I've never publicly shared my story about The Worst Meeting In The History Of Show Business, but this seems like an appropriate time, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. 

In the late '90s I was working as a sitcom writer, and in the spring of 1998 I was between jobs and needed one. My agent lined up a meeting for me with Al Franken, who was then running a show called "Lateline," a behind-the-scenes comedy about a TV news program. Franken wanted to meet me, my agent told me, because I had a news background, having been a writer for Newsweek before I moved to Los Angeles. My recollection is that "Lateline" was produced out of New York; Franken would fly out to Los Angeles to hold a few days' meetings with prospective hires at a hotel in West Hollywood. And so the meeting got set, for breakfast a week or so later. I arrived a little early and found Franken in the hotel restaurant, where he was meeting with another writer. He asked me if I'd mind waiting for a few minutes, so I took a seat in the lobby.

After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, which sat in the lobby, a few feet outside the dining room entrance, and about 20 feet from where I was sitting. The host answered the call, listened for a moment, then went inside and came back with Franken. The writer with whom Franken had just met, their meeting now concluded, continued through the lobby and left. Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD? He's DEAD? Oh my God, Phil—Phil's DEAD? What hap--- He was murdered? Shot? What about Brynn? Is she... Brynn shot him? Brynn shot Phil? And she's dead? They're both DEAD???"

This went on for a few more minutes, and at some point—I don't remember exactly how; there may have been a radio on somewhere—I learned that that morning, out in Encino, Franken's friend and colleague Phil Hartman had been shot and killed by his wife Brynn, who then killed herself. Franken eventually hung up the phone and stood there, silent and distraught.

You have to understand my line of thinking at that moment. 

The guy was obviously shaken, and who wouldn't be. The last thing I wanted to do just then was force him to sit down and hold a business meeting. In the spirit of full disclosure, let me add that I also didn't like my chances of holding his focus while I pitched myself for a job over orange juice and croissants. It felt weird, and wrong, and like it wasn't going to end well for anybody. I figured the best thing I could do was extend my condolences and offer to reschedule the meeting, which I did. "No," Franken said distractedly, "I'm only out here for the day. I have to go back tonight. We have to have this meeting now."

"Al," I said, in what was surely the biggest understatement of my show-business career, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

But he was insistent. We'd meet now. And he had a request: Would I mind, he asked, if we had the meeting in his room upstairs so he could keep one eye on CNN.

Again, let me give you a little background.

A show-business meeting is a performance. If you're in the position I was in that morning you're the performer, and the person across the table is the audience, and you want them to be captivated by what you're selling, which is always some aspect of yourself—your talent, your humor, your intelligence. All of this requires a measure of attention. Up to that moment I'd been pretty successful at capturing the attention of the people with whom I'd met for various jobs. Not universally so—one famous showrunner sat there and went through his mail while I ran through my resume. (No, I won't tell you who it was. Okay, it was Chuck Lorre.) This meeting seemed fairly certain to be worse than that meeting. But what was I going to do? So up to Franken's room we went, and as promised he switched on the TV and tuned to CNN.  It wasn't my best meeting ever. I talked, he listened—sort of. I kept glancing up to see him focusing one eye on the TV. Occasionally I'd hear a word or two break through --  "911 call." "Murdered." "Shot." "Coroner." "Suicide." I managed to limp through a presentation of my qualifications for the job, and then I finished, and then I stopped.

And then, here's the thing: It got worse. 

I guess CNN must have finally run through what little hard information it had on the Hartman murder/suicide and started repeating itself, because Franken switched off the set and focused on me. "All right," he said. "I wanted to meet you because I like your work, and because you have a news background that would work well for my show."

Okay, I remember thinking, so far so good.

"Now, I did a little checking on you," he continued. "I asked my friend Howard Fineman about you."

Okay, I thought again. Not an unreasonable thing to do. Fineman was then, and had been during my tenure at Newsweek, a big wheel in the Washington bureau.

"He told me two things about you," Franken said. "The first one was, you totally changed what it was possible to do in the back of the book at Newsweek. He said you were a real trailblazer in terms of writing with a casual voice and some attitude."

I thought this was very nice of Fineman, if a little hyperbolic, and said so. What was the second thing?

"That you're a screamer," Franken said calmly. 

"Excuse me?" I said, blinking rapidly a couple of hundred times.

"That you yell at people," he said. "You go nuts when you don't get your way, and you scream at people and treat them badly and make their lives miserable."

