One evening in 1994, my friend Nina sat me down and played me “Water From a Vine Leaf,” an ecstatic seven-minute epic by the British producer and synth wizard William Orbit, whose redesigned website went online yesterday. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that hearing “Water From a Vine Leaf” changed my life. I had been playing guitar for ten years at that point, and under Orbit’s spell I slowly moved away from rock guitar riffing and became an electronics-obsessed knob twirler (though I never stopped playing guitar). By the late ’90s, when it had become possible to cram an entire recording studio inside an off-the-shelf computer, I was spending endless hours at my Mac creating Orbit-influenced electronic tracks and then layering guitars over the top of them. Orbit is also responsible for my discovery of the glories of the resonant analog filter, for which I will be eternally grateful to him.

A couple of years after I discovered Orbit, Madonna enlisted him to be her main collaborator for the album that would become Ray of Light. He is now a very rich man. These days he has a very comfortable and lucrative career producing tracks for artists ranging from U2 and Blur to Pink and All Saints. He’s also known for having more or less discovered Beth Orton, who does a spoken-word thing toward the end of “Water From a Vine Leaf.” In 1993, the same year “Water From a Vine Leaf” was released, Orbit and Orton recorded an album together called SuperPinkyMandy. It was only released in Japan, and it’s now a collector’s item. I have a bootleg of it; it’s very hit or miss.

Orbit’s redesigned site has a lot of rare stuff on it, including dozens of snippets of the music he’s been working on for his next solo record. He hasn’t recorded an album of his own material since the mid-’90s, so the sound samples are especially cool to hear. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his collection of electronic versions of classic works by Bach, Satie, and other composers, was recorded in the mid-’90s but wasn’t given wide release until 2000.) The site’s video section includes the original “Water From a Vine Leaf” video, which I had never seen before. It’s a misguided New Age mess. Beth Orton appears in it, whirling like a dervish.

[Continue reading "William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers"...]

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According to NBC’s website, the pilot for the superfluous American version of the brilliant BBC show The Office will stumble onto the airwaves at 9:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 24.

Last month I posted a link to a bootlegged video file of the American pilot, and it was very bad indeed. The file is no longer online, which is nothing to be sad about.

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In the Talk of the Town section of this week’s New Yorker, the always sensible Daniel Radosh debunks the oft-parroted claim that the Academy Awards broadcast is seen by a billion people each year:

But the worldwide audience for the Oscars isn’t even close to a billion, as a little common sense makes plain. In the United States, 43.5 million people watched the show last year. That’s a lot, but it’s 956.5 million short of a billion. Can the show really pick up that many viewers in countries that most of the films and people being honored are not from, and where the speeches are in a language that most of the population does not speak?

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Don DeLillo gave a reading at the University of Texas on February 10 to mark the sale of his papers to the university’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The next day, the Austin American-Statesman reported that DeLillo read from Libra and Underworld, answered a few questions, and then left. Uneventful, but DeLillo isn’t exactly a flamboyant guy.

A few days before the reading, the American-Statesman published something excellent: an annotation of the opening page of White Noise, with details drawn from various drafts of that page found in the author’s papers. The reporter, Jeff Salamon, also interviewed DeLillo for the piece. Some of the information in Salamon’s annotation has long been known to DeLillo observers—e.g., the fact that DeLillo wanted to call the book Panasonic but couldn’t get permission from the Matsushita corporation—but the piece contains a number of specific new details about DeLillo’s writing process.

The American-Statesman’s site has a totally annoying registration process (and the login and password posted on Bug Me Not don’t work anymore). So I will just post the entire thing here, after the jump.

Twelve years after I first read it, White Noise is still my favorite novel. I don’t have a favorite movie or a favorite TV show or a favorite album or a favorite band; I don’t tend to narrow things down quite that much. But I have a favorite novel, and it’s White Noise.

[Continue reading "An Annotation of the First Page of White Noise, With Help From Don DeLillo"...]

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Another underground video gem from one of my Media Shower tapes. This one-and-a-half-minute clip was apparently filmed at a small club in Oklahoma. A redneck with an acoustic guitar has lost control of his audience, which is heckling him mercilessly. The agitated guitarist heckles back. One of the hecklers apparently gets up and makes a move toward the stage—and the guitarist steps down and goes all El Kabong on the guy. You don’t really see anyone but the guitarist during the clip—the camera never moves, and the violence takes place just out of camera range. But somehow that makes it funnier: The guitarist lunges out of view with an intact guitar; there’s a big THUNK; and then he steps back onstage with a broken guitar. He pleads with the audience to take his side, but the stunned crowd isn’t having any of it. Someone suggests calling security. And then the perfect kicker: Someone yells, “I want my money back!”

