 |
||
You are what you read. And what you see. And what you hear.
I am Heath.
Who are you? 
Email Heath at heath at mediadiet dot net about items of possible impact, interest, and intrigue. Or just to say hey! (Portions of our correspondence might make its way back here. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, be sure to let me know.) Send me links. Use Delicious, and tag them for:h3athrow.
AOL IM: h3athrow Delicious Links: Twitter Bits
Online: Steal this button and link to Media Diet.
Logo by Joe Szilagyi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
 |
Friday, August 15, 2003
Mention Me! XLIV Media Diet is one of two Web sites linked to from Far West Funk, a cryptic blog created by two people in Hawaii and California. My question to them is: "Who the hizzle do this dizzle?" And how do you know me? The other site linked to is Reshaping Minnesota, a much-less off-the-cuff activism-oriented blog about reshaping the social, cultural, and political landscape of that state. Mystery of the day! Street Art VIII New Jersey Churchscape is an online guide to early churches in New Jersey. Combining photography with architectural and historical analysis, the site is a pleasant directory of interesting edifices. Readers can annotate articles, there's a database of architects and master builders, the Endangered Churches section highlights at-risk structures. Wonderful. Thanks to Metafilter. Magazine Me XLII The State Department launched a glossy monthly magazine entitled Hi to win young adults in Arabic-speaking countries over to American culture. Frankie say: Propaganda. Media Diet wanrs against confusing Hi with the cheeky British celeb mag Hello. Or the seemingly defunct Russian rag Yo. Thanks to Bookslut. Workaday World XXXV Someone propped two pennies on a ledge above the bank of floor buttons in the Scotch & Sirloin building's elevator. Normally, I'm prone to pick up found pennies, but I enjoyed seeing those two cents sitting there subtly so much that I left them there for another denizen of 77 No. Wash. to find. Music to My Ears XLV Shades of the Network Auralization for Gnutella project, Eigenradio is an MIT Media Lab service that analyzes real-time broadcasts of dozens of radio stations, analyzes which songs are statistically optimal -- "only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy" -- and then distills the broadcasts into an iterative stream. "One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio," the site proclaims. More shadowy snapshots of the sounds between songs. Thursday, August 14, 2003
Water Blogged II The New England Aquarium lost its accreditation? I hope they're able to shore up their finances. Boston is now home to the only major aquarium not accredited by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. Music to My Ears XLIV Speech Accent Archive is an online repository of more than 250 recordings featuring people with different native languages reading the same paragraph in English. Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station. I find projects like this fascinating. Several speakers hesitate while reading, adding an extremely human feel to the recordings, and the IPA phonetic transcription is a handy comparison tool. Thanks to Metafilter. Magazine Me XLI Now there's a periodical devoted solely to men taller than 6'2" and women taller than 5'8". Tall magazine, scheduled to launch with a test issue in October, was founded by the managing editor of Game Developer. Everard Strong hopes to eventually spin out other titles so there's a Tall magazine for men, women, and teenagers -- and is working to secure distribution at big-and-tall clothing stores, as well as display placement on the top racks of newsstands. For some reason, I find the idea of a magazine for tall people to be a really funny idea. What's next, Bald? Skinny? Pale? Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Rock Shows of Note LXXIII The launch of Fast Company Now has distracted me from Media Diet for the last week-plus, but it hasn't kept me from going out to shows in the evening. Here's a roundup of the last week's worth of live music experiences. Last night after eating, reading the day's magazines, and taking a disco nap, I braved the possibility of rain to head to TT the Bear's. It's been awhile since I've listened to King Missile, but I've been reminiscing about bands such as They Might Be Giants and the Dead Milkmen lately, so I thought it was high time to catch up with one of their compatriots -- at least in my listening history. I got there a little way into an energetic, extremely funny set by Pittsburgh hip-hop duo Grand Buffet. Featuring Matt and Nate Kukla, who don't appear to be related, the act is a boisterous, humorous stage show limited to two vocalists and electronic beats. I think they'd fit well with Big Digits, and their lyrics were well suited for a show with King Missile. Their on-stage banter and audience antics added a lot to the performance. I'd check them out again. Next up was Bradford Reed and His Amazing Pencilina, who's also performing with King Missile III, the latest iteration of King Missile. Playing a homemade instrument that combines a guitar and bass in a lap-like setup intended to be played with pencils, Reed played a Lonesome Organist-like one-man band set. His songs were largely spacey pop numbers, and I quite enjoyed "She's a Rocket" and "Voodooman." I was pretty far back from the stage, so I couldn't watch him closely, but it's an interesting gimmick, he gets some rich sounds out of his set up, and his songs were solid. Then King Missile. On record, they come across as a joke band and novelty act, but on stage, John S. Hall's brain child is equal parts spoken word performance and art rock. Performing as a trio featuring Hall, Reed, and a female bassist, the band played an assortment of newer