CONSUME
The tension was held a little too long and you get bored for a moment, but that doesn’t stop the payoff of the show going live. You really root for it. Not all, but some of the representations were great. Even if the look wasn’t quite right, the essence was there.
THOUHGTS
I love high quality software.
…like, really love it. Probably more than most people.
I check the iOS App Store updates multiple times a day to see if someone wrote interesting release notes. I follow a Mastodon hashtag for #TestFlight so that I can see if people are working on something interesting. I’ve been closely following companies like Panic and the Iconfactory since the mid/late 90s. I’ve also scoured Mastodon’s @indieapps.space instance to find new software. I daydream about paying for Flighty even though I’m not currently flying enough to justify it, just because it’s good software. I’ve given talks internationally at conferences (I’m stretching it — once in Canada) about how we need more culture in our software.
And when bloggers started listing their “Default Apps” for various categories, I read over 350 of them. So I want to list mine, but I also found in reading through them all, the interesting stuff is on the fringes of the main categories, so I want to focus on that, too.
I also want to mention how much it leaves a hole in my heart when good software dies. I still feel frustrated every time I use email (RIP Sparrow and Mailbox) and use banking apps (RIP Simple Bank) — both killed off through acquisitions. When platforms get weird and kill off 3rd-party apps, I care enough that I leave the platforms (RIP Apollo, Twitteriffic/Tweetbot). It pains me that I feel unsatisfied when I use the Wikipedia iOS app and know that there used to be a better 3rd-Party app (RIP V for Wiki, though I’m working on something that scratches my itch in this space). All of this makes me really worried about Arc and their VC path.
Writing this is part of my grieving process over those “Dead Apps”, but I’m also wanting to hear what holes you have. Does anyone grieve over losing good software?
NOTES
It’s gotten very good! I’m sure that there are features that note-fiends will say are missing, but it hits every note I need.
NOTES
It’s gotten very good! I’m sure that there are features that note-fiends will say are missing, but it hits every note I need.
NOTES
It’s gotten very good! I’m sure that there are features that note-fiends will say are missing, but it hits every note I need.
NOTES
It’s gotten very good! I’m sure that there are features that note-fiends will say are missing, but it hits every note I need.
NOTES
It’s gotten very good! I’m sure that there are features that note-fiends will say are missing, but it hits every note I need.
Media
After 6 months of serious and strenuous evaluation, the BrumBrum Academy is proud to announce the Brummies for 2009. Previously: 1, 2
Boom Shadow by Nino Moschella
2nd album from the guy who I anticipate new work from the most. It’s a near-guarantee that I’ll love every piece of music that he puts out.
Good City for Dreamers by General Elektriks
It’s been a while since their last release, but he picks up right where he left off 6 years ago.
Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future by The Bird & the Bee
Easily the closest I get to pop in my listening habits, but I think I’m a sucker for Greg Kurstin’s production
Runners Up: Carried Away by the People Under the Stairs, BLACKsumers’night by Maxwell, The Ecstatic by Mos Def
Star Trek by the J.J. Abrams
After the new Batman movies and this, I’m hoping that folks are figuring out how to properly handle summer blockbusters.
In The Loop by Armando Iannucci
Hands down the best use of swearing in the last decade. Even better than the TV series.
The Informant! by Steven Soderbergh
My favorite thing about this movie is that this guy really exists.
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
I remember the author from one of my favorite super-hero graphic novels back in ’88, but I’m glad to see that 20 years later he’s done his first self-written graphic novel.
Nothing
I didn’t realize it until I started this list, but what the hell has happened to me?! I apparently stopped reading this year. Asterios Polyp is the only book that I can remember reading the whole thing. I mean, I read a few things that were published before 2009 which don’t count, but still…
Man… I better clean up my act.
Design
Interesting:
Lots to take away from this. For me, most of all is that I’ve been in this employee’s shoes and this story reaffirms that I will make sure to never be wearing shoes like his in a company like that again. It sounds clear that AA is a seriously messed up company, and, as folks have said, the original critique is a little naive of the situation: A little screenshot does not a website make.
Thoughts
I had a bunch of people get together for my birthday three years ago and we all played a few rounds of my favorite board-game, Hoopla (seriously, I’ve played this game with the same set of cards for about 6 years and I still love it; and yes, I understand it’s technically not a board-game). For people who gave a unique performance during the game, I let them draw from a hat a description on a strip of paper of a fake prize that they had won. Examples include free slumber-parties at a mutual acquaintance’s that we barely knew (who had no idea he was involved in the prize) to a dance-off between two friends of the winner’s choice.