I wish I could tell you I have a clear recollection of what I said next, but the truth is all I remember is a loud roaring in my ears. I think I eventually sputtered something to the effect that 1) Fineman worked in DC and I worked in New York, that we never crossed paths and neither did our co-workers; 2) I had never even met Fineman face to face (still haven't, years later); and 3) what he was saying was, not for nothing, totally and demonstrably untrue. But I think I also had the glimmer of a sense, right away, that I was a dead man walking. There was no way in hell I was going to get this job. I think I may also have had the presence of mind to wonder why Franken had decided to meet with me at all under the circumstances. Years later, I still don't know. But I have a theory.

You may remember a character Franken created for Saturday Night Live and later spun off into a book and movie—Stuart Smalley, who was so addicted to 1970s-style self-actualization that it controlled his life. ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!") Franken has said Smalley was born out of his exposure to Al-Anon, a support group for the friends and family members of alcoholics. Here's the disclaimer: I don't know to what degree Franken himself was or is personally a fan of Smalley-style self-improvement dogma. But I've always wondered if, in some part, he wanted to meet with me because he saw an opportunity to intervene in the life of someone he believed to be struggling with destructive personal behaviors. It was a beautiful tiger trap, in a way: However much I might have protested or tried to correct the record, that only would have hardened his position, because it wouldn't mean he was wrong, it would mean I was in denial. None of this occurred to me that morning. But the theory started to gel over the following days. A week or so later when my agent called to tell me I hadn't gotten the job—No kidding, I remember thinking—I called Franken to thank him for the meeting and wish him the best with the show. "Well," he said, "you seem like you're basically a nice guy. My hope for you is that you get some help with your problems."

It's 14 years later, and I never worked another day in television. I'm not complaining—life goes where it goes, and mine has been just fine, thanks. I still haven't met Howard Fineman, although I entertain the occasional fantasy of being introduced to him at a cocktail party and maneuvering him into a corner and murmuring "Hey, Howard, got a minute? Funny story." Franken, of course, has gone on to become the diligent and effective junior senator from Minnesota. I think of all this occasionally, in a sort of abstract, twists-and-turns-of-life kind of way. I'll trot the anecdote out from time to time for friends in show business when the subject of Bad Meetings comes up, which it does a lot. And I thought of it yesterday, when I saw this remarkable video of Franken on the Senate floor, eulogizing his former writing and performing partner, Tom Davis.

You should invest the 20 minutes or so it takes to watch it. Here's a guy who, with very few exceptions, has put his head down in his first term, worked hard, stayed low, and rarely even mentioned his time as a prominent comedian. And here, standing on the floor of the greatest deliberative body in the world, he takes time to speak feelingly of a guy with whom he was young, had a falling out, reconciled, grew older. He's loving and forgiving and generous, not only toward Davis but to a couple of generations of his peers, some of them now gone. He's even expansive on the subject of comedy itself, remembering late nights in SNL's 17th-floor offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Woody Allen once said that writing comedy is either easy, or it's impossible. When it's impossible it can be agony, let me tell you. When it's easy, when you're laughing, when you're rolling on the floor, literally, when Danny or Billy or Belushi or Gilda or Dana Carvey or Jim Downey or Conan O'Brien or Steve Martin or any of the hilarious people that we had the privilege to work with would come up with something that just made you explode with laughter and roll on the floor there on the 17th floor—that was just pure joy.

This is the kind of ex post facto reflection you don't tend to get from younger guys, mostly because they're still, well, facto, and they lack perspective, which is—you kids, trust me when I tell you this—more and more hard won. It is, to my knowledge, the most Franken has spoken about his show business time since he got to Washington. It's as if Davis's death unshackled him. The speech bristles with feeling, and it's studded with great little nuggets. (Recalling the Julia Child "Save the liver" sketch, Franken remembers Davis hiding on the set controlling the pressure of the fake blood spray: "I remember that was something of a union issue because that's a special effect, pumping blood.") The fact that it was delivered on the floor of the United States Senate—preceded, for good measure, by remarks from Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is nobody's idea of a laff riot—makes it something absolutely extraordinary.

Watching Franken in middle age letting go of the old hurts and slights to eulogize the friend and partner of his youth, I couldn't help thinking about that day in West Hollywood. And all I could think was: You know what? It's okay, Al. Forget it. He was misinformed, but if I have to assign a motive to his actions, I'm going to assume he did what he did out of good intentions, because life's too short, and the fact is I'd like somebody to eulogize me like this, although not anytime soon. It's okay, Al. Godspeed. And Howard, if you're reading this, let me talk to you for a second. It's kind of a funny story.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/27/me-al-franken-and-the-worst-m.html/feed 64 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/10/mind-blowing-movies-funny-bon.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/10/mind-blowing-movies-funny-bon.html#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:08:06 +0000 Bill Barol http://boingboing.net/?p=170440 Recently, Boing Boing presented a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. We are extending the series. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series. -- Mark

Mind Blowing Movies: Funny Bones, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] 1995’s Funny Bones, by the British writer/director Peter Chelsom, is either a comedy about dark things, like betrayal and manslaughter, or a drama about funny people, like a pair of retired vaudevillians who are winding down their days scaring children in the spook house on the Blackpool amusement pier. I’ve seen the movie, conservatively, two dozen times and I still don’t quite know how to describe it. I’ve never shown it to anybody who didn’t turn to me at least once with an incredulous look in their eyes, a look that says: “What the hell is this?”