material -- King Missile's recent records have been self-released or only available at shows -- as well as some of the kitschy hits such as "Detachable Penis" and "Jesus Was Way Cool." But, akin to Grand Buffet, the banter and between-song political and cultural commentary was most impressive. Hall's a smart guy, and King Missile is just one way he expresses his ideas, which aren't to be dismissed in the joke-band context. I was quite surprised the show wasn't better attended. Last week Thursday I moseyed over to Drugless Douglas' farewell party, also at TT's. Primarily an assortment of local power-pop bands, the highlights of the short sets I witnessed included the Red Telephone's reunion set, Ad Frank's solo keyboard drama rock, and the almost-mod bash pop performances by Dave Aaronoff and the Details and the Pills. Slightly overwhelmed by the number of bands performing -- and I only caught six of the 17 acts -- and embarrassed that I waxed crushy for Paula Kelley, I did have a chance to say goodbye to Douglas before he left town. "I kind of took you for granted," I told the long-running WMFO-FM DJ. "You were always around." And last week Monday I ventured unwisely to the Choppin' Block in Boston for a stop of the Paper Radio Summer of HTML tour. Featuring Extreme Animals, 8-Bit Construction Set, Beige Programming Ensemble, and/or Bitch Ass Darius, Taketo Shimada, Dr. Doo, Cory Arcangel, Extreme Animals, and DJ Jazzy Jess -- I can't always tell what Paper Radio projects are what -- the night was a hodgepodge barrage of geeky technology-driven music mayhem. Some of the performances were more demonstration than set, and highlights included the Mario Brothers game that had been hacked so the game's sound effects composed the soundtrack music, the Commodore 64 tour of cracked games -- including the work of Crapforce Omega -- and Ben Jones' percussion performance accompanying projected computer animation. Monday night was kind of a train wreck and I was lucky to get home in one piece, but if you get a chance to check out the tour, do so. It's an amazing combination of HTML performance art, computer animation, consumer electronics hacking, and music. Extremely interesting. From the In Box: The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXIV Media Dietician Quinn Skylark comments: Hey! I never really planned on watching Hair, but now you've given away the surprise ending. What's with that!?? Oh, yeah. One retroactive and belated spoilers alert coming up. Spoilers alert! Fun Things to Do with Silverware The Spoon Trick is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Now you, too, can learn how to do it. Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Technofetishism XLIII You know you're safely ensconced just on the outside of true technological geekiness when you read a Scripting News post about ZIP coming undone and you're concerned that the USPS is changing how the zoning improvement plan works. Or you learn you're just a different kind of geek. File under: Just fine, thanks. Workaday World XXXIV Bonding with a bicycle messenger in the elevator. Messenger: Op Ivy, huh? (commenting on my Operation Ivy T-shirt.) If it weren't for Common Rider, all we'd be left with is Rancid. Oh, Common Rider broke up. Rancid it is, then. Hiking History XI This Kuro5hin account of an urban exploration south of London makes me want to organize another Boston World Explorers Foundation expedition soon. What a wonderful vicarious read! Monday, August 11, 2003
The Movie I Watched Last Night LXXIV Hair Based on the musical by the same name, this 1979 movie doesn't quite capture the spirit of the '60s but sure tries hard. (This might be because the movie was made 11 years after the musical's original staging.) A young man from Oklahoma travels to New York City to enlist in the Army so he can serve in Viet Nam. Why he couldn't enlist in Oklahoma is unclear, but perhaps he wanted to go to the Big City before he was shipped overseas. Once in the Big Apple, he encounters a playful gang of hippies and an uppercrust debutante who steals his heart. Mmm, Beverly D'Angelo! The hippies turn him onto free love, sleeping in Central Park, smoking pot, taking acid, and anti-war rhetoric, but the country boy still plans to join the Army. The leader of the hippies, played by Treat Williams, decides they should follow him to Nevada, where he's stationed. They sneak him off base for a picnic, but -- much to his dismay -- Williams' character Berger is accidentally shipped overseas in his stead. A dark ending I wasn't quite expecting! For the most part I felt like the musical sequences gave the original book short shrift (even the rendition of "Hair" was disappointing) -- and that the story didn't hook onto the song order as well as it could have. Regardless, the back-to-back "Black Boys" and "White Boys" were awesome numbers, and the ending reminded me a little of Dr. Strangelove. What a twisted conclusion! Worth watching as a detached period piece, but not as valid a time capsule as Jesus Christ Superstar. Event-O-Dex LXXIII Friday, Aug. 15: Scrapple premieres Tromo, a sci-fi, lo-fi, techno-popera -- and Travers revisits his multimedia performance piece -- at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain. Comics and Computers V Donna Barr now offers two books through BookSurge, which provides on-demand distribution services for books listed in R.R. Bowker databases, including Books In Print, Global Books In Print, and BookWire. Available as paperbacks and PDF's -- e-books -- Barr's available titles include The Grandmothers' Hive and An Insupportable Light. Barr emailed me the PDF for An Insupportable Light this weekend, and to my surprise, it's a 280-page novel, not a Stinz comic at all! |
Last.fm Playlist
Confblogs: Sections: Things to Do: Honorary Media Dieticians: Media Morsels: |