I’ve seen this clip dozens of times over the last few years, and it still makes me laugh and laugh every single time.

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categories: Music and Audio, TV and Video

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“You didn’t have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson,” writes Tom Wolfe in today’s Wall Street Journal. “You attended an event at mealtime.”

In the early ’90s, Thompson made a public appearance in my college’s auditorium. It was probably billed as a “speech” or a “lecture,” but mainly it involved Thompson sucking down several pitchers of screwdrivers and rambling incoherently about who knows what. It was highly entertaining. Thompson was joined onstage for part of the event by Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone. Wenner was decked out in a pink dress shirt and, if I remember correctly, a navy suit jacket. The contrast between Thompson, the unkempt lunatic genius, and Wenner, the tight-sphinctered, pink-shirted businessman, was hilarious. The inebriated crowd practically jeered Wenner offstage.

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Stay Free!, the fine Brooklyn-based nonprofit magazine edited by my excellent pal Carrie McLaren, has just launched a blog called Stay Free! Daily. The blog will be maintained by a stable of about half a dozen contributors. Stay Free! comes out twice a year and covers American media and culture from a lefty perspective. It’s great.

Carrie often creates satirical ads and other parodies for the back of the magazine, and I’ve appeared in two of them.

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Improv Everywhere is a New York-based performance art group that stages elaborate public pranks. This weekend the group completed its latest mission: deploying a tuxedoed bathroom attendant to the men’s room in the Times Square McDonald’s.

Here is a full report, complete with some video. It was a solid mission. But I doubt Improv Everywhere will ever top its most inspired mission to date: Best Gig Ever, whereby the group and dozens of its associates showed up at a Mercury Lounge gig by a little-known Vermont band and pretended to be fanatical fans—not to mock the musicians, but to warp the space-time continuum. Genius.

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categories: Art and Design

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A few days ago, an eccentric one-named artist unveiled an art project that transformed a peaceful and staid environment into an orange wonderland. You may not have heard about this. Behold the Somerville Gates:

The installation is very elaborate, so be sure to check out the entire thing. Hargo says the installation will remain on view “until the cleaning lady comes.”

[Tip from the Sloaner.]

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categories: Art and Design

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The fantastic American Memory section of the Library of Congress’s website has a great online exhibit about Emile Berliner (1851-1929), the man who invented the gramophone—the precursor of today’s DJ equipment. Berliner, an immigrant who was mostly self-educated, also helped develop the first early microphones and a new kind of acoustic tile, among other inventions. The online exhibit, Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry, has an excellent short history of early sound recording devices, as well as an archive of dozens of audio files digitized from original Berliner recordings. (A recording from the 1890s called “A Few Words in Regard to Drinking,” by an apparent comedian named John Terrell, is an amusing time capsule.)

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categories: Music and Audio

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Computer problems the last couple of days, but I think I’ve finally solved them. For today I’ll just call your attention to Scott McLemee’s fine column about On Bullshit, the Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt’s newly published book. (Frankfurt actually wrote and published On Bullshit some years ago, as Scott explains, but this is the first time it’s been published as a standalone book.) Scott’s column appears in Inside Higher Ed, the new online magazine that is positioning itself as a livelier alternative to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott writes:

[Continue reading "“Bullshit Is a Greater Enemy of Truth Than Lies Are”"...]

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Pea-brained thespian Sylvester Stallone has a new magazine out. Who would’ve guessed they’d go with such an allusive design?

[I reverse-engineered this in Photoshop this time—not in Quark, as I usually do. Here is the real cover of Sly.]

[Not sure what this is all about? Some insight can be gleaned here.]

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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The website Superman Is a Dick, which I posted about last week, got mobbed with traffic and was taken offline a day or two after it went up. The site’s contents are now back online, at least temporarily: The site’s proprietor has worked out some sort of deal with National Lampoon, which is now hosting all the covers.

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categories: Art and Design

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As a kid growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I was creeped out by Jaws, Sleestaks, and a cheesy local public-access show called Haunted Indiana. As an adult, few things have given me the heebie-jeebies more than recordings of so-called numbers stations—mysterious shortwave radio stations that broadcast endless blocks of seemingly random numbers. Shortwave listeners around the world have been encountering these cryptic broadcasts for decades. As this site explains, “All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities.”

The sounds that emanate from these stations are mysterious and hypnotic and eerie. If you were to listen to them alone in a darkened room at 3 a.m.—not that I have, mind you—you might find yourself believing you’re listening to the voice of Death itself. Music groups such as Stereolab and Boards of Canada have used samples from numbers stations in their own recordings, and the director Cameron Crowe used some in his movie Vanilla Sky.