Hidden amongst all these fake prizes was a slip that looked just as made-up as the rest of them, but I actually had prearranged to make it into a reality. Some of my friends own a documentary company (Open Road Media, makers of fine films such as Pun Smoke and the Human Hambone) down in LA and I contacted them earlier in the day: Someone at the party would draw a prize of “A Free Documentary Of Your Choice By Open Road Media.” A choice would be made by the winner and I would discretely txt my friend, who would have a team of folks ready to take the chosen topic and turn it into a “documentary” as quickly as possible. They would then send me the result over the internet and I would play the video on the living room television for the winner and the rest of the party at the end of the evening.
Well, the winner of the documentary prize chose the topic of “Friendship” and the wheels were set in motion. About two hours later, I presented the documentary and had a very confused party, who were struggling to figure out what just happened.
Here is the 2min. 40sec. documentary on “Friendship”:
Design
The best thing to come out of web-design icon Doug Bowman’s resignation from Google is this well thought out article by Scott Stevenson. Doug on his departure:
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.
This particular point set off Mr. Stevenson to put into words concepts that I’ve always been aware of, but have always struggled to articulate as well as he did in his post:
The most contentious point between software engineering culture and visual design culture is the question of whether important things can be always seen in absolutes. The engineering approach values measurable, reproducible results which can be represented in a graph or a checklist. Unit tests and benchmarks illustrate progress. […] Visual design is often the polar opposite of engineering: trading hard edges for subjective decisions based on gut feelings and personal experiences. It’s messy, unpredictable, and notoriously hard to measure. The apparently erratic behavior of artists drives engineers bananas. Their decisions seem arbitrary and risk everything with no guaranteed benefit.
Through out my career, I’ve regularly been in similar environments; and one of my biggest problems has been figuring out how to hurdle that divide. I feel that part of my role is as a visual taste maker. You might test to find the most crowd pleasing shade of blue at the first pass, but I might come up with a blue that might not be your instant choice, yet will grow on you when taken in holistically. Like Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” There is a point with visual design where logic starts to breakdown in ways that only experience can answer.
Music
After Stacey Lester posted his 12 favorite song covers on Facebook, I couldn’t help myself but to compile my own list. In no particular order:
Andrew Bird – Don’t Be Scared
Originally performed by the Handsome Family
Drastic reinterpretation. Don’t miss the reprise at the end. Love the 3 bar loop over 4.
Groove Collective – Martha My Dear
Originally performed by the Beatles
One of the most abstract covers I’ve heard, but still great.
Audrye Sessions – Waltz #2 (XO)
Originally performed by Elliott Smith
There have been lots of albums dedicated to covering Smith, but almost all tracks fall short. I think I got it bad for intimate reinterpretations.
Estradasphere – Super Buck 2
Originally performed by Kōji Kondō
Ah, nostalgia. Also check out this take on the classic song.
Toots & the Maytals – Louie Louie
Originally performed by Richard Berry
Ahh, so much more personality…
Jose González – Heartbeats
Originally performed by the Knife
Taken from an elctropop song, this is further proof that I love a good intimate music.
Jose Feliciano – Golden Lady
Originally performed by Stevie Wonder
Great take on an all-time classic with a samba twist.
Phantom Planet & Mark Ronson – Just
Originally performed by Radiohead
I think I have a tendency to like Radiohead covers more than the originals. I know, blasphemy to some…
Easy Star All Stars w/ Citizen Cope – Karma Police
Originally performed by Radiohead
All the songs on the Radiodread album are surprisingly good; you’d expect a reggae cover album to come out cheesy, but it works.
Wynton Marsalis – Thelonious
Originally performed by Thelonious Monk
One of my favorite tracks by my favorite jazzman covered with a little kick
Derrick Laro & Trinity – Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough
Originally performed by Michael Jackson
The falsetto isn’t as strong as MJ, but for some reason it makes me like it more.
Steve Martin & Bernadette Peters – Tonight You Belong To Me
Originally performed by Gene Austin
Special moment from the greatest comedy of all time.
