Kyle Whelliston

The Soccer Monster

2010-06-13T15:43:33Z

During the summer of 2007, in the early twilight of my affiliation with a certain sports media giant, I went to a minor league ballgame in New Britain, Conn. with several of its employees. Sometime around the fifth inning, the conversation turned to the company's disastrous recent attempt to sell an emerging sport, one it had invested considerably in. ESPN had failed to convince the sporting public to embrace arena football. The flop was truly spectacular. I was told that the company had tried to ignite the fever in-house that spring, instituting Arena Football Apparel Days. On certain days, it was mandatory to show up for work in Russell Athletic Philadelphia Soul or Colorado Crush or Tampa Bay Storm merchandise. But despite HD coverage across multiple platforms and constant advertising, even with prime space on SportsCenter and the BottomLine, America never fell in love with the "50-Yard Indoor War." This is how bad it was: scheduled online chats with star players were so poorly attended that employees had to enter the chat rooms, submit fake questions. For all the money it spent on arena football, ESPN hadn't bought any actual fans. I've been thinking about this a lot this past week, what with a similar campaign underway, conducted by the same entity. This time, there's a lot more money on the line, and the product is world-style football. It occurs to me that this offensive has hurdles in common with the arena football thing, namely that opening hearts and minds is different than opening space on the American sports buffet table. The key difference between us and the rest of the world is that we have a crowded sports menu and too many games. We have MLB, NFL, NBA, college football, college basketball, golf, tennis, NASCAR; beyond those there are minor sports like the NHL, outdoor lacrosse, poker, indoor lacrosse, X Games, open-wheel racing, Olympic sports, college hockey and lingerie football. And lately, above all, sports celebrity culture too. But there are only so many hours in the day, a ceiling on the benefits of ADD, no room at the inn.]]> popular gonzo-soccer league in the late 1970's. So this entity has built a multi-million dollar monster month to sell soccer in America, but it must defeat another monster... one it itself created long ago! This is the second-reel twist of several Toho creature-features, many of the films shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the Iraq War. The soccer monster has a tough job. It has to win over a public that has become fat and spoiled and entitled, a nation of experts on Every Single Sport. Any game has to "show something" to be relevant. From early indications, the counter-approach to this mindset has been this: a.) "everyone else thinks this is important and so should you," b.) an appeal to U.S.-vs.-them übernationalism, and c.) the comparison of the Beautiful Game's elements to known American quantities (the Yankees of, the Kobe Bryant of, etc.). My first Beautiful experience came 18 years ago, in Barcelona. The Olympic tournament that year was weakened and diluted by FIFA rules, and only players under the age of 23 could participate. So, as like with many recent Games, the dominant teams were non-traditional footballing nations. Poland, for instance, ripped through the group stage and and destroyed Australia in the semifinals, 6-1. In the gold medal game, the Poles encountered host nation Spain, which had fielded a squad with such an air-tight defense that it hadn't allowed a single goal. I watched the game with some ex-pats. There's a little ex-pat dance that goes on at the Olympics among Americans. Finally, when I admitted that I was from Oregon and not Canada, I settled into a quick and temporary friendship with a guy in a Barca shirt that had attended the University of Washington (so we connected via the extended granfalloon of the Pac-10). He'd been living in Spain on a rotating visa for two years. Our little group of English speakers was surrounded by chanting and singing Spanish fans, there on the eve of the Closing Ceremony. When Poland finally pierced the Spanish defense for a goal just before the half, the break was all nervous silence, a sustained, low-level electric shock that covered the crowd like a superconductive static blanket. At some point, U-Dub Barca Guy gave me the most succinct and direct explanation of football I've ever heard. "It's really simple," he said. "The tactics and formations are really easy to pick up, you don't need an advanced education to tell the difference between a 4-4-2 and a 5-4-1. For that reason, there's a lot of room, a lot of space to fill. You can fill that space by thinking about the individual players and their tendencies, or singing and dancing and drinking. Most of the time, I remember where I was and who I was with more than I remember scores. Of course, the drinking part has a lot to do with that." The second half was wide open, back and forth, long careening open runs in both directions. Spain drew even, then scored a second, but Poland tied it again a few minutes later. With the Olympic gold medal on the line, with a late-arriving Juan Carlos, King of Spain, in attendance, the last 15 minutes were three hours long, though the clock kept ticking. Finally, in the last minute, a man named Kiko sliced the ball past the Polish keeper, and everything exploded. Red and gold everywhere, one last great victory before the rest of the world went back home. Everyone was crying. I was crying. And drunk. Towards the end of the Olympics, the nervous system is so overloaded that a cup of coffee can make one cry, which happened later. Back in America, I never found people to watch soccer with, at least not in that way. That's why it didn't stick for me. There were people who talked a lot of "soccer talk" in smug little clubs (some of whom I heard from with defensive rants after I wrote this), but that didn't seem like any fun. As I proceeded through my 20's and 30's, I ended up with a series of disconnected fragments: the Manchester City shirt I bought in England, the crema Universitario headband I received with a tearful abrazo as I left Peru, the unrequited crush (another one) on a pretty French girl in college who wore a green and white Saint-Etienne knit cap during the winter. All of this was just so many fits and starts, never added up to a lifelong love of the game. I watched the England-United States 2010 World Cup match at a local bar-slash-grill here in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, one with a canvas sign in front with a man's face covered with flags promising "all the games." (Even though the place actually opens at 11 a.m. every morning.) I set up camp in the bar section, under the two television sets, with my minor-league baseball buddy, as potential soccer converts filed in. Most of them were there for the Red Sox game. In the corner, a booth with four US National Team superfans. One had a Landon Donovan jersey and a New England Revolution ballcap on. This was anthropology for me. Sipping on my Diet Coke through a bendy straw, stuck in the middle, I watched as the folks at the bar made small efforts to find a way into the action. Anti-British sentiment was the easy hook (a "BP sucks!" chant was attempted). Xenophobia soon gave way to its close cousins homophobia and racism, and stock populist arguments about no scoring and ties and all that goddamn diving. All the while, the superfans made loud noises at every opportunity, and talked in world-isms like "good result" and "caps." Dissonance all around. My friend made an excuse, left at halftime, and we caught up later at the PawSox game. (Indeed, dear reader, while I've drawn up this scene as a typical American two-party system, the majority in attendance were too busy eating food and talking amongst themselves to pick a side.) I know there are people in the United States who love soccer for its own sake, who can see past wall-to-wall coverage and pretty shoe campaigns that emphasize superstars over collective effort. There are MLS fan sections, immigrants clutching to a piece of the old land, those who watched each and every U.S. team friendly and qualifier, the diehards who split $200 pay-per-view tournament packages with their friends and roommates. They don't need my approval, but I salute them. Maybe I'll fall in with some of these folks someday. They also don't need ESPN's hearts-and-minds campaign. The company has an interest in breaking through this three-decade American sports glut, to clear out space on the menu for soccer. But only to enhance the value of their soccer rights holdings, like the MLS and Saturday morning English Premier League matches. And it's using the same blunt object it used in that horrible arena football campaign: money. ESPN is operating with a toolbox full of hammers, no fasteners or adhesives. It attempts to cultivate a soccer relationship between individuals and their television sets, not one to another. Football, to play or watch, serves as a glue that binds family and friends and communities and countries. It inspires simple scenes like this, in which someone flies to a footballing country just to watch the games on TV with a beloved friend. It is the world's chosen cure for loneliness. And I'm telling you, once again, it's just too late for us.

Useless Men

2010-06-10T17:48:42Z

Thanks to internet information overload, I'd estimate that I consume at least 500 mini-factoids, polls and survey results per day. Or maybe it's 500 million per day, because that's what it feels like. But one single statistic has stuck with me ever since I first came across it back in January, the one that claims that one out of every five men in the United States is unemployed. The Great Recession has been especially tough on dudes. This trend has been pored over for a while now from a number of angles, and the socioeconomic impact is so powerful that it's caught the attention of America's thinking class. Just today, I got my copy of The Atlantic with a flaccid male symbol on the cover, and a feature article called "The End of Men." It's your basic new-journalism piece, full of shock illustrations and pullquotes designed to scare half the audience and validate the beliefs of the other. Beyond the window dressing, it's a good article! ("Good," of course, meaning "I agree with it.") That the salary scoreboard is changing is indisputable fact, based on raw numbers and observed evidence. And I'm not here to defend my gender. I'm more interested in American male population's internal dynamics, or rather, where my brothers are at right now.]]> Exciting! That very Atlantic article cites a projection that computer engineering will be one of only two of the top 15 industries that will continue to be men's worlds for years to come. (The other is janitors.) Perhaps the man's man of the future will be the digital hustler, wrangling giant amounts of data, building towers of code up to the sky, programming Robots. And I am the digital hustler. But what will become of the useless men, stuck in endless circuits of reschooling and retraining, finding that each new chosen profession is just as irrelevant as the last? (And what happens when they're too old to give up this hamster dance and join the military?) I live in Rhode Island, one of the most useless states in the union, where nothing of tangible or intangible consequence is produced. But the industrial revolution started here, and I've grown to love this place for that irony alone. Rhode Island has been devastated by the downturn -- or rather exposed by it -- and we were one of the first states to crack the 10 percent mark on reported unemployment. In short, we've got a lot of useless men here. I notice them when I go into downtown Pawtucket to mail something at the post office or pick up a book from the library. They're all over the streets in increasing numbers, all colors, shapes and sizes. And they're not very nice or friendly, most of them. Just last week, two blocks away from historic Slater Mill, a white man with a greasy t-shirt over a bulbous belly asked me for the time. I showed him my left wrist. "I'm sorry, I don't have a watch on." "Can you give me a dollar for the bus?" "No, sorry." "Fuck you." Useless men tend to be quite surly. My father (retired and beyond all this) was recently in town for a PawSox game, and he turned to me at one point and said, "Everybody seems so angry." Useless men are indeed angry and frustrated, and this hostility generally lies just below the surface. It's kept from boiling over into blind rage by consumer products like violent video games and NFL football. Loud arguments over terrorism/Obama/Bush [depreciated]/Congress are also examples of healthy and dignified outlets for this aggression. Occasionally, there are threats of bodily harm to others, but those generally stay empty and unenacted upon -- once the subject has the flash realization of insufficient funds and inability to defend legal action. But stripped of manhood, free of manly responsibilities, they become manlier than men. The key historical document of this dynamic is, of course, Fight Club, a novel published in 1996. It's fictional, but Chuck Palahniuk looks like a wise sage now. The book and movie triggered a wave of organized backyard brawling and the rise of the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a major sport, but coded in the work's DNA is what happens when men become useless: a.) extreme withdrawal into self, and b.) reversion to simian tendencies. It's one out of five now, but there is no mini-factoid, polls or survey result that suggests that things will get better. ("Better," of course, meaning "the way it was 20 years ago.") The United States is now a place where "stuff" is made elsewhere and most of the only people smart enough to run "things" are women! There's a whole lot of in-between, and millions of males are being pulled into that economic sinkhole. There will be more and more useless men, and fewer and fewer social services to help them. My advice? Invest heavily in things like ultimate fighting and pro wrestling. What happens now? Where are we going? And where will it end? What we're seeing is what happens when the concept of society stumbles, when basic human nature escapes out of civilization's cracks. And I have seen what may be the ultimate endpoint, one of the most extreme and sad cases of useless manhood in the entire world. Last summer, I traveled to Peru with a humanitarian organization. An hour's bus ride north of the capital city of Lima is Pachacutec, a desert town, a series of dune villages of shanties that are literally built on sand. It's a cruel twist that the place is named after one of the great Inca warriors, as it's one of the most destitute and poor regions on earth, in a nation that has one of the most extreme income disparities found anywhere (51% of the nation's wealth is distributed to the top 20%). We were there to distribute hundreds of pairs of new shoes. As the day went on, I began to realize that nearly every recipient was a woman or a girl. Once I noticed this, I counted men. There were several teenage boys, the local drunk, and the hustling horchata vendor on his bicycle (he didn't need shoes). Where were all the men? "There is nothing to build here, no money to be made," my translator told me. "So men abandon their families and go closer to the city. Most of them become day laborers, and spend what they earn on alcohol and prostitutes." "Wait," I replied. "Don't they send some money back home, take care of their families?" He shook his head sadly. I summoned up all the power of my sociology minor at the University of Oregon and rattled off a series of reasons why this is completely unsustainable, most specifically from a population standpoint. At the very root of it, one of a society's basic needs is enough sperm to survive. "They grow up, they have children, they leave. Over and over. It's a cycle that has repeated for generations now, and there's nothing that can stop it. The cycle is unbreakable. In 100 years, if you were to come here, it would look exactly like this."

Wear it Like a Shirt

2010-06-08T21:54:32Z

This week, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa gets underway. Since the 1920's, when the cold war between the International Olympic Committee and the International Football Association began (primarily over amateurism issues), the World Cup slowly and surely supplanted the Olympics as the earth's largest sporting spectacle. While the IOC worked long and hard to convince the sporting world that a modernized ancient Greek concept was a good idea, the rise (and genius) of FIFA can be credited to its basic success in tapping into a deep-rooted cultural instinct most of the world already had: the urge to kick a ball around with other people in an organized fashion. True love is always more powerful than shrewd marketing -- when taken from that perspective, it's no wonder that this single sport left all the other Games in its wake. But ever since soccer was dropped from Los Angeles 1932, mostly for financial reasons and a lack of local interest, the sport grew up weird in the United States. For starters, it took on a different name in the 1940's, resulting in a sort of Babel-tower disconnect with the rest of the world. Other sports, like baseball and basketball and American-Style Football, became the national pastimes, and the "global game" spent most of the 20th Century struggling to stay in our top ten. The U.S. relationship with soccerfootyfootball has been bizarre all along, and it's not really getting any more stabilized or normal. In most countries, the sport Just Is, like the sky and water and particle physics. Here, the bond is loose, complex and highly theoretical.]]> political campaign than a television event. Like any campaign, there's a base audience to indulge and a separate population to persuade. In this particular case, there are those who "know the game," and those who still need to be convinced, after all these years, of how great it is. I honestly don't know where I fit into that picture. Many in that first group are very difficult to be around, much less watch a match with. They talk and act a lot differently than folks I've met from places where soccer and humanity are symbiotically connected. I think it's because a lot of those first-groupers were, once upon a time, part of the second group, converted through a television set instead of on the pitch itself. (And this is a lie; I know at least 20 of this person.) So I'll be spending the next month avoiding people like this, and I'll attempt to enjoy the occasional peek at the matches in spite of them, and we'll see how that goes. The American soccer superfan, often found speaking in vaguely Continental terms learned on television from Tommy Smyth, is not a newfangled stock character by any means. There was a lot of high-minded fake smuggery after the 1994 World Cup here in the States, and I took it all back then as classic American us-vs.themism. I also used to think that this behavior was a function of guilt, some hyper-liberal yearning to reparate to the world for 80-plus years of sporting ignorance. But I've come to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with sports at all, that it's more a need to take a chair at the table of a misunderstood minority. It's a sort of social disease, a benign version of "the clap," as in, the desire to be part of shared applause. I speak from experience here. I have struck poses and thrown shapes. I was a Pavement fan in the early 1990's, a latecomer to The Sopranos and The Wire later on. Traveling with the Grateful Dead after high school only got me a bunch of (smelly) acquaintances who I don't keep up with anymore. "People just don't get it," the mating call goes. "When will they see the light and understand?" But this kind of Light is a terrible place to be, a self-congratulatory orgy of false simpatico and passive-aggression. The binding force is arrogance, so discussions tend to devolve into contests about who knows the most about the subject. Deep down, everyone thinks everyone else is a jerk, and that's no way to make friends. I don't See The Light, but I'm aware of it. I like soccer, I enjoy watching it, I have my teams, but it isn't in my blood. I played in high school, and I was an above-average goalie with decent reflexes, but I quit to focus on the school paper. I don't love soccer, and I can't pretend for the sake of social currency. Soccer will never be a part of my DNA, never was, and no amount of persistent marketing or 3D television coverage will ever change that. It's too late for me, and it might be too late for my generation as well. Maybe it's just too late for my country. Perhaps 1932 represents some sort of Original Sin, and we'll never get back to the garden -- without a time machine and the British blueprint for a soccer/rugby/darts sporting culture, that is. America didn't grow with the game, the game didn't grow with us, and it's not in our country's essential fabric. Which is okay. It's a niche sport with excellent and diverse demographics... even without the evangelists, but there's money to be made off of them too. Perhaps things will be different later on. All the sons and daughters of soccer moms might grow up to become an unstoppable economic force with unbreakable power, and they might demand the MLS instead of the NFL from whatever ESPN becomes in 20 years. It would be more in line with what they grew up with, after all, what they're comfortable with, who they are as people. But I think it's more likely that they just won't care. The soccer subsection of generalized Generation Millennial-B will probably take its soccer where it can find it, gather together to speak the language with fellow true believers, and otherwise get on with its life. People who truly love something generally don't feel the need to convert people who don't want that thing -- this is a dynamic currently at work with America's suddenly-marginalized pastimes. U.S. hockey fans who grew up playing and watching the game know where to find NHL/AHL/WHL contests and discuss the sport with their friends; for the most part, they've given up on sales pitching and are perfectly happy in the minority. The NBA has devolved into a sad, corrupt freakshow, but there are people who still love that for the right reasons. I've found that they tend to suffer together in silence, gathered in small support groups. Personally, I can't think of anything that I've grown to love because it's been shoved down my throat by marketers. I've come to most of the things on my list of interests organically, I'm pretty sure of that. I'm definitely not saying this is a superior method, because it doesn't fit well within a "social media" construct where people define themselves with avatars, screen names and Twibbons based on their consumption patterns. Plus, scattershot dissonance in one's chosen pursuits tends to confuse rather than fascinate, so martyrdom is kept to a minimum. Martyrdom requires an audience. The best-case scenario for the American 2010 World Cup marketing campaign, and perhaps the only scenario, is a few thousand more card-carrying members of the Soccer Snob Club. But among most of us in the 25-39 demographic powerzone, any near-term growth in soccer will be of the manufactured, false, disposable variety. By August, the easily-amused will be on to the next Big Event; as with anything else marketed like a salable garment, soccer will be back on a hanger in the storage closet. MLS stadiums will remain half empty, the women's league will fold again, the superfans will remain happily misunderstood, and folks will keep wondering why "selling the game" in the United States is such an endless, uphill battle. Or maybe the battle will finally end in surrender. I certainly hope so.

Exclusionomics

2010-05-18T22:11:21Z

So here's something. A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail intended to gauge my interest in being part of a panel discussion about raising money on the internet at a conference. In Florida! No, really, I am not kidding. I wasn't simply plucked out of the crowd for this honor, that's just not the way these things work. Somebody knew someone else, and the first one in that short chain was someone who's been a longtime supporter of my basketball web initiatives. The conference representative's e-mail name-checked this person as a way of introduction, and it mentioned that I'd raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for travel and that I'd managed to turn a profit with a paywall website, and who's my agent? There was something about a round-trip plane ticket and three nights' lodging, and you just don't throw that stuff around unless there's a timeshare exchange involved. It was all quite flattering, but I'm not going to do it. I could have flatly turned them down because I'd never heard of the organization, but I didn't, or I could have told them that I don't do things like that because I'm afraid of crowds (that's not true, just ask anybody I went to college with). As it turned out, I just didn't get back to them. Since then, though, I've thought about what words of wisdom and authority I'd offer about raising money on the internet -- and what I'd have to offer to a group of (presumably) paying listeners who would likely be subsidizing the panelists' travel expenses. After practicing my speech in my head a few times, I'm convinced they wouldn't like my advice. "First rule," I might have said. "Scare off or ignore most of the available market." Newsday found that out recently when they signed up only 35 people to their new $5-a-week web subscription plan. Because the newspaper's ownership paid $4 million to set up the new site, it's funny, as in Ishtar funny. An inability to cover enormous prior expenses, for whatever reason, is always hilarious. But a website like YouTube, a subsidized subsidiary that loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year for its parent company, isn't a public punchline because end-users are too busy using it as a basic utility. I sometimes wonder if YouTube would be better off with a Newsday-style paywall. Web traffic can be a liability. Well, at least massive, demonetized, hit-and-run traffic can be. The infrastructure costs for serving an endless stream of database-driven web pages, ensuring smooth datacenter operations, and guaranteeing perfect uptime can be incredibly significant... not as much as they were five or 10 years ago, but they're still very high. You can meet those costs with advertisements (like YouTube and Twitter are trying to do), or your an sell your customers' private data (like Facebook). Or you can scare people away. Our pay-per-view basketball website gets 1.5 million page views a month. It would be many times that if it were completely free, and it would also lose lots of money if that were the case. Instead, a curtain comes down after five page loads. Less than one percent of visitors actually pay the 20 dollars for a year of access, but the people who do are the ones who actually, really want the information behind that paywall. And their purchase ensures that we'll be able to afford to continue to give it to them. The financial numbers are relatively small, but we've turned profits and paid out dividends to shareholders in each of the site's first three years. I appreciate the cosmic justice inherent in the idea that popular success brings extreme liabilities, and that the humble (certainly not the meek) might indeed one day inherit the earth. Or rather, that millions of independent organizations will, constructed by those who have chosen efficiency over ego. This extends beyond economics, this being the Web, to all those who are content with being local heroes instead of pop stars. I try to reflect that sensibility in my other, more literary basketball website, where I write thousands of words in thick paragraphs where hundreds might do elsewhere. The audience is relatively smaller as a result, but it tends to skew brighter and more educated, gifted with extended attention spans. So I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the kind of racist, over-zealously religious, bigoted, sexist, narrow-minded spew that giant sites like YouTube have to deal with on a regular basis. Scareaway tactics. With smaller entities, time is immensely valuable, and the wasted hours and psychic weight of anonymous, typo-filled hatred can definitely be filed as overhead expense. But then again, so can the time spent on image cultivation: interviews, appearances, general P.R. self-puffery and social media self-pimping. Time spent selling self is time not spent creating actual salable product, or getting better at serving audiences. (This also happens to be the secret behind the mysterious "sophomore slump.") The attention feels good, but it's a double liability -- for both now and for the future. Which brings me back to that conference in Florida. Instead of "extending my brand," I'll be sitting here in Rhode Island, looking out my front window. Just beyond the first couple rows of houses is a cluster of small Pawtucket businesses, many of which are over a generation old. There's a high-volume laundromat, a barber shop, a credit union for city and state employees, a golf supply store, and an auto maintenance shop that specializes in Saabs. They're all doing well, despite the economic downturn, even despite the fact that I don't do any business with most of them. And they don't care, and they don't unnecessarily chase my business. They keep doing what they do, catering to their niche markets, making their modest profits. Once the web catches on to that dynamic, things will be just fine. ]]>

