September 16, 2005

Just so you know...



Not so much with the NYT Select
That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

Now Listening

Picked up a copy of the new New Pornographers album Twin Cinema the other day, and it's pretty much on endless repeat on my iTunes right now. I happened across Electric Version a few years back, and went nuts over it, picking up their first album and releases from A.C. Newman, Neko Case, etc. By now, it's gotten to the point where I don't understand how everyone isn't listening to them. EV is one of my favorite albums of the last 5 years, and TC is as good if not better (Pitchfork gave EV an 8.1 and TC a 9.0).

I tend to find one song that hooks me, and then build my impression of the album around it, using the hook to keep me listening to the other songs as well. And right now, I'm grooving on "These are the Fables." It's not "typical" of the whole album, but then, one of the things I like about the NP is that most of the songs aren't typical of the whole. So anyhow, give it a listen if you have the chance...

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:02 PM | Comments (1)

August 17, 2005

Devil vs. Deep Blue Sea

I'm trying to decide which recent commercial disturbs me more:

Target's use of "Baby Got Back" for their new back-to-school campaign, or

Lee Iacocca and Snoop Dogg appearing together in the latest Chrysler campaign. For shizzle, Iacizzle?! Oh. My. God.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:50 PM | Comments (3)

July 04, 2005

Independence month

I'll probably venture forth with one or two additional carnival posts, but today, as I reflected on the notion of independence, I realized that it's been almost a week and a half since I watched television of any sort. Having had to move to a temporary space, I decided not to bother switching either my phone line or my digital cable. Partly, I'm being cheap in the sense that I'd almost certainly have to pay my providers both to switch it and to switch it back. Also, since I'm going to be attending the Penn State Conference next week, and ranging westward from there, there didn't seem to be much point in (a) paying, and (b) paying for what would ultimately have been a fairly short period of time.

The result is an oddly quiet, pre-digital cocoon that I'm inhabiting just now. Of course, I come into the office to blog, email, etc., but I do a lot more reading in my homespace than I'm accustomed to doing normally. Oh, and I finally succumbed to the siren song of Netflix. I'm through the first two seasons of West Wing, and will probably embark on the third before I leave next weekend. Teaching assignments over the years have interfered with my ability to watch faithfully, and so it's interesting to see episodes that I hadn't before (or had forgotten) and to see them in order.

I know. How boring am I this weekend? Well, that's what you get for interfering with the slow, grinding process that is the composition of the presentation I'll be delivering in roughly a week. At 8:30 a.m., much to my future delight.

Anyways. That's all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:09 PM | Comments (2)

April 13, 2005

A. Sloane

That's A as in Another. Or Arthur, or Alvin, or Andy. Doesn't matter. If tonight's episode was any indication, the producers of Alias have finally returned to form, and added an honest-to-goodness, LOD-style, criminal mastermind into the works. And true to their roots, it's a heretofore unknown member of the family.

Rock. And. Roll.

In other news, I was interviewed today by Jeff Young (I think--I forgot to jot his name down) for the Chronicle. We had a nice conversation which began from the changing circumstances of university presidents, many of whom try to respond to all mail and email they receive. As you might imagine, with IM plagiarists, Ward Churchill, etc., they're getting a lot more correspondence these days, and it's exacerbated by the fact that most of them are accessible now via a simple web search and an email message. Events that at one time would have been covered by the campus newspaper and precious little else can now cascade into national news in a matter of hours. As slow as we've been to take up blogging in the academy, there are plenty of people out there blogging campus speakers, leveraging extra or intra-campus networks, etc., all of which makes it a lot more difficult to keep track of (or keep a lid on) what's happening on a given campus.