Here are all the songs for you to download: Covers.zip
Music
Around the age of 10, I started discovering music that I felt that was meant for me for the first time. The first band that I ever latched onto was Faith No More, but that quickly turned into a strong connection to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My friend Kaley and I were drawn to their high-energy aggressiveness in songs like Stone Cold Bush and Get Up And Jump1. Being from a little town of 3,000 people limits one’s exposure at that age to what you can get on the MTV; the Chili Peppers was IT for us.
We would slowly branch out to discover music through them. I became a lifelong Fishbone fan and my first concert was Firehose, both bands mentioned in RHCP songs. We knew that George Clinton produced the RHCP album “Freaky Styley” and found out that Kaley’s dad had Funkadelic’s “Standing On The Verge of Getting It On” on vinyl. Kaley would turn the RPM to 45 and yell, “IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE THE PEPPERS!”
One late night around this time, I turned the channel to PBS and caught this:
I was blown away and I called Kaley the next day to tell him about what I saw. At the time, I wasn’t resourceful enough to be able to find out who they even were. That added to their intrigue, but I soon discovered that it was Sly and the Family Stone and I was an instant fan. I wanted to know as much as I could about the man and his group.
Strange thing is, for Sly Stone (who led the group) being such an interesting story – stealing the show at what may be the most legendary concert of all time to hitting rock bottom while being on the run from the FBI – only little bits of info has come out about him in the last 35 years.2 In 2007, Vanity Fair did a seven-page article regarding his sabbatical and potential emergence; This last September was the first complete biography3, “I Want To Take You Higher“, of the man and the band was released. The book reveals a little, but upon my reading felt incomplete. UPDATE: I just learned of another bio that came out in Feb. of ’08 that I haven’t yet read.
BUT, what I’ve discovered after reading Higher is that the Dutch are NUTS for the man. I found that in 1992, two Dutch film students set out to document their search for Sly in “Let Me Have It All” (their results are below); Another Dutch documentary about Sly, “Dance To The Music” just finished completion and was aired on Dutch television. AND, another biography written by two Dutch twins that has been in the works since 2002 is set to be released in early 2010.
Back in ’97, when the web was still in its infancy, a Sly and the Fam fan-site webmaster4 was flown to LA by Sly specifically to teach him how to browse the web on a computer. During this time, he was allowed to hear Sly’s 15-year backlog of unreleased material. Since hearing this account5, I’ve fantasized of Sly coming back and releasing a huge backlog of unheard material.
These days, Sly is slowly making more public appearances; if only a few over the course of the last three years. While I’m sure that it’ll be tough to reach the level of his heyday, I feel that if I just am able to catch a glimpse of the man, however satisfactory, it’ll feel like I’ve completed something; regardless of whether it has any actual merit or not.
PS: The only site that I’ve found that publishes Sly & the Fam news is this one, but they don’t have an RSS feed. I used Feed43 to scrape the news off of this page into this feed: Sly & the Fam News Feed
Let Me Have It All (1994, 48 min)
Preview for the just released Dance To The Music (2008, 2 min)
Jimi and Sly: The Skin I’m In (2000, 60 min)
A feature documentary about the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone featuring Rose and Freddie Stone, Sly Stone’s mother, and band members Cynthia, Jerry, Larry, Gregg and David Kapralik, Manager of Sly Stone and his partner. You can watch it with a library card on Kanopy for free.
Media
Once again, it’s time for the BrumBrum Awards honoring excellence in various media over the course of the last year:
Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
I think this is the largest graphic novel I’ve ever read, coming in at 720 pages. I kinda imagined that this was a book by Noah Baumbach in which Noah was able to grow beyond the rut he got in with Margot at the Wedding.
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
I grabbed this because I was particularly interested in Dane Cook’s parallels to Steve’s stand-up career (not really). And I’m a sucker for any tidbits I can find on the Jerk.
A Practical Guide To Racism by C. H. Dalton
The perfect book to keep by your side when you need to inflame the racial hatred that you’ve worked so hard to hide away.
Runners Up: Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle, More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman, Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters
The Way I See It by Raphael Saadiq
Not as innovative as his first release, but still is probably tied for the best album out of the recent Motown revival along with…
JIM by Jamie Lidell
The first guy I know about to do the whole modern Motown sound came out with a close to perfect album. Every track is solid.
Metropolis: The Case Suite by Janelle Monáe
I have a strong feeling after hearing this album that she’s going to be huge, with crossover appeal to a number of audiences. She’s supposed to release another EP in Q1 of ’09.
