“ It is constant, unrelenting, second by second. It exalts, and fetishizes, in breathless, even orgiastic news flashes, the most boring subject in the world: the granular workings of government bureaucracy. It is, arguably, in its hyperbolic attentions and exertions, in its fixations on interests that could not possibly interest anyone but the person doing it and the writer writing about it, something like a constant parody of itself.
Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair on Politico, reading it because Wolff correctly writes that Politico “further alters the nature and effect of news.” (via betaworks)
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shield your eyes
“ Nirvana’s quest to derail the hair-spray element of heavy music (“Hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in,” from Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide review of Nevermind) remains well-documented but worth remembering, because they were a total inversion of what a band was supposed to do with its fame, and set the stage for the idea that indie music was in the on-deck circle, which wasn’t really true. It was in the hole. They wore dresses. They kissed each other on TV. They made sex sound like putrescence. They gave interviews in which they used the word “feminist” in a positive way and sang about rape as if it were bad. They were, in short, unheard of. The first time I heard Nevermind, I was stoned on the floor of an NYU dorm room on Halloween with a girl and—I’m not bragging here—it just seemed so appropriate not to make out. That was just the beginning of my ’90s. Of course, you could do it to Nirvana (well, Nevermind anyway—hard to imagine getting sexually aroused by In Utero), and I’m sure many, many people did. But it also seemed like a violation of something. Nirvana reignited a culture of refusal that extended to everything you might choose to extend it to.
Sean Nelson for Let’s (Not) Get It On - Or, Fucking to Songs About Fucking and Other Uncomfortable Developments in the Awkward Relationship Between What We’re Going to Have to Just Agree to Call Indie Rock and Sexuality in the 1990s
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I am irrationally upset about this Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett for The Runaways movie thing. Girl needs to calm her brow.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
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Jawbreaker - “Big”
“You and yours on us and ours. You’ve got the guns and we’ve got the scars. Turn the gun back on yourself. I love it when you think BIG…”
Don’t it make you feel small?
Art from Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland. Even if it’s terrible, it’s gonna be real pretty.
HuffPo at a Glance, 2009 Edition
Three rounds of financing: $5 million, $4.5million and, most recently, $25 million
Money spent so far: About $12 million as of February
Ad revenue from January through April: $3.4 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence
Full-time, paid staffers: 61, including 35 in editorial, of whom five are reporters
Visitors: 5.3 million uniques in May, up 106% from May 2008 and up 5% from its election-season peak in October, according to ComScore
Five year-plan: None, according to Arianna Huffington. “In the new-media space you don’t work in those increments.”
[via]
This NYT The Local article on the Brooklyn building collapse
is very new media friendly. Original writing and accounts directly from the journalists at the top with, not just links, but posted videos, blog posts and Twitter updates from the community below. We are all aggregators.
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