This is exactly what I love about Funny Bones -- it is sui generis, and impossible to boil down. I can tell you the broad outlines: Failed standup Tommy Fawkes, the son of revered funnyman George Fawkes, flees Las Vegas and returns to the tattered seaside town of Blackpool where he grew up, in search of the indefinable substance that makes people funny. Once there he discovers that he has a half-brother he never knew, and that this odd, shy sibling is the unwilling recipient of the comedy genes, the funny bones, that Tommy so desperately desires. But those few quick strokes really -- you have to believe me -- they really don’t do justice to this odd, dark, deeply funny and witheringly sad story, or to the faded netherworld of fringe show business in which Tommy finds himself, casting frantically about for something to keep him from going under. Nor does it prepare you for an ending in which (I won’t spoil it) Tommy’s life literally dangles from his half-brother’s hands as a rapt, horrified audience looks on. Or for the lump in your throat when the story’s threads of desire, comedy, tragedy, love and hate interlock in one breathtaking final shot.

The Cliff’s Notes version of Funny Bones also does nothing to prepare you for the performances of Oliver Platt as Tommy, the great and eccentric British comic Lee Evans as his half-brother, and -- I know, I know -- Jerry Lewis as the semi-retired but still-formidable George Fawkes. (“George Fawkes,” a Blackpuddlian murmurs when Tommy drops the name. “I thought he died in Las Vegas.” Nope, Tommy tells him: “Idied in Las Vegas.”) People who talk about how great Lewis was in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” have almost invariably not seen him top that dramatic turn in Funny Bones, playing a father whose pain at having to tell his son the worst, most hurtful truth he can imagine -- that he’s just not funny -- almost tears him apart. Later, having been proved wrong, the look of fatherly pride in Lewis’s eyes is incandescent. It’s a fabulous star turn.

The DVD packaging for Funny Bones burbles about how it’s a “zany look at two comedians who’ll do anything for a laugh!” You have to feel for the poor schlub who got the draw to write the copy. Like pretty much everybody who sees it, he probably didn’t know how to encompass its polar extremes in one sentence. My recollection is that both critics and audiences were more or less baffled when the film had a brief run in theaters back in the mid-Nineties. This is a totally appropriate reaction, of course, because in addition to everything above Funny Bones includes Raymond Scott music, a severed foot, some French fishermen playing spy, a few venerable old burlesque sketches and Leslie Caron as Cleopatra. That it hangs together at all is amazing. That it ends up tackling some very big things, and doing it with wit and grace and huge laughs, is absolutely unbelievable. But it does. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You really should see it.

[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE1wCo3N6As]

Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] If for any reason you doubt the power of television, consider the long career of Andy Griffith, who died this week at 86. Griffith had one TV role that was merely successful and one that was almost archetypical. That’s a pretty good run for any actor. But TV didn’t just give to Griffith. It also took away, and it’s here that the medium shows its muscle in a really astounding way. Griffith’s long TV career effectively effaced a film debut that, fifty years later, is so vivid and visceral that it startles with every viewing. The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd, are largely overlooked today -- these are testaments to TV’s power to swamp any cultural phenomena that have the poor judgment to get in its way.

Hang on, there’s more. What’s doubly delicious about this is, A Face In The Crowd is a cautionary tale about the power of -- Anyone? Anyone? Yes: Television. Griffith, who came from nightclubs and the stage and had no resume as a dramatic actor in 1957, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who stumbles into national prominence thanks to the demagogic power of the then-young medium. A grifter and a charmer, Rhodes is sleeping off a hangover in a rural jail when a local radio producer (Patricia Neal, doing that hard-but-vulnerable thing she did so well) sticks a microphone in his face. He has no ambition to be a radio star or anything else, but once he grasps that a guy with a friendly demeanor can wield mass media like a club, and he grasps it very quickly indeed, there’s no stopping him. Rhodes shoots like a star from tiny Pickett, Arkansas to Memphis to New York, from radio to TV, from a singer and storyteller to “a force... a force,” he says with megalomaniac intensity. And from there it’s just a quick hop to politics, with a presidential candidate sucking around for his magic touch, and a madman’s dreams of power behind the throne.