Oracular Spectacular by MGMT
More rock like this, please.
Runners Up: Droppin’ Science Fiction by the Mighty Underdogs, Shine by Estelle, Doomtree by Doomtree, New Amerykah, Pt. 1 by Erykah Bad
Bigger Stronger Faster by the Chris Bell
I went into watching this movie against steroids in competition to now not knowing what to think. Might not be as superbly told as Man On Wire for a documentary, but it had more of an impact on me.
Let The Right One In by Tomas Alfredson
I thought about this movie for a couple days after watching it. The two 12-year-olds in this do just as good of a job as most of this years nominees.
The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan
A little bit of an obvious choice, but that doesn’t stop it from being hella good.
Runners Up: Slumdog Millionaire, Role Models, The Wackness
Comics
Rutu Modan, author of last year’s great Exit Wounds, just finished up her 17-part strip in the New York Times Funny Pages, the Murder of the Terminal Patient.
Earlier this year, I consolidated Dan Clowes’ 20-page entry for the Funny Pages into a single PDF file; and now I’ve gone back and complied single PDFs for all of the NYT Funny Pages’ past strips. Enjoy:
NOTE: These are highly compressed, so there are slight visual artifacts. Their natural file size would be in the 40 – 80 MB range.
Thoughts
About three years ago, I had no idea that I would be anywhere close to where I am today. Around that time, my roommate came up with an idea to solve a problem: Music in an open space (Coffee shops, shared offices, etc.). Collaborative filtering of the collective collections from the open space could potentially be a better disc jockey than any single human with his singular collection.
About 4 of us would get together about once a week and kick around ideas for how to pull this off and generate a revenue model. We eventually drifted away from that when we got more excited about another idea: As the world becomes more and more digital, the tracking of the data that people pay attention to will be easier and easier to analyze. We could use attention data to notify people about events that they might be interested in.
At this point, it was a fun side project and I was always curious as to where it might lead to. It started off slowly and we got more serious about it, eventually convincing other people to join us. Soon enough, I would realize that we could really turn this into a viable business and eventually CultureMob was born.
But I still had no idea that today, I could walk around Seattle and overhear people I’ve never met recommending the service I helped start with 4 guys to other people I’ve never met. 2 weeks ago, we held our first event at Neumos with ?uestlove of the Roots. I never would have imagined that dorking out about attention data with friends in a coffee shop would lead to working with one of my longtime idols.
It’s not as if CultureMob has been instantly successful, but its really starting to come into it’s own. We’ve only been live for 7 months, and I’m already surprised at where it’s taking me. I have no idea where I’ll be in another 3 years, but here’s to hoping it’s just as surprising.
Media
I recently finished “Born Standing Up“, Steve Martin’s memoir about the beginning of his career. Martin’s “The Jerk” has been my favorite comedy since I was in high-school; but there is a relative a dearth of information about this classic film. So I decided to see what I could dig up. Below is a few random interesting things I could find about “The Jerk”. If you have any more additional interesting information on this film, please post it in the comments and I’ll continue to update this post. I’m dying to find more out about the “nine weeks and five days” scene…
The mansion shown in the film was actually two Beverly Hills mansions. The outside shots were taken at the same mansion (map) that was used in the Godfather and the Bodyguard, and was once owned by William Randolph Hearst. It is currently for sale for “what may be the most expensive residential property listing in the US.”
The interior shots were filmed just a year after the owner at the time, Sheik Al-Fassi, took over the mansion (map). After moving in, Al-Fassi proceeded to redecorate the mansion in the tasteful ways depicted in the film. He even painted flesh tones and pubic hair on all the Greek statues within the property. In the course of this 3 years owning the property, he adopted over 100 stray cats. The year after the Jerk was filmed, the property was torched by an arsonist, while onlookers reportedly yelled “Burn, burn, burn”. Al-Fassi was rumored to be secretly detained in Riyadh by the Saudi government for years following the Gulf War for airing radio messages in Bagdad in support of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He passed at the age of 50 in 2003.
Written in 1926 by Billy Rose and Lee David. Recorded by Gene Austin in 1927. Popularized by Patience and Prudence in 1956.
