this is sippey.com

For example, music written for contemporary discos, in my opinion, usually ONLY works in those social and physical spaces. Not only that, it works perfectly on their incredible sound systems. It feels stupid to listen to club music at its intended volume at home — though people do it.

via journal.davidbyrne.com

David Byrne’s journal post, which is an extended version of his TED talk this year, is worth reading; it’s a great romp through how music venues have influenced the music that’s created in and for them. Look forward to seeing this talk in its video context.

While Apple may not immediately sell as many iPads as iPhones and iPods, it’s possible that iPad owners will spend more on accessories, some analysts say.

via www.businessweek.com

In the future, people may buy things. Or they might not. It depends on whether they actually do. Buy them. In the future. Or not. Some say.

We have learned that when Amazon first submitted its Kindle application for the iPhone to Apple, Amazon included its own payment system within the app, so customers could just pay for e-books and download them right in the app. When Apple spotted the payment system, it told Amazon to get rid of it, according to a source familiar with Amazon’s operations. Why? It’s a rule Apple smartly instituted at the App Store’s beginning, forbidding third-party e-commerce of digital goods within apps.

via blogs.forbes.com

“So, um, George. We know you’ve spent the last four weeks learning Cocoa Touch and building that really nice, seamless book shopping experience within the app, taking advantage of the payments API, connecting to user’s Amazon accounts and all that. It really was a nice piece of work. But we’re gonna have to rip it out. Instead, can you just do a little button in the top right of the home screen that launches Mobile Safari? OK, thanks.”

“What’s new this year is that ebooks have arrived — now we get to figure out what we can do with them.”

via blogs.hbr.org

CharityBuzz has an interesting auction happening…

Includes: Portrait sitting with Shepard Fairey. Sitting will take place during the months of July-August, 2010 at both parties’ convenience.

Current bid: $4500. Estimated value: $30,000. (via)

Jake Siewert, a counselor to the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, said curling provided a welcome respite from the usual shout-’em-down-style of business TV. “It’s better than that thing where they have eight people in a box screaming at each other,” he said.

via www.nytimes.com

Also, pretty much anything is better than that thing where they have eight people in a box screaming at each other.

via hello.typepad.com

“And a palindrome!”

Tiger wasn’t apologizing to actual people, to his wife or kids or even his confused fans. Tiger was apologizing, straight up and to the bone, to capitalism itself. To his own brand. It was a scary attempt to shore up the multimillions in endorsement deals, his future as a billion-dollar icon. Tiger the man was apologizing to Tiger, Inc., mostly for tainting its earnings potential.

via www.sfgate.com

Mark Morfold takes apart’s Tiger’s public apology in only the way Morford can. That graf right there? Probably the tamest thing in the whole piece.

Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua posts a long, in-depth discussion with Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson about The Flaming Lips. (Richardson’s written a book about their record Zaireeka.) I loved this sentence:

I am drawn to experiences that take some work to make happen, because, since they require work, they will inevitably not happen as frequently.

I went out and bought a lot of ordinary products from a home supply store near the museum. I used at least three patterns of movement for each object and made a total of about 300 takes. … I filmed the relationship between the principles of physics, people and things as a performance.

Incredibly satisfying.

This is how the NBA’s situation differs from Hollywood three years ago. Hollywood stumbled by accident into the realization that things were broken. But the NBA already knows. The league wants a system more beneficial to owners that features a hard salary cap, no long-term deals (only three or four years guaranteed at most) and no luxury tax. The players will dig their feet in and fight. We will have a lockout or a strike. It will last for months. And months. And months. Start preparing yourself mentally now. It’s going to happen.

via sports.espn.go.com

Bill Simmons (yes, David, I know, I still need to read The Book) dumps 3,800 words on just how completely screwed up the NBA is. I don’t follow the sport that closely, but even the casual observer has to wonder just how the hell the league (as a system) can afford to do things like paying Jamaal Tinsley “$10.6 million this season and the next by Indiana *not* to play there.” Worth reading in full.

