12 posts tagged “culture”
yeah, yeah, we won on tuesday. i do sincerely hope that the democrats realize this wasn't so much a vote for them aas a vote against our current leadership. there is a difference there.
anyway, i get very frustrated with red state-blue state stuff - i feel it creates a false split. here's a better take on regional identities and differences.
The regions were based on election results, demographic data and certain geographic features. Each one represents about 10% of the electorate (i.e. approximately 10,5 million votes in the 2000 presidential election).
- Northeast Corridor: the richest, best-educated and most densely populated region of the US. A traditionally Democrat-leaning area, it delivered 62% of the vote to Al Gore in 2000. That’s better than any Democrat in any region since LBJ.
- Upper Coasts: anchored by Boston (on the east coast) and San Francisco (on the west coast), this region is relatively affluent and well-educated. Arguably more liberal than the Northeast Corridor, it is less reliably Democratic: third-party candidates do well.
- Farm Belt: has the smallest non-white population, with lower than average population growth. Ranks first in percentage of people who finish high school, but don’t get a higher education. Solidly Republican.
- Big River: has been the most closely contested area in presidential elections for over 30 years. And the region isn’t easily wooed, never giving either candidate more than 55% during this period.
- Appalachia: the poorest and most rural region, but catching up economically. Showed a dramatic swing towards the Republicans in 1980 and stayed that way ever since.
- Sagebrush: named after the anti-bureaucratic Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, this region occupies almost 50% of the US land area. The fastest growing region, it was also Al Gore’s worst region in 2000.
- Great Lakes: centered around Chicago, and suffering from population loss in smaller cities, it has Democrats chasing votes in more rural areas – the suburban counties have been tilting their way, anyway.
- Southern Comfort: fast-growing and average as to income and education, this was part of the ‘Solid South’ that squarely supported the Democratic party around 50 years ago. It has since turned into the most Republican region of the US.
- Southern Lowlands: the largest percentage of African-American voters, who reliably vote Democratic. This voting bloc is matched by some of the most Republican areas in the US, making it a swing area.
- El Norte: the youngest and most Hispanic region, it was carried by Gore in 2000. It is however not solidly Democratic, having recently sent conservative Republicans to Congress (from Florida and Texas).
I'll admit (before papabean comes in here to argue the merits) that copyright is a complicated issue and if i were at the helm of any old-model business based on maintaining a dominant share of content ownership being forced to acclimate rapidly to a constantly changing technological environment which i neither appeared to understand nor have any appreciation for, I'd probably be a little terrified and prone to bad, unnerved decision making. And I have neither the knowledge nor the passion nor likely the money to ever have been a Lik-Sang customer. I don't think I would ever make the decision Sony has, and fire me the day I do. (via)
Thanks, Sony. I hope you lose a shitload of money on Blu-Ray.
Christ, it's hilarious to see Sony wringing its hands over its poor customers! These are the people who compromised 500,000 computer networks with their rootkits and spyware!
from espn.com's bill simmons:
One more thing ...
I found it fascinating that, in the same month that "Gridiron Gang" became the No. 1 movie, HBO ignored perpetually crummy ratings and renewed "The Wire" for a fifth and final season. After plowing through the first 37 episodes of "The Wire" in three weeks this summer, I agree with others who argue that it's the most important television show of all-time, surpassing even "The Sopranos" because of its ambition and social relevance. The "Sopranos" worked because the acting and writing was so exceptional, we found ourselves identifying with unlikable characters who were basically unredeemable (save for Tony's wife, his children and his therapist). We excused every horrible action because we grew to like these characters personally over the years. In real life, we probably wouldn't like any of them, and we would definitely be afraid of them. It's fantasy disguised as reality: Lose yourself in the show for an hour, digest it when it's over and move on to something else.
Well, there's nowhere to hide in "The Wire." The characters are stuck in Baltimore, a washed-up city ravaged by drugs, poverty and political corruption. Our closest thing to heroes are renegade detective Jimmy McNulty (a likable, hard-drinking iconoclast who disappears for much of Season 2 and becomes completely irrelevant in Season 4) and a gun-wielding nomad named Omar (a scarfaced Robin Hood, only if Robin Hood was gay and stole from drug dealers). We spend three full seasons watching Baltimore police break the city's biggest drug syndicate ... only to watch an angrier, more ruthless group of rival dealers immediately pop up in its place. The current season centers around four poor teenagers (all of them threatening to succumb to the drug lifestyle) and Baltimore's incompetent school system (which can't even begin to hope to save them), with the show elucidating in painstaking detail why these kids can't be salvaged: They have no role models and no chance to escape, and things will never change because the lead politicians and major police heads only care about themselves. There's no overall plan to save the city, no passionate leader on the horizon, nothing. All of it would take too much effort. Like a dead fish, Baltimore rots from the head down.