This kind of transparency cuts both ways. On the one hand, we might argue that it forces universities, from the president or chancellor on down, to be more responsible to the people (be they parents or legislatures) who are helping to fund them. On the other, though, as these presidents with an "open inbox" policy are quickly learning, it can be crippling. We're reading some introductory essays about SNA (social network analysis) in my course this week, and something that Valdis Krebs has to say is directly relevant:

The secret to network benefits is in the pattern of direct and indirect connections surrounding a node. It is the pattern of relationships, that a node is embedded in, that either constrains or enhances the ability to get things done in the organization. The goal is to obtain wide network reach without having too many direct ties. It is the indirect ties that provide network benefits. Research has shown that both individuals and groups who are central in organizational networks, yet are not overwhelmed by direct ties, are very effective in getting things done.

The benefit of being at the top of a hierarchy is that the entire organization exists in part to solve problems and handle things before they ever cross your desk. The drawback of making that hierarchy transparent is that everyone outside that hierarchy starts at the top when it comes time to (a) blame and/or (b) flame. It's far easier to simply start at the top than to try and figure out how far down you have to go to find the person or persons responsible for whatever it is one disapproves of. And every one of those emails, from the hundreds of people who criticize you for uninviting a controversial speaker to the hundreds from the other side who criticize you for not doing sooner, is a direct tie. And even if you have 2 boilerplate statements, one for each side, and you just skim to figure out which one to use, responding to each of those direct ties can be utterly paralyzing.

Combine this with the shortcuts and connections that are multiplying--thanks in part to blogs but also in part to telecomm more broadly--and the next move, one you can already see in some places, will be to talk about management rather than growth. Smarter cats than I are already talking about the Dunbar Number as a ceiling to the size of effective social groups. Seems a small leap to me to suggest that there are analogous Dunbar numbers for direct ties, where ties include people, emails, projects, etc., and that this idea will be used to justify a return to some degree of opacity in the upper echelons.

If I'm lucky, then some of what I said today on the phone approached this level of coherence. And if any of it was quotable, then you'll be seeing my name next week (ideally, attached to something that doesn't sound too utterly dopey) in a Chronicle near you.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:15 PM | Comments (1)

March 31, 2005

Mix-a-lot

For slightly longer than I've been keeping this blog, I've engaged in another time-honored tradition, the mix tape. Partly this has been inspired by iTunes--when I buy a new CD, or download some music, if I like a particular song, I'll go ahead and throw it into a date-based playlist, which has left me with playlists for the last three years. And then, usually in Feb or March, I'll winnow the list down so that I can fit it on a CD, and burn a copy or three--one for the car, a couple for friends, etc.

I'm not especially intense about cut-off dates--my primary rule of thumb is that I acquire the music during the year in question, even if I don't end up discovering it until a little later. But even that gets bent a bit: I got Transatlanticism for my birthday last year, but didn't really listen to it until 2004, which is why a couple of songs landed here. The songs don't always all fit together into any category other than the most important one: I like em.

I've been putting off my 2004 CD for no real reason, and so I thought it might be the kind of project to drive away some of the doldrums. We'll see if it works. In the meantime, though, here's my playlist and what you'll hear if I give you a ride anywhere for the next few months:

my 2004 playlist

I always feel somewhat compelled to apologize for my music tastes, so I'll resist that here. I suppose it comes from having friends who know TONS more about music than I do, and from the fact that, at one point in my life, I would have described myself as someone who knew much more than I do now. Mostly now I just read Pitchfork and rely on the listening stations.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:49 PM | Comments (5)

March 07, 2005

Stop me if you've heard this one before

Technically, I suppose, that means that you should have stopped reading with the title. I wasn't watching 24 that closely tonight, but much to my dismay, I did get a chance to see a promo for a new comedy erring airing on FOX in April.

And it sounds like the kind of utter dross that you'd hear at 2 am coming out of the mouths of a couple of drunk guys in a bar. Hey! You know what would be a cool show? We could do a comedy starring Pamela Anderson, and it'd be called "Stacked," cuz it'd take place in a bookstore! Get it? Stacks of books? Get it? That'd be soooooo cool!

Umm, yeah. Not so much. Honestly, is that all you got? And advertising it during 24? How bout you keep that weak shit to yourself?

