Month: March 2006

Now that’s how you file for an election. The 2006 rematch for Newark mayor — between 70-year-old incumbent and vaguely corrupt Sharpe James and young Cory Booker, who was my T.A. for a polisci class in college. (They ran against each other in 2002, a race that was the subject of the documentary Street Fight.)
The election — filled with all sorts of racial invective last time, despite both candidates being black — will no doubt be entertaining to watch again. James’ petition filing — for which he stripped down to a tanktop and shades and looked like he’d be spending the afternoon sunning on a stoop — is part of the class code he used in ’02, in which his side accused Booker of not being “black enough” because he was an Ivy grad and Rhodes Scholar. (That was when James’ people weren’t accusing Booker of being controlled by “the Jews.”)
The NYT is even hosting a blog on the campaign — treatment I doubt the Times would give, say, mayoral elections in Passaic or Paterson. They link to video of the filing.

This year’s edition (MP3) of Bruce Sterling’s traditional end-of-SXSW talk. Thought-provoking as always, although you can skip over about 30% in the middle when he goes off on spime.

A find: Here’s video of that famous moment I mentioned a while back, a drunk (one hopes) Serge Gainsbourg telling Whitney Houston “I want to fuck you” live on French TV in 1986. (The famous quote is a little less than halfway in.) How this disgusting homunculus managed to seduce half of the most beautiful women of Europe — well, there’s got to be a dating self-help book somewhere in it.
Also: The video for “Lemon Incest,” the, um, incest-themed song he sang with his 13-year-old daughter (!) Charlotte.

To continue a burgeoning tradition here on crabwalk.com, here’s the fourth installment of Who Dat Drummer?, the regular feature in which, after attending an indie-rock concert, I interpret the appearance of the bands’ drummers via pop-culture references.
Last night, saw the great Belle & Sebastian at the Grenada. My view of the drummer was blocked for pretty much the entire show by bassist (and birthday boy) Bob Kildea, so apologies in advance if my visual referencing is less incisive than usual.

• Belle & Sebastian (Richard Colburn): 95% Peyton Manning, 4% John Kerry, 1% Gheorghe Muresan.

And a bonus installment of Who Dat Guitarist & Second Songwriter?:

• Belle & Sebastian (Stevie Jackson): 80% Chris Parnell, 12% Michael Dell, 8% Elliott Smith.

Alas, got there too late to see the New Pornographers. It is a strict crabwalk.com policy that Who Dat Drummer? is not a game to be played with any percussionist who the author has not personally seen in a concert environment, so Kurt Dahle is safe.
For now.

Here’s my film from 20×2 Monday night. It’s about a 10 meg file, and for some reason it takes a long while to download — you might want to open it in another window or tab.
As I did last time when I did 20×2, here’s a quick summary of how I did it (less complex than last time):

• The film was shot (poorly!) with a Sony GL2 camcorder. (At $2,000 list, it isn’t mine, of course; it’s a Dallas Morning News camera, leant to me by our Pulitzer photo genius David Leeson.) I’ve never really shot video before, and that’s fairly obvious at times. Particularly with my inability to get good sound. And with all the other people I shot whose footage was just too bad to include.)
• The locations: The bookstore is the Half Price Books flagship store on Northwest Highway. The Mexican restaurant is the Lakewood location of La Calle Doce (seafood dishes highly recommended). The woman on the bench was sitting outside the George Allen courthouse downtown, messing with some legal papers. The Internet inventor was in an East Dallas pet store (name forgotten). Everyone else was shot in and around the Dallas Morning News building.
• Assemblage: All done in iMovie. With assists from ScreenRecord (which recorded the Terminal sessions), Google Image Search (for all the screengrabs between shots), Quicktime Pro (for cutting down clips), and iPhoto (for imports to iMovie).

Also, just saw Lyle Lovett and his (very cute, very young) girlfriend. I feel like I’m officially a Texan now.

For the record, Maria Menounos is stupid hot. She was down here doing a standup (presumably for the film festival, but she was standing among us interactive types).
(Have I mentioned that I’m here at SXSW for the Interactive festival? Well, I am. I haven’t been in Austin for a full year, which is downright criminal for someone who lives in Dallas.)
Anyway, this year’s festival is crazy. Rumor has it that attendance is double what it was last year, and it feels like it. Registration Saturday morning traditionally takes about five minutes; this year there was a line extending across two floors and it took a full 50 minutes to get my badge. (Which features a photo of me from some past festival, giving me a chance to relive my beardless past lives.)
I’m happy for the organizers, particularly after persistent rumors in the last couple of years that Interactive might some day be canceled if numbers didn’t improve, but I think The Return Of The Boom makes SXSW a little less pleasant for folks like me — web hobbyists with no real business connection to the industry. Lots of panels on funding models and entrepreneurship and the business/tech-skills-to-make-money sides of things, less on the social-ramifications stuff. Totally understandable, of course — I’m hardly SXSW’s target customer — but unfortunate.
It appears the organizers have tried to fill that social-ramification void by grabbing onto the Gladwellian School of Yuppie Self-Help — that school of thought, driven by Malcolm Gladwell, that aims to convince college-educated people they can understand the world through five anecdotes, a couple of scientific studies, and an overarching theme. Gladwell spoke at SXSW last year, but this year there are two of his journalistic heirs on the program: Dan Gilbert and James Surowiecki.
Surowiecki gave what I’m sure is his standard stump speech on “The Wisdom of Crowds,” which argues that groups of people are collectively smarter than their smartest individuals. (Except, of course, when they’re not.) Gilbert is angling for a bigger market; his book blurbs him as a cross between Gladwell and David Sedaris, which is of course porn for bookstore owners. Despite his professorial background, his schtick is more stand-up than anything else; his basic point is that people make logical errors and do a bad job of predicting the future. He’s a lively writer, from the first 40 pages I read, but his presentation was sloppy, including a few basic errors that undercut his credibility (with me, at least).
Anyway, it’s been a good weekend to catch up with my Austin homies and my blogfriends from around the world. Special props to Lucian for giving me a place to crash.
Finally, those of you in town may be want to drop in at 20×2 Monday night. (At Tambaleo, 302 Bowie Street, 7 p.m.) I’ll be one of the 20 speakers. Well, I’ll actually be showing a two-minute short film, so the only speaking of mine you’ll hear is a half-second sound effect repeated several times. I’ll post the film here after the talk.

The list of Pulitzer finalists is out. (Well, sort of — it’s an unofficial, leaked list. The finalists aren’t officially announced until the winners are.)
Here, for no particular reason, are my picks:

• Commentary: Kristof (I think judges will think Chris Rose’s New Orleans stuff too “soft”)
  Investigative: WaPo (Abramoff)

• National: NYT (wiretapping), although San Diego could sneak in
• Public Service: WaPo (secret prisons), although the Times-Picayune should be a finalist here
• International: LAT (Muslims in Europe)
• Explanatory: Miami Herald (and sort of a second Pulitzer for my ex-colleague Mike Sallah, who edited the package)
• Breaking News: Times-Picayune

Those are all the reporting categories — I make no guesses on cartooning and photography, except to say that the DMN is a finalist in Spot News Photography for our Katrina work and I think we’ll take it.

An interview with the jury foreman in the Greg Haidl gang-rape trial in Orange County. (Search “haidl” to find my other posts on this case.) Of particular note is the detailing of the harassment the rape victim faced from the rapists’ legal team.

Let me join the journalists who are rooting for McClatchy to buy Knight Ridder (if it must be bought). McClatchy‘s a good, family-controlled newspaper company that runs a bunch of not-huge but journalistically solid papers (Raleigh, Minneapolis, and Sacramento being the biggest). (It actually reminds me a bit of the two good, family-controlled newspaper companies I’ve worked for, in Toledo and Dallas.)
Knight Ridder used to have a similar reputation in the industry, but that’s soured a bit in recent years (although they still publish some fine papers that employ some fine friends of mine.) In any event, McClatchy would be leagues better than the other apparent candidate for the company, a joint effort of Gannett and MediaNews, neither of which is…well, you never know when I might want a job with them, so I’ll be quiet.