Dying Twice in the Digital Age

2010-05-14T20:58:53Z

Over the past year or so, it seems that the only times I ever use this journal is when somebody dies. This was brought home to me when a friend mentioned in an recent e-mail: "Are you ever going to blog on your site again? You know, about people who are alive?" My first reaction was defense -- well, isn't death the only thing worth writing a longform journal entry about? And then, the quick fishhook-in-the-mouth before the whole sentence came out... wait, that sounds exactly like something an old person would say. And I am old, internet-old. I've been on the World Wide Web for 17 years, longer than some very savvy young internet users have been real-life alive. And the rewards for that kind of longevity are similar to those given the real-life elderly: blank stares, indifference, on to the next one. For the past day or two, I've had this feeling that the recent resurrection of Leslie Harpold's proto-webzine smug (1997-2000), by means of mirrored archive, should be a bigger deal somehow. Jason Kottke, a web aggregator who's been at it for 12 years and who makes money off his blog, pulled out the "get off my lawn" line, and well, there you go. I don't know if this is really like finding DaVinci sketches in your basement; to me it's more like rediscovering a stash of high school newspapers in the attic, and realizing that they're a lot more awesome than nearly everything since. We just didn't realize the full genius of it at the time. How could we have? We were all so young then. Leslie Harpold died in December 2006 mysteriously, alone. They didn't find her for a few days, and it might have been longer if her readers hadn't noticed that she'd stopped updating her site. This would have been like any number of similar American deaths, but she'd written hundreds of thousands of words online and made friends all across the (far less crowded) World Wide Web. There were many remembrances on blogs and message boards in the days following. It seemed like everyone knew her.]]> fans and friends to pay the account bills. They refused to allow republication; in time, the IP bindings for her domains loosened, dissolved and fell away. So most of what she wrote online simply vanished. I've spent many of the last 24 hours going back through the issues of smug, reading Leslie Harpold's words from a website that I'd originally read in a web browser with a giant N and a starscape in the upper corner. Here are my favorites, far too many to fit in a tweet: midi rock, WWB(eck)D, content, bracket gesture, 80's server, kung fu girls, dumb search engines, SETI, "geek", american-style football, rock show etiquette, Paseo, fan fiction, q-tips, toasters, hackers, fansites, web logs, My Yahoo, Real Dolls, sexy jeans, The Knack vs. Foo Fighters, strangers' homepages, Prozac, techno, and the future. Observational writing on the web can be funny and engaging on its own merits, without the need for a side-dish slab of hamfisted snark; it's easy to forget that sometimes. Much of the "magic" in her writing was nothing more than simple corner-brightening: it's amazing and wonderful what direct address, a tangential vignette, or a gently-placed note of kind respect for the readership can do. Leslie also kept a online journal that she called the Hoopla 500, an "experiment in text" that stored more personal memories and feelings in 500-word wedges. An incomplete portion of that project survives, thanks to the government, perhaps only because she wrote about living in New York City during and after 9/11. (Beautifully so.) Too many of those words are still gone. I don't have a Leslie story of my own to share, like so many of the early bloggers do. I never wrote her an e-mail to say, "Hey, I really think the Hoopla 500 is great, here's a link to my home page, tell me what you think"... not because I feared a critical kebabizing, but rather because a non-reply would have crushed me. So mostly, I just took from her. I followed her example, because there were so few people to copy back then. I started my own text experiment nine years ago. I wrote a series of pieces on various topics, each with three 500-word panels (separated by triple-asterisks) that approached a chosen yet unlabeled subject from a different angle. I called it Intersection. In 2004, I tried grander scale: I fused memory, observation, travel and sport in a slow-education experiment that's just now coming together six years on. At base level, Ms. Harpold's death and subsequent online disapparition is a lesson that the end comes twice to independent publishers on the internet. It also served as a clear warning that any of us who make periodic payments to a webhost absolutely must have a strong contingency plan. I'm lucky enough to have invisible friends who would be very upset if I died and my archives were wiped off the web (not the kind of upset that would last three years, though). But I also receive a fair amount of second-hand flak, and much of that is objection to the level of personal information I insert into my work. I've written about medical issues and family breakdowns and suicide fantasies. There's no real fearlessness in that, it's just how we internet-old people wrote "online journals" back then: honesty in complete paragraphs. I think the idea of complex digital personalities made out of "likes" and preferred consumer experiences is a more recent phenomenon. I wonder if Leslie dealt with that any of that sort of critical crap about oversharing. I wonder if I'd have the digital balls to write her to ask about that, if she was still around today. I also wonder what she would think about the way the future turned out, about sacrificing privacy for a false sense of community, and what the smug column about Facebook would look like. And what about Twitter? Or Tumblr? Leslie, have you heard about this one? Nowadays, bloggers become media superstars and get book deals and can even make good livings off their sites. The ones rewarded with big success are those who produce the most quality momentary content in service to their audiences, and spoiler alert, they're The News going forward. But I strongly believe that the online writers with legacies and lasting influence will always be the ones who are best at humanizing this web experience. The ones who put enough of their real selves out there so that their online fossil-fragments add up to complete, knowable, compelling people. They will be the ones who will be remembered, many years after they're gone, by people who didn't actually know them. Leslie Harpold is why I number my season epilogues every year.

Eulogy in Absentia, On the Death of Lazlo "Laci" Toth

2010-01-09T18:27:52Z

Lazlo Toth was my friend. To some of you, he was an acquaintance, or a former lover, or a family member. And then on January 6, 2010, a week into a new decade, he died. He passed on before we did, which is a shame for us. I don't know how he died, and maybe you do, but it doesn't sound good. Whenever they don't tell you the cause right away, it doesn't sound good.

