My temporary stay on WordPress.com is over. Come stalk me at vidiocy.com.
March 26, 2007
My temporary stay on WordPress.com is over. Come stalk me at vidiocy.com.
March 22, 2007
L.A. Blogger Continues Campaign Against N.Y. Hollywood Press
Posted by misskarina under Bad Journalism, Blogs, Box Office, Death of Print, Film Blogs, Film Criticism, Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman[2] Comments
Kate Coe, the blogger behind Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA, has a real problem with New York-based journalists writing about Hollywood, and she’s not shy about admitting it. The day after the Oscars, Coe savaged David Carr and Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, and Rachel Sklar and Melissa Lafsky of The Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog, for revealing their own personal biases, preferences and Hollywood-history blind spots in their write-ups (so, basically, acting like bloggers). “New Yorkers really shouldn’t be allowed to cover the Oscars,” the L.A.-based blogger sniped. “Maybe it’s something in that water that calcifies vital showbiz synapses. Or maybe they should drive more.”
Then, yesterday, Coe used Nikki Finke’s deconstruction of Sharon Waxman’s typically clumsy report on the battle between Joe Roth and Julie Taymor over Across the Universe as further evidence that New Yorkers should stick to their own turf. Where as Waxman painted Taymor as a poor artiste, victimized by the big bad industry, Finke defended the producers right to try to salvage a nickel from a pretentious trainwreck, and ran with the headline, “Why Did They Hire Her in the 1st Place?” The fact that Finke is a better, more thorough reporter than Waxman isn’t at issue; the attitude with which each woman relates their findings is. Finke’s “It’s just capitalism, stupid” attitude is the “correct” one. To Coe, Waxman’s dippy “why can’t we all just get along?” take is just more evidence that “New Yorkers don’t understand show biz all that much.”
I think many of Coe’s points, across both posts, are valid. Carr’s seasonal Carpetbagger blog is often insufferably twee in voice and mind-bogglingly hazy in facts. Rachel Sklar is a fine blogger and is well-suited to ETP’s usual mix of political savvy and pop culture snark, but anyone who doesn’t know who Thelma Schoonmaker is shouldn’t be blogging the Oscars. It upsets me that Gawker has turned Alessandra Stanley into such an easy target (if only because it pains me to watch the Gawker brand itself devolve into all-bullying, all the time) but the fact remains: she’s basically the Sharon Waxman of television critics. Speaking of Waxy … well, the fact that I have an entire category of this blog devoted to her bad journalism says enough.
But if Coe and I are in agreement that a lot of bad Hollywood journalism is generated by the New York Times, I’m still not willing to buy the assertion that the problem is geographic. (more…)
March 21, 2007
Twitter Ethics: Outsourcing
Posted by misskarina under Netscape, New Media, Stephen Colbert, The Internet in General, Twitter[5] Comments
When I first joined Friendster in 2003, much of the fun came from stumbling on celebrity accounts and trying to determine which ones were real, which ones were sort-of real but maintained not by the celebrity themselves but by an assistant, and which ones were totally fake. As Twitter exponentially grows in popularity, that same game is coming back, with added thorns. Twitter’s draw, after all, is its temporality; you’re supposed to use it to track your activity throughout the day. This raises the question: can lifelogging be outsourced?
There was an article in today’s WSJ attempting to diagnose the syndrome of uncool brands unsuccessfully adopting new technologies. In addition to an interesting quote from “a Netscape spokesman”, which the journalist somehow got a hold of without actually contacting anyone here at Netscape, the article criticizes John Edwards for jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. I thought it was interesting that the journalist failed to consider the fact that Edwards himself is in all likelihood not the primary Twitterer behind his own Twitter account. If you take a look at the posts, most of them are made from the Web or Twitterific, meaning that they were entered by someone sitting at a computer. Perhaps Edwards himself dashes off an occasional message from his Blackberry, but it seems clear that there’s an intern or an assistant — someone who sits at a desk all day — behind most of these updates. Used in this way, Twitter just becomes another form of direct mail, a campaign broadcast limited to mercifully brief blasts.
The problem of outsourcing is compounded when you include the possibility that the real person the Twitter account ostensibly represents may not actually have any real control over what is being broadcast. Yesterday I began following Stephen Colbert on Twitter. Colbert’s reciprocal Twitter friends include Homer Simpson, Santa Claus, and Jason Calacanis. The real Calacanis, not the fake Calacanis. I think.
I know the Colbert camp is always looking for new ways to engage their audience on the web (you remember the wikipedia affair, don’t you?), but they usually do it with more finesse than this. Beyond the fact that the majority of “friends” that this account is following are fictional characters, his posts read like table scraps not quite good enough to make it out of the writers room and onto a show. If this is being maintained by a Colbert show employee/intern (which I think is probably the case), that person should be fired. But what if it’s being maintained by a fan? Where does one find the impetus to faux-lifelog in a public figure’s stead? It’s especially interesting in the case of Colbert, who is at once a real person, and a fictional construct. If he is fan-generated, it makes sense that the Twitter Colbert would find community with people like Darth Vader and Borat — here Twitter makes it possible to create real-time fan fic.
If anyone who updates a Twitter account for another person (real or fitcional) reads this, I’d like to hear your take.
March 20, 2007
70s Film Gods Grab Headlines
Posted by misskarina under Francis Ford Coppola, New American Filmmaking, Tom Cruise, UncategorizedNo Comments
It’s only 3pm Tuesday, and it’s already been a big week for news about titans of the 70s American New Wave. Consider the following;
Exhibit A: Tom Cruise may distribute Francis Ford Coppola’s comback film via the new United Artists. Quoth Variety: “Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola may have skipped the festival route of selling the movie after witnessing the stir that her pic Marie Antoinette faced at Cannes last May…Youth Without Youth is both “intellectually challenging and emotionally remote,” said one acquisitions exec at a studio subsid. Another distrib likened the film to an arty Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Bittersweet irony: Coppola claims that he himself almost owned UA at one point int he 70s.
