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April 24, 2003

Bearing all
: Well, a little discreet nudity certainly got the Dixie Chicks lots of coverage.
The flash of flesh didn't hurt my old magazine, Entertainment Weekly, either.
A hint of nudity certainly goosed Gawker's traffic.
And my own audience is asking me when I'm going to follow (birthday) suit (see the comments here).
So who am I to deny my public? Who am I to pass up a cheap joke? Who am I not to use any stupid trick for traffic?
Herewith the cover of my next magazine...

: Update: I concede defeat. This is far funnier. [via the comments]

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Nabbed
Fox and CNN says Tariq Aziz is in custody.

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Political correctness knows many authors
: Now this is beatiful: Sen. Sanctimonious has pissed off not only gays and reasonable Americans, he has also pissed off polygamists for lumping them in with adulterers and gays.

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The age of populist publishing
: I've been saying to anyone who will listen that the tremendous potential of this blogging thing is that it brings the power of publishing -- yes, quality publishing -- into the hands of the people. More such tools will follow (photo, audio, video, collaboration, marketing tools, search tools... and they'll all get slicker and easier, note the great new stuff coming from Movable Type). And more power will follow (witness the noise blogging is making in Iran; witness the worldwide spread of it).
Here's Google CEO Eric Schmidt explaining (at last) the acquisition of Pyra in this context:

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.
The next step in general for information is the self-publishing part. If somebody takes the time to write something, having Google understand that is very important to that person. So if you view the world as one person at a time, getting that person, that author to understand that we value, we index, we search, and we care about their information is a very important part of our strategy....
We’re all still reeling from the fact that there are not homogeneous news sources anymore, that the magazine and publishing industries are becoming more variegated, more distributed, and smaller and more targeted.
The Internet, in particular what’s happening at Google now, is the extreme of this. This is not necessarily all good, but it’s clear that if you extrapolate this out, that there will be a million weblogs of communities that are very distinct and very strong. And they don’t favor one political party or one particular view of life.

Many other media companies -- newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, online -- will need to start looking at the world in this way: from the other side, from the perspective of the audience, the audience as publisher.

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War, who is it good for?
: Michele has a deliciously cynical view of the anti-war show biz crowd: Protest as a career move.

I mean, who would really know that Tim Robbins still existed (except as Mr. Sarandon) if not for his public tirades against George Bush? Would Bill Maher have a tv show or Michael Moore an Oscar or Arianna Huffington a website if not for loud, public dissent?
It's a marketing tool. The people who decry capitalism and all things America are the ones scooping up the cash by the fistful because they cry the loudest.
Don't cry for the Dixie Chicks. They have risen to the top of the pop culture ladder because they said some nasty things about the president.
Ain't that America?

As the war fades from the headlines, will these celebs find themselves suffering attention withdraws? Will their careers also fade?

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Ow, Canada
: Canada is up in arms over the WHO issuing a travel warning to Toronto because of SARS.
Reality check: I was supposed to be in Toronto this week with my family for vacation. But we cancelled for two reasons: war (which was on when we were reserving) and SARS (which wasn't this bad when we were planning). The truth is that we're very glad that we're not headed there now because of SARS.

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Critic, criticize thyself
: Do we sense the irony in Tina Brown making fun of retired generals and retired cops appearing on cable criticizing employed generals and employed cops?

An old-style prewar pack frenzy hit when the Laci Peterson murder case returned to the American airwaves. Retired homicide detectives instantly supplanted retired generals as the electronic experts du jour.

Does Tina sense the irony, being that she is a retired editor making fun of employed editors on cable (when her show finally launches in April)?
She tries so hard in her latest column to find greater meaning in the fickle interests of TV and its audiences: war and Pfc. Lynch today, Laci tomorrow, Elizabeth and Chandra yesterday.

Why is cable news so addicted to missing girls and women? Is it because so much of the audience consists of boiling white males who feel stomped on by the economy and their wives, and girls in peril make them feel protective and virile? The rescue fantasy has never been more potent.

This from the former editor of Vanity Fair!
Methinks she's trying too hard to find something to say in the media about the media. Methinks she's thinking too hard. Methinks even she knows it.

I wonder when Americans will get tired of being told what to do and think. By publicists. By bloggers. By the Pentagon. By talk show hosts. We are punch-drunk with other people’s prescriptions and opinions. Our think-tanks are overflowing. There are media mullahs everywhere you turn.

Yes, and you're one of them.

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Naked celebs!
: The mere promise (albeit dashed) of pictures of a half-naked celebrity has sent traffic on Gawker soaring.

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Sina Motallebi update
: MSNBC's Will Femia has a roundup on Iranian blogger Motallebi's arrest.
Will links to a post on Blogalization complaining that bloggers have not spread this meme as aggressively as we should.
And there are links to the arrest of a Tunisian blogger in jail because of what he said online. The full story here.
There's a warning in all this: When journalists who work for big-time publications get arrested because of what they dare to say, they still have the power or at least threat of an organization and its printing presses behind them. When a lone blogger gets arrested because of what he dares to say, he has no one but his family ... and us.

: New: Mark Glaser reports on the arrest and bloggers' support for Motallebi at OJR.

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Sin
: Don't believe that every Iraqi Muslim is like the crawling, self-flagellating, scalp-slicing pilgrims we've seen on TV this week (just as you shouldn't believe that every American Christian is Jerry Falwell).
Ibidem points us to a report by Rosie Dimanno in the Toronto Star on booze and cigarettes flowing onto the streets of Baghdad:

Two weeks ago, American troops eagerly traded their MREs — Meals Ready to Eat (or, in grunt parlance, Meals Rejected by Ethiopians) — for individual cigarettes, none so coveted as a good old Marlboro, but even the revolting Iraqi brands would do. Nowadays, there's a fag stall of all flavours every 10 metres and almost as many sidewalk vendors of alcohol: Johnnie Walker, Dimple, Bells, Absolut, all $25 (U.S.) a bottle. Suddenly, tubs of ice-cold Heineken and Amstel have appeared, replacing the Turkish-brewed Efes Pilsener that was the suds-of-choice (actually, no choice) in Saddam's hermetically sealed Iraq.
Where did all this contraband come from, almost overnight? But then Iraqis, after 12 years of United Nations-imposed sanctions, have become expert at smuggling and bootlegging. Oil, spirits, what's the dif?
Yet for a Muslim country, ostensibly disapproving of alcohol and tobacco, Iraqis sure do enjoy indulging their vices. Because U.S. troops and foreign reporters are not the only consumers of this stuff. And rare is the Iraqi male, Sunni or Shiite, without a butt between his fingers, even with prayer beads intertwined.
It delights me immeasurably to see so many Muslims enjoying the secular life. It's humanizing, and rather ecumenical in its way, for the practitioners of this self-consciously pious religion to burn the candle at least at one end. This is most reassuring, especially as the Shiite clerics — so tightly circumscribed by the secular-cum-Sunni Saddam — appear poised to flex their turban-sanctioned muscle in pursuit of a grim Islamic society.

Amen.

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