The song was performed in the Jerk by Lyle Ritz. Ritz was a studio jazz bassist during the 60′s and 70′s. In ’58 and ’59, he recorded two jazz ukulele albums and then didn’t touch it professionally until the Jerk in ’79. Since then, he didn’t put it down and was recently introduced into the Ukulele Hall of Fame in June of ’07.
Ukulele Chords for “Tonight You Belong To Me”. Alternate voicing and video for playing the song on ukulele.
Gene Austin – Tonight You Belong To Me (1927):
Patience & Prudence – Tonight You Belong To Me (1956):
Steve Martin & Bernadette Peters – Tonight You Belong To Me (1979):
Bird & the Bee – Tonight You Belong To Me (2008):
The Bird and the Bee are two of my favorite artists and coincidentally just released this on their new EP.
UPDATE (4.24.08) – From “Steve Martin, The Magic Years.” Regarding the performance of this song:
Steve purposely wrote the part for [Bernadette Peters] in The Jerk. David Picker, who was a Paramount executive and the co-producer for The Jerk, said, “The fact that they knew and loved each other made the scenes in the movie work even better.”
From Born Standing Up:
It was a joy to work on the movie and the script. Our goal in writing was a laugh on every page. But my favorite line in the movie was an ad lib, one that is mildly obscured by traffic noise in the finished film. My character, Navin Johnson, is hitchiking in Missouri, headed for the big city. A car pulls over, and the dirver asks, “St. Louis?” “No,” I answer, “Navin Johnson.”
I was injecting stage material into the screenplay, including a bit that was taken directly from the end of my act, first developed at the Boarding House. On stage, I would exit through the audience, saying, “I’m quitting, I’m leaving and never coming back, and I don’t need anything, nothing at all, well, I need this ashtray.” I would collect doodads from the tabletops until I finally disappeared out the door. The bit appears in the final film as I forlornly leave Bernadette Peters and my movie mansion.
Martin’s line from the opening scene was taken from his act as performed on his first album “Let’s Get Small” (1977):
I started off at the bottom. I was born a poor black child. And all day long around the house, they’d sing the blues. Then I heard my first Mantovani record, and I knew that this is where it’s at for me. The kind of music I enjoy. These are my people. So I decided to become white. I had my cock shortened. Then I got a job as a television weather man.
Martin’s co-writer (Carl Gottlieb) has a cameo role as Iron Balls McGinty. He also had a hand in writing the first 3 Jaws movies and wrote the character development for “The Jerk, Too”
UPDATE (4.18.08) – From “Steve Martin, The Magic Years.” The author discusses his early adolescence with Steve:
In discussing the way people actually “did it,” Steve suggested that a man would put his “thing” in the woman and move it in and out. I objected to this theory, and expressed my belief that one should just insert “it” and leave “it.” Well, Steve was right (except in rare cases); nevertheless, his only description of “it” was simply “it.”
Since he apparently had one hand up on me in this in-depth biological debate (no pun indented), I then had to explain to him that the real terminology for this “thing” we were discussing was given to me by my mother when I was but a mere child. “It’s called your special purpose,” I told him proudly. His face widened with a wild and crazy grin, which from that point on was instantly plastered upon his countenance whenever anyone would say “special purpose” –whether it was a teacher or an innocent bystander at Disneyland (we would break up and nobody knew why).
Bill Murray filmed a cameo that was deleted. On the December 15, 1979 broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” (S05E07), Murray jokingly reviewed ‘The Jerk’, saying:
Which brings me to “The Jerk.” Steve Martin is a friend. As a matter of fact, I was in the movie but cut out of it. That doesn’t influence my opinion. The movie is a dog. There’s something missing. I don’t– Who it is, I can’t say.
Stanley Kubrick was impressed with Martin and was interested in having him play the lead in his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler‘s “Traumnovelle“. Kubrick intended on making his take on the novel as a dark sex comedy. Kubrick approached several writers to take a shot at it, but the project never got off the ground until Kubrick recast the role in 1999 with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in what became “Eyes Wide Shut“.
The Jerk grossed over $100m on a $4m budget, and this convinced the world of television in 1984 to get a piece of the pie. A “made-for-TV” movie was made as a pilot for for a potential series staring Mark Blankfield of Fridays as Navin R. Johnson. It seems to take place in an alternate universe where Martin’s “Jerk” never happened. And there aren’t jokes in the movie as much as lucky occurrences that happen to Navin.
I found a copy of this and posted a torrent: The Jerk, Too (95min., 703MB, MP4)
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