Random Olympic closing observations

In no particular order:

Whether you found the opening and closing ceremonies quirkily entertaining or insufferably pompous and my FBF's already know where I stand, the Brits did an amazingly good job.

Brit pop music rocks. It has from the '60's when I was a kid and still does. Continue to invade at will, lads and lasses.

I don't know how they did from a budgeting/profit/loss standpoint, but they pulled the games off without Chinese overkill and with no major delays, no scandals, NO TERRORISM and all in one of the world's largest, busiest, most diverse cities. Well done, London!

This (or something like it) is what Mitt Romney should have said, but we already know he's no statesman or spokesman for American anything. Whatever he was asked when he made his infamous comment, he should have realized that his job wasn't to consult as a former Olympic organizer, but as an American dignitary. The hubris of the man. Epic fail on his part. Mr. PM and Mr. Mayor of London--well-said sirs!

Annuals and Decimals--Notes on the Passing Decade

Sweet dreams are made of these

At age 10, I had a dream about my fifth grade class going on a field trip to the moon. I actually entered the gleaming rocket ship and settled into my launch chair, but I never made it. The nuns discovered I'd forgotten my lunch money, so I was kicked off the space ship and left behind. I'd never forgotten that dream, but the last place I expected to be reminded of it was at the premiere of "Tron" this week.

My 16 year old and I settled in for the trailers and I found myself watching this theatrical Kia Optima commercial: "Sweet Dreams"  with a mixture of joy, wonderment and the feeling expressed best by Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." It felt like some evil mf copywriter genius at Park Pictures reached inside my head, extracted the glowing filament that best distilled all my most cherished fantasies and unfulfilled dreams and splashed them on the screen with a tagline "No one ever dreamt of driving a midsized sedan… until now.” The boy driving his bed through his fantasies turned into a driving man who watches in awe as the rocket ship of his dreams lifts off into the cosmos. He's happy in his sleek midsized sedan, but to me, it seems like a poor consolation prize.

Chatter astride the Social Network Divide, Halloween Edition

c.010101 is in your "face" for Halloween

Today, folks my (middle) age are split right down the middle. Half are FB junkies, half are still poleaxed by the social networks, their triviality, their meteoric rise in popularity (in direct proportion to that triviality). To both halves, the haves, the have nots, the "likes" and the "like nots" this is my final apologia.

I like having a tab on my 16 year old son and knowing who his friends are through FB. I like catching up with my nephews in college and my own friends from 20-30 years ago. I like knowing that my brave friend MN is a master woodworker and though she has breast cancer I can "like" her post in which she tells all, that I can offer her support and encouragement along with dozens of others of her friends. I'm sure she'll carry a little positive buzz into her next chemo session. I love the rolicking political debates I have with farflung friends in FL, PA, CA and all over on issues as diverse as "the meaning of tolerance" "abortion" the "Tea Party." I like bating my old TU classmate who is both a Republican media consultant and though he might howl at the label, a closet liberal. One guy from FL has a real knack for throwing out a debate topic and watching people pounce all over it like wolves. This makes for lots of freewheeling intellectual interplay and just plain fun on a purely social level. If you post about what you had for lunch and that you're at work and bored, chances are I'm not going to care or answer you. It takes less than a second to engage or dismiss a trivial post, but for the rest of us, there is discourse, real intelligence out there. You don't have to look very hard for it. I have a wife, two tech-savvy boys, a business and a pretty active "non-virtual" social life.

I am done justifying the value of being an online social networker. I'm not turning into a socially maladjusted hermit for using it but you may be turning into a socially maladjusted hermit if you don't use it. Many people are saying that the social platform is rapidly becoming not just the next communications platform, but the next communications, computational do everything platform. So whatever you say about the intrusion of the media into our private lives, social media are/is here to stay and some of us have stopped puzzling over what it says about us (as a society) and started wondering what it says next.

Facebook needs some work as a "cloud ap." Doing some things on it still takes too much guesswork and clicking about. That's all about to make a radical leap.   


Form Factor Follies

From geek ...

