I logged in today and was checking my Facebook homepage, browsing around like I usually do when drinking coffee in the a-m. With the sight of my homepage still fresh in my mind, I got up, and returned a short while later to see that my friend count had dropped by one.

As I prayed that no one else would notice, it gave me pause. Who were you, my friend, and how did our kindred spirit evaporate like a water drop on the surface of the sun?

There is an outside chance that I may have once even sent you a personal message. Maybe when I was so enamored with the new platform and added 80% of my high school graduating class. I believe it said “Hey! Long time no see!”

Or perhaps it was when you first joined, and both Lady Luck and Chance conspired to reunite two people who had emailed about your Coachella tickets two years ago…Gmail Contacts preserving that fated encounter and Facebook’s contacts crawler rekindling the flame.

Either way, something was there.  A missed chance at a perfectly non-invasive WordScraper relationship.  Something squashed as a caterpillar before the beautiful butterfly could emerge.

And with such a bond shattered, such a momentous, profound connection, so as to call someone “Friend,” laid to waste in a callous maneuver of cyberspace passive-aggression, I came to grips with being Facedissed.

A term brutal in its irony because the entire act could not have been more impersonal.

Perhaps we will meet again.  Perhaps not.  I know now, however, that when I spent 28 minutes thinking of the perfectly deep yet cool yet cleverly pop-culture or current-events-rooted status message, I am writing my daily magnum opus for one less set of eyes.  *single tear*

I can’t help but get agitated when superficial comedies such as The House Bunny rake in over twenty-seven million dollars in a span of two weeks at the box office, while a handful of award-winning, low-budget indie films make it to theaters, but remain under the radar of the movie-going public. Such is the case for American Teen, the latest documentary from Academy Award nominated director, Nanette Burstein.

The film follows four stereotypical, small-town Indiana teens — the jock, the geek, the rebel, and the princess — as they endure the highs and lows of their final year of high school. The premise of the film is nothing novel — we’ve all endured the angst and agony of growing into “our own” at the tail end of our teenage years (and some of us in our twenties still haven’t found “our own” in this big, blurry world) — but the universality of the experience, despite the changing backdrop of the times, makes this film relevant today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

And let’s be honest: Who isn’t intrigued by teenagers these days?

Despite heartbreaking moments when the acne-afflicted, gamer geek gets dissed by the gal of his liking, or maddening moments when the princess needs a rude awakening but instead gets . . . whatever she wants, there are those genuinely amusing moments that any Hollywood script would overlook — such as the time the geek gets dumped, briefly rests his head on a public table, and then comments to his ex on the greasy residue that his face leaves behind when he returns to an upright position. So awkward and yet so real.

There are also those surprisingly profound insights that arise out of the rambling of these kids from time-to-time — such as the time the jock realizes that heroes can only be heroes in the company of others. Or the time the princess realizes that toilet paper is probably not the best way to settle the score with someone. (In her world, this is profound.)

The bottom line: American Teen is nothing new, but it’s still something. Go see for yourself.

Still need persuading? Get a preview here:

Via Defamer.com

If hipsters watched sports, then 8/8/08 at the La Brea Tar Pits could fittingly be their Olympic Opening Ceremony. Fedoras, v-necks and leggings instead of foam fingers and team jerseys. Apathy and judgment instead of bros and enthusiasm.

Common denominator? Beer and fantastically embarrassing dancing. Japanese noise rock deities, Boredoms, together for over 22 years, headed by the fabulous 44-year-old Yamantaka Eye, continued with their second annual festival of drum-tastic noisegasm. The concert smashed the clock at 8:08 PM local time and featured 88 drummers selected by the Boredoms and Hisham Bharoocha, a drummer in his own right. While Eye took reign over LA’s crown, New York’s Gang Gang Dance led an identical concert in the Big Apple on the same night. With over 73 local L.A. percussions recruited, musical professionals included the asinine Brendan Fowler from BARR, Paul Quattrone from !!!, Yoshi Nakamoto from The Aislers Set and Sarah Anderson from Lucky Dragons. The night was awessomeeeeeeeeeee.

