Burning House of Love

John Doe and Exene "Burning House of Love"

the atmosphere smells of fall....a cool nip in the air hinting of sexuality and creativity...here in the american night...no frame of reference as understood by Emmet Grogan....I loved reading in Ringo Leaveo how he would apply the notions of film to his understanding of reality...long ago the framework I shared with others disappeared.....I feel John and Exene express this well..and also what tremendous survivors they are...

Thoughts on beauty and the abyss

Seeing in an ongoing process...like learning....like history...I remember when Mr.Nickerson lent me his copy of essays by Frederick Jackson Turner...the most prominent concept Turner was promoting was the closing of the frontier and the effect this would have on the American conscious. It was a provocative thought to a rebellious eighteen year old.  He had given me the book while I was being disciplined which was a rare occasion in and of itself because I always ignored it when he called me down to his office over the pa and the one class he went to look for me which was Mr. Barlow's class I just quit.  Contrary to Stormin' Peterson and Larry Myers, I wouldn't serve time.  Later Andy Ras Vegas would write an ode to Gary Gillmore who was killed for a crime he did not do inspried by Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song."  Back then in their rebellion eighteen year old read deep books and had deep thoughts. The other day while I was drinking a forty up on the ledge in the woods where I couldn't be seen, I watched the eighteen year olds play with their cellphones and ipods although I must admit the young girls did look good.  A little later on when Norm snagged me in the smoking area, he dragged me into his office.  I'm caught him off guard, however, when I bought up Turner's concept of the closed frontier.  A lengthy conversation ensued where we touched upon the more subtler point of Turner's thesis that day managing to avoid detention. Norm hadn't excpected me to have read the whole book.  But I had while skipping Barlow's class.

I would go on to Clark where a lot of my professors would debunk Turner's thesis.  After all, so many schools of historical thought would come after Turner like the progressives, social contract theorists, new revisionists and so on...the learning kept going on...just like this seeing here in this abyss...watching the leaves change...listening to me and tom on my ipod...

Dreamy Green..

The dream never stopped...just the perception of it...and the self's relation to it...the dream, however, never stopped by...sometimes it was there in strong force...other times clouded by the debris thrown up by society...so many wanted to take it away from me...dirty it...sully it...abuse it...but in the end, it really didn't matter...the faces of people who got in my way just drifted intoi the American night and like a tai chi stance when the mind turned off its feverish monkey like chatter there was the dream and it's space...

I suppose it is madness to take so many pictures of the back yard...it's just that it will be gone soon and all those memories themselves will fall into the American night..so click, click, click goes my camera...cpaturing the images I love so well when the final axe falls...

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

New York Fat Sensous

new york fat sensous and wide sex on the sly girls with lipstick and high heels zip code activists moving so fat in the new york minute late night tv sex the american dream...

Social Media Strategy

Getting a Social Media Roadmap started involves a 30,000 foot view of what social media is: The technologies on the web and mobile that enable people to create, publish and share content as well as connect/communicate with others. Brand control is in the hands (minds really) of consumers, not companies. So marketing on the social web means informing, educating and even entertaining those communities of people that care about the issues, problems, wants and needs met by your company.

Shared Experience...

In short, the SEC saw its draft policies on what fans can do at games go socially viral in a near textbook example of how rapidly information that creates a negative image of a corporation or institution can spread across the Internet's social networks.

"The idea that people can't capture their own lived experience is a losing proposition," new media expert and author Clay Shirky said in a St. Petersburg Times article,

More Fat Summer Light...

summer light bisects the landscape fat pregnant and bright...the crickets begin their serenade...shadows creeps across the manicured landscapes...time slips away on Aldridge...

Summer Light...

There's nothing like the summer light in the Greeeley Woods...the cicadas return and serenade you as you walk through the paths....

Two way two street....

That’s not how relationship-building goes in the social web. You can use your robot feeds to blurt out posts and showtimes and stuff, but if you want connectivity to people, engagement to your content, and a sense of participation on the social web, making people only talk about ESPN is a quick one-way ticket to “who cares?”

It’s two-way, ESPN. That means we talk with each other about non-work stuff, and that gets us interested in work stuff.

words by Chris Brogan....

If you’re email marketing, how do you go from pushing out content to building relationships?

In my case, I shoot for being as personal as I can. I write as if I’m writing only to you. I ask you questions where I’m genuinely interested in your answer. It’s the only way I know how to do it. I can’t imagine just lobbing news.

Information Design...

Information design is typography

Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.

With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. It is the information designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”.

Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job that typographers did 30 years ago:

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.

Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance. Organizing blocks of text and combining them with pictures, isn’t that what graphic designers, usability specialists, information architects do? So why is it such a neglected topic?

Design for a client...

When I design for a client, we discuss scope and timeline, a design brief, budget, and certain constraints. Brand, content, IA, and user experience get attention from the start.

Phone companies

It was JP Rangaswami (disclosure: I consult JP and his company, BT) who first pointed out to me that the primary competence of phone companies isn’t technical. It’s financial. They’re billing machines. That’s their core competency. And it was r0ml who pointed out, way back when he was with AT&T Wireless (before it became Cingular, and then the AT&T we all know and hate today), that phone companies arrived at the holy grail of micropayments decades ago. They don’t charge small amounts, but they know how to add them up, and round piles of microminutes into billions of dollars.

A better movie metaphor is The Matrix. We’re all wet cell batteries inside giant phone company billing systems. The machines

Corporate control of media...

These words were written by Glen Greenwald...

And now we have an example of GE's forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC -- ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer -- because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE. The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government. Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations "report" on the government -- driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products -- is completely delusional. GE's forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * *

On a very related note: this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC's Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation. When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an "MSNBC political analyst" and comments on political news. All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO. According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe's joining the company:

Wolffe, most recently Newsweek's senior White House correspondent, officially assumes his new position as a senior strategist on April 13, 2009. He will be based in the firm's Washington office, where he will advise several of its top clients. . . .

Public Strategies, Inc. is a business advisory firm that serves a diverse clientele including some of the world's largest and best-known corporations, nonprofit organizations, associations and professional firms. Public Strategies helps forward-thinking organizations assess public opinion and risk, and develops strategies for managing corporate reputation and uncertainty. Much of its practice involves managing high-stakes campaigns for corporate clients, anticipating and responding to crises.

Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program -- or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" -- is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist. Wolffe's role in life is to advance the P.R. interests of the corporations that pay him, including corporations with substantial interests in virtually every political issue that MSNBC and Countdown cover. Yet MSNBC is putting him on as a guest-host and "political analyst" on one of its prime-time political shows. What makes that even more appalling is that, as Ana Marie Cox first noted, neither MSNBC nor Wolffe even disclose any of this.

This is a conflict so severe that it's incurable by disclosure: who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and "news reporting" in the United States. Then again, Wolffe himself -- when it was previously revealed that he was exploiting his position as a Newsweek reporter covering the Obama campaign to leverage access to Obama in order to write a glowing book about him -- said this: