Want to be creative? Just look at a Mac or the back of an iPhone for a second.
Normally, when one sees the phrase “sick Nazi orgy,” the assumption is that “Nazi” is being used in a loose, metaphorical sense — in the manner that certain angry young liberals call anything they dislike “fascist,” even if it has nothing to do with the trains running on time.
But in this case — which is one of the more smile-inducing stories of recent months — no, they really mean “Nazi.”
The Nazi orgiast in question is Max Mosley, the head of Formula One racing and the son of Britain’s most famous fascist, Oswald Mosley. (Well, maybe Lord Haw Haw beats him.) His mom was the noted Nazi Diana Mitford, who is probably better known to Americans at the sister of Jessica Mitford.
(Americans may know Oswald Mosley best as the inspiration for Roderick Spode in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, or as the real “Oswald” [not Lee Harvey] in the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s “Less Than Zero.”)
A great reminiscence of a 1978 pilgrimage to Memphis to hang out with power-pop legends Big Star — back before they became power-pop legends. (It’s fair to say that if one of your two guitarist/songwriters is wearing a paper hat at a fast-food joint, you haven’t yet become a legend.)
The people making the pilgrimage turned out to be Peter Holsapple and Will Rigby (who would later start the dBs) and Mitch Easter (who would later produce R.E.M.’s Murmur and Reckoning).
Friends of Crabwalk Dept.: My old childhood buddy Josh Caffery is one of the centers of gravity in a certain sector of the south Louisiana music scene. (It happens to be my favorite sector: the smart young folks who are trying to reclaim Cajun music from its own Scylla and Charybdis, old-timey stagnation and lowest-common-denominator commercialism.)
He helped found the Red Stick Ramblers a few years back, then produced the best snapshot of the scene, the terrific compilation Allons Boire Un Coup. (It won Best Cajun Album from Offbeat not long ago. And it really is terrific — the title track is hypnotic, and big talents like Cedric Watson, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Pine Leaf Boys, Racines, and just about every Savoy are accounted for.)
Now Josh has taken on the job of chaperone/guitarist for south Louisiana’s version of Menudo, a.k.a. Feufollet. (I kid because I love!) Feufollet gained notice as a band of young kids a few years back, having been one of the first cultural outputs from intensive French-language instruction in Louisiana public schools. (Check those early album covers.) But they’re all college-age by now, and they have a new record coming out on Valcour on April 15 called Cow Island Hop, and you should buy it.
My copy is in the mail, so I can’t do a full review, but Valcour has posted an MP3 of one song, “Femme L’a Dit,” and it makes me hopeful. The melody sounds a lot like the Red Stick Ramblers and, to be honest, doesn’t even sound particularly Cajun — more like a soulful French chanson. Anna Laura Edmiston — one of the few females in the scene — has grown into her voice nicely and can pull off the full-throated-diva thing better than she used to.
But the greatness comes after the vocals end and the horns come up for a New Orleans-style rave up, with tuba, sax, trumpet, and fiddle all playing and counterplaying. Historically speaking, there’s been much less interchange between Cajun music and New Orleans music than you might imagine, and I’m all for new sounds that can reach a broader audience while staying true to their roots.
And this may be just my longstanding desire to merge Cajun music and indie rock talking — but if they’d just loosened up the sound a touch more, the horn section could have had the ramshackle, tumbling sound of perhaps the finest Louisiana-bred rock musician of the past 15 years, Ruston’s Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. My biggest complaint with most contemporary Cajun recorded music is that it’s too precise and well played and ends up with the sort of clean-room feel that you get listening to folk music on NPR. One of the things I loved about Allons Boire Un Coup is that it’s an album of drinking songs and, on several tracks, it sounds like the musicians had taken the theme to heart in the studio, if you catch my meaning.
(More Feufollet tracks at their MySpace. And their label, Valcour, led by Joel Savoy, is also the place to buy Allons Boire or fine releases from Cedric Watson, Cedric/Corey Ledet, or the Figs — which feature Josh’s lovely wife Claire on banjo.)
This essay in the Sunday Times Book Review is painful to read — if only because anyone who would really break up with someone because he/she had never heard of Pushkin should have his/her reproductive organs seized by the state.
(The only person I’ll agree with in it is Salon’s Laura Miller, who once broke up with someone who loved Ayn Rand. Someone who loves Rand is either (a) the owner of spectacularly bad literary taste, which is forgivable, (b) a believer in a bunch of truly poisonous philosophical hooey, which is less so, or, most likely, (c) both of the above, which truly approaches dealbreaker status.)