Computers. We have always been slaves to their form factors. When I was a teen wolf, they were as big as libraries, and now you can slip one in your pocket and carry it everywhere. One of my standard jokes is that as a tween geek I always dreamed about owning a pocket computer and now that I have one (a 5 year old Palm Treo) I'm old enough to need glasses to read it it. The joke loses something without my scintillating delivery, but the Treo, mature tech, fits handily in my pocket. So the problem with mobile computing is no longer size, but two other issues. Better imaging and input. We've all seen people walking down the street staring and clicking away at tiny screens until they walk into walls or other people. They're mobile, but the tiny screen and finger input sucks. It requires that you absent yourself from your surroundings. In the case of texting and driving to disastrous results. Wearable, discrete, heads up displays built into glasses or contact lenses and corneal sensors and the next phase dataglove-finger/hand-whatever thingy sensors will solve this issue. That's just current/breaking tech. Who knows what kind of cool, weird body-integrated computing interface is being dreamed up by the bright boys and girls in Silicon Valley and MIT.  



To chic!



The form factor change of computers drives the very definition of "computer" and "computer user." It's changed and will continue to. Computers used to be computational devices. They solved mathematical problems. Like the payload to get men to the moon and back. Then they shrunk down onto people's desks and became personal problem solvers. Business machines. Users changed from scientist to teenagers. Now our personal communications machines are social machines. And they are rapidly becoming ubiquitously portable.

Here's what the next big leap will look like.

It's more of the same.

It's everwhere.

It's in your face, introducing ...

facespace-3D



FaceSpace 3D Live--What, you think it won't happen?

 Imagine, Facebook 3D and other non-virtual platforms where social networks run amock and becoming completely equally untethered and mobile. Whether I want to or not, I'll be wading through endless streams of social data. Ron in Florida is stirring up his conservative friends. My sister in Virginia is posting the Steelers jerseys she knitted for the lab puppies. Here in Philly, I take a moment and friend the Art Museum as I run up its steps and do my Rocky victory dance.

The Rocky Statue, already my friend, says, go ahead, friend both the museums too. When I get to the top, I'll let you all know. Heck. You'll all be watching. We'll share likes and posts from the restaurants, galleries, service stations and CVS's I pass on foot or you drive by in your car. You think we live in a media-cluttered world now. Man, just wait.

I don't know how I feel about that. Ten years from now, I'll no doubt be nostalgic for the relative simplicity of these our current times. That's just the way it works. We will all walk around endlessly distracted by our personal technology and our personal enviroment and its global extensions. Soon our environment and our technology will merge. And we will merge. I just hope I can keep up with all of it.

Off to get some Halloween candy with "Tween Wolf." Live from the trenches.

"Heirlooming" and the Family Network

Looking into the Future

A friend of mine in the biz sent the above link to a very interesting article by David Pogue, tech maven of The Times on the perils of "data rot" as they pertain, here to family videos.

Pogue writes:

As you may be aware, we're about to enter a whole new era of data rot, one of the biggest and most personal of all: consumer videotape is going away. At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, I was astounded to see that Canon, for example, has only one MiniDV (tape) camcorder model left—which hasn't been updated for several years. The other companies are following suit. It's all about built-in hard drives or memory cards now. That development hit me especially hard, because I've always loved documenting my family.

It got me thinking about the work I've done to establish our own clan's Family Media Network but as you can see, I take a different tack than Pogue. I've read his column and don’t always know what to make of him. If he’s such a tech maven, why should he be stymied by, or even surprised with the phasing out of tape as a storage medium? Tape? Take it from somebody who used to thread portapaks and 1” Ampex machines by hand with it. I won’t miss it!!!! No siree.

Wanna talk about classical media formats? Okay. I collected all my Dad’s super 8 films and Mom’s Bell and Howell projector to transfer my family’s heirlooms to Digital 8 and then from there, straight to the family network drive. Probably the same cheap 2Tb one that Pogue picked up. Last year, I picked up a BVU-800 for a $125 (on Ebay) last year to transfer the handful of ¾” projects I want to keep. I have a handful of portapak tapes, but most of those I’m sure I transferred to ¾” back in the 80’s. Mom just gave me 4 milkcrates with of 78’s from the 20's-40’s. Big Band and lots of RCA Victor classical pressings. Most of them pristine. Haven’t quite figured what I’m going to do with them yet, but my turntable is up and operating again after a 10 year hiatus. I've never had it on the '78 setting before, but it might be fun to rip some of that old wax to mp3.

Bennett interviewed my Dad about his mother over the phone for a school project. I have about 15 minutes of Dad reminiscing about his mother's anti-child labor marching days. This gem will be easy to deal with. I don't have to do anything. It's already an MP3 file.