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:14 PM | Comments (1)

February 23, 2005

Jump the Sark

I knew that Jen would be happy, what with the returns of Julian Sark and Anna Espinoza to the roster on Alias tonight. I was pretty pleased, too, but I do have a thought or two.

First, it's pretty clear that the whole Rimbaldi arc is about to fade. For the first couple of seasons, Rimbaldi was an eerily prescient prophet and genius-level inventor, who'd provided the juice for all sorts of wacky quests and subplots. Tonight, they made a big point of treating Rimbaldi as someone that certain "zealots" believe in, and now, apparently, it's all about how the zealots (like Espinoza) will do all in their nefarious powers to make R's visions come true. The agency has shifted from the prophecies to the people who foolishly believe in them. Unless they end up tying this to Sloane somehow, my guess is that this belief is not long for the new-look Alias.

And that's too bad. Because right now, there's no kryptonite on the show. No one can really die--although that's not stopping them from the old gunshot coma, clearly--and so they're going to run into the Superman problem, or perhaps more appropriately, the Superfriends problem. As long as the Superfriends are taking on individual villains, they're pretty much unstoppable. But when you've got a Legion of Doom to match them up with, then there's actually the possibility of loss, and that makes it interesting. SD-6, Covenant, whatever--there's got to be an LOD pretty soon, or they're going to run out of plot.

The common theme here, and the thing that Lost is still doing well, is that there's no larger puzzle that the Alias crew has to figure out. And that role has been played both by LOD-style organizations and by Rimbaldi in seasons past. So while I'm happy to see Sark and Espinoza back, I'm still waiting for the return of the arcs that made me a die-hard fan. And pretty soon, I'm going to start getting impatient.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:40 PM | Comments (1)

February 11, 2005

Apparently Stacy's Mom's daughter has also got it going on...

You may recall that last month I posted a mildly disapproving entry about the new Dr. Pepper commercial. Not being content to just let their creepy commercial rest on its own demerits, the good folks at Dr. Pepper, purveyors of the taste of originality, have decided to enter the spam business as well. To wit, my new friend "Stacy" has contributed her own insight:

I absolutely love this commercial! How funny to do a take-off on the video. You think the boys are looking at the Soccer Mom but are really more interested in the Dr. Pepper. It's finally great to see a well done commercial! I'm off to buy some Dr. Pepper!

Ah yes! I absolutely love this comment! How funny to explain this commercial to us as though we were absolute morons! It's finally great (?!) to see a well done comment!

And yes, "Stacy," I'm stunned by the originality of your fake name, and overwhelmed when I think of just how much Dr. Pepper you'll be able to buy with the checks you're getting from Dr. Pepper! Just think! All you have to do is spam a bunch of blogs with fake comments, and they'll give you money! What a great scheme! All the boys are looking at your comments but will really be more interested in the Dr. Pepper! How clever!

Let me just say that I will be drinking my own urine before I buy Dr. Pepper. Commercials fade from my memory, but crappy, exclamation point ridden spam has just earned Dr. Pepper permanent Nemesis status.

That is all.

Update: Apparently, it's not all. "Stacy" has a friend named "gary," who shares her high opinion of Dr. Pepper:

Wow you guys need to lighten up, the commercial is a spoof intended to be funny. I loved the Stacy's Mom spot and the I Can Do Anything For Love spot as well. I hope they keep playing them, I love to hear the music and the ad makes me laugh. You rock DR Pepper and Stacy's Mom.

Wow, "gary," you're right. Thanks for reminding me of the other commercial--its relevance to the original post is so undeniable that I almost swallowed my tongue. You rock, "gary," you rock. I hope you keep trying to spam that entry, I love to read your fake names and your thinly veiled advertising pander (this time masked with really bad grammar) makes me laugh.

Comments.....off. Go spam somebody else. That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:20 PM | Comments (5)

January 24, 2005

Creepy is the new Cool

The Starburst commercial begins in the hallway of a high school, with a slightly geeky guy standing there, as several girls get out of class and walk into the hallway. The boy calls out to Cheryl, who turns, and he tells her that he's got to show her something. They walk into what's clearly an art studio, and he walks her over to something that's covered with a cloth.

He takes off the cloth, and it's the bust of a female head, built entirely out of Starburst. "Cheryl, it's you," the guy explains. "I used lemon for your hair, because your hair's fresh and yellow. And I used cherry for your lips, because your lips are so juicy."

And as Cheryl stares at him in what I can only imagine is an emotion roughly parallel to my own as I watch this, he starts making out with this weird Starburst Chia Head. And as this happens, we hear Lionel Richie's "Hello" playing in the background. Umm. I was young enough when this song came out that I completed missed its psychotic, stalker overtones. Yeah. No longer. This particular combination of commercial and song may very well haunt my dreams tonight.

"Is it me you're looking for?"

Not so much.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:44 PM | Comments (5)

January 23, 2005

Must G33k TV

I've gushed in this space before about Monk, where I described it as the best television show not appearing on HBO. And while I think Lost may be giving it a run for that title, I'm not ready to do the soul-searching necessary to offer up such a decree. The new season began on Friday, and again, if you're not watching the show, you should start. While it's not quite as dramatic as Alias's remake, Bitty Schram left the show (over a contract dispute, I think), and they recruited Traylor Howard, whose career has mostly been being the "Girl" in Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. Her role there was largely cute and perky, I think. Much less so on Monk, I suspect.

And the result was basically a transition episode, introducing us to her, and giving us backstory to explain Sharona's absence. Not bad, but not brilliant.

And only part of my point in posting. By the end of the Patriots-Steelers game tonight, I was anxiously waiting for the new CBS show Numb3rs, which features, among others, a pretty solid geek ensemble:

Morrow's an FBI agent, while Krumholtz is his brother and a math professor who apparently harnesses serious mathematics to assist him in his cases. I say apparently bc I don't really have the math to know. The show seems pretty interesting, although I'm hard pressed to say how they'll manage to come up with solid plots over the long term. But Ridley Scott is one of the execs, and it was pretty stylish. They did a lot of flashy math interludes, modeled (I suspect) after the CSI stuff, where formulae get superimposed on phenomena, with lots of arrows and notations.

While I don't really know the math well enough to comment, I can mention that tonight's episode featured some insights that I've come to associate with network studies--the human tendency to seek underlying patterns, even when resisting them on the surface, for instance. I got the impression from the trailers that Krumholtz would be a lot less socially adept than he proved to be in this episode, which was something of a relief, bc they didn't go for cheap stereotypes in that regard. He is a little bit of a Beautiful Mind type, and I'm sure that this was another influence on the visual style of the show.

All in all, I'd call it intriguing, and worth another look. Except, of course, that CBS has scheduled it for 10 pm on Fridays, which is the same &*#$@!ing time as Monk. Of course. All of the props scheduled for CBS, for airing a show with smart people as the protagonists, have been cancelled for airing it at a time designed to remind smart people in the audience that their social lives are such that they're actually home to watch it. Not nice.

Oh, and every single reference to the show I've seen (including the URL for the show's page at CBS) keeps the 3. Woot.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:23 PM | Comments (7)

January 20, 2005

Labor-saver

Oh. My. God. It's been years and years since I read Mark Trail. Heck, it's been years since I carried on a conversation involving deeply sardonic praise of the faux profundity of Family Circus. And yet, just when I thought the web couldn't give me any more of what I didn't even realize I needed, I found a link (hat tip to Johndan) to joshreads.com. Josh reads these comics so I don't have to.

Or rather, he reads the comics so that I myself want to. It's early, but I'm thinking that Josh will join Merlin's 5ives, the Onion, and Homestar in my personal Hall of Funny. Good stuff.