(Warning: Long nerdy post. The CrabBot 2000 estimates it will be of interest to 6.4% of crabwalk.com readers.)
While I don’t share the information-wants-to-be-free technoutopianism of some of its proponents, I like Creative Commons. The idea is to create an easy way for people to declare their creative work (to varying degrees) part of the public domain, so that it can be reused or manipulated by others. It’s a fine idea — making it clear when and how it’s okay to use someone else’s work, and when and how it’s not.
But I’ve got a quibble. Some CC-licensed works (let’s talk about photos for now) have a non-commercial license. That means, according to CC, “[y]ou may not use this work for commercial purposes.”
But it doesn’t define what “commercial purposes” are.
Someone named Aaron Landry is concerned that a photo he took — that was licensed as “non-commercial” via Creative Commons — was used to illustrate a post at the highly popular blog Boing Boing. Aaron says that, because Boing Boing sells ad space and makes money, using his photo was a violation of his license.
But it depends on how you define “commercial purposes.”
I ran into this confusion last year, when I was still blogging for my newspaper. I wanted to be able to use CC-licensed photos to illustrate some of my blog posts, but I didn’t know if that counted as commercial use. So I emailed CC to ask what “commercial” meant. The response I got, unfortunately, was something along the lines of: “We can’t tell you whether that’s commercial use or not. We’re not in the business of approving or disapproving particular behaviors.” (The actual emails are on a computer many miles away, alas, so I can’t quote them.)
Obviously, selling a CC-licensed photo would qualify as a commercial use. And putting it on, say, the packaging of a good you’re selling would probably qualify too. Or using it in an ad for one of your products.
But does using it on a blog owned by a for-profit corporation automatically make it “commercial,” even if the use itself isn’t going to make any money? Or is it the money-making nature of the blog itself that makes it “commercial”? Is it the presence of advertising? If so, is every random blog with Google Ads or an Amazon affiliate link a “commercial purpose”?
The CC license’s legal language only refers to use that is “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.” There’s obviously no private monetary compensation when I post a photo on a newspaper blog — no money is exchanged for the photo. Is using the photo giving the newspaper any “commercial advantage”? That seems unlikely to me — no one is going to buy or click on an ad on the page because the photo is there — but maybe in a theoretical sense.
Maybe the answers seem obvious to everyone else, but those of us coming from a news background are used to the idea that commercial enterprises can sometimes use copyrighted material under “fair use” if it’s part of our newsgathering. Example: Imagine Joe Shooter has taken a beautiful photo of his girlfriend. If my newspaper wanted to use his photo, say, in a marketing campaign, it would have to license the rights to the photo from Joe. But if Joe is murdered by his girlfriend because she didn’t like the photo, we could run the photo in the newspaper — because it has become newsworthy in and of itself and would fall under “fair use.” That’s even though my newspaper makes money selling the news.
Fair-use rules require an evaluation of “the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” But federal courts in recent years have tended toward de-emphasizing the commercial question. Take this copyright case from 1994, in which a district court ruled that one of Texaco’s research scientists, a man named Donald Chickering, had improperly photocopied articles he was interested in in a scientific publication named The Journal of Catalysis (to which Texaco had a paid subscription). Part of the district court’s reasoning had been that Texaco was a for-profit company and that, therefore, the photocopying was de facto commercial. But the Second Circuit, on appeal, disagreed (starting around paragraph 35):
We generally agree with Texaco’s contention that the District Court placed undue emphasis on the fact that Texaco is a for-profit corporation conducting research primarily for commercial gain. Since many, if not most, secondary users seek at least some measure of commercial gain from their use, unduly emphasizing the commercial motivation of a copier will lead to an overly restrictive view of fair use…[cites another case saying that] if “commercial” nature of a secondary use is overemphasized in the analysis, “fair use would be virtually obliterated”…[and another case calling a] categorical rule against commercial uses unwarranted since this “would cause the fair use analysis to collapse in all but the exceptional case of nonprofit exploitation”…
The bold section, to me, makes sense: Just about anything could be construed as having a commercial purpose. The web site you’re reading now is a purely personal, non-money-making enterprise for me. But if it’s good, someone might offer me a paying freelance job because of it. (It’s even happened!) So does that mean anything I do to make crabwalk.com better is “commercial” in nature?