From Jeffrey L. Smith’s Amazon review of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing.

What we have here is an 85-page hardback book that has the contents of a 4-page article from the New York Times. How is this possible? You can use cardstock instead of paper, to make the book 3/4” thick. Then you put one paragraph on a page. And on other pages, you put one sentence. Make 85% of the book white space, and make the book pretty small. Add some pen and ink drawings on some pages. Pretty soon, this hardback book is starting to look like a hardback book. You can’t bend the pages (remember that they are made of cardstock). How long does it take to read this hardback book? A little bit longer than reading an essay in the NY Times. The pages are easier to turn in the NY Times.

It is interesting that the Tag Suggestions provided by Amazon.com include the terms “ripoff” and “rip off”. I’ll choose “rip off” as it takes up more space and will make this review seem much more like the length of a hardback book.

File under insufferable: Blue Bottle opening up in Brooklyn.

“It’s 1.5 ounces of espresso with 2.5 ounces of latte-style milk,” Mr. Freeman said. “It’s a nice drink, a nice size. It looks good, and you look good drinking it.”

via dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com

…is Alex Ross’ Listen to This. Mozart, Schubert, Björk, Radiohead, Verdi, Sonic Youth, Dylan, Brahms and more. (I finished the other book I was looking forward to this year about a week ago…still processing.)

The latest headline news round up, courtesy of my new favorite Google News search for “declares war on.”

• Cisco Delcares War on HP
• Apple iPhone App Store declares war on sex
• Audi Declares War on Weight
• County Declares War on Heroin
• Molly Shannon declares war on Sue Sylvester!
• White House Declares War on Asian Carp
• Richard Branson declares war on carbon
• Kayihura declares war on bad road users upcountry
• Al-Qaeda Leader Declares War On US
• Cuomo Declares War on Pop-Up Ads
• The Obama Administration Declares War on Toyta
• Ed Milliband declares war on climate change sceptics
• Prince Charles Declares War On The Enlightenment
• Baghdad declares war on new apartment blocks
• Google Declares War on Apple with iPhone App
• Opposition leader declares war on racist Victorians

Forget picking one particular news source; I’m declaring the next trend in news reading is to filter your stream through one particular turn of phrase. See also Greg Knauss’ The American People, which, sadly, hasn’t auto-updated since last September.

Today and Tomorrow points to Quarter Mile Groove, a conceptual art piece by Daniel Eatock.

The recording translates the length of its vinyl groove into audio allowing listeners to experience the 1/4 mile length of the spiral as the record is played.

I like that Eatock included the vinyl residue of the initial master cutting of the record as part of the piece. When unraveled it would (obviously) be a quarter-mile long.

As I discovered this weekend, Curling is a fantastic sport to watch while operating at less than full capacity. And now, there’s a fantastic infographic that explains the sport to newbies. I really could have used this on Sunday morning.

(Via Good, who describes Curling as “shuffleboard with real-time friction management.”)

Kontra takes Opera to task for the seriously flawed implementation of Opera Mini.

It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different for Opera Mini to proxy the entire web through its own proprietary servers. Yes, you read it right. Opera gets in between you and every single URL out there, from your bank to your school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it.

Mobile proxies were useful 13 years ago when devices were razor-thin and data pipes were the size of coffee stirrers. Today? Not so much. Worth reading in full.

…and, ummm, it was like whoa.

Via clusterflock, The Atlantic’s piece on The Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead:

Oddly enough, the Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to_—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—_and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me.

What’s not even mentioned here is the economy that the Dead created around the shows, which was responsible for most of those “whoa” moments.

Over at GeekWeek, Luke Thompson’s been reviewing various fast food items. Up this week, the Wendy’s Premium Fish Fillet.

