(08.14.08) Recommends:

Obey The Life Cycle.

We're going back to the Obey theme today (More ObeyLA: here, here, here, here; ObeySF: here) to mourn the passing of an old Obey standby. We work downtown and heading West on Wilshire at Virgil we always liked passing this Misfits slash Ramones slash Andre the Giant hybrid piece:








Somebody obviously did not like it as much as we did; we did a double-take when we were in the area yesterday and saw this, which we'll call a Nobey:





Curiously, in its stead, rising up like a mutant Phoenix, there is now this:





What is this? A gang sign? A bat with the shakes? Whatever it is, we couldn't help but wonder if, once a piece by someobody with the credibility of Shepard Fairey is removed from an area, less talented people come in and put up their street jibberish.

The idea might seem like a stretch until you read this LA Times article, also from yesterday, coincidentally -- or not, perhaps. Seems the proprietors of a family-owned store became so fed up with being hit with lazy graffiti that they payed a street-artist to put up a mural (the difference between "street art" and "murals" and "graffiti" and "tagging" and, um, "advertising" is a topic we will eventually photoblog). The lazy graffiti stopped and the consensus was that the taggers had respect for the muralist and left the space alone. Until the city stepped in, made the family paint over the mural at the behest of a concerned citizen, only to watch the lazy graffiti come back worse than ever.

So, in conclusion:
Street art: smart design :: graffiti: intelligent design.

(08.13.08) Recommends:

Trending Topics on Twitter Search.

So, some background. There used to be a company called Summize.
It was a search engine for Twitter. Then it was purchased by Twitter. The search engine can now be found here.

It has a nifty feature called Trending Topics. Pretty self explanatory -- presents words that are appearing in lots of Twitters (or "tweets," a word we cannot actually bring ourselves to use). This afternoon we noticed the phrase Arkansas Democrat. We knew this had nothing to do with Barack Obama's VP selection because we had not received an email (we presume you, like us, have signed up for the notification). Curious, then, as to why an Arkansas Democrat was in the news, we clicked on the link. To discover that the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party had been killed. We quickly went to the NY Times online. No news. Like with the LA earthquake, Twitter again trumped the wires. We suspect we'll see more and more of this.

We're very excited with the prospect of being able to mine the vast amount of underlying Twitter data. The future exists somewhere in them there hills.

(07.25.08) Recommends:

A Blogger in the White House.

So yesterday we ranted about the old guard media. While we were hammering out that post, Barack Obama was, as you know, giving a speech in Berlin. There was a lot in there that we've heard before: skinny kid, funny name, goat herders, army cooks, coming to america, Kansas, Kenya, etc.

But near the end he slipped something new in there:

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here...Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe?

There's a blogger in his campaign who has his ear. And that's a very good sign. It also makes sense. Obama understands the power of networks. He started off as a community organizer. During the primary he leveraged the internet to reinvent campaign fianance (click on this very cool pdf for a graphical depiction of the reinvention). He knows that the power of this country lies in its citizens. As more and more of those citizens share their wisdom and talent with others through tools like blogging software, sources like CNN will be forced to change or die. Having a president with blogger advisors will not change the health care system or cure the economy or the environment. But we're convinced that having a strong blogging culture is a step in the right direction.

(07.24.08) Recommends:

Understanding that if CNN Really Is The Most Trusted Name in News Then We Are All Really, Really Fucked.

So, we have this friend, Fellow Blogger. She's among the smartest people we know. Both book smart and current event smart and generally just smart at life. So once a week or so, she'll send us a ridiculous headline from CNN.com. A common example is something like "54% of Americans think we may be headed toward a recession." Or "George Bush doesn't think we are headed for a recession." Everytime they are Very Serious headlines from a Very Serious news source. And everytime they are completely and utterly useless.

We never check CNN.com unless we get these articles, but we always sort of figured Fellow Blogger was just cherry picking the worst articles.Umm , we now seriously doubt this. For this morning, we casually checked out CNN.com. And this is what greeted us (click for larger image):



Yikes. Where do we even start with this? First of all, the fact that there are Black people in America? Is this really a Live! Developing! Story! And not just that but do we really need Your! Reaction! to the fact that there are Black people in America? I mean, is this Turn Back The Clock To The 1800s Day on the Internet? Moving on to Latest! News! check out those stories.

Is marriage only for white people!
Black people not playing football!
Mississippi closed for the day!
Kids playing with sawdust and paper!
Helping whales help themselves!
Video sluts pissed off that people think they're slutty!
Kid Rock! At the Waffle House!
All this, plus super heroes and Salman Rushdie!

Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
Okay, my head just split in two; no more, please!

I guess this should not be too surprising. CNN, the television station, is pretty absurd. There's Lou Dobbs, a border-line xenophobe. Larry King, a border-line robot. Anderson Cooper, who used to be the host of reality game show The Mole, and who often produces Hard! Hitting! Journalism! a representative example of which is how the fact that prostitution is legal in parts of Mexico is evidence of international sex-trafficking. And, lest we forget, there's Wolf Blitzer. Who can forget Wolf Blitzer, just last week, on the Situation! Room! running around, mouth agape, eyes bulging out of head, convinced that No American could possibly understand that the New Yorker is a liberal magazine known for producing satirical cartoons (the same Americans who, before this morning, were unaware of the existance of Black Americans).

So here's what we're thinking about this morning: As newspapers continue with massive lay-offs and the unending tide continues toward the internet and 24-hour cable television for news, should we be concerned that CNN.com, presumably one of the most trafficed web properties, offers up almost nothing but steaming piles of horse shit?

We, unlike Wolf Blitzer, believe that the vast and overwhelming majority of reasonable Americans understand that the New Yorker is liberal and the cover was satire. To that end, we are hopeful that the vast and overwhelming majority of reasonable Americans understand that CNN is completely full of shit and offers, perhaps, 5% news and 95% foaming at the mouth nonsense.