The appeals court ended up affirming the lower-court judgment for other reasons, but it ruled that Texaco — even though it was a for-profit company and the scientist was copying the materials so he could get better at making money for the company —
…was not gaining direct or immediate commercial advantage from the photocopying at issue in this case — i.e., Texaco’s profits, revenues, and overall commercial performance were not tied to its making copies of eight Catalysis articles for Chickering.
So, at least in the context of fair use, the courts say a huge corporation can copy copyrighted material and have it not be for “commercial advantage.” Or at least “direct or immediate” commercial advantage.
Now, I am so not a lawyer, so I’m certainly willing to be convinced that I’m wrong here. CC licenses and fair use are obviously not the same thing, even if the internal logics are similar. And if people like Aaron Landry don’t want their photos to be used by people like BoingBoing, they should certainly have the right to have their wishes obeyed.
But I just wish the CC people could make it clear, one way or the other. Unlike with copyright law — where Congress passes the law and it’s up to the courts to interpret and tease out the finer meanings of specific cases — Creative Commons creates its licenses itself. They should be in a position to give some better guidance on this — so people like Aaron know what rights they’re giving away, and people like Boing Boing and me know what rights we have.
Have you seen the new DirecTV ad campaign? The one that just launched a couple days ago, apparently. Features a bunch of empty suits representing Big Cable, sitting around a boardroom table and being dumb. Video of the ads here, here, and here.
To the extent that anything’s been written about it (and it’s a limited extent, judging by a-Googlin’), it’s been that mockumentarian Christopher Guest is directing the spots and that they feature some members of his comedic company of players. But I think the key point they’re missing is that these ads are attempting to evoke the glories of Arrested Development, the greatest television program of all time.
Think about it: Who are the lead actors in the commercials? Ed Begley, Jr. — a.k.a. Stan Sitwell, the Bluth family’s hairless corporate rival. And John Michael Higgins — a.k.a. Wayne Jarvis, the Bluth family attorney turned turncoat prosecutor. It’s the same humor, the same handheld camera work, the same boardroom scenes. Mitch Hurwitz should be getting royalties!
Despite the fact that approximately 17 people watched the show in its original run, this is not the first time a pop-culture entity has reached for a little Arrested flava. There was the Veronica Mars episode that featured guest appearances from George Michael (Michael Cera) and Maeby (Alia Shawkat). And, of course, Juno, which featured both Cera and his Arrested father, Michael (Jason Bateman).
All that — plus the fact that whenever I lend out my Arrested DVDs I have to fight to get them back — suggests the Arrested Development movie, whenever it may arise, may have more success at the box office than the series did on Fox.
Whenever I’m around blogging triumphalists — the kind of people who would applaud the withering-away of the mainstream media and think of journalists as elitist, “MSM” know-nothings — I try to point out the huge swath of contemporary human knowledge that would never have come to light without institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Don’t get me wrong: I love blogs. But no blog would be able to do something like this story from the front page of Thursday’s NYT. It’s the complicated (but worth it!) tale of how a 22-year-old guy named Efraim Diveroli ended up with federal arms contracts worth perhaps a third of a billion dollars despite, oh, any number of what should have been red flags. Like his penchant for domestic disputes with girlfriends that required police intervention. Or the fact his company’s vice president was a masseur. Or, you know, the fact he was 22 years old.
As it turns out, young Efraim — the main supplier of American-funded ammunition for our side in Afghanistan — appears to have been giving them illegally purchased 40-year-old Chinese ammo that doesn’t even work.
Anyway, it’s a great piece of reporting that crosses continents and is beyond the ken of even the finest blogger. But I’ll add the one thing I can. Whenever I see a young person do something newsworthy, I always look him/her up on Facebook and MySpace. And in this case, paydirt:
Here’s his MySpace page, which appears to have been last updated in 2005. Some highlights, in case it comes down (all emphases mine):
His “About Me”:
Well of course im a super nice guy!!! , i know what i want out of life but not exactly quite sure how to get it yet. I was born and bred in miami beach and have no immediate plans to leave but i have thought about it. Im a pretty easy going guy and many say i have a good sense of humor. I had problems in high school so i was forced to work most of my teen years and i probably grew up way to fast. I finally got a decent apartment and im content for the moment , however i definately have the desire to be very successful in my business and this does take up alot of my time.