As Aaron Sperske, of the recently reunited L.A. psych-country group Beachwood Sparks, was quoted in the LA Times about the show (yeah dood, the Times covered it. With 15% editorial newsroom cuts, glad to know they’re hitting the important stuff)…

“It was a little chaotic, but they wanted chaos…It was about one-third drummers and two-thirds people who knew how to play drums. If this were a summer camp, you could already see who would hang and who would be left out. It’d be like ‘Meatballs.’”

Feel like you were there.

As if saying good-bye to one of the Original Kings of Comedy wasn’t hard enough over the weekend, Isaac Hayes died at the age of 65 yesterday, depriving us of one of the original kings of funk, R&B, and soul music. He collapsed on a treadmill and at this point, the cause of death is still unknown.

As someone too young to fully appreciate Isaac Hayes through memories of when he was first dropping cuts like the insanely popular (and Oscar-winning) theme song from Shaft, my musical sensibilities are developed enough to know that another perpetrator of old-school musical ingenue has passed. Someone who set the stage for so much of the music that is being reworked, re-sampled, mashed-up and re-spun as live performance by any Danger Mouse or Girl Talk wannabe with a Macbook.

Of course, I am intimately familiar with his work as Chef on South Park, and his decision to leave the show in 2006 after they skewered his religion of choice, Scientology.

When a cultural icon like Hayes passes away, however, there is no room for politicizing. Regardless of how you feel about Scientology or those who practice it, watch the video above and tell me that Hayes wasn’t a man who ushered in the modern era of cool.

Oh so sad. I have a special bond with Bernie Mac. Of course, he didn’t know I existed, but in the last year in NYC when I defiantly hung up my nightlife hat, I celebrated the freedom of not having to be in a club by staying home and watching the same five TV shows every night, all of them reruns of shows that were big in the 90s and early 2000s, that because I was too busy going out to see them, I missed them all. One of those shows was “The Bernie Mac Show,” which was on between “Sex and the City” and “Friends.” The other option during this time was “Seinfeld” and I had enough of New Yorkers. So I watched the Mac.

I thought he was hilarious and the very idea of such a bad ass starring in a “Father’s Knows Best” scenario tickled me. My favorite episode is the one where he was set to go to his big annual Vegas vacation with his boys and one of his friends got sick, so the Mac banned him and took major preventative action. But then, his adopted daughter (”Baby Girl”) had a birthday party, and one of the kids was sick at the party and in response, he turned into an OCD freak, washing his hands, and wearing a mask, even when his own kids caught the bug, he stayed locked in the room, spraying air freshener around. The kicker was at the end, when he was up late and wanted something to eat and remembered there was some birthday cake left in the fridge. So like a little  kid, he tiptoes over and eats some, only not realizing that the cake had kids germs all over it and the next morning he was illin’ and couldn’t go to Vegas and his family basically went, “Neener, neener, neener.” I know this sounds ridiculous but it was pretty funny.

I also loved the ep called “The Incredible Hulk,” where Bernie gets a card to a Costco -like store and starts going every day to get more stuff, until he finally runs out of space. As someone with a Staples/Ikea/Bed Bath and Beyond addiction, I could sympathize.

I loved when he would push the boundaries that were normal for a sitcom—like the one show where he keeps getting busted for using euphemisms with Baby Girl, such as, “I’m gonna kick your ass!” which would get him a scolding by the uptight school teachers and social workers every time he “got out of line”—or in other words, was classic Mac. That’s the same episode he told his wife to keep an eye on the kids for running up the phone bill. “Yeah, but she think we’re old country club rich—old money rich. Shoot, we just nigger rich.” OMG, I almost fell out of my chair when he said that.

RIP Mac. Sorry to to see you go.

Bernie Mac Is Dead, Publicist Says - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com.