It all unravels, of course, because that’s what happens in cautionary tales. But until it does Rhodes is a villain of Shakespearean scope and depth, and Griffith -- this is TV’s Andy Griffith, remember -- Griffith tears into the part with both hands. When Griffith as Rhodes laughs -- “I put my whole self into everything I do,” he tells the Neal character early on, equal parts seduction and threat -- the sound explodes off the screen like gunfire, and Griffith’s eyes widen and shine, and sweat dots his forehead like stars, and the tendons stand out in his neck. Understand: Rhodes is a monster, all appetite and ambition, and Griffith makes every second of his rise and fall queasily believable. That doesn't just apply to the operatic moments, though. There’s a great scene early on where Rhodes uses the power of his radio pulpit to turn the populace against the local sheriff, and Neal asks him how it feels to “say anything that comes into your head and have it sway people.” At first Rhodes is too busy enjoying the moment to grasp what she’s saying -- “I guess I can,” he says offhandedly, tears of laughter streaming down his face -- but then the weight of the insight settles on him and the laughter stops and his eyes go cool and appraising. “I guess I can,” he says again, and this time it’s all business. You can practically see the connections being mapped in his hustler’s brain. Later, leaving Arkansas to go to Memphis for his first TV job, Kazan has Griffith stand in the steps of a departing train, and as he turns away from the cheering crowds who’ve come to see him off and sets his gaze down the track toward his future, his face is a mask of hunger and calculation.

There are good actors in A Face In The Crowd -- Neal, Walter Matthau as a well-meaning good guy, and the underrated Tony Franciosa as a conniving office boy-turned-theatrical agent. (Franciosa has a hilarious moment when Rhodes improvises a commercial jingle for some prospective national sponsors, and the office boy/agent wings some backing doo wops to help close the deal.) But for all the starpower the film has, and that includes Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg working at the tops of their very considerable games, it’s Griffith’s film to make or break. And in much the same way that Rhodes seized his opportunity when it happened along, Griffith did too. In every frame his Rhodes is violently alive, for good or (much more often) for ill. Griffith never again duplicated the jet-propelled power of that first performance, and within three years he was a TV star, and he stayed one until Tuesday, when he died. Ask any ten people who know him from either of his long-running TV successes if he ever played a heavy and eight of them will look at you like you’re nuts. But the other two? The other two will nod in appreciation of what Griffith did 55 years ago, before a new medium set his nice-guy image in stone and wiped away the memory of Lonesome Rhodes’ grinning, voracious face.

(RIP, Andy Griffith)

When John F. Kennedy was asked how he became a war hero, he’s supposed to have replied: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” That’s how I became a self-published novelist: A large number of New York publishers rejected Thanks for Killing Me, my spiky little crime novel about the aftermath of a con gone wrong. They did so for an exquisitely heterogeneous variety of reasons. One liked the plot but not the characters; another liked the characters but not the plot. A couple thought it moved too fast, and a couple found it too leisurely. About the only consensus was that none of them felt optimistic about their chances of selling a caper novel, and a first novel at that, in a declining publishing market. Being the self-starter that I am, I took these rejections in stride and leapt into action, throwing the manuscript into a drawer and sulking for eighteen months.

Sometime around the start of this period I had lunch with an old friend who’d done some time as a publishing executive. I told him that I was beginning to kick around the idea of self-publishing. His advice was short and sweet. “Don’t,” he said. “It’s all the stuff you hate: Marketing, self-promotion, asking people for favors.” This was enough to discourage me for a while. A couple of months back we had lunch again and I told him, again, that I was giving the idea some thought. He asked me what I hoped to accomplish. My thinking had clarified some since our last lunch, and I was honest with him: I told him that I still wanted to attract the attention of a traditional publisher (the Grail of self-published novelists) and/or the movie business. This time, maybe sensing that he could no longer talk me out of it, his advice was a little more expansive. “Okay,” he said. “First, forget everything you know about traditional media; all your experience is worthless. Take all that time you spend screwing around on Twitter and put it into marketing your book. And, at least in the beginning, sell it as cheap as you can. In fact, you know what? Give it away.”

“What?” I said.

“Give it away,” he said. “For free.”

His reasoning was hard to argue with, and not just because I suddenly had a loud buzzing in my ears and the room was all swimmy. The logic went like this: Given two facts -- the odds of any self-published novel ever making any real dough were astronomically low, and the job of my novel was now to be its own loss leader -- why not set its retail valuation at zero and get it into as many hands as possible? It sounded screwy, it sounded counter-intuitive -- hell, it was counter-intuitive, as my intuition was to make money by my work, and as much of it as possible. But the more I thought about it the less nuts it sounded. If I was really serious about exposing my work to a broad audience and generating the kind of critical mass that would make publishers reconsider, I had to make the book almost impossible for anyone with even a passing interest not to acquire. The Get It/Don’t Get It decision had to be friction-free, and cost was the point of friction I could most easily lubricate.