What kind of gal he’s looking for:
a sweet pretty girl with a good attitude and love for life , a woman that will stand by her man because she knows he would do the same for her no matter the circumstance [ed: you can judge for yourself by the mugshots whether Ephraim is really the stand-by-his-woman kind of guy]
To fulfill the stereotype of this kind of guy, his favorite movies include Scarface and The Godfather — and, slightly against type, American Beauty. Dude must love floating plastic bags. And his interests:
for the moment im basically just working and chilling with my boyz when im not, im looking for some hobbies like i keep saying im gonna go to the gym and i started playing football again which is definately my favorite sport. im one of those guys who needs to be entertained and having lots of fun all the time so if your also an undiagnosed case of ADD look me up. i like to eat good food and i dont know how to cook so i eat out alot!!!! ilike to travel whenever posssible sometimes for business , and of course i like going clubbing or going to a movie, oh and ive really taken a liking towards fine scotch whisky recently dont ask me why….
His mugshot is on the left, his MySpace photo on the right:
This video (made by a friend of a friend) is particularly mandatory viewing for (a) multiracial crabwalk.com readers, (b) people of full or partial Hawaiian ancestry, (c) Barenaked Ladies fans (and now is not the time to start evincing shame over that fact), and (d) people with good hearts. The rest you, um, go read Metafilter or something.
I would like to associate myself with this article proclaiming Babe: Pig In the City an overlooked masterpiece. Easily the best hoofed-mammal-in-a-metropolitan-area movie of the past two decades.
Helpful hint: If your friend invites you to an NHL game and has the best tickets imaginable, take him up on it. (Thanks, James!)
Another hint: While the railing along the glass may seem like a good place to put your beer, it is not. Large gentlemen enjoy banging into that glass, and that can negatively affect your beer’s location.
May I brag for a moment? So I gave a talk Saturday at the Nieman Narrative Conference about blogging. More specifically, it was an attempt at a grand defense of blogging — a form too many established journalists crap on as beneath them — by placing it within the historical context of “reporting in its natural state,” by defining it as a worthwhile vehicle for perspectives and emotions and observations that can’t find a home in traditional newspaper journalism.
Anyway, the talk went really well. First it was declared “brilliant” by Wall Street Journal writer Julia Flynn Siler. And now Roy Peter Clark — perhaps the most prominent teacher of writing in journalism — has written up his thoughts on my talk.
You can imagine how many writing seminars and conferences I’ve attended since 1977, so you’ll excuse me if I confess to an occasional spasm of boredom. “Writing is a process…find a focus…stories are good…nut graph this…blah, blah, blah.” Which is why surprising moments of great learning seem so satisfying and joyful.
I experienced such a moment at the Nieman Narrative Conference, thanks to a young reporter and Nieman fellow named Josh Benton, who offered the most dynamic presentation I’ve ever witnessed on — of all things — blogging. Let me kick it up a notch: The last time I remember learning so much in an hour was the first time the late Donald Murray showed me in 1981 his model of the writing process.
Wow. It’s fairly well known that the playwright Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia, and that his new name came when his mother remarried when Tom was still young. But I had no idea his stepfather had later tried to take his name back — in 1996. After Stoppard had already been famous for, oh, thirty years.
An ill-tempered martinet bristling with bigotry, [stepfather Major Kenneth] Stoppard lost no time, when the family settled in England, in anglicising his stepsons’ first names and changing their surname to his. Since loathing of “artiness” figured high among his prejudices, it was a move his younger stepson’s flamboyant theatrical career subsequently gave him ample cause to regret. Days after his wife died in 1996, he wrote to Tom Stoppard demanding that his surname be returned (with some restraint, Stoppard replied that reassuming the name of Straussler after half a century was “not practical”).
I don’t have any idea what rough beast, its hour come round at last, this is, but it had better stay the hell away from me. (Disclaimer: crabwalk.com is not responsible for any nightmares set in remote dystopic futures caused by this video.)
(Actually, it’s a 165-pound gasoline-powered manimal that will someday be killing declared enemies of the United States.)
A history of The Nose magazine, a sort of low-rent-Americana Spy which I absolutely devoured in college. I used to love going down to News Haven on Chapel Street and seeing a new issue on their never-ending racks.
Remember when people went to newsstands in search of interesting information? Or record stores, or book stores? Le sigh.
Speaking of Jack Boulware, The Nose’s editor, I loves his Foghat humor piece when I first stumbled across it a year or two ago.
Food Fight, a history of 20th-century war as told through fast food — complete with food-decoding cheat sheet here.