I knew Laci (lah-TZEE) in high school; we lived on opposite ends of the boys' dorm at High Mowing. Back then, Laci was a soft-spoken soul with wide, round eyes. A gentle giant, probably not as tall as I remember him being, which is about 6-foot-6 because memory distorts things. He had a big mane of wild brown hair. Everybody who met him back then -- myself included -- always immediately assumed he was a gangly, awkward, shy kid.

And then there was the name. Lazlo Toth was the nom de' of Saturday Night Live's Don Novello, who undertook a writing project under the name of a Hungarian geologist who attacked a Michelangelo back in 1972. But that was the year I was born, and Laci was older than me. Did he just end up with a weird, star-crossed name? I never knew. But later on, after high school, I did end up reading Novello's collected letters, in which he wrote odd tracts to famous people and received unintentionally funny replies. I thought it was all low-grade toss. The Lazlo Toth I knew was the real comic genius.

"The Bee Gees were the true punks, people don't realize that," he'd say in a mellow deadpan. "You can really mosh to that shit."
]]> He used to put disco records on his turntable and play them backwards, and he could swear he could hear evil messages like "I love Satan" and "Fuck Jesus."

And so Laci spent his high school years as a highly misunderstood individual. But unlike most hormone-addled teenagers who were just looking for a place to fit in, Laci didn't care. He was a mysterious study in contrasts and contradictions, but he always fit perfectly inside his own skin.

Laci loved music. He introduced me to a lot of those old crusty post-New Wave punk bands like the Minutemen and the Circle Jerks. He had all these thrashcore records with black covers. But he also loved old Genesis, and I thought about Laci a lot when I went through a "Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" auto-repeat phase last summer. He had the full collection of former Genesis member Anthony Phillips' "Private Parts and Pieces" series, which is about as close to the boundaries of actual classical music that progressive rock ever came. Laci was a gentle soul who was also so hardcore.

Laci and I were in a band together, along with Zak Nilsson. We called ourselves Anal Shrapnel, and got together after evening study halls to record "albums" on my boom box. Zak would start the preprogrammed beats on his Yamaha keyboard, Laci would play guitar, and I'd bang on stuff. Then we'd all intersperse freestyle raps with farting noises. Anal Shrapnel had songs with titles like "Dingleberry Rebel" and "I Got One Wet Spot For You, And It's My Asshole." We did a tour of campus bathrooms.

It was the most juvenile, eight-year-old thing in the world, but it was Laci's ironic, dead-serious attitude about Anal Shrapnel that made it the funniest thing in the world.

Laci left High Mowing after the 1988-89 school year, if I remember right. But I do recall this: he was living in a spartan two-room apartment in Boston when I visited him a year later. Laci, Keith Vanetti and I went down to Harvard Square and bought some fake acid from a shady dealer. Then we went back to the apartment to stand around, waiting for the drugs to work. They didn't, of course, because we had dropped 20-weight copy paper. Finally, Laci went over to the stereo and flipped the switch. It was "Night Fever" by the Bee Gees, from the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack.

We knew what to do. We slam-danced in his kitchen, breaking one of the chairs in the process.

And that, almost exactly 20 years ago, was the last time I saw Laci. In those two decades, social networks, online class reunions and magic phones have made it virtually impossible to truly disappear after high school. But Laci was gone to me whenever I tried to find him -- his infamous name made him completely and perfectly un-Googleable.

When I heard about Laci's death, I was on my way to a basketball game, which is my job now. I was standing on a train platform in Philadelphia, miles from home, wearing a pinstripe suit with my hair slicked back. In my iPhone earbuds, I was listening to a ridiculously filthy Kool Keith rap song about space aliens licking his balls. And just then, that's when the news came in, via a Facebook alert. The shock gave way to a quick realization that news of his passing had interrupted a scene of bizarre audiovisual contrast -- in other words, a Laci moment.

---

Our life in the First World, wrapped in a cocoon of government, corporations, supermarkets and persistent computing, has made human instinct and survival drive obsolete. To fuck or kill, or not to, are choices of convenience. We're all social animals now, defined by our interactions with fellow humans. In other words, we are made of other people.

Since we last spoke, you and I have been shaped, changed and transformed by those whom have crossed our lives. None of us are the same as we were back in high school. And I don't know the person Laci turned into over the course of the last decade, or the men and women who moved him in the directions he decided to take. I don't know what path led him here, to his death.

What I do know is that my time with Lazlo Toth, at a formative time in my own journey, changed my life and inspired me greatly. And even though he's gone from this earth, I will always carry a part of him with me.

The Bloomer-Leg

2009-11-03T11:24:31Z

I wanted to share one of my favorite passages from the book I helped Tony Ingle (the head coach at Kennesaw State University) write. The book is called I Don't Mind Hitting Bottom, I Just Hate Dragging. The forewords were written by basketball Hall of Famer (and current ESPN NBA analyst) Hubie Brown and multimillion-selling author Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). It's available for direct purchase, and ships this week. Buy it, you'll love it!

This is a story from 1978, when Tony was a first-year head coach at Cherokee High in Georgia.

Later on, we were playing at Marietta High School. Charlie Hood was the coach there, a living legend in Atlanta-area high school ball. His team at the time featured Dale Ellis, who went on to the University of Tennessee and hit a lot of 3-pointers for the Seattle SuperSonics. A lot of people forget that Dale had a twin brother named Darryl, who was an exceptional athlete in his own right.

And both Dale and Darryl were on this team. Marietta was a powerhouse, ranked second in the state.

Marietta had us down by 25 points at their place, and time was winding down. I called time out, and everybody came running over to the bench.

"Guys," I said. "Remember what Bart Starr said about champions? He said that you can always tell a champion, no matter if he's up 30 or down 30. He's still playing and giving the best that he's got. The game's never over. Remember when he said that?"

Said all the players in unison, "Yes, sir!"

"Well, this game's over," I told them. "We're getting beat like dogs."

They all looked at me, dumbfounded.

A guy on my team named Russell Simmons - I loved him for being such a competitor - spoke up. "C'mon, coach, we can still win!"

"Nope, game's over," I repeated. "We're down 25 points with a minute to play, and there's no 30-point shot in the rulebook. We're beat."

"But here's what we're going to do," I continued. "We're going to have some fun for the rest of the night. We're not going to let them destroy us, we're not going to be down and out and unhappy because they beat us like a bass drum. We're going to leave here happy. So who wants to bloomer-leg one?"

The players were stunned. They didn't know what I was talking about.

"Ummm, coach, what's a bloomer-leg?" asked Russell.

"You get the ball, you put it down between your legs," I explained. "Just like Rick Barry shoots foul shots. Then you underhand that ball with all your might up towards the rim. So who wants to bloomer-leg one from half-court? Kevin Foster, what about you?"

Kevin was kind of a shy kid. "Welllll," he said tentatively, before his face broke out in a big smile. "Okay, I'll do it."

I knew Marietta was going to sit in that 2-3 zone and stay off our shooters, so I had Kevin dribble the ball up to half-court where it said "M.H.S." in big letters. He looked over at me, and I gave him a little wink.