Thumbnail Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/people/72787140@N

Confession: I have been a Getting Things Done addict for a while. I read the book and have tried to follow some of David Allen’s rules of organizing. Sometimes, it works, sometimes it doesn’t. However, what it does allow for is procrastination that feels very worthwhile. Call it Not Getting Things Done. I am what you call a GTD hobbyist. This is someone who spends inordinate hours messing around with the various GTD applications on the web. Because I am a MAC user, this means I can’t use Outlook, as Lifehacker has suggested in this post. I can, however, use Entourage, but after I had spent several months converting everything over to Entourage, getting my calendar and contacts synced, I was forced to quit when my database became corrupted.

Though, I like the concept of simple pen and paper, I don’t like rewriting stuff that needs to get carried over to the next day, and reorganizing the list. Yes, I know, this post is unbelievably geeky. Hold on, it’s about to get worse.

I really like Actiontastic, a really bare bones application, but didn’t like that it didn’t print out. Also, the creator hasn’t updated the application in a looooong time. But it was great to use with Quicksilver, another really geeky third-party app that’s designed to make your life easier.

So, I turned to IGTD, which is my current app. This too, hasn’t been updated in a while, and tends to be buggy and a bit complex. Also, not one of my emails to the developer were ever returned. However, it syncs to mac mail and Mailtags (I know! I might as well just stick a pile of pens in my pocket and write “Dork” on my forehead), and iCal, which in turn syncs to your phone. And it prints out.

But in my quest for collecting all ideas and notes to self, I tried out a few others: Evernote is pretty full featured, and there’s also the fast-and-loose idea grabber called Shovebox. I can’t figure out how to set keystrokes to Evernote to capture a webpage that I might want to blog about later (which I can do on iGTD), so I don’t think this will work. Still fiddling, though. Dejumble lets you add tasks pretty easily, but it doesn’t let you change iCal tasks, which is a downer. It has a nice onscreen display but if you have several different calendar working as “contexts,” you have to sync and print them one by one. Verdict’s still out on that one.

There are a couple of online-only apps that people like. I’m not a fan of those simply because of the lack of syncing and integration with mail. I tried Remember the Milk which was pretty and easy to use but want hardware syncing abilities and again abilities to add emails from mailtags directly into the application. Ditto with ToDoIst. I’ve never tried Toodledo but this is another online app that people are fans of. I should note that most of these apps are free or relatively cheap, but the most full-featured GTD app, Omnifocus, is also the most expensive at a whopping $79.95. However, it does all the things you want it to do—the main downside is that it’s almost too complete and you can feel overwhelmed when using it.

Another similar, full-featured app is Things. It’s in beta mode and will eventually cost $49. It syncs nicely with your iPhone, uses tagging technology, and looks and works a bit like a more sophisticated version of Actiontastic. Journler is another full-featured app, but I haven’t really gotten
around to taking it for a full-spin. It allows you save web pages,
photos, and links. It’s relatively cheap.

A pared-down simple text app is Task Paper. At $18.95, it’s a bit overpriced, however, for those who want to use pen and paper but have crappy handwriting like me, it’s a nice app. It’s made by the people who created one of the most awesome writing tools of all time, WriteRoom.

However, the downside with trying out all the fantastic apps, is that you spend more time planning how you’re gonna get things done than actually getting anything done.

So CBS is reporting today that it might be too early to really scrape any bit of substantial information from the horserace polls emerging on the hour every hour (ironic, considering the MSM is typically the sole propagator of such polls in the first place).

Setting the horserace dilemma aside, traditional polling completely misses potential voters who pass on landlines (read: young people and Latinos, two of the fastest-growing voter demographic pools this cycle). A Pew study released this summer says that passing over the 14.5 percent of Americans rely solely on their mobile doesn’t really make a difference, but we’d like to point out that less than 10 percent of Pew’s respondents were cell phone-only users… how’s that for skewed data?  For a complete dissection of The Great Cellular Overlook, check this out.

In any case, the ever-astute New Yorker has this deliciously funny scoop on who’s up and who’s down and why it really does(n’t) matter.

Grace Jones is releasing her first album in 18 years, called Hurricane. This is the first single, “Corporate Cannibal.” What was that about mellowing with age?

