- How to use a French Press. “It’s important to add your coffee quickly after grinding – if you’re smelling aromas, it’s going stale.” CoffeeGeek is so cute.
- Holy crap people Jeff Bridges’ website!!
- “Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.”
- Chuck Klosterman got 96 Germans to write an essay about who their most influential American was to weed out which 20 would get to take a pop culture class he was teaching. “There was a female student who selected Jared Leto. I must admit — I did not see this one coming. He is perceived as a triple threat of acting, music, and environmental awareness (apparently, his tour bus runs on vegetable oil).”
- Better then the van lets you sign up to let broke ass bands on tour crash at your house. Joy.
- Songza lets you listen to any song anytime you want. Doesn’t work on my Firefox, but still great.
- My favorite new twitter feed: Captions from New Yorker cartoons without the cartoons.
- Some harsh words about Will Smith’s career. “Smith’s rules for how to be a global black superstar, then? 1. Keep it easy and breezy. Heroes must work for the good of the white folks (especially families and romantic pairings) in the movie, often to their own detriment.”
- Go play in graphic design traffic.
- “Never tell the hired gun that someone else has a bulletin, letter, memorandum, or document of any kind. You cannot possibly know this to be true, because the other person may have thrown it out since you last saw it. If you never saw it, then you did not know of its existence and cannot testify about your own knowledge. Don’t ever talk about a document unless you have the document in front of your eyes.” Actually, I have no idea what this is.
- Nobody wants to help me out.
- !!! (Via Keith Gessen’s blog, which is stuff about literary culture and photos of puppies and pretty great itself. Oh and who this person has a problem with. Too much internet, too little time.)
- On the internet you can buy yourself something to make you happy, like a picture of a flying car.
- So, Liz linked to FreeRice.com earlier this week, and the site seems like win-win for everybody, but I always get suspicious about stuff like this, so I poked around and found this. But still, right? Not only is it not completely credible, but even if true… well, I dunno.
- Six tips for designing your happiness commandments. I can’t believe I’m not grossed out by this.
- “. . . although it does not have law enforcement powers, TSA has begun issuing navy-blue uniforms and silver, cop-style badges. Not by accident, the badges look exactly like the kind worn by actual police officers. They say “U.S. Officer” at the top, with an eagle emblem in the center and “Transportation Security Administration” across the bottom. Not all law enforcement officials are happy.”
- Hey you people riding around the beach on squeaky bicycles: Lube that shit.
- Ted just posted a talk filmed in 2005: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration. This is interesting because a lot of the threads that Shirky ties together are pretty old hat at this point (e.g. flickr tags), but whether or not his grand conclusion works out is still a bit up in the air.
- Still Bored? Want something to unravel? Try this, but don’t expect to be enlightened at the end of it all.
OK, I’m going back to read what Gessen thinks of the word ‘twat.’
On freerice.com see snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/charity/freerice.asp
Emigre comlete set: $8,000. Worse, I actually contemplated asking the agency to buy it.
Oh, and about Will Smith. The Root is a multiple-personality blog and among its writers Dauphin wears the hater mantle. What he says about Hancock is ridiculous (BTW, spoiler alert, don’t read his article if you haven’t seen the movie), starting with the parallel with black athletes (nevermind that Bonds is in trouble not for being black but for, duh, taking steroids. So it’s Clemens who last time I checked is white) and continuing with the ridiculous assumptions about the Smith/Theron dynamic in the movie, assumptions anybody who has seen the movie knows they are false.
Dauphin doesn’t like that Smith is successful by being “too white”. But I suspect if there were calls were for Smith to become militantly black, he would be protesting that as well. There are people that delight in seeing the spectrum of racism at every turn for their own purposes. They don’t advance anything but their careers.
Miguel~ I saw that. BUT I’m not sure they address the issue that the article I linked brings up.
Alex~ I love a few of those fonts (the logos of both this site and CM came from typetease screen grabs), but the complete set? Some of that stuff is just ass.
There is a certain parallel between some African American analysis of culture/society and Marxist analysis of capitalism — you may not agree with its most extreme claims, but it raises many good issues, and in any case is an interesting ride to go on.
In the case of Will Smith, I think the real lesson is that you make $$$ by creating bland, inoffensive, predictable films. The stuff about Hancock sounded plausible, but then I haven’t seen the movie and have no interest.
I would argue, though, that occasional exposure to arguments like this is good medicine — there IS more then a grain of truth to the article, and people need to hear it articulated.
Some, but most of it is brilliant. I worshipped Emigre in college.
Re. Smith: I think the biggest problem is that it souunds “plausible” when it’s really a distortion of what the movie says —and it’s distorted to tint Smith with some kind of cynical racial awareness when the guy just wants to make money. (Before he was attacked for selling boatloads of “clean” rap). Whatever grains of truths Dauphin has get lost on the “too white” argument. Why does Smith have to behave any different than Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt just because he’s black?
BTW, there’s a link to an online version of “Parents just don’t understand” in my twitter feed in the footer.
“Distortion”? It read as an interpretation to me, but I guess an interpretation one disagrees with could be classified as a distortion.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I suspect that Dauphin would point out differences in the roles that Cruise et al have taken and those that Smith has taken, and point out the political implications of those differences.
