Mediavorous

May 2008
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Links for May 7th through May 8th

8 May 2008 | Media | No Comments

Things I’m tracking for May 7th through May 8th:

Don’t worry about MySpace, News Corp. says - Los Angeles Times -
Chris Erskine: May their marriage outshine this toast - Los Angeles Times - “More and more, the world resembles a Joseph Heller novel, with occasional scenes from Dr. Seuss thrown in. Too much uncertainty, too many worries, too much e-mail. So there is something remarkably soothing, grounded and plain-old-wonderful about an impen
Cell phone firms’ dream demographic: Latinos -

Short Post: Mac/PC/Palm Calendar Woes

8 May 2008 | Personal, Culture, Internet | No Comments

Why is it impossible to find a program that will empower my wife Kathi and I to synchronize our datebooks across:

My Palm Treo 700p
My Dell desktop
My Dell laptop
Kathi’s Palm PDA
Kathi’s Mac iBook?
A web calendar

This doesn’t seem like an impossible dream, but so far it is.

Does anybody out there have an idea on this? I’d happily export everything to another program if that program could then sync across all six appliances.

More on “I like big BOOKS and I cannot lie”

7 May 2008 | Culture, Internet, Community, Media | 1 Comment

Note: this is a continuation of my last post.

Digging into this image:

The joke hinges on a simple substitution of the word “books” for “butts,” but that substitution creates a collision of two opposite sensibilities. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song is about a public, joyous, Rabelaisian and loudly-proclaimed love of the bodily and sensual– complete with dancing and lots of movement. Mix-A-Lot uses precise Anglo diction (how many urban black guys say “fellas” without it being satirical) and a battery of witty rhymes and puns (Honda, Fonda and Anaconda) to mark out a black aesthetic as profoundly different than that of the white mainstream media. (The music video makes this point even more clear.)

From public, bodily and sensual we move with the change of one word to private, still and cerebral. Rather than raucously celebrating the butt in a song performed out loud, the t-shirt stands on the wearer’s chest to be read and appreciated in silence… a different sort of wit.

You don’t need to know Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song closely in order to get the joke– a passing memory of the title conveys most of it. However, if your memories are at all clear then each recollected detail increases your awareness of this sensibility collision.

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song came out in 1992, before the internet had extended much beyond college campuses and the government, before Napster took apart the music industry and while the television industry was starting to recover from the first fragmentation of media that happened with the birth of cable. As the Wikipedia editor notes, the song has been covered and parodied many times.

One of the most memorable performances, or at least the one that was seen by the most people, is when the Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy, who himself had a 1985 Rick James produced hit single in “Party All the Time”) briefly sings the song at the end of the first “Shrek” movie (2001).

Had Sir Mix-A-Lot released “Baby Got Back” much later than 1992, then the joke of the t-shirt would have failed, and this is where I’ll continue tomorrow.

Links for May 2nd

5 May 2008 | Media | No Comments

Things I’m tracking for May 2nd:

Harry Potter meets Sir Mix-A-Lot

5 May 2008 | Culture, Internet, Community, Media | No Comments

I recently ran across this funny t-shirt design, which some college friends pointed out in an email list we all share, and it has stuck with me as a wonderful example of where fat old mass culture and our new, more nimble and infinitely more fragmented niche or slice culture intersect.

Take a look:

The t-shirt is distributed by Café Press, which empowers individuals to design shirts, mugs and other things and profit from them, much like Threadless but without the community-voting aspect.

Digging into this image, it alludes to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 rap hit, “Baby Got Back,” which is an over-the-top enthusiastic celebration of the large buttocks of some women. The famous first line of the song is “I like big butts and I cannot lie” (see hysterical full lyrics here).

On the t-shirt, instead of butts its books, and while the Harry Potter subtext is not overt the Rowling door-stop novels intended for children and young adults were the first books that leapt to my mind.

I’ve been thinking about this shirt all weekend, and over the next few posts I’m planning to tease out why this shirt is an important signpost about how much we still depend on fat old mass culture for resonance and recognition, even though that fat old mass culture is wasting away quickly.

More to come.

My iMedia interview with Kodak’s Jeff Hayzlett

2 May 2008 | Internet, Marketing | No Comments

I interviewed Jeff Hayzlett, who keynoted at last month’s ad:tech San Francisco, and the interview has been published today in iMedia.

I think it came out rather well.

Links for April 30th through May 1st

1 May 2008 | Media | No Comments

Things I’m tracking for April 30th through May 1st:

Links for April 30th

30 April 2008 | Media | No Comments

Things I’m tracking for April 30th:

Obama’s Falstaff: Why the Senator should banish Jeremiah Wright

30 April 2008 | Culture, Media | No Comments

Listening to Senator Barack Obama’s measured, careful and slowly increasing rhetorical acts of distancing himself from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s dizzying flights of intemperance and just-plain craziness, I keep finding myself wanting to hear more bite from Obama. Obama came close when he mentioned, yesterday, that Rev. Wright “certainly wasn’t thinking of me” when he reopened his mouth in public, but, alas, it sounded more petulant than angry… and we need a forceful, angry and unequivocal rejection of Wright for this topic to go away.

This morning, I found myself thinking of Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff from Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays. A quick search on “Obama Falstaff” picks up many pundits citing Hal’s rejection of Falstaff when he finally becomes king at the end of Part II: “I know thee not, old man, fall to they prayers!”

But why is Wright doing this in the first place? And for insight into this, let us move back to the start of Henry IV Part I, where Hal pretends to be his royal father and Falstaff pretends to be Hal in Act 2, Scene 4.

Sir John, pretending to be the prince, says:

To say I know more harm in him [Falstaff] than in myself were to say more than I know. That he is old, the more the pity: his white hairs do witness it. But that he is (saving your reverence) a whoremaster? That I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord. Banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins. But for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff — and therefore more valiant, being, as he is — old Jack Falstaff… banish not him thy Harry’s company. Banish not him thy Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack. and banish all the world.

To this, the prince (again, pretending to be the king long before he actually becomes the king) replies, “I do. I will.”

The massive self-absorption of Falstaff here — throwing his compatriots under the rejection bus in an attempt to save himself from what he knows must one-day come — seems like a good fit for Rev. Wright.

Did Wright know that it was coming anyway and just decide to have a little fun… to provoke the rejection on his own timetable and terms? It would be a hugely selfish thing to do.

And quite in character.

Has Obama read his Shakespeare?

Links for April 24th through April 27th

27 April 2008 | Media | No Comments

Things I’m tracking for April 24th through April 27th:

Earlier Posts