Lighter, these are not. The piece of fish on my sandwich was dwarfed by the bun (Hey Wendy’s, I think I hear the ghost of Clara Peller: “Where’s the fish?”), and the fish itself was dominated by the, ahem, “Panko.” Wendy’s dense buns are good for burgers loaded with drippy toppings – if they were to bring back some kind of chili cheeseburger, I’d advocate them – but when you’re dealing with an already-breaded product, it’s a bit much. The fish was also a bit too salty for my tastes, though I tend to like less salt than most, but a hint of slight spiciness was welcome. Beyond that, they add lettuce, sauce, and – for forty more cents! – cheese.

This isn’t an ironic foodie review (“Oh, look how hip we are appreciating the fast food”), this is from a true fast-food lover. Who else would know so much about Wendy’s dense buns?

Berkeley’s mostly transitioned to electronic parking meters, and now they need to do what New York’s doing: “Under the city’s latest green transportation plan, about 225 parking meters across the city will have their heads hacked off and be turned into bike racks.” (Story in the Post, via Good.is via Cool Hunting.)

Doc Searls took some photos of his frosty windows last February; they’re now the images at the heart of NBC’s Olympic bumper reels. (See also, how one guy’s Flickr photo wound up in the Iron Man movie.)

This past weekend I spent a few hours at SFMOMA, enjoying the 75th anniversary show. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for going on 20 years now, so the show was like a highlight reel of past great exhibitions; I especially loved seeing Richter’s Lesende, Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #54, the huge canvases from Sigmar Polke, and room-sized fridge from Matthew Barney.

The piece I absolutely fell in love with, though, is Bruce Conner’s new video projection piece, THREE SCREEN RAY. Here’s the description of the piece from SFMOMA’s site:

In Bruce Conner’s electric THREE SCREEN RAY (2006), a new acquisition that premieres in this exhibition, Ray Charles’s 1959 hit song “What’d I Say” is set to an ecstatic, frenzied collage — nude women, bomb explosions, fireworks — of original and preexisting imagery, including war newsreels, cartoons, and TV commercials. A tour de force of editing and experimental film techniques, the piece features Conner’s manipulations of the film surface itself and his signature use of countdown leader. The work’s point of departure and central image is Conner’s 1961 film COSMIC RAY, which he adapted to three screens in 1965 and later reedited to create this gallery installation of three video projections.

Words don’t really capture it, though. So, thinking about you, dear reader, I stood in a corner, turned on my iPhone’s video camera, and shot a couple minutes of it. And then yesterday, testing out the super slick upload feature inside Snow Leopard’s QuickTime player I posted it to YouTube.

So…within five minutes of posting that video yesterday I had an email notifying me that my video “may have content that is owned or licensed by WMG.” And, as you probably noticed if you clicked play on the video, the soundtrack’s been muted.

Now, I know I’m most likely breaking copyright law by publishing this on YouTube – I might be able to argue Fair Use, but IANAL – and I’m not surprised that YouTube did what it did. What surprised me was how fast it happened. The audio quality on this iPhone recording was crap to begin with (you’ll have to trust me on this, obviously), so either they (a) have great machines listening in on the audio content, (b) they knew that anything uploaded with the title THREE SCREEN RAY would have Ray Charles music in it, or (c) they’ve got a massive staff of people trained to recognize the catalogs of the major labels. Any one of those is frighteningly impressive. And I’ll let you know if/when I get the DMCA takedown or get shut out of my Gmail account.

Anyway. Here’s the point: this off kilter, 480px wide obviously amateur recording without sound doesn’t do the piece justice at all. I’m just trying to give you a taste so that you get your ass to SFMOMA and sit in that dark room for a while.

Update, Feb 19 2010: And…scene. The video’s been pulled from YouTube entirely for copyright violation. Disappointing, but not surprising.

I’ll confess that I was sort of looking forward to Peter Gabriel’s album of covers. Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua tears it apart. When Perpetua loves something he lets you know…and when he hates something, well, you get gems like this:

Peter Gabriel’s new album of covers, Scratch My Back, is one of the most mesmerizingly awful records I have ever encountered. It is terrible in a way that seems unique and special; hideous in a way that is possibly quite profound. His selection of material is fine, but his execution is horrendous, to the point of obliterating the appeal of every song.

