you guys, and I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve offered up. Keep in touch, people.
So, whether you’ve traded before or if you’re new to all this, by all means sign up for the March trade, which will proceed as normal. The deadline isn’t until March 17.
I’d like to give you all an invisible gift. A gift of a silent minute to think about those who have helped you become who you are today. Some of them may be here right now. Some may be far away. Some, like my astronomy professor, may even be in Heaven. But wherever they are, if they’ve loved you and encouraged you and wanted what was best in life for you, they’re right inside yourself. And I feel that you deserve quiet time on this special occasion to devote some thought to them. So let’s just take a minute in honor of those who have cared about us all along the way. One silent minute.
Whomever you’ve been thinking about, imagine how grateful they must be that during your silent times you remember how important they are to you. It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our lives from which we make our choices is very good stuff.
Happy day: the back-to-school section I helped assemble and write last year was just named the best in the country, edging out The New York Times.
Fametracker is always best when it’s hopelessly bitter.
On a “what the stars drive” feature in this month’s GQ: One of the people featured showing off his car is Neal Moritz, producer of The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Two excerpts from his answers: ‘I’m addicted to Range Rovers’ and ‘I’m a pretty big fan of money.’ Amazing. You’ve never heard of this man before, but just twelve words later, you already think he’s an asshole.
On another story in the issue: It’s about an assistant who used to work at GQ, then he sold a screenplay. It’s readable and enjoyable. On the downside, it’s written in that flip-literate style that’s so popular these days, as evidenced by the thousands of novels/memoirs about young singles working lower-rung jobs in the New York media, biding their time until they can quit and write a flip-literate novel/memoir about their time working in the New York media. Oh, and navigating that crazy Manhattan singles scene! It’s crazy! Who did I just wake up with?!
I am on the phone with Robert Burrows, author of the recently published political novel Great American Parade. This book has sold only 400 copies nationwide, and Burrows seems flabbergasted to be hearing from me. The most prestigious newspaper to have shown any interest so far is the Daily Student at Indiana University.
I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.
Silence.
“My review will reach 2 million people,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again. I really love my job.
The video to the new Johnny Cash song (a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”) is beautiful.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the postponement of the state’s new standardized test because of North Texas’ wintry weather.
Has anyone ever used the word “wintry” in front of any word other than “weather”? I don’t think so.
As someone who lived in Connecticut and Ohio from 1993 to 2000, I can vouch that the roads here in Dallas are a mess. Up north, cities can deal with this storm fine, but Dallas doesn’t seem to believe in salting or plowing. So every downtown road and every freeway is just a frozen sheet of ice. I’ve skidded out five times in the last 36 hours. At least it gave me an excuse to order in Chinese last night.
This may be the most boring post in crabwalk.com history. Apologies.
Skinema: the long-awaited intersection of movie stars and dermatology.
“As a dermatologist and a film buff, I’ve found a series of skin conditions featured in movies. All of the films listed are readily available on home video. Peruse at your leisure and let me know what you think. You may look at movies in a new way. Disclaimer: None of the individuals featured on the site are patients. The images are publicity photos (not clinical photos taken in a medical office). Actors seen with skin conditions include some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. To most quickly find individual celebrities, try a search!”
Coming next month to a bookstore near you: Crabwalk, a novel by Nobel laureate Gunter Grass. And the lead character is a journalist, no less!
Grass has been wrestling with Germany’s past for decades now, but no book since The Tin Drum has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany’s wartime suffering. “Scuttling backward to move forward,” Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.
I’ve always viewed this web site as a tragedy at sea.
So you go through all the bother of driving to work while hell freezes over all around you, arriving to an almost empty newsroom — and you’re the one who gets stuck writing the goofy weather story for tomorrow’s paper. It’s just not fair.
Now don’t take this the wrong way — I’m sure the CD you sent me this month is great.
But Jesus Christ, people sent me some crappy music this month.
Here’s my story from today’s front page, on the debut of Texas’ new standardized test. Complete with interactive quiz!
I hadn’t realized Clifford “Black Rhino” Etienne is one of my people. (Well, he may not be ethnically Cajun, but he’s culturally Cajun — that’s just as good.) My high school was about five miles from his house. I’ll look past that armed robbery conviction on his C.V. and root him on to victory Saturday against crazy man Mike Tyson. (Etienne’s gone from a 7-1 underdog to a 4-1 underdog in the last week.)