It's an exceptional show, and I'm not even sure "exceptional" is a strong enough word. Of course, barely anyone watches it. HBO deliberated over its renewal all summer until the gushing feedback for Season 4 left them no choice. Late to the party, I spent the past few weeks devouring the show, then the next week wondering what took everyone else so long to jump on the bandwagon, and more importantly, what took ME so long to jump on the bandwagon. Two weeks ago in this space, I explained how I'm one of those people who doesn't like when other people tell me, "YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS SHOW!" If anything, that makes me not want to watch it. I like to stumble across these things organically.
Now I'm wondering if I avoided "The Wire" because its central themes -- drugs, corruption, urban decay -- were realities that I simply wanted to ignore. Instead of being haunted by a show like this, it was easier and safer to skip it entirely. Most people feel this way, I'm guessing; it's the only conceivable reason why five times as many people would watch "The Sopranos" over a show that's better in every way. See, when most Americans dabble in inner-city TV shows or movies for our "taste" of street life, we're hoping for the Hollywood version. We don't want despair and decay, we want hope and triumph. We don't want the zero sum game of drug dealers killing each other, we want the Rock coaching juvie kids and turning their lives around in two hours. We want them to win the big football game, we want the movie to end, and we don't want to think about these people ever again.
That's the real reason why "Gridiron Gang" became the No. 1 movie last weekend, and that's the real reason why "The Wire" was barely renewed for a fifth season. Upon further review, maybe the problem isn't Hollywood after all.
ever hear people complain that media corporations are consolidating, and gaining strength, and that some of them are so powerful that they influence governments and policies and even what you think of what's going on in the world, because they have a lot of control over what you see and hear and experience? these fucking maniacs ramble on about how there are three companies in control of us all. dumbasses! there are six.
so busy as of late that i haven't kept up with posting or reading. i am swamped, officially, although it is paying off.
New York Magazine presents: What if 9/11 never happened? Not in the conspiracy sense, but in the history can go a million different ways sense. [via]
The US ranks among the lowest in the world in acceptance of evolution. Next you'll tell me that dinosaurs were real.
Fifteen of the most important websites of ALL TIME! I could quibble with some of this (like the implication that napster's current 500,000 paying subscribers have anything to do with its all-time relevance, or friendsreunited, which can't be that important since i've never heard of it), but it's a pretty solid list of the pretty solidly obvious. But man oh man, they're missing a huge one. If they only knew. [via]
Having worked in customer service (over email and a one-time phone call that ended with the other guy saying, "this game is the only fun i have in my life. please fix it"), I can sympathize with these guys. But I've also been the caller, haven't we all. [a different via]
no chance i can effectively comment on things like this right now, but i think about them. I need jobs that revolve around thinking through things like this. I've got one this summer but it's over in a week. [via]
i've always trusted the us news & world report college rankings, but i've read a couple of arguments against it lately - mostly here. similar to the above article about gaming digg, you can game the usn&wp as well. the washington monthly rankings take a different approach to college rankings. personal anecdote: i didn't take a friday class my junior or senior year of college. i later learned that the school had only in the last ten to fifteen years begun to have friday classes, as their existence - wait for it - factored into the algorithm.
this is sorta funny; i'm only linking to it cause a lot of people are ending up in new york these days.
a wifi router that includes 160 gig drive, itunes, bittorrent & ftp. i very rarely use bittorrents, but it strikes me as a huge leap forward. i see down the path to totally on-demand cable, where content comes from all over instead of through huge traffic, and you'll buy youtube videos for a penny (or a cool grand, following hyperinflation), sopranos episodes for 1 to watch or 3 to save, movies on similar prices, and you can manage what you want to pull down from the web from your pocket or laptop. hell, price could go up or down depending on how often you watch something. the point is, now that anyone can get or contribute content so, so easily, (insert your local cable provider/isp/cell phone service here) has less and less control over the market. my hope with net neutrality is that there now that we can bypass the "lay cable all the way around the world" phase with satellites, can't you see the harvards and stanfords, as well as the gates and bransons and buffetts of the world, fronting for a satellite to provide information to the people? i definitely can. hell of a tangent but something i've been wanting to write out for a while. carry on.
ben casnocha's observations on travelling and such. pretty amazing guy who's taking a year off between high school and college to travel. and he started his own company, about four years ago.
from get rich slowly, ten secrets of success by john paul getty.
ibid, how to raise a family on one income. unsuprisingly, many of the techniques for saving money are techniques for living sustainably.
and finally, how to protect your search information - i'm not sure there's an organization i like more than the electronic frontier foundation. [via]
This is a really, really pretty long essay about the experience of traveling abroad and reflecting on America, but it's really fucking good. Here's an excerpt, but you really should read it in context.
