Panopticist

★ The Coolest Tablet-Magazine Fantasy I've Seen So Far

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:54:33 -0500

Check out this breathtaking concept video from Bonnier Group, the Swedish media company. It demonstrates an elegant, highly developed magazine interface for the sort of tablet computer that Apple and other companies are said to be working on:

I’ll be first in line when Apple releases a device that can accommodate this sort of interface, which is close to what I’ve been dreaming about for the last couple of years.

[via Peter Kafka of All Things Digital.]

This tablet fantasy from Time Warner is pretty good too, although too busy and multimedia-ish for my magazine tastes.

Callout: William Zinsser on clutter

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:14:21 -0500

"Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

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★ Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Out and Driver, Town & Country & Guns & Ammo, and Wired Brides

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 09:50:00 -0500

Here are my latest magazine covers for Vanity Fair. They appeared in the September issue under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some Shotgun Magazine Mergers You Might Soon See (Second in a Series).” I’m especially amused by how perfectly the Out and Car and Driver logos fit together.

The first installment of “Annals of Our Endangered Medium” appeared in the March 2009 issue.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

★ In This Amazing Music Video, the Drum Heads Really Are Heads

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:20:00 -0500

A British production house called Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories created this fantastic video of a scientific experiment in which disembodied heads are used as musical instruments. Incredible compositing work.

The Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories website has more info, including some production stills.

[via my colleague Chino, via my colleague Sam.]

★ Photos of Bobby Fischer's Grave

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:20:00 -0500

I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. For several years earlier this decade, I had an extra reason to make a trip: Bobby Fischer, who moved to Iceland in 2005 after a series of international incidents. As I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, Fischer and my father were friends and colleagues on the U.S. chess circuit in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bobby wasn’t exactly known for being a friendly guy. But I still imagined visiting Reykjavik, spotting him on a park bench, and walking up to him to say, “Bobby, I’m Eliot Hearst’s son.” He’s a major figure in the mythology of my family, so of course I always wanted to meet him.

It was not to be: Fischer died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.

Fischer is buried in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reyjavik. I have an Internet pal in Reykjavik named Halldor, and he passed along these photos of Bobby’s grave. They were taken by an American friend of his named Judith Gans, a singer and Icelandic music expert:

★ I'm at the AC/DC Show at Giants Stadium--and Here's a Clip

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:37:16 -0500

Ever since I got my new iPhone with video capabilities a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to do this: upload a video from my phone to YouTube and then immediately post the video to Panopticist using Movable Type’s mobile interface. I’m sitting in the upper tier at Giants Stadium, where AC/DC has just begun its set. It’s my first stadium show since I saw Pink Floyd at the Hoosierdome in 1987. It’s 9:30pm. Here’s a clip from their first song:

Well, crap, it appears to be impossible to copy and paste a YouTube embed code on an iPhone—the code won’t select. So here’s a direct link to the video on YouTube—I’ll fix this later:

http://bit.ly/4wlAz

UPDATE, Saturday morning: I’m not the first person to discover that YouTube’s embed codes aren’t selectable on an iPhone. As this guy points out, it’s because the iPhone doesn’t allow you to select form-field text that isn’t editable—and YouTube’s embed codes aren’t editable on YouTube. Luckily, there’s a workaround: On tools4noobs.com, you can paste in the URL of a YouTube video and it’ll spit out a valid XHTML embed code that you can then copy. So, here’s another video from last night—it’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” in its entirety. The sound quality is really bad—I wasn’t surprised to discover that the iPhone’s microphone can’t handle high volumes.

I love technology. And I also love to rock. Viva the Young brothers! It was a great show.

Callout: Colum McCann on Don DeLillo

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:24:01 -0500

"I teach at Hunter College in New York and recently had Don DeLillo come to class. It was an extraordinary day. He was incredibly profound and moving and gracious and just plain honest with the students. I was also stunned by his humility. At one stage he said to us, ‘I seem to be the beneficiary of an occasional revelation.’ This is the man who wrote Underworld, one of the best novels of the last 25 years. We went out afterwards with a couple of students and had dinner, and a few drinks, and I watched him climb into a cab, and I thought that I would like to be that mind, I would like to sit inside that mind, if even just for a while, traveling home to Bronxville on a March night in 2009. I would very much like that indeed, to be going in that direction.

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★ Annals of Our Endangered Medium: National Geographic Cosmopolitan and Harvard Entertainment Weekly

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:50:00 -0500

These covers of mine appeared in the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some shotgun magazine mergers you might soon see (first in a series).” I was excited to finally get a chance to deploy Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed for a Cosmopolitan parody:

The first one is a slightly different version than the one that actually ran. And there was a third cover, which I haven’t posted here.

I’ll be doing more of these for V.F. in the near future.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

Five-Word Link: Eno's Sydney Opera House projections.

Sat, 30 May 2009 17:06:42 -0500

Five-Word Link: Van Halen's underwhelming original logo.

Fri, 01 May 2009 11:53:28 -0500

Five-Word Link: Billy Bob Thornton's really high.

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:32:31 -0500

Five-Word Link: These people aren't very nice.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:40:32 -0500

Five-Word Link: Seductive audio from Bill O'Reilly.

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:03:13 -0500

Five-Word Link: Fans' Death Cab video. Amazing.

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:42:04 -0500

Callout: Brian Eno on creativity and self-imposed restraints

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:37:20 -0500

"In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.

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