Media alert: I’ll be on TXCN at 4:25 this afternoon, with the spot repeating through the evening. I’ll be talking about a story that’ll be on Monday’s front page. (Assuming this refinery fire on Staten Island isn’t al-Qaeda — in which case we’ll probably have bigger fish to fry.)
Since everyone’s mix should be in the mail by now, I hereby announce the February CD Mix of the Month. A little more guitar-oriented and less experimental than most, but it’s gotten good reviews from those who’ve heard it.
Bought some CDs yesterday for the first time in a while. Now (along with September/October) is one of the peak periods for new CDs, particularly indie-friendly ones for all the kiddos heading back to the dorms for the start of a new semester.
I can give unrestrained thumbs-up to Calexico’s Feast of Wire and New Wet Kojak’s This is the Glamorous. (New Wet Kojak, originally a side-project for Girls Against Boys, became substantially more interesting than their brother band some time ago.) The Postal Service’s Give Up gets an only slightly less enthusiastic upward appendage, although I’ll likely warm up to it on future listenings. Cody Chestnutt’s The Headphone Masterpiece brings up the rear, a bloated, juvenile mistake that just didn’t meet expectations.
Worthwhile Canadian initiative finally falters: Alas, Shift Magazine appears to have published its final issue. Conspiracy theorists will note this happens only five months after naming this site one of the 75 “cultural movers and shakers in the digital era.” The meaning is clear: Write about this site at your peril!
I hope this doesn’t mean Saturday Night, a former crabwalk.com favorite published by the same company as Shift, is also on thin ice.
Outmoded fraternal organization of the day: The Improved Order of Red Men. Of course, real “red men” weren’t allowed to join for centuries.
Gregg Easterbrook has been everywhere lately! Dissin’ on the space shuttle (in Time), dissin’ on hydrogen-powered cars (in The New Republic), dissin’ on chemical weapons in The New York Times. For 20 years, he’s had a pretty steady beat in the world of journalism: the don’t-trust-scientific-hyperbole, researchers-screw-up-a-lot beat. Depending where your faith in machinery lies, he’s either comforting or frightening.
If you can’t beat ‘em, pander to ‘em. Ever wondered what McDonald’s does when it sets up shop in an area that hates Americans? Egypt, 2001: Local outlets introduce the McFalafel, rolled out behind an ad jingle sung by Shabaan Abdel Rahim, best known for his chart-topping hit “I Hate Israel.”
A hint for indie snobs like myself who try to track down import CDs: Ordering via Amazon.co.uk is usually cheaper than you think. I just ordered Mark Eitzel’s new disc there for GBP 11.58 (about $18) total. Not bad, since it might not ever get released here in the states. (It’s a collection of old Eitzel/American Music Club favorites, rerecorded with traditional Greek instrumentalists. It’ll either be brilliant or absolutely miserable.)
Maple Music’s always been a good source for Canadian imports, for those times you just need that great Flashing Lights EP that’s somehow gone unreleased south of the 49th parallel.
John Cage piece to be performed for 639 years (bottom of page).
Seven years after his death, the John Cage Organ Foundation has begun the performance of what will be Cage’s longest piece. Entitled “As Slow As Possible (ASLSP)”, the work will be performed on a town organ in Halberstadt, Germany over the course of 639 years…
Cage originally wrote “As Slow As Possible” in 1992 as a 20-minute piano piece. According to Art in Action, “musicologists have deliberated over just how slow, as slow as possible really is.” The group agreed on the figure 639, representing years since the construction of Germany’s first single-block organ.
At the piece’s opening performance, approximately 360 people paid $15 USD to see someone turn the organ on. They’ll have to return in another 18 months to hear the first chord. Notes will be played on similar intervals until the performance ends in 2640, provided sponsors can be found over the next several centuries.
Why Kobe Bryant can’t get a shoe deal: He’s not “urban” enough. And he speaks Italian.