In retrospect, deciding to take a whole year’s work and assign it a valuation of $0.00 was the easy part. Actually doing it wasn’t so simple. What I discovered was that however much of a crazy-ass hippie I had become, CreateSpace, the print-on-demand arm of Amazon, apparently exists to make money, or at least recoup its costs. In practical terms, this means that Amazon sets a floor below which authors are forbidden to sell. So here was my first lesson in self-publishing: While the capitalists with whom I’d gotten into business might abstractly admire my entrepreneurial imagination, they drew the line at letting me give my work away. Like Paulie Cicero’s crew in Goodfellas, they’d get theirs first, off the top. The floor for the paperback edition of my book was $7.49; I set an introductory selling price of $7.99, yielding a profit to me of $0.30 per book. Then I priced the the Kindle edition and the iBooks edition at a cheap-as-possible $0.99 each, which yielded per-unit profits to me of $0.30 and $0.35 respectively. From now until some time in the near future when I decide to raise the prices to something more sensible, the sellers will keep the rest. Which is to say, almost everything.

That doesn’t seem unfair to me. It’s payment rendered for production and/or distribution services provided. In this, they’ve executed one part of the job that traditional publishers have always done. Which leaves every other part for me. This is one thing readers may not immediately grasp about the new world of self-publishing: Printing books and getting them into readers’ hands is only one aspect of the process. To the degree that these most mechanical parts of the publishing business have been peeled off and put within reach of authors, that’s a good thing. It’s disruptive, it’s liberating, it’s downright democratic. But it’s only half the story. Self-published authors also assume responsibility for everything else traditional publishers have always done, chief among these marketing and promotion. And these are another bucket of type.

Marketing and promotion matter. They are the whole show. And they cost, one way or another. You can spend dollars to hire a specialist -- there are people who do nothing but arrange “blog tours,” where authors make virtual guest appearances at sympathetic blogs -- or you can spend time and energy to do it yourself. I have, at least initially, chosen the latter, rolling out the social-media equivalent of a full-court press: Website, Twitter feed, Facebook fan page, a presence at Goodreads. Shamelessness also helps; I’ve spent a good part of the last week mooching favors from influential Twitterers I have, in some cases, never even met offline. (These people have, I should add, been unfailingly generous in their responses.) Why go the blogging/social-media route? Because I have experience blogging, having written for years at my own sites, here at Boing Boing, at Huffington Post and at Forbes.com, and also because, as my friend put it, I’ve spent a lot of time screwing around on Twitter. You use what you’ve got, and these are assets I can bring to bear. What are they worth in the overall calculus? You could say they’re worthless. I prefer to say their worth is incalculable. Tomato, to-mah-to.

But this is exactly what I’m talking about, and it’s the great thing about the situation in which I find myself: As the screenwriter William Goldman said years ago about Hollywood, Nobody knows anything. You try something, you try something else, you try everything, even things that sound insane, because in an industry where the longstanding business model has been upended, everything else has been upended too, even the gravitational tug of logic. If you want to get rich, value your work at zero. Yes, okay, it reads like the last line of a Zen koan. But self-publishing’s best practices are still unwritten, so really: Why not? That tactical freedom might be the most disruptive, the most liberating part of the whole self-publishing business. I can’t wait to figure out what I get to try next.

Bill Barol’s Thanks for Killing Me is available now on Amazon and the iTunes Store. Buy it now at super-low introductory prices before he loses his nerve.

You might know Joshua Allen from the Twitter, where he posts hilariously (and not often enough) under the handle Fireland. Allen is one of the three or four people who make it seem possible that Twitter can spawn something like art. (Others? Tim Siedell, Adam Lisagor and Christian A. Dumais, the guy behind Drunk Hulk. That's my list. I'm sure you have yours.) Now, just to rub it in, he has a new project: Ten Sexy Ladies, in which he rates "everything ever, on a scale from one to ten sexy ladies." And when Allen says "everything ever," you better believe that's exactly what he means. Here he is on "This Thing of ChapStick":

Come closer, mon petit chou. I have generously applied deodorant that smells like a lumberjack fresh out of a clear mountain stream. I have swished mouthwash until it burned my gums like a sexual fire. I didn't floss because come on, really? But I did shave. Everywhere. And I got in there real good with a Q-tip. I am ready to receive your makeouts. (Rating: Two sexy ladies.)

Got chewed out by the boss? On your way out throw some pennies in the recycling bin. He'll be impressed with your lackadaisical approach to finance. This kid knows something I don't, he'll think later that night as he pays a woman to take a straight razor to his neck hair, slowly, so slowly, the only time he ever really feels anything.