Attack of the Insult Comics

Watching the kids watch shows like "America's Funniest Videos" with our newfound over the air broadcast TV; you realize how breathtakingly cruel and stupid people will be to each other to get a laugh. Parents will abuse their own children. Children their parents. And everybody turns on the animals. It's shocking. Disgusting. What does it say about us? Where are the light, naive days of "Candid Camera"? Certainly not in the opening of Sacha Baron Cohen's newest chien andalou. All the typical trots are trotted out against Cohen, but I take my own counsel. Most times I find him eerily repulsive. Except when he makes me laugh, which is more often than I'd care to admit, particularly with my teenage son present. The kids worship him without the reserve adults grit teeth over. And the grown ups, the people who should know better, just keep falling right down into his little nightmare hole, like flies to a Venus fly trap. They never emerge unscathed. It's funny as hell, if you can get past the fact that the anti-social behavior is neither real nor staged, but something grayer in between, the product of a very clever, but warped mind. So not surprising, that Ron Paul, and Boutros (Boutros) Boutros Ghali no particularly dim bulbs were stung by Mr. Cohen. In his Sixer's shirted Ali G guise, Cohen has nailed celebrities, newsmakers and world leaders of all stripes and subjected them to the most inarticulate outrageous bigoted abuse, disguised as interview journalism. When interviewed himself, as by Terry Gross a couple of years ago, he articulates a daring vision of comedy, a candid camera farce/assault for the digital age. As uncomfortable as his button pushing makes us, there are a couple of reasons at least to like this guy. He uses the media to tweak power and celebrity in ways we ourselves only wish to. He is this generation's Chaplin, a true subversive.

But you didn't hear me say that because I've been watching some of my must see TV away from the broadcast box. TG for Hulu. It enabled me after five years of delayed gratification, to fall hopelessly under the spell of a show I wasn’t even sure I’d like. I was fortunate enough to come well under Hulu’s June 14^th deadline and in a concerted three week marathon, went from Season 1 to Season 5 of FX's amazing "Rescue Me", starring Denis Leary, Callie Thorne and the luminous Andrea Roth. Never have a more compelling, ###'ed up group of characters inhabited the small screen. Mr. Leary and producer partner Peter Tolan have appropriated the tragedy of 9/11 and given it a human scale and trajectory through the lives and loves of the NYC firefighters of Truck 62, a group of, in the words of character Franco Riviera, “the brotherhood of dysfunctional action junkies.” The show is bracingly un-PC and with its "pinned to the edge" explicit depictions of all the darkest nooks and crannies of the human psyche, it must give even the liberal FX morality police agita. Janet Jackson got fined for a nipple slip. The FCC must be watching "Rescue Me" closer than I do. Hopefully, with a new administration, they have their own must see TV and will leave mine alone.

The leader of this pack of dogs is Tommy Gavin, as played by Mr. Leary. Turns out I had him all wrong. Leary and I are the same age. He’s the type of macho wiseass guy who picked on my type of guy as a kid. At the beginning of his career, it seemed he was just another insult comic, an indoor sunglasses wearing, sneer-faced, Dice-Clay cloned Mick comic more known for profanity- drenched humor than serious work. IMH. Oh, but in “Rescue Me” his ghosts and demons leap, dance and blaze all over the screen and it is absolutely gut-wrenching and mesmerizing. Like watching luxury cars crash in slow motion.

Wherever he goes, whether to the firehouse, his own uneasy bed, or the kitchen of his lover, Leary’s Gavin lugs his Marleyesque purgatory train, the visible, trash talking, punch throwing ghosts of Jesus, his dead cousin, brother and father as well as civilian others who've perished in flames Tommy has fought with so little regard for his own life. At first I thought the device a little obvious, but I soon realized that Tommy’s ghosts are Leary’s first clue that his asshole alpha stud puppy alter ego is human, sympathetic and far frailer than maybe even the talented Mr. Leary is willing to concede.

Tommy's on again, off again, on again affair with the bottle is one only an AA lifer could fully conceptualize. You feel the burning ache of his thirst in the back of your own throat as he contemplates a fifth of vodka, pours the tumbler, raises it, sets it down, raises it again, all the while screaming "Don't do it Tommy boy!" Still the guy is an asshole and his own worst enemy. He is a mysogynist. He burns all his bridges, buys his kids' love with money and undermines everybody who cares for him. What a paradox! I care so deeply for him and his whole band of merry misfits. ( I hope he never finds out!) I love when a character, through the integrity of the writing, rises from the table, like Frankenstein’s monster, a creature far greater than the sum of his parts. Denis, I hardly knew ye. But man, am I impressed!