And yes, I almost titled this post "A Post about Collin Brooke, the author of Collin vs. Blog"

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:44 AM | Comments (1)

An Entry Conferring "Most Favored Televisual Entertainment" Status on the ABC Wednesday Night Lineup

Well, not quite all of it. Needless to say, given my hostility to "reality" programming, I can't get behind WifeSwap or SpouseSwitch or FamilyFlip or whatever the hell that crap is called.

But in the interest of continuing my series of Directorial Decrees, and in response to a reader request (!!), I present to you the first recipient of "Most Favored Entertainment" status, the 120 or so minutes on Wednesday night where we are treated to the work of J. J. Abrams. I'm speaking, of course, of the shows Lost and Alias, the back-to-back anchors of my weekly entertainment cycle.

I'm coming quickly to the conclusion that it's largely pointless for me to conceal my own "aging fanboy" status, so I will warn you right now that this post reflects this status without apology. Years and years of fantasy and science fiction leaves a body with particular tastes when it comes to entertainment, and I recognize that those tastes aren't universal, that not everyone will share my preferences. So this is not a post about "why Lost & Alias are great" but rather "why I like them." Caveat lector, and all that.

Damn if I'm not a dork.

So anyhow, one of the core elements that draws me to both shows is a particular style of storytelling that Abrams has been honing to good effect for the last few years, and it's a style that these shows have in common with a lot of epic book series and tv series (and if you have trouble thinking of X-Files or Star Trek as epic, well, umm, don't read further?). For ease of analog, think the original Star Wars, and how provincial and nerdy Luke Skywalker is. Or think the character of Dr. Watson, whose understanding unfolds on our behalf in Sherlock Holmes stories. A good epic series begins with characters with whom the audience can identify. But there's always a disjunct between the character's horizon and the place she or he will ultimately occupy. Luke starts out on Tatooine and ends up defeating the Empire. The process of unfolding that character's horizon until it begins to reach an epic scale is the way that epics work best for me (and for most people, I suspect). When I reviewed the movie treatment of LeGuin's Earthsea a while back, for example, one of the biggest failings of that version was that it basically ignored the unfolding that LeGuin allows for in the books themselves.

So, unfolding. In Lost, a bunch of people get on a plane and crash on an island. There's an immediate goal--how we will get home?--but Abrams's island is far more than it seems at first, which provides the outer horizon of understanding, and a goal that's becoming more and more pressing as Said gets captured by a mystery Frenchwoman (in next week's repeat), as Clare gets kidnapped, and as various suggestions of the supernatural (Walt's strangeness, Locke's miracle recovery, Jack's hallucinations) manifest. One of the ways that Abrams draws that outer horizon out, though, is by giving us flashbacks for various characters each week, helping us to identify with them as individual characters. To my mind, one of the really genius moves of Lost is this strategy for dealing with a 40+ person ensemble cast. The series starts at an intermediate point, and moves both backwards and forwards to create that inner/outer horizon dynamic.

Alias worked a little more traditionally in the sense that Sydney Bristow is our "in," as the opening sequence now goes to great length to remind us. She begins as a part-time grad student, full-time spy for a covert branch of the CIA. Except that she finds out it's not the CIA, but a terrorist organization instead, and so she goes double agent. There's way too much more to capture here, but I'll note that the first three seasons of Alias uses plot tricks galore, pushing that outer horizon outwards, just as we think we understand it all, discovering new family members, Renaissance prophecies, genetically manipulated dopplegangers, competing organizations, etc.

I think that the Abrams crew recognized a couple of dangers in the show. First, it was awfully tough, I think, for the series to attract new viewers. It's not as complex as some people make it out to be, but then, I've been watching since the get-go, and for someone hopping in during Seasons 2 or 3, it was bound to be a little difficult. And the second problem was that the show was in danger of becoming a self-parody. They'd slowly killed and doubled one of Syd's best friends, put another in witness protection, married off her love interest (in the "2 years later..." cliffhanger of Season 2). In the terms I used above, they'd slowly removed Sydney's inner horizon, the life with which the audience actually could identify, and so when Syd flirts with the idea of leaving the spy game for good, it ends up sounding disingenuous--during Season 3, it was pretty tough to imagine exactly what life she'd be leaving for.