P&H Soda Co: Refreshing All Natural Syrups for Soda Lovers from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

[Video Link] You know, it's all well and good to talk about how bomb-sniffing mice are the future of security, and sure, it sounds good. But ask yourself: What does the phrase "genetically-selected rodents, optimized by integration with Hi-technology system" mean? I think it means they stuff mice into a plastic shoebox and train them to push a button when they get the whiff of contraband. And all I'm saying is, if I were stuffed into a plastic shoebox at the airport I'd give some serious consideration to pushing the tiny button a few extra times to screw with my tormentors, or maybe just because I was bored. Unless it's a gag. It's gotta be a gag, right? It's a gag. I'm pretty sure it's a gag. (via dvice.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/08/bomb-sniffing-mice.html/feed 21 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/03/also-youre-gonna-lov.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/03/also-youre-gonna-lov.html#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:58:06 +0000 Bill Barol this Wall Street Journal trend story. I really do. It encapsulates everything I hate about trend stories: The totally fake, self-justifying notion that Suddenly everybody is {insert trend here}!!!, the lazy reliance on a few East-Side-of-LA hipsters to underpin the thing, the utterly un-self-aware trashing of whatever previous trend the publication has just pivoted away from. I mean, it's all here. It's a Perfect Storm of Trend Story Clichés. (Please note: The use of the phrase "Perfect storm" is itself a big whopping trend story cliché.) But the thing is, and I'm not proud of this, lasagna cupcakes sound totally delicious. Listen to the way a TV writer (well, of course she is) describes the savory snacks: They're "all corners, they're a wall of crust." Have they got you yet? Are you getting hungry yet? No? Then take a look at the semi-pornographic photos of lasagna cupcakes in various stages of preparation. It's like being beaten over the head with cheesy deliciousness. You win, Wall Street Journal Trend Guy. But then I guess we both knew you would.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/03/also-youre-gonna-lov.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/02/the-exotica-project.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/02/the-exotica-project.html#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:29:10 +0000 Bill Barol
It's easier for me to define exotica, a lush, atmospheric, sometimes-sappy instrumental pop music of the '50s and '60s, than it is for me to explain why I love it. I think it has something to do with nostalgia for a time I didn't really live through -- a late-postwar period in which the world was bigger and stranger, and unfamiliar locales could be described with a straight face as "exotic." (One historical theory holds that the music was initially marketed to ex-GIs home from the Pacific, and trickled down to the populace at large.) There's something emotionally resonant in that idea. It's like we're looking back at a generation that looked forward, and out to a larger world it hadn't yet subsumed. Also: While the music is frequently syrupy, some of it is unironically pretty. And some of it, like the best of genre superstar Les Baxter, bubbles with an unexpected, almost subliminal complexity. Dan Shiman, who's also proprietor of the excellent MP3 blog Office Naps, curates a fantastic introduction to the music at The Exotica Project. (Via the tireless Maria Popova.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/02/the-exotica-project.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2011/01/13/bill-murray-at-the-n.html http://boingboing.net/2011/01/13/bill-murray-at-the-n.html#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 06:47:35 +0000 Bill Barol this, his speech introducing writer/director Sofia Coppola at last night's National Board of Review Awards. Murray was perfectly suited to the task of winging an introduction for Coppola: She directed him in a titanic performance in 2003's "Lost In Translation," and he has for many years engaged in eccentrically good-natured public appearances that have added up a unique kind of improvisational performance art. (My favorite was last year at SXSW, when Murray showed up at an Austin joint and began tending bar, sloshing out slugs of tequila to the clientele, no matter what they'd ordered.) Anyway, here's Murray at the NBR, chewing on Red Hots and, in a deceptively easygoing fashion, making some moving points about life, work and the places where they meet.

..why do you encourage these people? Because now she's had this success, she's had this work, she has this life, she has this family, she has this thing going, and now is when people like you have chosen well to say, 'Let's give this person another boost, let's give this person another boost to say keep going, because now life will come to you hard, like it's come to everyone that's lived long enough. It comes hard and it gets in the way of your career; it stops your career, it stunts your life -- not necessarily your life, but it definitely will make your career go left. You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce. [Audience laughs.] Right? Right? [Looking around the room.] You know who I'm talking about.

The integration of mobile structures - including a rolling hotel, public bath and concert hall - has the potential to transform the city into a dense, integrated and continually changing scenography. The temporary, small-scale structures sets the 'city in motion', providing an important connection between the land and the sea.

So here's what I'm going to do: I'm crowdsourcing my outrage for Christmas. Do you have a Twitter account? If so, can you help me out? All you need to do is tweet the following:

@twitter @support You owe @billbarol $62,000. Pay up. Link.