Grace Jones - Corporate Cannibal

Since Mad Men’s rocket launch to Must See T.V. status, everyone’s suddenly all interested in the ad industry. I hear questions like these all the time:

• “Do you guys really drink all the time?” (see this Gawker post for more on that – the first agency mentioned is mine)
• “Are the guys really that bad?” (in the ad agency of 2008, everyone’s that bad)
• “Do you really have that much fun?” (well, to answer your question, we have a jumping contest today from 1-4pm in the 15th floor “Jumpatorium”)
• “Are your co-workers really that clever?” (a whole-hearted head nod YES)
• “Who is the Don Draper at your agency? Can you give him my number?” (we’ve got a Draper or two, and I’ll see what I can do)

And then there’s the fashion. Sure, a few creatives sport fedoras, awesome button down/blazer combos and daring hair color choices. But to be honest, our everyday outfits pale in comparison to what you see on Mad Men.

American Copywriter thinks the sleek and sexy will make a comeback in the modern agency. While I could imagine a male creative perhaps pulling on a suit for a pitch (maybe), I highly doubt they’ll be a drastic change in daily ad man fashion. A pity, really, because a man with a sharp suit and a vision can sell virtually anything.

And as for the women? Joan-chic… that has a nice ring to it.

Originally posted at CheapThrills.

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Beet.tv has Steve Grove, the head honcho for news and politics at YouTube, discuss the internet video giant’s new speech-to-text functionality.  Just like we do at the bottom of our posts and YouTubers do when they upload videos, content is tagged to provide a shortlist of terms (called metadata) that search engines will see first.  Match the combo of search terms with the tag combo and what you’re looking for is likely to be the first result returned in Google.

With YouTube’s new technology, however, a computer is able to analyze the entire text of a video - like a political speech -  and submit all of it as metadata, making any portion of a speech highly searchable through their YouChoose site.

Adobe is also said to be working on the same technology for Flash.  Put it all together and you’ll be able to pinpoint any phrase in almost any video anywhere on the net.  Daaamn.

Harlem-based rapper Immortal Technique has always bucked the system - he’s turned down record contracts to have complete control of his musical output; he’s fearlessly recorded overtly political tracks “Bin Laden” and “Impeach the President” in a paranoid, post 9-11 world; and he’s released an almost 10-minute-long, gritty, urban rise-and-fall narrative set to a Beethoven piano riff (the epic “Dance With the Devil”).

On his new record, The 3RD World, he returns with his signature blend of sociopolitical fire-branded lyrics and stripped-down beats.  DJ Green Lantern adds some production flair not found on Revolutionary Vols. 1 and 2, but his work is never ostentatious, letting Immortal’s words remain front and center.

“Locked and loaded / muthafucka, you should know it” is how he finishes “Death March,” the first track, inciting all the revolutionaries to buck the system with him or die in lockstep.  And for the next fifteen songs, he proceeds to spit hollow-point rhymes that enter your skull innocuously but leave gaping exit wounds as your grey matter breaks them down.

They are ruthless in the images they paint, unrelenting in the subject matter they touch upon.  Other rappers put on a persona, try to sound angry.  This man has real baggage. Not a Louis Vuitton matching set; this is the beat-up leather trunk that brings three generations into America, looking for opportunity, only to find exploitation.  This man sounds straight pissed.

In his gruff, Latin twang, he can indict capitalism (“fuck your private jet, nigga / we shootin, that shit down), invoke the Bible, (I play the role of Abraham / idols get ripped down), and threaten the establishment with his own personal global warming (melt the ice caps / and make all of this shit brown) - all in one verse.

Many rappers talk about dropping knowledge, but how many are actually able to do it?  Only a few come to mind; Immortal Technique is more down-and-dirty than Mos Def and more scathing than Black Thought. He schools his listeners in gentrification, the diamond trade, and corrupt Republicans.

In “Harlem Renaissance,” he describes gentrification as “trying to put the Virgin Mary through an early menopause,” claiming that the hood is being “ethnically cleansed, economically.”  “Lick Shots” takes a few at Scooter Libby, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter, to name a few.

In “The 3rd World,” he says “I’m from where the gold and diamonds are ripped from the earth.”  Or “where they lost the true meaning of the Koran / because heroin is not compatible with Islam,” talking about poppy fields in Afghanistan.  Or he’s “from the only place where democracy is acceptable / is if America’s candidate is electable.”