At the public courts on Venice Beach, the mention of Bryant’s name provokes mixed emotions ? not the urge to splurge on his footwear. After a spirited pickup game, Rich Baderinwa said he respects Bryant’s game but can’t see himself in Bryant’s shoes. He scoffed in particular at Bryant’s attempt at rapping. “His rap was whack,” said Baderinwa, 26, of Venice. “When he put out that CD, nobody bought it. And you know why nobody bought it? Because nobody bought him.”
Who says the DMN doesn’t have a sense of humor? Dear stranger in my house…
Happy Valentine’s day, everyone. Me, I spent my morning hanging out at The Institute for the Study of Man and Earth. (Pretty broad mission, that.)
I think I’m right to be frightened: A Tribute to Avril Lavigne, coming soon to a CD store near you. Isn’t it a bit early for this?
(Although I do have a bootleg Dismemberment Plan show where they drop the chorus of “Complicated” in the middle of their show-closer. Entertaining proof here.)
What I wouldn’t give for a Dallas version of Flavorpill. (Guidelive is great and all, but something more editorially discerning would be great.)
Great news: A Tribe Called Quest is talking about reuniting. Reunited and it feels so good! Or, as Q-Tip would put it: “Okay, if knowledge is the key then just show me the lock. Got the scrawny legs but I move just like Lou Brock.”
Now all we need is Black Sheep to return to form, and it’ll be 1991 all over again.
Sign No. 3,497,263 of the Internet’s encroaching role in popular culture: Driving back from Louisiana Monday, I came across Shreveport radio station KBED at 102.9 FM. But during station breaks, instead of calling themselves “one oh two point nine,” they called themselves “one oh two dot nine.” Dot. As in dot-com or dot-org.
Sign No. 1,647,748 of how far the Internet still has to go: The radio station in question doesn’t have a web site.
Buy Mogwai drummer Martin Bulloch’s pacemaker! Bidding’s at $102 at the moment, with three days left to go. Straight from the heart, directly to you.
Alarming fact: 319 people signed up for the CD Mix of the Month club this month. Jumpin’ jehosaphat! I’d better make this one good.
If you’re one of those people who obsesses over the difference between an INFP and an ESTJ — and you know who you are — the Hartman Value Profile may be for you. As This American Life put it last weekend (about 42 minutes into that RealAudio file):
“A standardized test, just eighteen questions long, created by scientists, that not only can tell you things about yourself that will haunt you for weeks, it can diagnose just how good you are…and how evil.”
The secret of successful personal ads, revealed!
I got a call from Jane Lederman, 44, a divorced Boston business manager whose ad touted the “high cheekbones of Renee Russo plus personality of the young Katharine Hepburn.”
She didn’t write the ad, she said. It was ghostwritten by Susan Fox, founder of Personals Work, a professional personal ad ghostwriting service in Boston.
“She interviews you and gives you homework assignments,” Lederman said. “She asks you to name an actress you identify with. And you have an assignment to ask your friends, ‘If you were to think of me as a celebrity, who would you think of?’ “
It was that process that inspired Fox’s lyrical ode to Russo’s cheekbones and Hepburn’s personality.
Now, Lederman says, she can pick out a Fox-written ad at a glance: “When you see a reference to an actress, you figure she had a hand in it. Or somebody was copying her style”…
As soon as I hung up with Lederman, the phone rang. It was “Head-turning good looks evocative of Diana Rigg.” She was willing to talk but not to be identified by name. Her ad, too, was ghostwritten by Susan Fox. In fact, she said, it was Fox who came up with the Diana Rigg line.
“I said, ‘I don’t look like Diana Rigg,’ ” she recalls. “And she said, ‘This is advertising!’ ”
I called Fox. She was eager to talk. A former freelance writer, she has been a full-time personals ghostwriter for 11 years. She charges $125 an hour for a job that she says takes at least three or four hours. She has “hundreds” of clients, 75 percent of them female.
Fox doesn’t think it’s cheating to hire a ghostwriter to compose your personal ad. Nor does she think she was deceptive when she used the phrase “evocative of Diana Rigg” to describe a woman who says she doesn’t look like Diana Rigg.
“We said evocative of,” she explains. “We didn’t say a look-alike or a carbon copy.”
Personal ads are, she stresses, advertisements.
“It is, after all, advertising, and people have to put their best foot forward,” she says. “If you say you’ve got a botox appointment and a screwed-up 17-year-old kid in addition to being bright and fun, it doesn’t work.”