The best thing about this sort of stop-action short is the knowledge that someone spent hours, countless hours nudging cheeseburgers and flinging pickles, frame by high-glycemic-index frame.
My old college buddy Ben Olken — a very smart guy who’s on all the hot-young-economists lists — is profiled about his work on corruption and assassination over here. More on Ben here. And, since his wife Amy Finkelstein also appears on those hot-young-economists lists with alarming frequency, here’s something about her work too.
Badass. This may be my favorite video-audio mashup ever — and not just because it sets the greatest of all journalism movies, All the President’s Men, to one of the most common background tracks of my college years, the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” It also just nails the cuts and transitions. Beautifully done.
The man who made it, Jeff Yorkes, has done a bunch of other mashups: The Dark Side of the Moon meets The Wiz, Dustin Hoffman meets Phish (?), Planes, Trains & Automobiles meets The Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar meets the original Superman, et cetera.
This NYT article creates the need to perform a public service: helping you tell apart the various David Axelrods.
— The David Axelrod mentioned in the piece is the male lead character (played by Martin Hewitt, opposite a young Brooke Shields) in 1981’s Endless Love. It’s known today mainly as Tom Cruise’s first film and as the origin of the treacly Diana Ross/Lionel Ritchie title ballad. (For the youngsters in the audience: Lionel Ritchie is Nicole Ritchie’s dad.)
— The David Axelrod most often in the news these days is the schlumpy-looking journalist-turned-consultant who is Barack Obama’s top political guy. He’s Obama’s Karl Rove (although I imply no value judgments in that comparison — just comparing roles).
— But he has a ways to go before taking the title of “best David Axelrod” from, um, David Axelrod, the genius music producer and A&R man who reached his peak in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He specialized in a couple areas. First, the more crossover-friendly end of that era’s jazz — he was the main studio muse for Cannonball Adderley (this site’s favorite jazzman) and Lou Rawls. Second, a huge, effortlessly cool, and highly cinematic sound inspired by spaghetti-Western soundtracks, which manages to sound both timeless and deliciously dated at the same time. He layered some of that sound on his work with the weirdly great David McCallum, the Man from U.N.C.L.E. actor who made some terrifically jazzy symphonic records. Not to mention on a couple great Axelrod solo albums like Song of Innocence.
Quite a lot of Axelrod’s stuff gets sampled in contemporary hip-hop, which has led to his rediscovery by a certain class of producer — not unlike what’s happened to fellow old guys Galt MacDermot and Monty Stark. The best introduction to his stuff is probably The Edge: David Axelrod at Capitol Records 1966-1970, which combines the best of his solo sides and production work.
Here — fittingly, considering the widescreen and vaguely Bond-like feel of his music — is some Axelrod set to a montage from the original Thomas Crown Affair.
More groovy Axelrod tracks to check out: “Holy Thursday,” “The Smile,” Jimmy T,” and the excellent “The Mental Traveler.”
Great high-concept post on the transition from old to new journalism realities. Key quote:
So we, as journalists, have a choice: Do we want to be just “content” providers? If so, then admit you are going to rely on someone else to distribute your product and you are going to be one — small — dot on the map with relatively low value. Like any artist, you ‘ll be able to do what you are doing for its intrinsic beauty. A few will become superstars. Most will need a second job to eat.
Great video from 1975 of Marc Savoy and D. L. Menard playing Menard’s “La Porte d’en Arrière” (“The Back Door”). This would be right at the beginning of the Cajun music revival in Louisiana (as opposed to the Cajun music revival on the folk-festival circuit, which had arguably been going for a decade or so), right after the first Tribute to Cajun Music in 1974.
“La Porte d’en Arrière” is one of the genre’s most iconic songs. When I was a kid — and in the weird middle state of being surrounded by Cajun culture but almost completely uninvolved in it — I heard it almost every Saturday afternoon, when Channel 15 would show a live broadcast of Cajun music from Randol’s. I didn’t know the name — I just knew it as the song where the chorus ended with what I repeated as “NYYAAAAAAAAH.” Menard is still alive, and I think still overseeing his chair factory in Erath.
The same fellow who posted that video to Youtube has a nice collection of francophone live music videos, mostly Quebecois. He also had this excerpt of a Clifton Chenier show in New Orleans — notice Buckwheat Zydeco on keys:
The founders of Television Without Pity are leaving. I never read TWOP — watching TV would seem to be a prerequisite for reading an obsessive web site about TV — but I admired the same founders’ work on the sadly shuttered Fametracker greatly. They matched some of the snarky-shell-covering-secret-earnestness tone of Suck.com in its late-period glory days. Wing Chun mentions it here.
