A Slight Delay

Update: an article today (July 2) on the website of the Asbury Park Press reports that the suit against Wikimedia has been dismissed. A story hit the web last evening to that effect, but not having seen anything to corroborate it, I didn’t want to say as much last evening. Read on…

An article in yesterday’s Newark, NJ Star-Ledger highlights a series of lawsuits brought by Monmouth County literary agent Barbara Bauer against no fewer than nineteen websites and web companies. In the opposite corner are, among others, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Wikimedia, the parent organization of the online open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, which seek to have the case dismissed.

The crux of Bauer’s case is that criticism on a wide range of websites, some of which have taken on her practices as an agent and others of which have taken a decidedly more personal tack, have eroded both her reputation and her business. If it’s tried, the outcome of the case bids to have consequences far outside the Garden State. (more…)

 The Dada painters and poets aren’t exactly on the tip of people’s tongues these days. Styles and tastes change, and what seemed fresh and shocking in 1920 doesn’t have the same impact now that it did then. Hell, things done more recently than that don’t shock like they used to, either. Just ask Damien Hirst.

But as I was saying. John Heartfield (1891-1968) has faded into obscurity, known mostly to art history students, artists, and a handful of other people. It’s a shame, really, because Heartfield presaged some of the methods, and the esthetic, of Pop art, influenced his contemporaries, and helped–whether he either realized it, wanted it, or not–to usher in a breed of contemporary artists (Cindy Sherman comes to mind) who would mine the same vein that Heartfield did, but without his insight or mordant humor. (more…)

Nicholas Negroponte (MIT professor, Being Digital author) and his OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization have unveiled the XO2, their second-generation laptop, according to an article from the BBC’s website.

The Mac Book Air it ain’t. What it is, however, may prove more important to OLPC’s target “market”: classrooms and children in developing nations. Like the first-generation XO, which has shipped 600,000 units since it was unveiled late in 2005, the XO2 is intended as a low-cost learning tool for classrooms in locales as widespread as Brazil, Nigeria, and China. (more…)

Books, lectures, films and articles on the state of society, and speculation over where it’s going, have never been in short supply. The amount of it worth reading, on the other hand… well, that’s something else again. One site that takes a broad view of what a public intellectual is, and what they have to offer, is Edge.

The site is a hodgepodge of current thinking in and about the arts, sciences, and culture. Past and present contributors have included Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Clifford Stoll, Esther Dyson, Elaine Pagels, and Stephen Jay Gould. The Foundation seeks to lay bare the forces shaping modern life, “rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.” It’s an ambitious undertaking, and if its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, it never fails to make for interesting reading.

The April 12-18 issue of The Economist has an intriguing special section on wireless telecomm that you can read here. The series’ premise—reduced to ridiculous simplicity—is that the technology has had an enormous impact on the way we live, work, write, and… do other things. While that’s not exactly a revelation, there’s something to be said for how it’s reported; you’ll find neither hand-wringing jeremiads or breathless praise. While the report finds much that’s praiseworthy in the world o’ wireless, there’s also some clear-sighted criticism and questioning of the technology, as well as the uses to which it’s being put. Especially worth reading (at least for people concerned with reading and writing) is the last segment, “Homo Mobilis.” There’s likely a longer blog post buried in there somewhere, but you’d do better to just read the original.

Maybe it’s just a byproduct of being in the New York media market, but it seems like radio is a fickle place. Radio stations don’t last, and the few that have seem to have mutated beyond all recognition. At any given point from the late ‘70’s to the early ‘90’s, you could spin the dial and hear anything from Nektar, The Clash, Elvis Costello, PiL, the Smiths, the Cure, Joy Division, and the Style Council rubbing elbows with the likes of PWEI, Killing Joke, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, King Crimson, Big Youth, Pat Metheny, The Wonderstuff, and others, sometimes side-by-side.

Times have changed. WQCD is off the air (thankfully), while WNEW and WHTG have changed call signs and formats multiple times. These days over at WBLS (which Ross Davis once described as a “crack house with turntables”—does anyone else remember Paco?), if anyone tried to play a Clash dub plate back to back with the Sugarhill Gang, someone’d throw a Molotov Cocktail in the lobby. (more…)

First, the not-so-good news: Frank Miller, co-director of Sin City (2005) and co-writer of 300 (2006) is in the director’s chair for a film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, due for release in January, 2009. Now, the good news: Frank Miller, author of the classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, is in the director’s chair for a film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, due for release in January, 2009.

The film likely has an enormous budget; Miller’s other properties have, thus far, been a good ROI, and I’m sure that the people producing this one expect no different. The cast includes the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and Dan Lauria, with Gabriel Macht in the title role. If the film falls flat, it won’t be for lack of money or star power.
(more…)

We’ve been in a more or less constant election cycle since late 2003. We went from being in the run-up to the ‘04 election, to the election itself, to a protracted runup to the ‘06 election, to the run-up to the ‘08 election starting pretty much as soon as the polls closed in November ‘06. I don’t expect that will change; the only thing that will be different, I suspect, is a different opposition party doing the talking.

And there’s been no shortage of talk… the endless rounds of the Sunday talk shows, dozens of commercials (including 3 renditions of the “3am” ad, as of this writing), and 30 or so debates. (more…)

The US Department of Justice has approved, in principle, the merger of XM Sattelite Radio and Sirius. Full approval from the DOJ is expected to come in a few weeks’ time, at which point the matter will be taken up by the FCC.

For all intents and purposes, this means that the merger is a done deal. According to Bloomberg:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last week that his agency would “go forward quickly” after the Justice Department ruled. Mary Diamond, a spokeswoman for the FCC, said yesterday the commission “is looking at” the transaction.

The FCC has not, historically, bucked the judgment of Justice, and is even less likely to do so given its more recent history of approving media mergers of all stripes.

Whether the Department, or the Commission, should approve the merger is still open to debate, not that it’s likely to be debated. Stocks of both companies at first traded up since news of the DOJ approval, only to fall soon thereafter; they’ll likely trade better still once the inevitable wave of layoffs follows the merger. The hundreds of employees likely to be put out of work completely aside (and no, that wasn’t intended to be as callous as it sounded), there are other factors which would tend to make this a lousy idea. (more…)