Here’s my story from today’s front page, the latest in the Schools That Work series. It’s about the Carver Academy, the new school Spurs center David Robinson has founded in San Antonio. I just got an email that 60 Minutes saw my story and now wants to do a feature on the school. So when you CBS watchers see that San Antonio dateline at some point in the future, remember it was crabwalk.com that gave you the love first. (Oh, I’ll also be on TXCN at 4:35 this afternoon talking about it.)
Side note: I’ll be leaving for Louisiana tomorrow morning for a much needed long weekend. Expect blogging to slow from its recent breakneck pace to something more snail-like. Or maybe creeping-mold-like.
“Memphis, Michigan — A high school senior says he earned an A+, not an A, and has sued to get the grade changed to bolster his chance at becoming valedictorian.”
A little later in the story, you learn the class in question was a work-study gig in his mom’s office. In other words, Mom said I deserve an A+, so I deserve an A+!
Letters, we get letters:
HELLO MY NAME IS [omitted]. I HAD TO REPLY TO YOUR WRIGHT UP IN THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS. I WANTED TO SUGGEST THAT THE ONLY WAY THAT WE CAN STOP OUR SCHOOL SYSTEMS FROM SUFFERING SANCTIONS, DUE TO WEAK ENGLISH STUDENTS, IS TO STOP TRYING TO BE SO POLITICALY CORRECT. I DO NOT KNOW FOR A FACT, BUT I AM WILLING TO BET THAT A LARGE NUMBER OF THE LIMTED ENGLISH STUDENTS CAME HERE ILLEGALLY, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. AND UNTILL WE STOP REWARDING PEOPLE FOR BREAKING THE LAW, OUR SCHOOL SYSTEM WILL FALTER. THANK YOU [name omitted]
The Wifely Duty: Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy. One less thing to look forward to.
Missed this: Hugh Trevor-Roper, the gentleman historian who (oops!) said the “Hitler diaries” were genuine back in 1983. That obviously put a dent in his credibility, and unfortunately brought the Holocaust denier and anti-Semitic historian David Irving to prominence.
Isn’t that a great name for a British aristocrat? “Hugh Trevor-Roper.” He could have been a West Texas rodeo star.
Oh, one other thing: I’ll be “performing” at 20x2 at SXSW next month. I’m supposed to take up two minutes answering the question “What are you waiting for?,” in whatever way I choose. Ideas are welcome.
Two stories in today’s paper: a new report claims that afterschool programs are a failure and new federal testing requirements target kids who can’t speak English.
The first story there was a national exclusive until 5 p.m. yesterday, when the U.S. Department of Education went ahead and released the damned report I had an advance copy of. Damned P.R. people and their release of reports!
I said it on Friday and I’ll say it again: I need a weekend.
Here’s my story from today’s paper, on how teachers will talk to children about the shuttle disaster.
Film Movement. “Film Movement is an innovative new film club that gives you unprecedented access to award-winning independent and foreign films. Finally you have the freedom to experience the best new releases whenever and wherever you choose.”
Join up and you get one indie DVD (hot off the festival circuit) mailed to you each month. An interesting way to get around the absence of quality art-house cinemas in most places. I’m sure some people would be interested.
Gregg Easterbrook (who has one of the truly odd job descriptions in journalism: liberal policy-wonk writer by day, cheerleader-happy football columnist by night) predicted the Columbia’s demise back in 1980. (At least if you’re a supporter of the tiles-did-it theory.)
Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other. They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules; they can be used indefinitely. But they’re also a bit of a letdown in another respect — they’re so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them.
The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as “safe life.” That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can’t be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
Here’s the story I was working on yesterday, about how reentry is supposed to feel. I’m back at work today, too.
My job today was to track down some of the 100-plus astronauts who’ve flown on Columbia over the last two decades. (A few of them will show up in a story in tomorrow’s DMN.) I spent some time trying to track down a working phone number for Ken Bowersox, who’d gone up on Columbia twice (STS-50 and STS-73). For some reason, I just couldn’t get in touch with him.
Then on the way home, I realized why: He’s been on the International Space Station since November. I imagine he wasn’t waiting by the radio for my call today.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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