Exhibit B: Peter Bogdanovich Has His Third Act of Boogie Nights Moment. This Hollywood Reporter item has gone weirdly undiscussed: “Actor/filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich and his business manager have been sued for allegedly shaking down a man trying to get his son into the film industry…[the lawsuit] alleges the Oscar-nominated director of The Last Picture Show and [his manager] demanded $100,000 to hire [some guy's] son as a director’s assistant on Bogdanovich’s next film.” Apparently, two years after that mindblowing deal was cut, Bogdanovich still hadn’t been able to get a movie together, and now the kid’s dad is suing. Bittersweet irony: Bogdanovich famously got his own start in Hollywood not through bribery, but by being annoying. He used to sneak into industry screenings and try to schmooze with moguls. Eventually, B-movie master Roger Corman gave him a job. As Bogdanovich tells it, “I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks.”
Exhibit 3: The guy who directed Cool Hand Luke died. Yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got on that one.
March 20, 2007
Magazine Death Pool
Posted by misskarina under Death of Print, Magazine Death Pool, The Internet in General[2] Comments
This is funny. And probably accurate. I wish I could call myself a stalwart patron of print, but honestly, the only magazines I buy these days are big glossy ladies magazines, with stories about fashion and diets to get me psyched up for going to the gym, which I throw away immediately after using. I collect industry mags like RES and FILMMAKER when I go to festivals. I read Film Comment and Film Quarterly sitting on the floor at Barnes & Noble. I read everything else online. I even printed out J. Hoberman’s long piece on Sunshine Noir in Artforum last month, so I could read it on the subway, rather than buy the actual hard copy (looks like I caught it just in time, too — the article is no longer available free online. But David Hudson posted some related material here). All of the magazines I loved as a teenager — RAYGUN, Select, Sassy, Spy — magazines that put culture into focus, that made the world beyond high school seem so seem vital and sexy — they’re all gone. So I’m okay living in a world where magazines=nostalgia. I’m comfortable with the death of print.
March 20, 2007
Ignore Rosie O’Donnell’s Quackery At Your Own Peril!
Posted by misskarina under 9/11, Blogs, CNN, Conspiracy Theories, Rosie O'Donnell[2] Comments
At Netscape, we get a lot of submissions from 9/11 truthers. We used to get more, but we banned a ton of users for shady tactics — sock puppet voting, submitting the same Google Video over and over again under slightly different titles, etc. I have to admit that I kind of love this stuff. I’m not really into kitsch — I don’t like cartoon lunchboxes, I don’t like to pretend it’s the 80s. The kind of ironic pleasure my peers get from dressing like Olivia Newton-John circa 1982, I get from conspiracy stuff. Of course, it all goes back to childhood — I watched a lot of Twilight Zone when I was a kid, and when my mom was waiting for prescriptions at Sav-on, I’d sneak over to the magazine rack and flip through the Weekly World News (favorite headline ever: BABY RAISED BY ROACHES!!!) I just get a little turned on by the idea of media that wants to convince us that the stuff of mid-century horror films could actually happen here and now. It’s one thing to question historical narratives, but I totally lump that brand of 9/11, “Don’t you get it? George Bush blew up the Trade Center with his own hands!” conspiracy with headlines screaming ANNA NICOLE - IMPREGNATED BY ALIENS!, and that one Twilight Zone episode where the ghost of Abraham Lincoln shepherds dead Confederate soldiers to Hell.
Anyway. Today when I started my shift, I noticed this story on the front page:
Basically, it’s an InfoWars story trying to drum up some outrage over the fact that Rosie O’Donnell dribbled some 9/11 skepticism on her notoriously silly blog, and CNN just didn’t care. As if they have an entire bureau devoted to Rosie O’Donnell’s batshit insane poetry blog. I think the first commenter got it right:
March 20, 2007
So, I’m still waiting for WordPress to clear my Paypal payment so I can move my blog off their servers and back to my host and the vidiocy.com domain. In the meantime, www.vidiocy.com is redirecting here. I hope to at least finish the template tweaks today.
A commenter asked me to explain why I finally decided to make the move. To be honest, I really didn’t want to do it — I’ve had my blog there since January 2003, and had no problems until recently. But it switching over to “the New Blogger,” Blogger forced me to abandon their services by instituting a number of new policies that basically made it impossible for anyone who wanted to host their content via their own FTP to fully customize the page. Switching over to their “custom domain” made the problem even worse. So, I know that WordPress can sometimes be infuriating, what with all the trial-and-error and the plug-ins, but I’d rather have a solution that requires work but is fully customizable, than an option that’s one-click easy but publishes a page that I can’t stand to look at.
More soon.
March 20, 2007
The migration of archives from Blogger to WordPress is complete. I’m now working on some design tweaks, and waiting for WordPress to recognize my Paypal payment before they’ll let me move my shit back onto my own server. In the meantime, please change your bookmarks - my new blog URL will be http://blog.vidiocy.com.
March 19, 2007
Bloggy Moving Day
Posted by misskarina under Karina Work Stuff, Karina's Personal Life, Non-Film Bloggers1 Comment
Today/tonight, I’m moving this blog from Blogger to WordPress. I was going to try to hold of until the weekend, but I just can no longer stand the way Blogger insists on fucking my shit up. In case the URL transition does not go smoothly right away, you can temporarily look for new posts at misskarina.wordpress.com.