"Let 'er fly, big man," I said.

And he took the ball and put it down between his knees, and Kevin Foster bloomer-legged it from half-court. When that ball hit the rim, my whole bench stood up. They thought it was going in. But it rattled off the iron and bounced out.

Robert Thomas grabbed the offensive rebound and dribbled out to the top of the circle, and then he bloomer-legged one too. That shot almost knocked a hole in the backboard.

The game was over, Marietta won by 25, but we made our statement. They might have won the game and embarrassed us, but we weren't going to let it ruin our lives. We weren't going to leave that gym feeling sorry for ourselves.

Book #2

2009-10-01T23:29:56Z

Is this a book you might be interested in?

I DON'T MIND HITTING BOTTOM, I JUST HATE DRAGGING
by Tony Ingle with Kyle Whelliston
with a foreword by Hubie Brown

Release date: November 2009

----

When Tony Ingle grew up in the government housing projects of Dalton, Georgia, he was so poor that he had to fish his first pair of basketball shoes out of a dumpster. And after a horrific knee injury during the national junior college basketball tournament ended his playing career, he set about chasing his championship dreams as a coach. His long climb up "the ladder" from high school to college was chock-full of high-octane offense and circus plays, culminating in a dream job as the interim bench boss at Brigham Young University. But after a nightmarish 0-19 campaign full of season-ending injuries and blowout losses, BYU put Coach Ingle out on the street. During his three years in basketball's wilderness, he performed a series of odd jobs to provide for his wife and five children -- including carpet salesman, TV pitchman, and stand-up comic. Coach Ingle's second chance finally came at Kennesaw State University, a small college near Atlanta, where he took the Owls from utter mediocrity to the Division II National Championship in just four years.

With a foreword by Basketball Hall of Famer Hubie Brown, "I Don't Mind Hitting Bottom, I Just Hate Dragging" will entertain, motivate and inspire. It is the engaging and unique story of a life full of resilience, perseverance, faith and family... told by a man the Deseret News once called "the Will Rogers of basketball."

Thomas Rubick, R.I.P.

2009-07-20T03:56:00Z

Thomas Rubick, "Return of the Return" - self-portrait ©
I lost my sensei today.

Thomas Rubick was my primary graphic design professor when I lived in Oregon, he was the best teacher I ever had, and he passed away Sunday morning just before 8 a.m. Pacific time. He had brain cancer; he and his doctors thought he had it beat with chemo this past summer, but it came back much worse once autumn arrived. I've promised to always speak of him in the present tense, a high respect afforded only the greatest of artists, but I can do so only when it doesn't end up confusing the timeline.

When he died, it was three hours later here on the East Coast, and what I was spending my Sunday morning doing was -- of all things -- drawing a three-panel cartoon on a bristol pad. I was having trouble rendering an expressive hand gesture, and I was thinking about him. I was remembering a time back in school when I stayed up all night on a deadline and completely screwed up an illustration by putting somebody's thumb where the pinky would be. Thomas made me draw 50 hands if I wanted to save my grade. Twelve years later, wearing through the pad with pencil scratches and eraser snibbles, I could swear I felt pressure coming from over my shoulder.

I didn't find out until much later in the day that he had died.

This wasn't a random spiritual experience or anything. I've been thinking a lot about Thomas for the past seven months, and I wrote extensively about him here back in March. Mostly, I've been racked with regret that I didn't keep in better touch beyond annual three-paragraph Christmas cards (his were always signed, "Your Sensei"), and that I never figured out the proper way to say farewell while I still could. But that's what people do. We're programmed to take things for granted, to forget about things when they're present and abundant, to despair and panic when their scarcity and absence become evident.

]]> The Graduate.

"I'm going to say one word to you," he said. "Are you listening?"

"Yes, sir," I replied.

"Watercolors," Thomas deadpanned.

He then dragged me to the art supply store a half-block away and spent over half an hour sorting through the paints and canvases. He brought over a clerk and grilled her about the pros and cons of certain brands. Before we parted company, he made me promise that I'd pick up some brushes and materials once I got back east. ("There's a great future in watercolors. Think about it.") And I promised.

Of course, I never followed through.

As I write this, the news of his passing is still fresh, not even 90 minutes has gone by since I learned of it. I've gone through the stages of grief in rapid and random order, I've thought about standard responses like plastic Livestrong bands or cancer research donations, and I've rewritten these paragraphs several times. But the feeling I keep coming back to is a compulsion to drop everything, and just make stuff.

That's the feeling that Thomas lived with every day, and it defines his spirit. While alive, he constantly painted portraits and drew things, he took photographs, he decorated objects, and he made stuff with computers. Whether people liked it or not, whether they bought it or not, he kept creating either way. When he consumed the world around him -- whether it was paging through The Art of Looking Sideways or curating his giant collection of pictures of "things" (oh yes, he loved slide shows) -- it was always in the name of more production. He passed that joy of creation to many, many students.

There are plenty of powerful forces in our world, like cancer, that destroy without prejudice, and they do win a lot of the time. So if you knew Thomas, or if you didn't, or even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, this is a call to make stuff. Do something in a medium you're familiar and comfortable with, or take on a challenge (maybe even watercolors). Every act of creation pushes back against a consuming darkness, it's up to us.

[UPDATE 7/22: Thomas wrote his own obituary.]

Heroes for the Desperate

2009-07-09T15:17:25Z

Human loneliness, and the sheer desperation that too much of it inevitably causes, is the 21st Century's most potent and powerful driver of everyday action in the First World. I'm convinced of it. Nearly all bad life-changing decisions come from wild and selfish desires for human connection, and our municipal court hallways are littered with the endings and by-products of desperate acts: gang shit, quickie divorces, restraining orders, and children of ridiculous unions cursed at and by birth.

None of this fits into the narrative structure we've commonly accepted as entertaining or enlightening -- except maybe for the shows on the teevee down at the laundromat during which viewers are invited to pick a side whilst ignoring the larger picture. There's no place in Joseph Campbell's hero-story arc for a journey that ends in a victory over desperation; it tends to be a second-act problem for Good Guys, who are saved by quest completion, religion or a Good Woman. It's a first-act issue for villains.

The ability to refrain from making stupid decisions is not, sadly, considered a superpower. They'll never make a movie out of any of those old German novels in which the protagonist achieves a victory over a baser self by way of internal monologue, or from Saul Bellow's Herzog. As a result, there's no real cultural roadmap for breaking the desperation cycle, no hero to turn to. Is this, too, something the internet and its new complex media can help with?