Go read the whole thing, especially the bits where he tears into Gabriel’s cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” and has to resort to all caps.

And I also love it that 13 year old Tavi Gevinson’s done enough great blogging to drive Gawker writers to jealousy-induced fits of apoplexy.

To the crowd at China One in the East Village, where last night Brooklyn design duo I Love Factory held a Fashion Week party for a new line of fancy hats, Tavi was a real gut-level, “holy shit!” superstar. Tavi’s entrance—mom and entourage in tow—was heralded by a tectonic shift as partygoers scrambled out of Tavi’s way. Tavi passed through the parted crowd, back to where models showed off the hats. The two syllables of her name filled the room. A semi-circle of fans snapped pictures with their iPhones. The bolder ones approached her, then the party photographer Bronques waved them away so he could get a clear shot.

File under: this type of coverage makes me seriously doubt what I’m reading about topics I know less about. CNN covers the “major new app store” that the wireless carriers are cooking up. And the story’s written as if this will finally allow consumers to get apps for their iPhones from someone besides Apple:

The groups said their site will give app developers a simple route to publishing and marketing, and will offer smartphone customers new apps quicker and a wider selection than anyone else. … Until now, Apple has had control over all apps that run on its iPhones, offering them only through the company’s official online store.

Literally unbelievable.

Off to read some CNN.com coverage of health care, the financial markets and the war in Afghanistan!

Andrew blogs the rumor that Amazon is going to give Kindles away to their Prime subscribers[1], and comments…

But I don’t know… there’s something about it that still just doesn’t feel right to me. Most of my heavy reading friends love theirs (I’m looking at you Sippey). I’m buying an iPad as soon as it comes out and can see applications for it in my life all over the place. And hey, I’ll happily take a free device I didn’t want any time. But for some reason, I just don’t see myself lustily opening that free Kindle and gleefully downloading away.

Since I was called out, I had to comment…and since I left such a long comment I thought I’d reblog it here.

My book buying habits aren’t necessarily lusty, but now just more “on demand.” Done with one book, pick up the next right now. I’ve shifted the bulk book buying I used to do on Amazon to the device… But frankly, they do a really lousy job of merchandising titles through the Kindle’s on-device store – it’s a seriously crappy shopping experience.

Which makes me wonder just what the heck they’re doing. This just feels like a combination of iPad fear an unnatural love for his own device on the part of Bezos. Assuming that Apple doesn’t lock them (and Stanza and all the other one off ebook sellers in the app store) out of the iPad because of the iBookstore, presumably they’ll have a great Kindle.app for the iPad, just like they do for the iPhone. Sure, the Kindle’s probably a better reading experience outside, but unless they’re sitting on some massive amount of inventory that they don’t want to have to write down completely, or are thinking about their Spint data deal in the wrong way (sunk costs, anyone?) I just don’t get this.

I’m not saying that they should exit the business, mind you, but that they should just rightsize it, make the product better, and realize that Kindle as a service brand will have a longer shelf life[2] than Kindle as a product brand. Amazon should look at the iPad and scream “holy crap, this is awesome – we can have a much better selling experience on the device than we can with our slow, non-responsive black-on-gray reflective screen device. Hooray!” Instead, Bezos just wants to be Jobs.

[1] I loved Hunter Walk’s tweet this morning on this: “Conspiracy Theory: Apple behind the ‘free kindle to amazon prime customers’ rumor to chill kindle sales pre-ipad”

[2] Pun fully intended.

Tweet of the day from Chris Dixon:

checkins: commodity. game mechanics: too easily copied. social graph: fb/twitter. tips/recs: v. interesting. monetization: most defensible.

And to pile on, monetization isn’t just about the monetization engine, it’s about building the relationships with the people who actually trust you enough to pay you money…and repeatedly pay you money for value delivered. And if we’re talking about the local-mobile-social space, then it’s going to be very interesting to see the upstarts (Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.) take on Yelp, who has a huge headstart in building monetized relationships with local businesses.