So, Season 4. Alias has undergone something of a plot reset. Some of last season's cliffhangers are dumped, almost apologetically. Syd's recently discovered half-sister Nadia is tortured by her father (Arvin Sloane), and yet chooses to join him at the end of the 3rd season. The darkness of that choice has pretty much been abandoned in favor of a much less developed character, one that seems a little at odds with the character as it was conceived last season. They've kept the main characters together, dumped some of the marginal ones, and taken them out of the institutional context of the CIA (they're now a black ops team).

For me, the problem of the new season is that outer horizon. The only ongoing tension is the fact that Nadia remains unaware of Jack Bristow's role in the death of her (and Sydney's) mother. But "I've got a secret" is an inner horizon issue. And after 3 episodes, there's no outer horizon, no real reason for what they're doing, no ongoing villains, no context to place the characters in.

To be fair, I thought tonight's episode was the best of the new season. It felt like they finally committed to treating Vaughn as a character, and they did it in an interesting way, allowing his attempt to turn a former IRA agent turn into self-therapy. And the closing scene, where he falls asleep while Sydney tries to connect with him, led me to think that Vaughn may actually (finally!) grow into a character that's more than just "Sydney's boyfriend." That's a good thing.

And I hope that, after a few freestanders to bring in new viewers, we'll start to develop the kinds of ongoing stories that reward loyal viewing, and make a series more than an interchangeable set of shiny objects. Right now, the potential tension between Nadia and Jack just doesn't do it for me. I simply can't reconcile Nadia crying over a picture of her mother with the potentially dark, kick-ass, wild card character she was at the end of last season. It's certainly not beyond the Abrams crew to simply have her be part of the gang for a couple of months, and then turn out to be someone completely different and unpredictable later on--in fact, that'd be par for this course. But she's got to acquire some inner horizon and characterization of her own or be part of an outer horizon. The character hasn't earned a pass, as far as I'm concerned.

So, I'm guardedly optimistic about Alias. And I'm pretty high on Lost, which strikes me as a show that demonstrates Abrams's ability to learn the lessons provided by three seasons of Alias. Lost has an awful lot of polish for a new show, and it does things that no one else on the networks is even trying. For a while, I'll be watching Lost and staying tuned, but hopefully by mid-season, they'll both be can't-miss.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:15 AM | Comments (7)

January 07, 2005

Flavor is the new taste

If, like me, you watched more than your fair share of football over the holiday season, perhaps (again like me) you encountered the sports fan's version of the old Chinese "man-butterfly" dilemma. To wit, am I watching football with beer commercials, or beer with football commercials? No matter how much you cling to the worldly illusion of the former, those beer commercials sink in a little.

And so, one of the things I've noticed lately is how beer companies are no longer content to exaggerate the "taste" of their product. Now, they are skirting the issue of bad taste by speaking instead of the amount of flavor, as if there's a certain amount of flavor that's significant. First time I saw this was from Miller Lite during their really stooopid "Election 2004" campaign. In one of the ads, reporting on the results of a national taste test, they beam with pride over the fact that a majority of tasters found that Miller "had more flavor" than Budweiser. Not that the majority of tasters preferred the flavor (as you learn in the small print to the ad), but that Miller has more. At least one more company has followed suit in their ads, and recently, I saw that KFC has taken up the "more flavor" banner.

Umm, ok. I'm just going to say this once: motor oil has more flavor than water (I think), but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go out and start ordering pints of it at my favorite bar.