(Image via DTMM)

How To Be an Internet Superstar

2009-06-21T14:49:20Z

Iran's ruling government is bad

iPhones are cool, but AT&T's policies are bad

#inaperfectworld, cats would audibly speak in LOLcat language

All this will get you, however, is a tiny and anonymous place in a massive crowd, which can be a lonelier existential state than the emptiest room. Some internet-people rebel against this dejection by saying the exact opposite, in order to draw a sharp reaction. Examples include, "Ahmadinejad is awesome!" and "I like killing kitties with my gun." These people are called trolls, which is a bad name for them because there isn't anything particularly fearsome, powerful or Norse about them. They're just dicks.]]> A more effective form of getting sharp reactions involves taking an established side in an established cultural debate. There are people who have made a lot of money and achieved a lot of fame doing this, like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann. Yesterday, for example, I was watching a professional baseball game on teevee. A famous rich ideologue threw out the ceremonial first pitch, while half the crowd cheered loudly and the other half booed its collective lungs out. It must be weird having strangers hate you, but I suppose those people consider it a cost of doing business. And that business is conflict and divisiveness. Many internet-people are smart and clever and have figured out this dynamic, and want a piece of the pie for themselves. Sacrificing half of the potential audience is worth it if it means a deeper, richer relationship with strangers that is based on real stuff like doctrines and beliefs; if internet-people on the other "side" shout them down, it just means they're making an impact that's important. It doesn't always work out, though. In most cases, internet-people who try to split the audience just sound like boring complainers, or cartoon pirate parrots. It's much easier to set one's sights lower, to settle for being less known, to be an expert at something small and inclusive. It's a good way to be happy, content, free of desperation, and to avoid the endless stream of hateful negative spew that famous dividers get. Better to be a specialist, a guru, a value-added conduit (VAC). Not better by much, however. Experts make easy caricatures, fit well into cubbyholes, and are easily disposed once exhausted. For instance, there's a friend of mine, someone with whom I've talked with a lot recently, who has a website about a sport that only a few thousand people care about. As soon as he starts talking about other things, including himself and his personal problems, people get weirded out and jump off. Experts on the internet are designed to be one-dimensional, and there's little room for their surgeries or families. This is a dead end. But there's a rare class of internet-people who have keyed the lock, solved the conundrum. These folks work really hard to make certain groups of people happy, creating things that make them smile and laugh (songs and videos and cartoons, most often). What separates these internet stuff-makers from navel-gazing YouTube vloggers and those who make momentary meme-diversions is consistency and quality... as well as that they make a point of openly inviting and inspiring creativity from their audiences, make others feel good about themselves, blur the line between creator and consumer. If you've been on the web for a while, and if you think about it for a second, you've probably encountered someone like this. I'm fairly certain I'll never be one of these internet-people, because my East Coast cynicism keeps me from transcending distrust of strangers and their motives. Indeed, there aren't many of these chosen few right now, not enough to turn the tide against drones and dividers and gurus... so there's plenty of room out there for this magic to happen. I just hope this is the next growth industry on the web, not monetizing Twitter feeds, pharmaceutical timeshares or mechanical turks. There's still plenty of opportunity to become somebody worth remembering.

So Sad

2009-06-19T14:40:42Z

Sure I love Twitter. I love teh tweets so much that I ditched my "personal" account and opted into a read-only experience. Twitter is history's most advanced way yet of obtaining small blips of useful information... anywhere you are. On the desktop, on the phone, in the van, in the can. I'm not so convinced that its legacy is as a interpersonal communication tool.

A lot of people are going to point to recent situations on Moldova and Iran as proof that Twitter has come of age, supplanted traditional journalism, changed the world. These people won't likely mention that week of endlessly cascading Swine Flu misinformation and paranoia last month, or the service's losing battle against truth verification and endless spam. Try this: read 1,000 scattered updates from #iranelection, then read a dispatch from a BBC reporter who's lived in and studied the region for years. After that, go ahead and tell me what the future of journalism is all about.

]]> That breathless Time article from earlier this month made some really powerful points about shared experiences. The last two American generations are so starved and desperate for shared cultural experience that we'll accept anything -- if we can't have Woodstock or World War II, maybe we'll take #threewordsbeforesex, #iremember, and retweeting proxy addresses to help Iranian revolutionaries. I wonder how many of the folks with the green-tinted avatars are exercising old guilt from 2000, when there were no million-strong street protests or Sea of Green over our own stolen election. (We didn't have Twitter back then, but we did have e-mail and a cc: line.)

At its best, Twitter is a dumbed-down Google Reader, but one that gives you occasional updates from heroes, extended family and distant acquaintances. Those parts of it work really well.

My favorite thing about Twitter right now, and I'm not being sarcastic about this, is shockspam. The example account above is just one of many that scrapes the list of "trending topics," then adds an imagined headline followed by a link to schwantz enhancers. These tweets are not very effective on their own, they just help the tweetstreams stay broken and confusing.

But look at a list of updates from one of these robotic accounts: this is a stark description of a world in complete upheaval, crumbling around us, a thousand million 9/11's. World leaders and captains of industry dead, bombs going off around the world, pop stars misplacing tapes of themselves fucking on camera. Real actual Armageddon doesn't creep up on you, it happens all at once and everywhere, and the sheer scope of the global tragedy is numbing. This is the kind of clarity that an unfiltered Twitter will never, ever match.

Smoke, The Wonder Horse: A Loving Tribute

2009-06-07T18:54:25Z

Recently, I came across the 1936 B-Western California Mail on Turner Classic Movies. The late Dick Foran, who had the worst teeth of any of the singing cowboys, has top billing, and there's a thin plot about romantic jealousy, mistaken identity, and the end of the Pony Express.

But the real star is Smoke the Wonder Horse, a grey palomino with an complicated harness who's credited as "himself" and is responsible for all the major plot turns. I was watching the movie in the "background" while doing some divorce paperwork on the couch, but halfway through, Smoke turns on a bad guy who's stolen and mounted him, throws him off, then kills him with his front hooves before galloping off and leaving the man for dead. I was, like, "Whoa! I didn't see that coming!"

Then, in the climactic chase scene, Smoke runs down another black-hat and stomps him until he dies. It's shown in quick-cut edits (because of the Production Code, most likely), back and forth from close-ups of the dying man's frightened, bloodied face to the rearing horse shown from an upward perspective. The blood-curdling neighs and the screams signaled the day was saved. I leapt from the couch and gave the film a standing ovation, much as folks in the theater must have all those years ago!

Finally, I checked the Internet Movie Database so I could find out what other movies Smoke appeared in. He was in 13 other B-Westerns from 1936 through 1941, forgotten films like Empty Holsters and Winners of the West. He's credited as Dick's Horse, Red's Horse, Rod's Horse, Chip's Horse. The grey wonder-steed never found a regular rider, never had the opportunity to be Silver to any Ranger, lone or otherwise.

]]> But Smoke wasn't forgotten. His death-skills were so legendary that he was specially thanked over half a century later during the credits of Lethal Cowboy. Dana Plato is in it. The movie isn't available on DVD and the master tapes are probably lost or destroyed, but Czech IMDB commenter unclehugo describes the action thus.

In the first two minutes of this terrible movie, a long haired, half naked man named Cody is beaten, whipped and shot by Mr. Malone and his right hand Frank (played by Frank Stallone) because he owed them some money. Two Malone's men then take Cody out to the desert and dump him into a hole in the ground. A spirit of an Indian warrior turns up and plays the flute. After a while, Cody gets out of the hole and asks the spirit where he is. The spirit informs him they stand on a sacred burial ground and tells Cody he must stop the evil represented by Malone. Cody isn't too enthusiastic about the idea and says he doesn't want to feel the pain again. The Indian spirit replies: "Without pain, there can be no life."

And without life, there can be no miracles. The very next year, Smoke the Wonder Horse returned from the dead too.

Hustler White was a 1996 Canadian/German independent film about the gay S&M prostitution scene in Los Angeles. This Bruce La Bruce production is not a porno, apparently. IMDb went ahead and listed the film, which inspired a quote from Newsweek: "The difference between art and pornography is the lighting." Here's a rundown, via commenter fuzon:

A campy crime/love story intersects with random vignettes from the lives of various hustlers on Santa Monica boulevard. The protagonist, a pretty and altogether amoral dumbster hustler, robs a hippy trick and steals his car, running over and maiming a skinhead in the process. A prissy writer comes to the city and becomes obsessed with the same hustler. The surrounding vignettes are more outrÃƒÂ©, with a singing cowboy saddling and riding a young stud...

According to IMDb, the internet's most exhaustively populated and updated movie database, Smoke (I) -- who certainly knew about singing cowboys -- wrote and performed a song for the movie called "Luke's Feet."

And Smoke (I) wasn't finished. IMDb also lists him as the performer for a soundtrack song called "It's On Tonight," featured in 2002's frisky Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock light fake sex comedy Two Weeks Notice. Because a score was issued instead of a soundtrack (a move that drove the CD's Amazon rating down to two stars), this song is as lost to history as the real truth about Smoke the Wonder Horse.

I'm in the database business, and I know how similar names can make things complicated. From a research perspective, I know how difficult is can be to Google somebody named Joe Smith. We'll probably never know the real story about Smoke's true temperament, what his body count was, if he really did outlast his expected lifespan of 25-30 years, whether he was straight or gay, or if he has another reinvention-slash-comeback left in him. But if you can believe that there is enough magic in this world that a horse can kill somebody in the name of human justice, you know in your heart that absolutely anything is totally and beautifully possible.

Excellent Birds

2009-04-24T15:28:13Z

I like the Twitter a lot. I live-Twittered 109 college basketball games last season, and I've even created several Twitter robots. One of them has sports scores from America, and another one has soccer results from places that are not America. I even made a special robot that tells me what the weather's going to be today where I live. I like Twitter so much I own a Fail Whale t-shirt to help support the artist who drew it. I've been on Twitter long enough that my KyleWhale avatar is usually somewhere near the top of follower lists ranked by tenure. In that time, I've defined my relationship to Twitter, as one must eventually do with any technology, and I've made my decisions about what it is.

Millions of other people have made that decision for themselves, too. Twitter is telegrams without the news, a ball-point pen, a subway platform conversation, maybe even the second coming of the telephone itself. Twitter challenges creative folks to shoehorn big thoughts into 140 characters, and it's a way for others to consume celebrity culture in unprecedented ways. What's fascinating to me is that such a uncomplicated data construct is capable of being so many different things to so many different people.

]]> Twitter doesn't force you to accept its terms of existence like other social networks do, doesn't impose a rigid and strange framework on participants. In real life, a "follower" relationship -- in which one is interested in what another has to say -- is far more common than the double-bound "friend" tie that Facebook and MySpace insist upon. You can talk to everybody who's "following"... or if you want to address one person, there are ways to do that, both semi-publicly and privately. Of course, you don't have to use Twitter for talking at all.

That CNN's breaking news feed has over 1.1 million followers proves that Twitter is much more than the chirpy teenage party many critics think it is. The 140-character limit is just enough to fit a headline and an invitation (in the form of a compressed link) to the whole story. That fits in well on top of the headline/lead-paragraph/trailing-details format taught in beginning journalism classes; it also delivers on an early internet promise that the news would come to you, and that you wouldn't have to make any effort unless you were interested in learning more.

Twitter's simplicity, and resultant extensibility, are about as close to beauty as I've seen in the electronic world. Any internet device capable of data entry is an entry point, and information retrieval options increase every day. If you'd like, you can output to your calendar and turn a Twitter feed into a running diary. If you're a BlackBerry owner, you can redirect your incoming messages into your inbox. Every user defines their own relationship to it.

Mine is rather easy. I use Twitter the same way that one would use a mailbox, or an RSS newsreader, or a Google search: as a filter against the 99.99999999 percent of available information that I don't want. I have a few news sources for stuff I'm interested in, and "follow" the 15 or so people I'm actual friends with (I treat "I had soup for lunch" as "[ping] I'm alive and okay"). I understand that some "follow" hundreds of feeds from people they don't know in efforts to be polite netizens, but that seems to render the whole idea of a timeline useless. However, that's their version of Twitter, everyone has their own.

So I don't find the ongoing and growing debate on Twitter's usefulness very interesting. It's as useful as one's imagination will let it be. But whenever that Fail Whale pops up on the screen, with its "Too many tweets!" message, it reminds me that despite its simplicity on the far side of complexity, nobody's found a way to have this pay for itself yet. I just hope that solution ends up being as simple as all the others Twitter's solved.

My Napoleon Dynamite Pilgrimage

2009-01-10T21:47:53Z

On the evening of New Year's Day, I was sitting in a hotel room in Pocatello, Idaho, flipping around the channels, and "Napoleon Dynamite" was on E!. It was an amazing feeling -- watching the best movie ever made about Idaho in Idaho. It's been five years since it was made for $400K and made over 100 times its costs back, but everybody's over it because in America, sensations die easy. Napoleon's legacy lives on well into 2009, however, because he's screwing up the Netflix Prize.

During one of the 379 commercial breaks, I checked the map to see how close I was to the town where the film was shot. Too close not to make a pilgrimage, it turned out. On my way south to Utah, I slid off the interstate down the one-lane mountain road to the small town of Preston. I'm not the first to make the trip, and it's to the point where it's organized religion, but my trip was flippin' sweet anyway.

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Before 2005, Preston was famous for rodeo and Christmas lights.

Downtown looks like a lot of small main-drag based towns in the intermountain west. Lots of brick, and plastic.

That's where you'll find Deseret Industries, which is basically the Mormon version of Goodwill. Two of the key turning points in the film happened here.

Sure enough, there was a brown suit on the racks, perfect for any high school dance. "It's incredible. It's awesome." If it were two sizes bigger, I totally would have bought it.

Napoleon's life changes when he finds D-Qwon's dance video in the Deseret Industries audiovisual section. The best thing I could find was a cassette compendium of Jerry Clower's best routines.

Contrary to the message of the film, Preston is very open to Hispanic culture. This restaurant from the Taco Maker chain, however, had gone out of business.

On to the high school, which is really the emotional centerpiece of the movie.

It was covered by snow at the time, so there was no chance to play tetherball.

Not a "Sledgehammer." It's a Huffy, which is not capable of taking sweet jumps.

The lockers are really as colorful as they were in the movie. Blindingly so.

I'll bet they sooo played this song at the Stag Dance.

This picture would never have come out anyway -- it was Saturday, the school was empty, and the lights are controlled remotely (so students won't turn them off in the middle of assemblies), but this is the Preston High Auditorium. If I was better prepared, I would have bought some moon boots as Deseret Industries (they had some), loaded up some 'Quai in the iPod and done this properly. But I did get on stage and bust the moves I know best (the hands-in-pockets slide-step at 0:40-0:50, mostly). This is one life experience I'll always have on you, no matter how much better you are than I am.

How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?