That's all there is to it. It's so simple. And the beautiful part is, it's not even remotely insane, it's NOT. Together we can make Twitter do what's right. And to show that my heart is in the right place. this is my pledge: Upon receipt of a certified check from Twitter in the amount of $62,000, I will in a relatively prompt manner donate $250 to a major charity that is legally registered in the US or her offshore waters. Because it's not about the money. And I am not insane. Merry Christmas! Viva la raza!]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/24/all-i-want-for-chris.html/feed 55 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/24/ghost-bus-spotted-in.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/24/ghost-bus-spotted-in.html#comments Fri, 24 Dec 2010 10:41:20 +0000 Bill Barol The merry pranksters at New York's MTA are turning the holiday season into a kooky, trip-your-brains-out, you've-fallen-down-a-wormhole, what-in-the-name-of-all-that's-holy-is-happening-to-you time-travel freakout by putting a vintage 1958 GM bus into service on a selection of routes. Reader Dimitrios Gazis filed a full dispatch with the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog, and reports that "the noise and the stench of diesel was comforting." A reader of the EV Grieve blog, meanwhile, caught the bus, #9098, in transit on 34th Street between First and Second Avenues. That's his photo above. The whole thing is nutty and beautiful. I miss New York.]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/24/ghost-bus-spotted-in.html/feed 32 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/21/warm-heads-for-chris.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/21/warm-heads-for-chris.html#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:22:00 +0000 Bill Barol
I live in a warm place now, but I retain a vestigial -- well, let's call it a respect for cold weather. So these handsome little art cards by designer Sam Tudyk scratch at a deep place in my psyche. A deep, cold place. Even the vaguely creepy one that suggests a bank robbery about to happen. I'd love them even if they weren't selling at a web store affiliated with the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, which is responsible for the single greatest achievement in the history of advertising. I wish them, and you, a Merry Christmas. (Via Coudal.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/21/warm-heads-for-chris.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/17/dial-9-for-fun.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/17/dial-9-for-fun.html#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 04:17:20 +0000 Bill Barol Today!!!, as BBC1 probably would have styled it) -- I mean, push-button phones weren't an unimaginable prospect even in 1965. To be fair, though, in 1965 Britain was still trying to recover from the Blitz. In fact, the whole prospect seems to inspire a gloomy air. Take a look at the poor customers in this clip, who look like they're assembled for a wake, not an evening down at the local. Now that I think about it, I'm actually a little relieved the scenario sketched here never came to pass. I was once served a 7Up by a robot at London's YO! Sushi. I still wake up screaming. (Via How To Be A Retronaut.)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/17/dial-9-for-fun.html/feed 25 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/14/do-one-thing-do-it-r.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/14/do-one-thing-do-it-r.html#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:33:09 +0000 Bill Barol I've tangled with every GTD app there is. I've wrestled with setting repeating tasks in iCal. I didn't know it, at least not beyond a certain inchoate longing, but what I wanted was something that didn't hogtie me with complexity. I wanted something that would live in my pocket and execute simple reminders with deadly efficiency and an absolute minimum of fuss. What I was looking for was Due, "the missing reminder app" for iPhone.