Question: is there enough dissatisfaction amongst small businesses with Yelp that there’s an opportunity for a newcomer to steal away the Yelp budget? Or will it be possible for said newcomer to convince the small business owner that there’s a need for incremental marketing spend through another local channel?

Just realized that I avoided Gmail all day because I was worried about getting sucked into reading Buzz.

Tyler Green covers the project that will finally connect the Gateway Arch more directly to downtown St. Louis.

The National Park Service and the city of St. Louis have sponsored a competition – which seems to be called Framing a Modern Masterpiece, but which should be nicknamed something less metaphor-abusing – to encourage architects to come up with plans to link downtown with the Arch with the Mississippi River. Yesterday the competition announced its nine finalists. The Architect’s Newspaper has the list, as does the competition itself, via PDF. (The list of firms that entered is pretty impressive too. Saarinen’s successor-firm, Roche-Dinkeloo, did not make the cut to nine.)

I grew up in St. Louis, so for me the Arch is myth-level sculpture; I blogged about the relationship between the Arch and the new Busch Stadium last summer.

Note – this was originally posted to Buzz. You can follow me there if you’re so inclined.

Not that I’m ready to do this, but could one move their RSS reading into Buzz? Can you subscribe to an RSS feed from Buzz? (There’s a longer thought here that needs more time to gestate about the distinction between “sites” and “people,” and how Twitter’s basically ignored that distinction, and how Facebook’s dealing with it via the distinction between profiles and pages).

If the New York Times, for instance, or a multi-author blog, wanted to enable people to read their headlines through Buzz, how would they do that? Create a Google profile, connect it to their site, set up a link with a rel=”me” tag on it? And that’s a “push / rely on the publisher to create a discoverable profile” model – what about a “pull” model where end users just want to flow things into this one UI?

OK, this is now a blog post, and I might as well just cross-post it to my blog. So when you see the headline here flow through (thanks for the instructions bradfitz), you can ignore it at will.

Nelson Minar details why flying a plane is hard.

Planes at altitude have a lot of potential energy. A primary challenge of landing a plane is learning how to bleed that energy off to make a soft landing. In a car you just brake. And if something goes wrong in your car you can pull over to the shoulder and stop; that doesn’t work so well in a plane.

Read it all the way through and tell me your brain doesn’t hurt just thinking about it.

Via Kottke comes info about deckle edges, the imitation in modern books of what sliced pages would look like. Which makes me wonder just why the iPad – with its faux bookshelf and its faux page turn isn’t going all the way to having the user cut the edge of the virtual page with a virtual knife before being able to turn it.

Steps were takes [sic] to contact Ms. Winfrey, who agreed immediately, Mr. Burnett said, and then Mr. Leno. Mr. Burnett said he spoke with Mr. Leno’s executive producer, Debbie Vickers. “She asked if this was for real and then she laughed for about 10 minutes,” Mr. Burnett said.

via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

I’m a bit frightened by the idea of Oprah Winfrey laughing for TEN MINUTES STRAIGHT. Also, how much do you think CBS paid Leno?

I’ve been hearing about Siri for a while – a friend works for the company, and the app’s been in development for a long time – but it was absolutely worth the wait.

Siri is young and, like a child taking its first steps, may be awkward at times. Siri may occasionally misunderstand things you ask it to do even within its range of understanding. Nonetheless, Siri will improve quickly by getting to know you better and understanding a broader set of tasks. In fact, right now, Siri’s learning how to handle reminders, flights stats and reference questions. Our vision is that, over time, you’ll trust Siri to manage many personal details in your life - from recommending a wine you might enjoy to managing your to do list.

Since Apple won’t let users customize what’s triggered with a long press of the iPhone’s home button, they should just buy the company and turn this into the default Voice Control app.

“How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?”

via www.nytimes.com

So when the New York Times quotes Sarah Palin like this, do they do shorten the word “working” to “workin’” themselves? If it’s just her accent / manner of speaking, then shouldn’t they be doing that for every quote they transcribe? (Did they do this for Clinton, for example?) On the flipside, if they’re not shortening this themselves, and actually getting the quote from the teleprompter transcript, then is Palin’s camp writing in the shortened form of the word in order to make sure she hits the homey accents?