Somewhere out there, there's an ad executive who's feeling all smug and self-important, believing that this strategy is cleverness incarnate. Don't. It's dumb, and more than a little pathetic.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:55 AM | Comments (4)

August 19, 2004

The NYT Style Guide for New Technologies

Title: X is the new Y

I. Opening anecdote (2-3 pars.)

II. Definition (2-3 pars.)
A. Oversimplification
B. Overgeneralization

III. Examples (3 sets of 2 pars. each)
A. Narrow claim (1 sent./par.)
B. Anecdotal support/quote (1-2 sent.)
C. Repeat

IV. Reservations (4-5 pars.)
A. X may encourage looseness (of prose, morals, etc.) according to "critics"
B. Anecdotal rebuttal, usually indirect
C. Repeat if necessary

V. Conclusion (1 sent., normally platitudinal)

Think I'm joking? Try this NYT article on "web blogs." And no, that's not my typo--their headline reads "Web Blogs." I swear, there are times where I feel like I'm reading the same article over and over from them.

Will both appears in the article and discusses it over at Weblogg-Ed. He's dead on, but my favorite part of the article, I think, had to be the "educational consultant" who implies that teachers see blogs as a way of making their own lives easier. Heaven forbid that it might have anything to do with sound writing pedagogy.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:28 AM | Comments (4)

August 14, 2004

Competition at its finest

I didn't watch the whole thing by any means, but for a while tonight, I put the Olympic opening ceremonies on in the background while I worked. It's hard for me to feel too jazzed about the Games--the coverage we have here is extremely partisan and talk-heavy. At some point, even though they're the same people who talk about the purity of competition, the TV wonks decided that the only appealing competitions are those where Americans win. And how bizarre it was to hear announcements that this partisanship is now extended to corporate sponsors, as though Coke and McD's need "protection." Maybe this can all be traced back to the Dream Team, when they wore flags to cover up their Reebok logos as they stood on the medal platform. That kind of cynicism only seems to get deeper.

Anyhow, I watched pieces of the opening ceremony, which to my mind has become only slightly less annoying than listening to songs whose lyrics have been written specifically for movies. Those are the worst. But listening to Bob Costas and Katie Couric explain the painfully obvious symbolism of the choregoraphy ("This is cube man, and he symbolizes humanity's evolution as a logical being." "The runner stumbles and falls to the ground here to symbolize World War I.") helped it climb the charts. Add to that the woeful, MST-wannabe observations--of Alexander the Great, who was apparently at one time an average Olympic sprinter, Costas remarked, "In atheletics, at least, he was only Alexander the So-So." Yuk yuk.--and I'm glad that I didn't watch more than I did. I like Costas quite a bit, but listening to him annotate the whole thing, and from a script that others probably wrote for him, was enough to send me looking for infomercials.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:38 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2004

Truth in advertising?

Caught this over at Anne Galloway's site, and I'm not really sure what to think. Seems that Penguin UK has, for better or worse, joined the rest of us in the 21st century in terms of their ad campaigns. I'm not saying that's a good thing, btw. So you visit their site, and are greeted with the following claim: Good Looking Women Want Good Booking Men.

Umm...yeah. After I stopped laughing, I started looking around through the site. I even started taking their online quiz to "find out how Good Booking you currently are." I did make it all the way to page 3, but I couldn't get past the first question thereon:

See how many bona fide authors you can pick out of this lot:

  • Alan Cumming
  • Hugh Jarse
  • Dave Eggers
  • Phil McCraichin
  • Jack Orff
  • Daisy Chaine
  • Martin Wank

Yeah, that should give you some clue as to the overall tenor of this particular marketing campaign. If I were Dave Eggers, I'd sure be thrilled to find my name in that list. Anyhow, apparently Penguin's hired a model who will bop around from bookstore to bookstore, giving out 1000 pounds a month to someone who's reading the Book of the Month. Oh, wait. Did I say "reading"?

What women really want is a man with a Penguin. You may not even need to read it, just bend the covers, let it stick out of your pocket and the book will do the talking!