The worldview is that of an enraged Puerto Rican, who is able to step in and out of character—much like Eminem—while portraying the demons he’s skewering. Though the transitions can be confusing to the casual listener, put in the time and you’ll be drawn into his lyrical angst. The 3RD World is a record that’s everything a good, politically-charged hip-hop album should be:  an angry, socially-conscious, neck-snapping, tour de force.

Immortal Technique - Harlem Renaissance

Immortal Technique - Lick Shots

Immortal Technique - The 3rd World

Those of you who are tired of Google, have a brand spanking new alternative search engine to play with, called Cuil (pronounced kewl). Its designers are ex-Google employees who left the company a few years ago when they realized that Google, for all its innovation and invention, was pretty rigid in terms of how it approached its hallmark product, the search engine. Co-founder Anna Patterson told the AP Press: “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

How does Cuil look? Pretty cool. (Really, really trying hard not to overdo the puns today! Obv. not working.) The entry page is all black with a little search bar tilted just to the left of the center of the page. The results are indeed very visual. There are pictures and full paragraphs are extrapolated for a glance-through. However, as others have already noted, part of Google’s dominance is due to its been-around-the-block status. Searches get more accurate the more people use a search engine.

I took the two for a test-drive. First up, googling and cuiling (?) myself. (But, of course.)

---

There are 18,332 results for me. Yay! However, the first page of results only shows a random collection of my columns from my time at the Village Voice and a few Gawker-related posts. It doesn’t show my homepage, or other, more bio-type, newsy announcements on Citysearch. Even though, I’ve only been here less than a week, Google’s got my connection to Pop + Politics on the first page, and Cuil doesn’t.

I am not sure if this is just a result of the fact that Cuil is a day old, or if it’s just broken. Time will tell.

Second attempt. I typed in “Tim Kaine gay marriage” into both search engines. I was trying to locate the news that Kaine is actually not for gay marriage at all, even though he opposed an anti-gay marriage amendment on the basis that it was too broad and could also hurt innocent, straight people. In this, Cuil was a bit more useful. There was one entry high up on the page that clearly stated his opinion, whereas I searched Google through pages and pages to weed out this basic fact.

So far, the Internets are not very impressed.

Googling is going to be a hard habit to break: I realized after after I wrote the post, that I had used Google, not Cuil, to search for news articles on the start-up. Not cuil.

Like Harvey Dent’s gruesome alter ego in the second half of the film, The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s second installment of the franchise that shares its titular character’s uncanny resilience, has something of a split personality.  On one side are the script, a stiff Christian Bale, and three under-utilized iconic actors of their time.  On the other are the action, the set pieces, and an absurdly engrossing, scene-chewing Heath Ledger.

When the Joker is off the screen, the movie is rigid and without the gritty edge that made Batman Begins so enthralling (and refreshing amid a gaggle of cartoony comic book reprises).  The lines fall flat, sometimes reminiscent of even the ghastly Schumacher treatments the franchise received in the 90’s.  Batman Begins succeeded because it took itself seriously as a film, side-stepping the pitfalls of the comic book medium while still showing the utmost respect for its source material.

At times, The Dark Knight comes off as another victim of sequelitis: a studio throws $180 million in the follow-up to a hugely successful first film and waters it down to secure a hefty return on their investment.  The dialogue, especially the first half an hour, is stilted and too expository.

Luckily, the film completely transforms and exceeds the original every second Heather Ledger is on-screen (and he’s there a lot).

It’s as if the scenes with the Joker were written in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the script, incubated in the same acid bath of edginess that spawned the first film.  Where Jack Nicholson’s Joker was a Buster-Keaton-on-shrooms caricature, Ledger hones in on a truly psychopathic core that implausibly sidesteps the typical machinations and hyperbole of big screen bad guys.