Unlike Leary, Callie Thorne is an actress whose career I have followed for decades, before she played long-suffering Elena McNulty, wife to serial destructo boy detective Jimmy McNulty on HBO’s critically heralded “The Wire” and before that, Det. Laura Ballard on NBC’s amazing six year, ‘90’s-era “Homicide, Life on the Streets.” With her trademark sexy vulnerability and toughness, she stole scenes, shone in these relatively minor roles, playing second fiddle to bigger names and storylines. In every role she plays, you feel her absences from the screen like gravity and wait impatiently for her return.

Mr. Leary, to his eminent credit, understands this. He trained the spotlight and let slip the leash that other directors and writers have restrained the incredibly talented Ms. Thorne with and she leaps to deliver, oh God does she deliver as Sheila, the predatory, over-the-top, head-case, pill-popping, sex-starved, Tommy-loving widow of Gavin clan cousin, Jimmy Keefe, the firefighter who died in the second WTC tower’s collapse. In bed, in a chair, on a table, on the floor, she is every bit Leary’s femme foil and like him, displays no fear in her exploration of desire and fallibility. I can’t take my eyes off her. I would give body parts to watch Thorne and Leary rehearse. I think I'd finally truly get the writer/actor connection.

They are as unlikable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

They are as lovable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

I now wait with bated breath, hook and ladder, for Wednesday early, early mornings, when the previous week’s show is posted by FX after an agonizing eight day delay.

Another Hulu offering I didn’t think I’d warm to is Showtime’s “Dead Like Me” which I assumed would be yet another death-trip rip-off of HBO’s wildly popular “Six Feet Under.” Again, I got it wrong and I happily report I’m in love with 28 year Ellen Muth, who plays, no carries the show, as pug-faced, saucer-eyed 19 year old Georgia, a college drop-out office drone who is freakishly and summarily dispatched by a Russian space station toilet seat turned fiery reentry debris. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, instead of meeting her eternal reward, the unfinished George, aka "Toilet Seat Girl" is pressed reluctantly into yet another dead end job as an undead case worker, a grim reaper who harvests the souls of the living, seconds before their often gory denouements. The reaper squad receives daily assignments from the bureaucracy of death, but no pay or expense account for their grim but merciful tasks. So they must resort to some sordid and hilarious scavenging to keep it going 9-5 in the land of the living. Clever, though the writing isn't yet near as crisp or insightful as "6 Feet," yet it has its moments and the camera loves Muth. With her rolling eyes, deadpan voiceovers and fixed scowl turned smile; she outshines even thespier thesps Mandy Patinkin and Jasmine Guy, episode after episode. Watch this dead little lady rise like a phoenix.

It’s shows like these that make the last two decades the true golden era of the little screen. As long as talented writers and actors are allowed to parade and exorcise their demons on the little box, I will keep watching, far into the night, cheating sleep and drawing inspiration as I seek out the clues and tools for mining the veins buried deep in my own dark writer's heart. Television drama, written by writers, acted by actors, like reality, only better.

I want my DTV?

For those of us who have neither cable or satellite TV, a transformation has come that the rest of you might have missed. On June 12, the old NTSC (never twice the same color) signal disappeared, though not completely and the new digital signal, DTV, (http://www.dtv.gov/) took its place. A handful of networks (NBC and CBS among others) jumped on the bandwagon early, but for the most part, the full force of change wasn't apparent until I rescanned the tuner of the Pioneer DVD-RW-VHS machine I'd bought six months ago and to its glory it added nearly all the new channels. 3-1, 6-1,6-2,6-3, 7 (low power signal), 10 1-3, 12 1-7, 17-1,2, 29-1, my new favorite Mind TV 35 1-3 and on and on ... at least twelve more channels.

I put it to you, does anybody really need more TV than that?