City of Sound’s Dan Hill has a long, thoughtful piece on the iPad. There’s much worth quoting; I’ll just snip this little bit:

As software becomes a service, data resides in the cloud, various forms of wireless connectivity coalesce over the city, and yet face-to-face physical connection becomes more important than ever, a device like the iPad becomes obvious. The cloud is the connective tissue between these spaces, the software provides the platform for interaction with information, the tablet is the tool, and the forum is the city.

Go read (or Instapaper if you must) the whole thing. (And art geeks will appreciate the “Apologies to Bill Viola” bit.)

FourFour’s Rich Juzwiak, in a post about an interview with RuPaul:

(And funnily enough, a large part of the clip above is devoted to talking about animated gifs, a medium that feels like home to me.)

Not surprisingly, I really like Mike Monteiro’s take on the iPad.

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

Also, there’s a great diagram which I won’t steal for my blog but instead will mention as a way to entice you to click through.

Instead of boring everyone here to tears with LOST stuff for the next few months, I started a flashsideways blog – FAKELOCKE.COM -- and invited some fellow LOST fans (so far: David Jacobs, Tiff Chow, Ben Trott and Mike Monteiro) to contribute meaningless trivia re. season six. Consider it chock full of spoilers (real fans watch); subscribe at will and let me know if you want to participate.

I guess we’ll find out tonight. Can’t frickin’ wait.

• Yep, I bought the t-shirt.
• Go read David’s post, Real Fans Watch. “Theoretically, cultural criticism (neé OMFG SMOKE MONSTER) in the public domain should lead to casual intellectual exchanges which strengthen our democracy (and blogging!) Unfortunately, it’s no longer that simple.”
• His mouth isn’t creepy, he’s just eating an orange. But you knew that, because you’re a Real Fan. And you watch.

The Criterion Collection is having an out of print sale, so go nab Alphaville (or a slew of others) for $5 off.

Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a large group of titles from StudioCanal at the end of March, and we wanted to give you advance notice that our editions will be going out of print. … The titles are going to Lionsgate, and we don’t know when they may be rereleased. As ever, we will continue to try to relicense the films so that they can rejoin the collection sometime in the future.

(via)

Two great things about John Scalzi’s wrap up of the Amazon / Macmillan cluster this weekend. First, this bit:

The letter took time to praise Amazon but also did some interesting rhetorical heavy lifting — for example, labeling Amazon a “customer” of Macmillan rather than a “partner,” which is a fun corporate way of jamming Amazon into an ecological niche it probably would prefer not to be in.

Second, Scalzi’s changed the descriptive slug on his blog to read “We have a monopoly on John Scalzi.” Nice.

But since his post is trending on Techmeme, I wish that Scalzi had a bit more to say about how the only real winner here is Apple. Not only because this weekend’s drama has the potential to drive passionate readers away from Amazon and to Apple, but also because the only way Macmillan’s tough guy bargaining position re. the “agency model” would have been possible is because of iBookstore.

Most of them are good; this one is great: Maybe naming him Rimbaud wasn’t such a good idea. (via, via)

The Whitney Museum is selling Jenny Holzer temporary tattoos, “designed using select tattoo fonts by Whitney designers.”

I’ve decided I don’t like “select tattoo fonts.” (via)

Barnes and Noble Review interviews Don Delillo re. Point Omega.

I don’t write essaylike fiction. My work tends to have a strong visual quality – the idea is to make the reader see, and it may be the case that my interest in film has helped fashion this tendency. In the case of the videowork what I experienced was not only film, it was also time; it was also mind. With motion slowed so radically, one experiences another way to see, another way to think. Things seem intensely what they are, broken down into atoms, into motes of light, as if seen for the first time.

My copy arrived today. Blogging this now to remember to return to it later after reading the book.