I'm not even going to try and crack wise about "a man with a Penguin." I'll leave that to your imagination. To my own imagination, I'll leave the question of who in their right mind at Penguin thought they could drum up sales by giving their corporate image over to the shallow slackwits in charge of the corporate brand for FHM, Maxim, Stuff, or whatever the hell softcore porn rag "men's magazine" they're obviously emulating.

Did I mention that page 2 of the quiz involves matching book to bosom?

Yikes.

Posted by cgbrooke at 02:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2004

Everything I need to know I learn from TV

There is no one--dead, alive, or as of yet unimagined--that does not have something to do with Rimbaldi.

I'm sure that people with their fingers on the pulse of pop culture already know this, but it's become increasingly clear that David Kelley's next lawyer series will star James Spader. The Practice ended tonight in classic Ally McBeal fashion, and far too much script is being devoted to characters that otherwise would only last two more weeks, for this not to be the case. And the edges on Spader's character are being sanded down very quickly.

Again, I'm sure there are many who know more than I about this, but I spent some time this weekend with Food Network's new Iron Chef America, and I wonder they'll actually go serial with it. Plusses? No William Shatner, no Las Vegas, and a commentator (Alton Brown) who seems genuinely interested in commentating rather than trying to be as kitschy as the voiceovers for the original. Fox's short-lived version was almost unwatchable. Minuses: I've only seen the first two of four so far (I'll catch the encores this week), and in each, I was able to identify ingredients (daikon radish, benito broth) before the commentators. For those of us who watch the original, these are not "mysterious Asian" ingredients--they're staples of Kitchen Stadium. I hope that they treat this not as a one-off special event (also a drawback of the FOX series), but as a regular series, one that introduces people to some of the "culinary diversity" of the country.

Also, I understand why it's important for them to have the American chefs win, but I get the impression that Sakai and Morimoto already know that this is the case. I would have thought, after years in this country, that Morimoto at least would have come a little closer to winning over American palates than he did. Doing it as a series, inviting the judges to actually be critical on occasion, inviting chefs who aren't already celebrities, getting rid of the stupid 5-dish rule, and using ingredients that aren't "special!!!" would go a long way towards making the shows seem a little more authentic. And it would give Food Network (not to mention US chefs) a way to tap into a pretty loyal audience. It's cool to watch "battles of the masters," but it's cool in a different way to be able to make a reservation at a restaurant bc you've seen the chef in action.

Update: Dana Stevens has a review that is good in places, but perhaps a little obvious in others:

I can't weigh in on what made Iron Chef so popular in Japan, but its success as an American import has everything to do with language and with the mysterious gulf that separates one culture from another. Sadly, everything that was charming, exciting, and moving about the original show has been, quite literally, lost in translation.

I guess that last bit was too good to pass up on. But I suppose I'd disagree that its only success was on account of that "mysterious gulf." Part of the success has to do with taking an everyday activity and making it larger than life--for me, that's the universal appeal of the show. Sure, the Japanity of it is cool, too, but I'm also interested in the food. I'm fascinated by the idea of extemporized menus, different styles and approaches, and having a chance to actually watch them work. Most cooking shows are talk show formatted, and I find them as claustrophobic as Stevens does. At the same time, I think that there is some appeal to the show that might be translatable--I'll never have a chance to visit the restaurants I see on Iron Chef, but if Food Network really threw genuine effort behind ICA, it'd be a boon for the chefs who work a level or two below people like Flay and Puck.

To date, though, both attempts at Americanizing IC have reminded me of the first fight in Rocky IV, the one with Apollo Creed dancing with James Brown. It seems really Vegas to me, and that's not what made IC work. Odd ingredients (milk?!), theme shows (V-Day dessert battles), and opponents who really seemed to be invested in competing (think Kandagawa, e.g., or some of the competitors who were trying to rebuild their careers as chefs) make the show more than just an Event. I'm not quite cynical enough to believe that it was all sham--and until there's a version of ICA that seems genuine, I don't think it'll even come close to the original. But I'm still hoping...

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:42 PM | Comments (2)