“You’re Not My Father,” a video art project by Paul Slocum. It’s a scene from Full House, repeated and recycled through reenactments. Particularly interesting are the instructions he gave to reenactors (PDF), who were working remotely. You can judge for yourself how well all the men matched Dave Coulier’s fist clenches. (More here.)
Dallasites may know Paul as one of the leading lights of the electronic-art scene, or more likely as the guy behind Tree Wave, an electronic band that uses obsolete ’80s tech — Commodore 64s, Ataris, a dot-matrix printer — as its instruments. Or you may know him as the guy behind that vocodor-y “Hello, hello, hello” in Metro PCS commercials.
I only wish an Olson twin could have been scared up to take part.
Slocum posted a looping version of the original Full House scene on Youtube:
Heard a talk on disruptive innovation today from Clay Christensen of the biz school. The main point he hit on is neatly summed up by this Steve Jobs quote I found today:
So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’”
(Am currently assembling a journalism talk for next week that covers Mr. Jobs, the fall of Saigon, 18th-century British painting, the Kennedy assassination, and blogging. Wish me luck.)
I link to this tale of interference in a college newspaper not because of my high-minded defense of First Amendment principles. No, friends — I link because the student government president is named Ron Chicken. (My humor bar is low.)
Oh noes! My friend Mary reports that south Louisiana crawfish farmers may be about to go on strike! They’re meeting tonight in my home town of Rayne to decide how best to deal with the bad prices they say they’re getting from crawfish processors.
It would be a shame if, as in any divorce, the children end up the most hurt. And by children, I mean the humble Louisiana crawfish, who want nothing more than to be eaten by, say, me.
Under the 1729 Treaty of Seville, the British had agreed not to trade with the Spanish colonies. To verify the treaty, the Spanish were permitted to board British vessels in Spanish waters. After one such incident in 1731, Robert Jenkins, captain of the ship Rebecca, claimed that the Spanish coast guard had severed his ear. The British government, which was determined to continue its drive toward commercial and military domination of the Atlantic basin, used this incident as an excuse to wage war against Spain in the Caribbean. In 1738 Jenkins exhibited his pickled ear to the House of Commons, whipping up war fever against Spain. To much cheering, the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, reluctantly declared war on October 23, 1739.
More here.
You’ve probably heard that William F. Buckley died last week. I have two Buckley stories:
— When I was in high school and going to debate tournaments, I used to do “foreign extemp,” which was a competition in which you’re given a foreign-affairs topic and 30 minutes in which to prepare a seven-minute speech on it. I don’t remember the topic, but one time I wanted to quote something Buckley had written, and in my speech I called him “Bill Buckley.” I still remember the judge’s comment: “I don’t believe you know Mr. Buckley well enough to call him ‘Bill.’”
— When I was a senior at Yale (his alma mater), Buckley taught a seminar on writing. It was tough sledding, but I got in. I spent two hours every Monday afternoon in a small room with 11 other students, a TA, and Buckley. Our assignment every week was to write a very short — maybe two paragraphs — piece on a topic of Buckley’s choosing. Then, during the seminar, he’d pick three or four, put them on an overhead projector, and do an extremely close reading — analyzing it word by word. “What do we think of this noun?,” that sort of thing. It was quite an experience — I can’t say I got to know “Bill” particularly well or anything, but hearing that mid-Atlantic clipped voice talking about your own prose sure focused the mind.
In other Buckley-related matters, check out this great hand-puppet video of Buckley interviewing Allen Ginsberg. I love the freakout in the second half.
It appears that this guy is the one behind the video.
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.)
Links
About | Archives | Contact | Writing | Photos | Links | Wish
RSS feeds 
Recently played tracks
- Rhys, Gruff – This Is Just The Beginning
- Air – Universal Traveler
- Blind Lemon Jefferson – Prison Cell Blues
- Cibo Matto – Know Your Chicken
- The Dismemberment Plan – The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich
- Stephen Malkmus – Out Of Reaches
- The National Lights – The Dead Will Walk
- Afghan Whigs – The Vampire Lanois
- Devo – Mr. B's Ballroom
- Isimo, Takkyo – Stereo Nights
Most recent stories
06 Aug: COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
Archives
Search
Disclaimer
Any opinions expressed here are solely mine, and not those of my employer. In many cases, they may not even be mine.