I understand the impulse to bulk up a smartphone with pre-installed apps, and the impulse to make those apps Swiss Army knives. But I have a tremendous affection for software that does one thing and does it really well. Due, from developer Lin Junjie, is like that. It's about the reminder, the simple nudge in the ribs to draw your attention to a task that may be need to be done as infrequently as once, versus the "task" or the "project," ungainlier creatures that can have multiple steps and deadlines. It's uncomplicated, beautiful and functional. My only beef with it is that it includes a secondary functionality that's sort of neat, I guess -- you can define and save timers of varying lengths keyed to different events -- but which I never use. Just knowing the timers are there detracts a tiny bit from the gorgeous simplicity of the thing. I'm a purist that way. But is Due in every other respect an essential addition to my home screen? Absolutely. It passes the highest test I can imagine for an iPhone app: It's so smart, and so pretty, I can't imagine why Apple didn't bake something like it right in. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/14/do-one-thing-do-it-r.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/10/more-sumac-please.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/10/more-sumac-please.html#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:12:13 +0000 Bill Barol
God, I love food blogs. I love all sorts of food blogs, from the hip and sensible to the bizarrely specific. But I think the one I love most is Serious Eats, with its luscious, almost pornographic closeups of brisket and apple cake and Mac & Cheese Carbonara. I love its enthusiastic coverage of coffee and burgers. And I love the way it occasionally does what it did yesterday -- break down the exact appeal of an obscure ingredient in a fashion that makes you want to drive to the obscure-ingredients quarter of town and spend the afternoon hunting it down. The ingredient is sumac, which blogger Max Falkowitz calls "the saving grace for the unapologetically lazy cook, a Swiss army knife of finishing touches." (Tell me that wouldn't make a lazy cook, or an energetic one, want to read more.) His sensuous descriptions of the spice (" ...it's much more complex than lemon, reminiscent of perfectly ripe raspberries and tomatoes, with a pleasing bitterness that lingers just a second after swallowing") practically make me salivate, and this is the thing: I have never to my knowledge tasted sumac. If that isn't good food writing I don't know what is. Falkowitz's lovely essay on the spice reminds me of the story Bruce Springsteen told about Chuck Berry in Taylor Hackford's Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll. Springsteen recalls the first time he heard Berry's "Nadine," with its description of "a coffee-colored Cadillac," and tells Hackford: "I'd never seen a coffee-colored Cadillac." But after hearing Berry, Springsteen says, "I knew exactly what one looked like." (Photo by Robyn Lee for Serious Eats.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/10/more-sumac-please.html/feed 37 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/nick-dewolfs-hungry.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/nick-dewolfs-hungry.html#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:08:04 +0000 Bill Barol Nick DeWolf was one of those passionate, indefatigable amateurs who were just made to live on via the Internet. He wasn't an amateur at his chosen profession, which was engineering; he co-founded Teradyne, a manufacturer of electronic test equipment that survives him. In his spare time, though, he was a photographic hobbyist, and a good one, and over a period of about fifty years he photographed everything: Guys in cars. The Boston skyline. Women on subway platforms. How many images are there in total? Who knows? DeWolf's devoted son-in-law, Steve Lundeen, has been uploading them a few at a time to Flickr for about the last six years. There are now almost 44,000 of them. Taken together they represent a vast, varied swath of the latter 20th century. "He carried a camera with him at all times," Lundeen writes, "usually a family of cameras. If you knew Nick, you got used to this...eventually, he'd be pointing his camera at you." (Via Retro Thing.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/nick-dewolfs-hungry.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/01/and-now-the-floor-cl.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/01/and-now-the-floor-cl.html#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:15:15 +0000 Bill Barol Today's Kooky Koncept Design is the Foki, a "Floor Cleaner Shoe" from Adika Titut Triyugo of Institute of Technology Bandung in Indonesia. The rechargeable Foki has tiny cleaning devices on its soles and an LED readout topside to display information on cleanliness level and battery status. The Fiko is intended, Triyugo says, for people who "have to do multiple activities in one moment." It's an ingenious idea. But despite the delightful prospect of skimming across my hardwood floors on rotary brushes, busting dust while "The Skater's Waltz" plays, I have to wonder of Triyugo hasn't misread the market for a rechargeable floor-cleaning shoe. Aren't the people who would most benefit from a device like this -- your slovenly, your lazy, your easily distracted -- the ones least likely to get up and move around at all? I know I am. (Via PSFK.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/01/and-now-the-floor-cl.html/feed 19 http://boingboing.net/2010/11/23/live-right-now-the-e.html http://boingboing.net/2010/11/23/live-right-now-the-e.html#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 04:29:42 +0000 Bill Barol this, the worst building-demolition video in the history of the genre, is set in my hometown. It documents the attempted destruction of The Spectrum, Philadelphia's shuttered '60s-era sports arena, and it violates every precept of building-demo videos: It's slow, awkward, and utterly lacks any anticipatory drama or final, dusty explosion. Plus it gets bonus points for the weird, Palin-y diction of the Fox News anchorbabe who tries to fill time by explaining that the demo is "a little uneffective... Y'know, we wanna bring you these pictures because, y'know, this is a building that longer is being used, and they're gonna be doing this big destruction of it... " Any way you look at it, it's Art.]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/11/23/live-right-now-the-e.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2010/11/18/did-hitler-plan-ufo.html http://boingboing.net/2010/11/18/did-hitler-plan-ufo.html#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:32:27 +0000 Bill Barol Londonist slugs its post on this absolutely nutso piece from the the Daily Mail Hitler Planned UFO Attack On London, Claims Newspaper, while the paper itself goes no further than gonzo speculation: Did the Führer plan to attack London and New York in UFOs? See, it's that little bit of wiggle room that lets the real pros operate. And should anybody be so prickly as to take the paper to task for photoshopping an Iron Cross onto an old illustration of the alleged SchicksalSaucer der Himmel, which they freely admit they did, just because it looked bitchin' -- well. hell, the Mail never said the Nazis actually had the thing. They were just asking the question! (Also, for the record, nobody except me ever actually called the saucer the SchicksalSaucer der Himmel, which, roughly translated, means Doom Saucer of the Skies. But they could have!)]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/11/18/did-hitler-plan-ufo.html/feed 22