Two questions we have this morning. Is this a reasonable hope? And, even if it is a reasonable hope, what pressures, if any, does the success of CNN.com (and CNN) put on sources who actually are trying to enlighten, educate, edify our society?

(06.22.08) Recommends:

Connecting Consumers of Hyperlocal Content with Producers of Hyperlocal Content.

So, Hyperlocal blogging. Placeblogging. Citizen journalism. Whatever you call it, the idea is you see something of interest happening in your neighborhood or community and you blog it. Bloggers and citizens and venture capitalists (see, Outside.in, twitter, et al) are just getting out of the gates figuring how it's all going to happen. But there is no dispute that it will happen. Over the last several decades we have witnessed media consolidation of an unprecedented scale, and we are now at the beginning stages of the biggest media decentralization in the history of the world. You can laugh at this idea or take it seriously. We're choosing to take it seriously. And having come of age on the internet (we were high school freshman when the first internet browser was commercially released), we strongly urge everybody take it seriously.

Here's an example that shows there is demand for hyperlocal content that is not being met with supply. Yesterday afternoon, as we were descending our neighborhood of Beachwood Canyon, two police cars were urgently ascending it. While this does not happen tremendously frequently, in a city as big as Los Angeles it still happens enough that you don't think about what's happening. Probably a small fire, you shrug off.

But as we came back to our neighborhood, later that afternoon, we noticed that the Franklin Ave. entrance to Beachwood Canyon was blocked off by police presence. We thought this was stranger than the urgent police we previously had seen, but we were still reluctant to draw any connection. This is Hollywood after all, sometimes streets just close down for filming or whatever.

But then a curious thing happened. We got online. And one of the first things we do when we get online is browse the page that tracks our blog's analytics. And starting at 6pm, and steadily continuing until currently, we were getting lots of traffic directed by google from people searching some form of "hostage beachwood canyon" due to the combination of our frequent blogging about our neighborhood and one random post where we jokingly said our camera was being held hostage by a terrorist. In fact, if you currently google the term, our blog will be the first hit. Here's a screenshot of our analytics page (clicking on the pic brings up a bigger image):



So, we did some googling of our own. Currently nothing in the LA Times. Currently nothing in the local blogs we frequently check. But something happened last night in Beachwood Canyon that is a concern to residents. And the first instincts of those residents was to search the internet for more information. It may or may not have even been a hostage situation; the story has not been told, but people want the news and are willing to go to sources outside of the mainstream to find it.

Filling this void, eventually, will be this new form of citizen media. At some point in the near future, I [to drive home the point I'll step outside my usual use of "we"] won't be the only one who will be able to see that people around my neighborhood are searching in abnormally and statistically significant numbers for hostage news. Last night might have been a disconcerting way to see the future. But the future usually springs forth from discontent.

Things are changing, people. And we all get to play a role in the resolution of that change. This should be exciting to us all.

Update: here's a news clip calling the whole episode a hoax.

(03.01.08) Recommends:

Citizen Journalism!

So as we previously mentioned, we saw Cat Power last night. She used to have a reputation for putting on really shitty live performances. But, as we understand it, in the last few years she's gotten things in order and now puts on completely engaging performances. Last night included. Also, owing to the fact that we have friends in Los Angeles who are as generous as they are cool, we had a spectacular view of the show.

But what was particularly notable about the night occurred before the show. We got to the Wiltern a early, because it is located in K-Town, and we never, ever pass up an opportunity to drink Hite like a native. [Even though we're silly white people from Kansas[1], it can hardly be disputed that Koreans love us and think of us as practically half-Korean. South-style, yo. Stop laughing back there; this is all more or less true.] And when we got to the venue we noticed a sign posted on the Box Office[2]. The sign was a Public Notice of Application For Ownership Change. It listed the current owner as the Wiltern Theater. And the new owner as Wolfgang Puck Catering and Events, LLP. The sign also mentioned "on-sale general eating" whatever that means. So, does anybody know, like, what this means? Is Wolfgang Puck a reformed rock star who's going through a mid-life crisis and is now getting the band back together? Is the Wiltern going to be turned into a restaurant? Is Wolfgang Puck just going to be catering the shows? (And maybe some drum solos). We're confused, but we suspect that we can find the answer through fellow bloggers. So if people know what's going on, let us know.



[1] We were sporting a Kansas t-shirt last night. And before the show, while walking from the bar to the venue, we got a "Rock Chalk!" with accompanying fist pump. Then, while in the venue, an impossibly attractive female came up to talk to us because she had graduated from KU (as any KU grad can attest, there are many impossibly attractive girls at KU, the majority of which come either from the farmlands of Kansas, or from Minnesota. Strange, but true.). We mention these stories because one of our favorite parts of living in Los Angeles is that when we wear KU garb people approach, without fail, to tell us they either went to KU or are from Kansas. It literally happens every time we wear KU stuff. Honestly, we now wear Kansas apparel way more then we ever have before because these encounters make us really happy. We realize it might be corny to talk about things like a "sense of community," but we really feel it with our fellow Kansas ex pats. We also realize that it's strange that we strongly identify with our Kansas heritage when we did, in fact, leave Kansas, and all our friends and loved ones therein, when we left for California. But just because we left Kansas does not mean that we have forgotten it, or stopped thinking about it. We want everybody back home to know this.

[2] We would show a picture of this sign, but our camera is currently being held hostage by terrorists. Actually, terrorist, singular. Thus, we do not have access to it. So we took a picture of the sign with our camera phone, but we are bad with the technology and cannot figure out how to transfer the picture from our phone to our computer. So bear with our prose description.