Only once have I let loose with this theory, because it's generally not my business. In Livingston, in a bar, one of my cobackpackers started up with the whole "I'm so glad to be away from all that shit, all that wholesale corporate shit, all that unthinking consumption, all that overly aggressive American culture, all that Bible thumping and fast food and 9-5" routine, and I was drunk and talky.
I set down my beer, and gestured for the guy to lean over.
"I've got a hunch about America, dude..."
"What's that?"
"...You're doing it wrong."
Divebars. Jukeboxes. Allen Iverson. Beerball. Super Mario Kart. NetFlix. LiveFuckingJournal. The way my girl looks in that skirt.
An aversion to whitehats and fast food might be a reason to leave the country, but it's no reason to bash it. To fail to find a place for yourself in the USA might be a failure of fucking imagination, but it ain't a failure of the culture to provide. I dunno... I've given up on thinking that I can really tell anyone else what should be going on in their head - but when I go from America to Guatemala to America to Guatemala, the virtues of our ways of doing things are pretty self-evident. Guatemala is a sucky place to be born. Without qualifiers. A lot of people come down here and backpack around and go back to the U.S. or Europe talking about what a great place Guatemala is, how nice the people are, whatever. They're wrong. I think they're even objectively wrong.
agency.com (a former employer) makes a video for subway; it is in fact lame. coudal submits an unsolicited response. this scares the hell out of me from ever wanting to work in such an environment.
anyway, i think the lesson is that there is no authenticity in advertising short of planting a video on someone unknowingly and waiting until they buy the product you're selling, and then proving that they like it. the second that lady starting talking about it is when the thing went south.
If you want to know about good music from the last thirty years or so and don't know where to begin, Brian Eno is about as good a starting point as you can find. I was searching for things by him at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz, CA, when I found this, and since it was a David Byrne project and I hadn't yet gone through the David Byrne Live experience that would somewhat ruin him for me, I picked it up. I loved it, but I really loved it when I found out it was made in 1981, and that it wasn't another take on sampling and ambient beats, it was the prototype (or one of them). Another album I could not put away for a long time.
Q: I have a new category called a "Gooden." Basically someone who
had an amazing 3-4 years and just got worse as time went on except this
person does not know it. I say this because I saw Britney Spears on
"The Today Show." Oh my; was it just a couple of years ago she was the
hottest female in all God's creation? She now looks like a very worn
Go-Go dancer in an afternoon dance who you look at and say "She must
have been hot when she started."
--Mike Dietrich, Old Bridge, N.J.
Q:
You (me, us) are all older, musically savvy types, always could spot a
pretender from the real thing (OK, alternative music snobs), never got
suckered in ... and yet, you still bought into the Counting Crows when
they burst upon the scene, thought that these guys actually were the
real thing and a possibly great group ... and the next thing you're
wondering [is] what the hell happened, and feeling slightly sheepish,
embarrassed that you professed believing in them. But that first album
is still great, and it still makes you wistfully recall those days.
Call it the "Counting Crows Corollary" -- what athletes out there
seemingly came out of nowhere, had an amazing first season or year, had
everyone believing the were the Second Coming real deal, and then just
imploded/revealed themselves to be nothing at all, leaving all to shake
their heads in befuddlement, yet still you can savor that magic season.
--Nick, Washington D.C.
SG: Did you ever think you would see two people separately use Dwight Gooden and the Counting Crows to come to the exact same conclusion? That was kinda cool. I love this job sometimes.
By the way, further down the page:
Hollinger needs to expand his horizons because the whole efficiency rating gimmick could work for just about every aspect of life: Amount of alcohol somebody drank over the course of a night; number of quality hookups; money spent on a woman versus the actual "return" on the investment; percentage of drunken eBay, Amazon and iTunes purchases versus sober ones; quality of sex scenes during a Skinemax movie; ability of someone to continually get friends to buy them drinks over a prolonged period of time by using a variety of excuses like, "I forgot to hit an ATM. Can you cover me?"
Simmons has mentioned this idea of lifestats before; I can honestly say I had it (or at least expressed it to myself) before he did. I wrote a post on teh old worldwideeyed.com site about this, and about how heaven was just a chance to look at your stats, understand where you really need to improve and what you do well, and you get back out there. But he has a national audience, and I don't.