And it's a high def signal that looks great on my $127 Sanyo 27" TV. It sounds great on my home audio system. This is in the same bandwidth that the old signal occupied and is incredible compared to what we used to get before cable came. Which was nada, zilch, crappo. Down the hill in the city, with poor line of sight to the Roxboro transmission towers, our reception historically sucked. We pulled in ghosted, fuzzy 10 and 12 on good days and a few of the UHF channels. When cable came on the horizon, I was an advocate. Literally. Back in the early 90's I sat on a City Council public access advisory sub-committee that worked to bring cable to Philadelphia and true public access to cable. Well, it half worked, considering that 15 years later, the house that Comcast built is the tallest building in Philadelphia and the largest cable provider in the country, while a new public access movement is still struggling to democratize the media. Good luck.

Cable. Sure, we enjoyed it for awhile, though it never had the range of programming choices and signal quality it claimed it would and I expected it to. And cable companies have never been known for their service ethic. Ancient history. To pinch pennies, I took back the $90/month box back over two years ago and never looked back. The financial savings were only part of the picture. Son 1 started a new comic strip. Son 2 took up piano. Mrs. W devours novels and I read to my sons and ... I write. More and better than ever before. I did it for the money. I did it for the family and our lifestyle. I did it for dinner conversation and the young minds. I did it for myself.

I go to dinner parties, tell friends this story, thinking I'm very out there and instead run into others, yes, even media types, who say yeah, me too; I gave up cable and never looked back. My solo back to basic protest is more like an underground movement. But don't feel sorry for us. We're not exactly sewing our own clothes and working by candlelight here. More like we're burning up the DSL line. Today, I'm ordering a Roku box and we'll be watching 500 films in my queue on Netflix "watch now" films. There are 49,500 more videos that I haven't found yet. I found Hulu and Amazon Videos on demand. I had a short dalliance with Graboid. Again, how much more do you need than that?

But back to basics. With the goofy antenna we have that looks like a Star Wars radar device we get strong, clear HD station signals, though positioning is important and sometimes we see digital lag and dropout especially during storms. But the most important thing is that we get it all free. We went from weak to no signals to clean, snow/noise-free terrestrial transmission. Yee haw. By the way. We are watching more TV since the switchover. The young people particularly, with summer upon us, must be poked and prodded to turn off the computer and TV and read or go play in the street. I too am not immune to the 'lure of the box.

I'm witnessing traditional terrestrial TV reinvented. For somebody who makes his living writing video, who has studied television from the days of Vladimir Zworkin, it's beyond cool, but it's not the only game in town. FIOS will probably obsolesce my current setup when we can get it. Which we will eventually, but can't yet.

True story.

For some inexplicable reason our leafy upscale little urban neighborhood 15 or so blocks from the old Bell of PA headquarters, can't get FIOS on some blocks. The guy up the street got so pissed because they kept him on a phone a half hour waiting to hear the news I could've told him. Nope, no fiberoptic cable here. Not yet. After waiting so long, since 1996 in fact, when Bell of PA first promised what they then unglamorously called "fiber to the curb," I'm in no hurry anymore. Funny, but 500 channels of nothing, which my parents in Pittsburgh have, is mind numbing. 50 channels of nothing is something. Something better. Something more manageable. A leap from far too much to more than enough. True innovation.

Can't forget the net. Which we all know changed everything. Lots of television to watch out there, including my current favorite. More on that later. Television has decided to grow up. In some ways it's too late. We’ve moved on. Sort of. But we're still grateful and still watching. Maybe with a little more selectivity. But we're watching. And that's the way it is.

Late to the gate?

A Trident Production

Day 1. Take 2. I blog, therefore I am. After casting about for a more lightweight, contemporary version of my dormant digital zine, the blogging craze finally connected with the simian steno pool at Trident Central. From the beginning, I struggled with the layout, time and list management demands of the monthly newsletter model which ceased to make sense long ago even though friends and colleagues know I've always had plenty to write about life as a conspicuous consumer and producer of big and small M media.

Well c.010101 is back and marches right into the fray of politicos, eroticos, scribes and pharisees who blog away at the drop of whatever they're droppin'. I like the spontaneity, interactivity and sense of community the better blogs cultivate. Heck, in some countries, you can get five years in jail for doing this. There must be something to it. I promised many moons ago, with c.010101's maiden issue, never to bore faithful readers, a promise reiterated here, to those who reward this post with a click. To paraphrase a more self-important media outlet's tagline, (I don't have voiceclips so you'll have to imagine the velvet JE Jones VO here) -- you give me a handful of minutes and I'll give you the world. Or at least a piece of it that we both care about.

yours in the faith,
-@v@- rick