Ledger completely disappears, leaving a raw, unpredictable force of evil on the screen.  Like Daniel Day Lewis or co-star Gary Oldman’s classic performances, nuance pushes it over the edge of greatness. Gleefully hanging out the window of a taxi, relishing his escape from police custody, with no natural sound, just an eerie fluorescent hum to compliment the bombast on screen.  A simple delivery of the word “Hi” while in a nurse’s outfit and a wig.   A slithering, menacing prance around Rachel, chewing the scenery and sporting a knife (best scene of the movie).  Ledger’s cadence, his intonations, and the impeccably crude make-up job all combine to create one of the most perfect movie villains ever.  Ever ever ever.

So much so that he does more than save the movie.  He elevates it to probably the best one I’ve seen this summer.  He’s that effing good.  Behind this epic performance are some clever (and subtly written) motivations.  The variations on the story of how he got his scars.  His monologue after Harvey Dent (Eckhart) undergoes the Two Face transformation (“I’m just a dog chasing cars…an agent of chaos”).  The conversation with Batman while dangling upside down in the finale (“This is what happens when an unstoppable force slams into an immovable object”).  Brilliantly written.  Brilliantly acted.

It would be doing the film a disservice to not credit the action, set pieces, effects, and stunts as well. The semi truck and motorcycle sequence in downtown, Batman’s capture of the mob’s moneyman, and the Joker’s reacquisition of the same moneyman (and subsequent demolition of several large buildings) are all mind-blowing.  No frills, no lame-o curved bullets, just straightforward, badass action.

At the same time, to let Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Gary Oldman essentially go to waste as window-dressing characters - vehicles to either advance the plot or deliver information to the audience - is painful to watch.  Bale is one of the better young actors of this generation but is vacant of the complexity that was so painstakingly developed in Batman Begins.  Gyllenhaal and Eckhart have some meatier roles, but they just don’t say much of interest.

The relationship between Batman, Joker, and Gotham is where they stashed all the heady stuff.  The motif of duality and the blurred lines of good and evil are rampant throughout the film.  Comm. Gordon (Oldman) repeats one line about how Batman redefined himself as a hero to Gotham several times.  The coin-flipping Dent muses that you “either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”  And the Joker is consistently identifying himself through Batman, the ying to his yang.

These thematic elements are reasonably well fleshed-out, but they remain shackled by clunky dialogue and Bale’s exaggerated rasp while speaking as Batman.  Both pulled me straight out of the film several times.  Thankfully, Ledger came back on to draw me back in with each maniacal lick of his lips.

Though it’s a comic book movie, I walked away thinking of it as a tragedy.  Not for its attempts at heady themes or operatic character arcs, but because we will never get to see Heath Ledger play another role again.  I think an Oscar nomination is a sure thing.  If Academy voters tack this on to the Brokeback snub (imho), a win is almost a lock .

Regardless of its flaws, The Dark Knight has the best performance of the year so far, and the best action of any summer movie.  Those alone make it one of the best summer flicks.  It’s just a shame that the atmosphere and tone weren’t as consistently brilliant as in the first film.

See those little wrinkles on the door?  That ain’t a crappy paint job.  This is a living, breathing BMW concept car (i.e. not just some cracked-out artist’s rendition) with an exterior made completely of fabric.  To call it cloth would be a misnomer as it’s an absurdly advanced polymer compound.  But you could feasibly make a skintight shirt out of it and prowl the boardwalk in Newport looking for a sugar mama.

The GINA LIGHT is a roadster concept on which the usual body sheet metal found on production vehicles such as bonnet, side panels and doors have been all replaced with a special, flexible, highly durable and extremely expansion-resistant fabric material that stretches across a metal wire structure.

A number of elements of the substructure are actually movable and the driver can shift them by means of electric and electric-hydraulic controls resulting to a change the shape of the outer skin. For example, when the headlights are not active they are hidden under the special fabric cover. As soon as the driver turns on the lights, the contour of the front ends changes revealing the twin-headlights –just like a human being opens his eyes.

Check out this link (where the above text was ripped) to see more pictures.  But if you want to cut straight to the chase and stave off the accusations of rampant LSD usage at P+P, check out the below video.  Oh it’s real, Jerry!  And Skynet is soon to follow…