And now, the hook for this post: The British label Irdial-Discs recently rereleased its 1997 four-CD set of numbers station recordings, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Irdial’s main Conet Project page contains this description of the numbers station phenomenon and the questions it raises:

[Continue reading "The Conet Project"...]

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Nothing interesting can be said of Paris Hilton, the mantis-like creature who represents celebrified Homo sapiens in its purest form. Except this: One of her aunts is Kim Richards, the ’70s child star who appeared in such fine cultural offerings as No Deposit, No Return, James at 15, and, most significant, Escape to Witch Mountain, the classic 1975 Disney flick about two badass kids with magic powers. Richards’s character, Tia, was the Buffy of the 1970s preadolescent set. Also noteworthy is the fact that Escape’s villains were played by Ray Milland and Donald Pleasence, which is just awesome. (The villains in the 1978 sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, were played by Bette Davis and Christopher Lee, which is also just awesome.)

And what of Ike Eisenmann, the young boy who played Tony, Tia’s brother? In 2002, he directed and co-wrote a short movie called The Blair Witch Mountain Project, a Blair Witch parody and nostalgia exercise that features appearances by several actors who had roles in Escape to Witch Mountain:

In the 13-minute-long production, filmmaker Blair Billingsly (played by actress Hope Levy) seeks out members of the Witch Mountain casts and visits various locations where the movies were shot in a quest to uncover why, more than 20 years after their initial release, the pictures remain so popular. As she encounters many of the actors, she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding Tony and Tia, the two “alien” children who starred in the features. At one point, she even interviews famed celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli (author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness and Sinatra: Behind the Legend, among other books).

You can watch The Blair Witch Mountain Project here. It’s cute but, um, not so good.

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categories: Best Of, Film

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No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings. I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters. Like the entire show itself, the Sleestaks seem hilariously campy now, but they were terrifying to a six-year-old. Also terrifying was the show’s incredibly weird music, a bizarre amalgam of eerie synthesizer bleeps and down-home banjo pickin’.

This image is from the opening credits of a Walter Koenig-penned episode called “The Stranger” that aired in late 1974, when Laimbeer was 17:

One of these Sleestaks is Laimbeer:

Laimbeer went from menacing Marshall, Will, and Holly as an adolescent to menacing the entire NBA as an adult.

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categories: Best Of, TV and Video

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First Johnny Carson, now this:

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categories: Art and Design

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From today’s Washington Post:

A Feb. 5 Names & Faces item on an Evite to Michael Saylor’s birthday party was based on a copy of the invitation that had been partially forged before it was sent to The Post. The original Evite from MicroStrategy’s CEO said the party will be “exotic, mysterious and ebullient,” but it did not say “erotic.” It said “Think ‘Alias’ (the TV show), but sexier,” but did not include “much sexier,” as was reported. The original also specified “cocktail dresses,” but did not say “the shorter the better.” And, the original did not end with — or even contain — the words “no one leaves alone.” Nor was there anything in the original invitation unfit for a family newspaper. The birthday celebration involved dinner and dancing at the Ortanique restaurant for about 200 guests.

[Via Romenesko.]

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categories: Miscellany

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I’m a little hesitant to post this, because I have no desire to add to the Dan Rather pile-on, even though I’m basically neutral about the guy. Despite the obvious screw-ups involved in the whole National Guard imbroglio, I think Rather has taken way more lumps than he’s deserved in recent months, especially when you consider that (a) the overall thrust of the National Guard report was, without a doubt, true, and (b) dozens of reporters made worse mistakes during the Lewinsky saga without paying a price—and many of them even saw substantial career benefits from their willingness to trot out unsubstantiated information that later proved to be false.

In any event, Rather can’t be blamed at all for the incident shown in this brief, grainy video, which is interesting mainly because it’s fun to watch highly controlled media environments fall apart. The first half of the video is the opening seconds of The CBS Evening News on January 22, 1991, when three AIDS activists infiltrated the CBS studios and interrupted the broadcast with chants. The protesters didn’t make it on camera, but a production assistant or producer is thrust into the frame as he tries to push them back. The second half of the video is Rather’s apology after the hasty commercial break.

I pulled this off of one of my old Media Shower tapes.

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Because sometimes I play around with Quark when I’m bored.

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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From the article in today’s New York Times about a new advertising campaign by Condé Nast:

The theme of the effort, produced by a new agency in San Francisco named Heat, is “The point of passion,” underlined by vignettes of ardent readers hugging, cuddling and snuggling with their Condé Nast favorites. The goal is to promote the ability of magazines to forge strong emotional bonds with readers, and by extension, of magazine ads to form similarly potent connections with consumers.

