Doug LeMoine · Poetic pragmatism, royal crown chinpoko mastery.

El Super

1 March 2010 in cinema, new york, reviews | No comments

New York’s blizzard of 1977 makes a riveting cameo appearance in “El Super,” an indie (before the term was formalized) film about the hard adjustments that immigrants make in coming to New York. The movie is great for many reasons, but the blizzard steals a few scenes as the main character — a Cuban super — walks around town. Snow is massed on cars, piled high in the streets, and pedestrians stumble through snow-walled sidewalk canyons. Quite a scene, especially in the 70s, when New York looked crumbly and decrepit.

Amidst the blizzard, the film is a melancholy document of the lives of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as they reckon with the immensity of New York City and their dismal prospects for work in the bad old days of New York. The dialogue is great, often funny, just as often poignant. Good stuff. I had to resort to extreme measures to find it, but you can buy it on VHS from Amazon. Or you can let me know, and I’ll hook you up.

Speaking of the blizzard, there’s an amazing Barney Miller episode about the blizzard? There is. Worth watching just to hear the theme song again.

Fur flyin over The Atlantic’s redesign

1 March 2010 in ixd, lit | No comments

There’s a lot of animated chatter among some of my favorite journalists over the redesign of their publication’s site. Last week, the Atlantic Monthly rolled out what appears to the casual reader as a slight update of the IA, along with some major changes to the way that blogs are integrated. Reader reaction was anything but casual; anger and suspicion seemed to be the most common reader emotions, shared, at least in part, by the writers. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein nails the goal of the redesign, “Seems like a bet to re-center the Web site around the Atlantic as an institution rather than leaving it as a web hosting service for a couple of bloggers.” Which seems smart, actually.

This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).

The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.

It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.

According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.

I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.

To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.

Uhhhhh-hot pants! That’s where it’s at.

25 February 2010 in music, visual | No comments

Wordle seems sort of perfect for representing James Brown lyrics. I used Internet lyrics, which don’t appear to be a true transcription of the version on In the Jungle Groove, which is 8+ minutes of “huh!” and “hey!” and “Good God!” and “smokin!” Still, good enough. While you’re considering James Brown as a lyricist, you should check out Eddie Murphy’s theme song for “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub Party” — the video; and in Wordle, which is an interesting way of visualizing one element of the satire.

Recipe for the rain / Escabeche

23 February 2010 in food, ideas | No comments

(Also known as those pickled vegetables from the taco truck.) ... Mara made some this weekend, and I’ve basically been living on it for the last three days. The recipe originated in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, but we found a previously adapted version at Simply Recipes. ¡Horale! ¡Vamos a do this!

Ingredients

1 lb jalapeño (and serrano if you wish) chile peppers
1/3 cup olive oil
2 – 3 medium white or yellow onions, thickly sliced
2 – 3 medium carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
Florets from half a small cauliflower (optional)
1 head garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
4 cups apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp Kosher salt or sea salt
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 sprigs of fresh marjoram or 1/4 teaspoon dried
4 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 Tbsp sugar

Method

Wash the chiles, leaving the stems intact. Cut a cross in the tip end of each chile so that the vinegar will be able to penetrate the chile.

Heat oil in a large, deep skillet. Add the chiles, onions, carrots, cauliflower if using, and garlic. Fry over medium heat for about 10 minutes, turning them over occasionally.

Add the vinegar, salt, herbs, and sugar and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes for serranos or 10 minutes for jalapeños. Make sure the chiles are entirely cooked through before canning.

Pack 4 pint-sized sterilized jars with the chiles and vegetables. Top with the vinegar and seal. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Once opened, can keep for one to two months in the refrigerator.

In a cloud

22 February 2010 in california, music, san francisco | No comments

Oh wow, our pal Greg Gardner put together a really nice collection of new music from local bands. It’s called In A Cloud, which describes the recent winter weather and the album itself is a time capsule of San Francisco sounds in 2009-10. My favorite song is a sweet little thing called “Baby Held” by the elusive and pseudonymous Jacques Butters; you can listen to it below. There’s plenty more on the album — a lovely track by Sonny & the Sunsets, a good one from the Sandwitches, a keeper from Kelley Stoltz. You can buy it directly from Greg’s label, Secret Seven Records. Yay.

Jacques Butters, Baby Held

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Aw, woo-ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah

20 February 2010 in music, visual | 3 comments

Wordle + The First 100% Accurate Transcription of Led Zeppelin II Lyrics =

John Perry Barlow, discussing the Grateful Dead’s methods of engaging its audience:

What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then — the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate [taping at Grateful Dead] shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way.

From Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, in the current Atlantic.

20 February 2010 | No comments

Actually, I am the walrus

4 February 2010 in ideas, music, visual | No comments

I’ve love infographics, and I’ve gone on and on about collaboration and the Beatles before, so when I heard that someone had created an infographic displaying the degree to which Beatles collaborated on songs — well, “interested” would be hugely understating my emotions at the time. (Thanks, Dan, for the tip).

Author: Michael Deal. Full image here.

“The Beatles: Authorship & Collaboration” is a nicely composed graphic, clearly breaking down the contributors to each song, Beatle and non-Beatle. The songs are laid out chronologically, and the overall effect clearly reveals that the Beatles collaborated less as they progressed in their careers. (If anything is true of the Beatles, it’s that they grew apart over time). The chart’s data is drawn from Beatlesongs, which quantifies the degree to which each Beatle contributed to the writing of a song, using a scale of 0 – 100%.

Beatles - Collaboration - Octopus's Garden

I can’t quibble with the desire to understand and visualize the degree to which each Beatle shaped each song, but I find the quantification bit a little — well — falsely precise. It makes for a nice infographic, but a mere skim through The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962 – 1970 makes it clear that there was quite a lot of collaboration among the four Beatles — not to mention the various “fifth Beatles,” the “Black Beatle,” and their producer, George Martin. Perhaps there’s a difference between “collaboration” and “authorship?”

In the example to the right, “Octopus’s Garden,” is said to be 100% Ringo? Yes, Ringo does receive sole credit for “authorship,” but it is widely known that George had a significant role in shaping it. In fact, George works out the song on a piano in the Let It Be movie. How to represent this softer sort of collaboration? Good question. Shapes? Sizes? Colors? Dimensions? Whatever it is, it should fairly communicate the organic nature of creative collaboration. And dispense with the too-neat round numbers.

We come from the land of the ice and snow

3 February 2010 in music, tech | No comments

Curious about what songs I’ve listened to most, I navigated over to my last.fm profile and saw this:

Do I love “Immigrant Song?” Yes. Do I imitate its opening vocal, Robert Plant’s reverberating war cry that gets as close to the heart of awesomeness as any lyric in the history of rock? Frequently. But have I listened to it 3,000+ times in the past couple of years? Roughly 5x per day?

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I would say that there would be no way of knowing, but I guess that there is.