(nb this site is temporarily under construction; for now you can keep up with me here, here, and here.)

listen to ‘the mexican.’

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SONGS
1. The Joy Formidable, “Cradle” (Try Harder)
2. Vistoso Bosses, “Delirious” (Collipark/Interscope)
3. Natalie Imbruglia, “Want” (Island)
4. Lady GaGa, “Paparazzi” (Interscope)
5. Brandy feat. Ne-Yo, “Decisions” (Unreleased)
6. Robbie Williams, “Bodies” (EMI)
7. Alphabeat, “The Spell” (Polydor)
8. Micachu & The Shapes, “Golden Phone” (Rough Trade)
9. Annie, “Anthonio” (Pleasure Masters) / Anthonio, “Angel Face” (Pleasure Masters)
10. Fefe Dobson, “I Want You” (21)
11. Amerie, “Why R U” (Def Jam)
12. Shakira, “Did It Again” (Epic)
13. Kelly Clarkson, “Don’t Let Me Stop You” (19)
14. Maxwell, “Bad Habits” (Sony)
15. JJ, “Ecstacy” (Sincerely Yours)
16. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Zero” (Island)
17. Paramore, “Ignorance” (Fueled By Ramen/Atlantic)
18. Keri Hilson feat. Ne-Yo and Kanye West, “Knock You Down” (Interscope)
19. Impossible Arms, “Here On The Couch” (Odessa)
20. DJ Steve Porter, “Press Hop (feat. Allen Iverson, Jim Mora, Dennis Green, Joe Namath, Mike Gundy, and Terrell Owens)” (djsteveporter.com)

(last updated 05 dec 09; HT to S/FJ)

tonight i remembered the password to my diaryland account, and i read all the old entries. plus ca change…

i got this album on 180-gram vinyl for my birthday, and it’s still so, so good:

i also bought a siobhan donaghy picture-disc 12-inch, because, well, who else was going to.

riverrun cafe, 176 franklin st. humongous burgers that were wrapped in english muffins that i can still taste to this day. cheap, but good, draft beer. also: this was where i found out who, exactly, steve keene was. now a furniture store.

village idiot, 355 w. 14th st. i saw the tonya harding sex tape here during a bn.com happy hour; it also had a huge, scary scorpion tank. a popular venue for post-work socializing at bn.com (happy hour started at around 6 p.m.) and mlb.com (happy hour would start right before last call). i played pool here but was never very good. now empty because the yuppie lair with leather chairs and poorly mixed drinks that chased it out had financial problems and closed late last year.

red light lounge, 50 9th ave. along with its catty-corner neighbor gaslight, the prototype for my favorite type of bar: the divey, poorly lit space lined by velvet-covered couches that were vomiting stuffing. now empty after it became the ill-fated, lousy-food-plagued pizza bar, best known for being the venue outside which remy ma popped a “friend” of hers.

i should probably quit it with the meatpacking-district reminiscing, since by this time next year it’ll completely be paved over with doucheterias. sigh. but i will note that tribakery is gone, too, and it’s been replaced by the restaurant that employs the not-even-good-by-reality-villain-standards spike from top chef.

nb: this album would provide a fine soundtrack to reading the above bulleted items.

not much to report; everything i’ve been doing lately could be summed up with the phrase “trying to shake the winter off my back.” the next two months are going to be filled with travel (austin, seattle, philadelphia) and baseball (spring training in hd, the last opening day at shea, whatever else espn will let me have). right now there are many records i really like (headlights, beach house, m83, violet vector) and many things i want to do (buy patio furniture, go to a financial planner, figure out how to install the long-awaited crossword puzzle program on my iphone, learn how to make a good cream puff) and even a few movies that i want to see.

speaking of movies: i continue to be amused by the abject ridiculousness of squeaky-wheel types who claim that anyone who holds the (very true) opinion that diablo cody is a one-note hack are “woman haters” of any stripe. note to those sensitive little flowers: did you ever notice that it’s only “hating” when it’s people critiquing things that you like? even if those critiques have, like, valid points within? honest to blog, indeed.

before i delve into this further, here’s heffernan’s definition of “franchising”:

An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

This is an enormous social shift that coincides with the changeover from analog to digital modes of communication, the rise of the Internet and the new raucousness of fans. It’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol,” Derek Waters’s “Drunk History”) and more avant-garde (“Battlestar Galactica,” Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class form of the novel.

that sounds pretty smart! but is it really true? sci-fish shows like battlestar galactica and heroes may seem popular in the internet hothouse, but looking at the current nielsens, the popular scripted dramas this week seem to not have much going for them as far as “roots and shoots” go. instead, the police procedurals that make up a good chunk of the current top 20 are pretty low on the “user-generated offshoot” totem pole (although i bet jeremy sisto’s addition to the law & order cast upped that show’s fanfiction-writer quotient by a fair amount^*). one could argue that all those law & order spinoffs and csi versions are, themselves, franchising, but their genesis wasn’t “franchising” in the heffernanian sense as much it was abject laziness/cowardice on the part of programmers.

more:

Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art — at least when it takes the form of prime-time TV. They won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love of attention, and thus money, and thus life. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.

As the writers’ strike has made clear, art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.

note that heffernan doesn’t make a single mention of shows that did have a fair amount of user-generated excitement–wikis, overexcited blog chatter, “save our show” campaigns involving fruit–but turned out to be flops, ratings-wise: arrested development and buffy then, gossip girl now. a small subset of viewers may want to remix and review, but do the bulk of them? i’ll answer that question with another: if they did, wouldn’t we be seeing a lot more two and a half men-related youtubing out there?

i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.

a show like friday night lights–which i haven’t seen, but which i’ve heard is quite good–doesn’t need a user-generated encyclopedia of characters in order to thrive; it needs a commitment from the network supposedly supporting it, whether it’s proper promotion or not sticking it in the ratings graveyard of friday night then claiming that said move was an effort to help dimmer viewers out there remember when it was on. that’s what has been missing from television in general over the last few years. (anyone else remember how the total time fox spent running ads for skin far exceeded the total airtime the actual show got?)

^* the marty dressler thing being its own animal, obv.