I’m not saying that I follow his argument all the way, but I’m glad there’s someone out there trying these arguments out, because there often ARE racist practices in unexpected places, and having them pointed out is helpful.
AMERICA’S CHICKENS ARE COMING HOME TOROOST!!
The rents in this godforsaken town are prohibitive. Nevertheless, I’m staying.
It’s hard to tell you what’s distorted if you haven’t seen the movie or without giving spoilers, but I’ll say this: the “white PR guy” doesn’t force Hancock to apologize (he’s a very naive, idealistic PR guy whish is a fantasy), Hancock stint in jail is not “pro-forma” but deserved (and it says a lot about Dauphin that he thinks Vick is serving a pro-forma stint) and to see what happens between Hancock and Mary through a racial prism is to deliberately miss the premise of the movie by a mile. Most ridiculous of all is to say Hancock gets out of Dodge so that Mary and her hsuband can make “white babies”. If he doesn’t get out of Dodge, nobody is making any babies of any color.
This is “perhaps the most racially dishonest major American film of the last 20 years”? It’s a damn superhero fantasy. Change Smith for Cruise, nothing at all changes. It’s as ridiculous as claiming there is a racial subtext in “I am Legend” in which Smith’s black, brainy and brawny hero lays waste to all the pale zombies.
Dauphin wants so much to see racism that he’s painting Smith as an uncle Tom motivated by greed. Smith is not “keeping it real” (an old accusation), although I don’t know what would please Dauphin since he doesn’t like when Denzel kept it real in “Training Day” either. Maybe his ideal black movie superhero was Ice Cube in that XXX sequel.
This critique can only work for those who hasn’t seen the movie or those blinded by either black victim complex or white guilt. everybody else will be turned off, and what’s helpful about that? I’m a big fan of pointing out covert racism. I’m not a big fan of crying wolf for self-aggrandizement.
I saw Jeff Bridges a few years ago riding a bike outside the Public Theater in NY (he was wearing a murse), and so I online stalked him, and I found his website. It is THE BOMB. I can’t even tell you how much I love it. I think it’s on “my interests” on my My Space, really. I’m glad you found it and appreciated its beauty.
About FreeRice, I hope they give those poor bastards some food!
Alex~
I agree that pro forma stint re Vick is BS. That aside, I have no intention of seeing this movie, so the spoilers are irrelevant, but I can’t really address the “facts.”
I also can’t address how the movie would read with Tom Cruise in the role. But I DO think it’s a worthwhile exercise (since he’s arguably the biggest movie star in the world right now and the most successful african american actor in history) to look at the range of roles Will Smith has done and see what we can learn from it.
Liz~
The Dude abides. It really tied the room together. Fuck that other actor Jeff.
Ok. Also, would it bother you if FreeRice WAS giving poor bastards food, but and also somebody was making bucketloads of money and riding around in a porche?
Worthwile? Well, here’s what we can learn from it. He has done the kind of roles you have to do to become the most successful actor in the world. Biggest common denominator, tent pole material, created and marketed by first class professionals. That’s not Smith’s formula, that’s everybody’s formula. Smith just happens to pull it off very well and with more charisma than anybody else.
So when he does “Ali” it does’t make as much money as “Independence Day” and Dauphin assumes it’s because of race. That gives us an interesting parallel with Cruise, because Cruise also did “Collateral” with “Ali”‘s director, Michael Mann (incidentally a producer in “Hancock”) and “Collateral” didn’t do Cruise kind of bank neither. So is it race or simply the material? You could also look at it this way: “Ali” is Mann’s most profitable film. More than “Heat” and “Miami Vice”.
Anyway, I could go at this for hours and bore everybody stiff. One parting shot: the quote you pull is quite revealing. “Heroes must work for the good of the white folks (especially families and romantic pairings) in the movie, often to their own detriment.” Take away “white” and it’s the formula for EVERY HERO MOVIE EVER MADE. Who ever heard of a selfish hero?
Alesh-
I understand that people find issue with others profiting off of “do-gooder” endeavors, and I know that’s what that “investigation” site is about, but I have mixed feelings about it.
Look at me, I make my pathetic salary helping other people, like that dude, and I’m a little jealous and also impressed by this guy making millions feeding hungry people. Who knows, maybe he gives tons of his profit to charity or will use it to develop more do-gooder sites or something—- this would be the ethically sound thing to do. If he’s using it to lobby for off-shore drilling, then that sucks. However, no matter how much I want to, I can’t control how other people make their money nor how they spend it, otherwise I’d be very wealthy. I can only try to exercise some faith in humanity, and hope that if he’s feeding the hungry, he’s not the kinda guy that’s over-feeding his own ego/stomach. Ya know?
Alex~ Yah. I understand what you’re getting at, and I think most people would agree with you. And obviously Dauphin would still say there’s something you’re missing, but I’m not going to keep sticking up for him.
Liz~ I guess. They say that if he was serious about it he’d incorporate as a non-profit and report his income/expenses, but I agree that that’s not for everybody. Heck, google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, is a FOR-profit (supposedly because it allows them to support a wider range of good endeavors). I guess there’s room for all types.
The only effect I’d worry about a little is “I don’t need to make my donation to oxfam this year because I spent, like, hundreds of hours playing freerice.” Then again, I don’t think anyone who was giving to oxfam would really be susceptible to that type of thinking.