From the article in today’s New York Post about Star overlord Bonnie Fuller’s potential hiring of political consultant Howard Wolfson:

[I]nsiders say Wolfson’s real assignment would be to burnish Fuller’s reputation, which was golden as she rode rising circulation at Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Us Weekly, but dimmed when Star magazine tumbled and stalled. Fuller is in the second year of a multimillion-dollar contract, and some observers say she wants to buff her image before the contract expires.

Maybe Fuller could reverse her magazine’s declining fortunes, and therefore her own, by following Condé Nast’s lead:

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categories: Magazines

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The thought of being interviewed on live TV scares me, because I’d probably end up doing something like this:

As far as I know, it was not a prank. But prank or not, it’s compelling viewing. The slow, dull buildup only adds to the soul-crushing horror at the end.

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categories: Best Of, TV and Video

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The first film to be made from a Don DeLillo script, Game 6, had its premiere at Sundance a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a playwright and Red Sox fan (played by Michael Keaton) who skips the opening night of his new play to watch the fateful sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Game 6 was shot on a tiny budget by the director Michael Hoffman, and it also stars Robert Downey Jr. and Griffin Dunne. After the film’s Sundance premiere, The Hollywood Reporter had this to say about it:

[Continue reading "Don DeLillo, Screenwriter"...]

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categories: Books, Film

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I think I was about 15 when a family friend turned me on to Luis d’Antin Van Rooten’s extremely clever and hilarious 1967 book Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. The conceit of the book is that it’s an annotated version of an obscure collection of medieval French verse. But it’s actually a homophonic translation of Mother Goose rhymes from English to French. What that means is that Van Rooten translated the sounds of the words, not the words themselves. The resulting “French” versions only make sense as French-accented English. So “Mother Goose Rhymes” becomes “Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames”; “Jack and Jill” becomes “Chacun Gille”; and “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater” becomes “Pis-terre, Pis-terre / Pomme qui n’y terre.” D’Antin’s “translations” use real French words but are utterly nonsensical in French. You don’t have to understand actual French to read d’Antin’s rhymes; you just need a fairly good grasp of French pronunciation rules and an ability to recall Mother Goose. D’Antin’s elaborate, deadpan annotations, in which he purports to extract meaning from the incoherent French, are great parodies of academic pretentiousness. The annotations are amusing even if you don’t know French (I don’t, not really), and I’m sure they’re even funnier if you do.

[Continue reading "The d’Antin Manuscript"...]

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categories: Books

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One of the weirder style sheet idiosyncrasies I’ve noticed in recent years is Slate’s use of superscript for ordinal suffixes—e.g., the “st” in “21st.”

That’s not the most gripping sentence to start a post with, but bear with me. As in Chinatown, where a few innocuous clues eventually lead to the discovery of a vast criminal conspiracy, this style sheet tic is the key that unlocks a sinister plot—and it has nothing to do with George W. Bush’s failure to fulfill his National Guard duties in the 1970s. Let’s start with this passage from a restaurant piece today by Inigo Thomas:

The conventional view is that a visitor to New York should get to know as many places as possible in the city, especially its restaurants, no matter how short their stay. … [But] you tend to see and hear more of New York if you go to one place again and again. Pick one saloon: Take, for example, the Café Loup on West 13^th, between 6^th and 7^th. Here, you’re as likely to find interesting strangers who will tell you something of their New York as you are anywhere else. It’s an old Village hangout, once located further east, in the days when William Burroughs was a habitué.

I know of no respectable publication, print or online, that shares this style sheet tic. About the only place you can get away with using superscript ordinal suffixes these days is in signage and other graphic contexts. They would be bad enough in a print publication, but on the web they’re even worse: The conventions of page rendering mean that the superscripts force entire lines of text down and away from the lines above them, wreaking havoc on line spacing. It looks terrible, and there’s absolutely no justification for it. For footnote references, there’s probably no way around the problem, so it’s justified in those situations. But not for ordinal suffixes, which are never superscripted by any knowledgeable copy editor. What was Slate’s copy department thinking when it made this choice?

But all becomes clear when you consider Slate’s long association with Microsoft, the company that launched Slate and owned it for almost a decade before selling it to The Washington Post Company a few months ago. Microsoft has exasperated literate people for years with various seemingly arbitrary defaults built into Word, the most popular word processor on the planet. One of those seemingly arbitrary defaults is the superscripting of ordinal suffixes. A decision made long ago by some illiterate flunky at Microsoft has led much of the English-speaking world to believe that the superscripting of ordinal suffixes is not just okay, but standard.

Was Slate forced to follow some company-wide style sheet? Is there a shadowy Martin Stett figure deep within Microsoft who works to impose the company’s sinister copyediting rules on the rest of the world? Will Slate’s ordinal suffixes drop to the baseline now that they’re no longer propped up by the diabolical Bill Gates?

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categories: Best Of, Magazines

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