Two years ago, I found a Smith Corona Galaxie 12 in the alley behind my apartment building. I spent the next month researching repairs and buying spare parts. I spent the month after that repairing it. When I was done I loaded in the ribbon, lined up my margins and paper and started typing. 

Gabe is typing o na typqriter.

Gabe is t ying ti tpe on a rpewriter.

Never mind.

I had never used a manual typewriter. I got better, but I never found practicality in using it. (Although it was harder to goof around online while writing on it.) Now people come over and ask to use the typewriter once they see it. They make the bell ring and return the carriage a few times. Half of them then say, "I wish I could type on a typewriter." I always answer, "No you don't." 

It's a pain to use a typewriter. The sounds that make it quaint and charming in 2011 get obnoxious after about ten minutes. Mistakes are inevitable and impossible to properly fix. It's hard to line things up. Then you have to retype it into a computer to do anything with it. But my months with the typewriter taught me two things: 

• Computers are better than nostalgia
 
• Slow down

Those two lessons are indicative of technological advances in general. They make life easier, but they eliminate helpful inconveniences.

The newspaper staff at Florida Atlantic University learned what a pain typewriters are this summer when their advisor made them produce an issue without computers. It was all manual typewriters, pencil copy editing, darkroom developing and literal cutting and pasting.

It seems silly, right? Why not make them put together their own printing plates? Why not use slightly older computers? It smacked of the kind of "Back in my day" yammering journalists of any age are prone to.

But it kind of makes sense, too. As the professor justifies: 

1. J-schools teach History of Journalism, so why not live it for a couple weeks?
2. These days, we obsess about technology and don’t always focus on the old-fashioned skills of writing, reporting, shooting, and designing. Remove today’s tech, and guess what’s left?*
3. For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with having a little fun?

In reading the students' reactions to the whole ordeal, it seems like they learned a lesson not mentioned: that tools shape the medium. 

The class found out how software functions like "cut and paste" got their names. For the photographers and designers, this was probably immensely helpful. Adobe software is much easier to use if you understand the analog equivalents. 

It's harder to imagine this is the case for writers. I started journalism school in 2003 with my copy of "The Mac Is Not A Typewriter" (thanks, Mom and Dad) in tow. I knew when to use an em dash and why it was called an em dash. I quickly learned the technical terms of journalism. These didn't help me write at all. 

What helped was being told I couldn't record interviews. Without the safety net, I became a better note taker. It also helped to be told I could only write so many words. Writing to a specific length always, in my experience, yields better results than cutting a longer piece to length. These are techniques that were crafted by the medium. The craft of journalism has been, to a large degree, shaped by the restrictions of media. Concise, to the point sentences make copy understandable, but they also make the copy fit in the space allotted. They save time typing. The inverted pyramid, which is the base structure for almost every straight news article, is a necessity of the "cut from the bottom" school of newspaper editing. The influence of standard definition and the 4:3 aspect ratio is clear in modern TV news videography. 

McLuhan said "We shape our tools and our tools thereafter our tools shape us." It's true. But we're in an awkward time now, creatively. We're in a world created with technology that's obsolete, and our minds haven't yet caught up with the latest tools. Having a spellcheck is great, but needing to use it because Mavis Beacon taught us to type 120 words a minute is no good. The mind can't create that fast. Someday it will.

So I can see the value in forgoing technology to teach a lesson about work. One of the Florida newspaper students said he got more work done without the computer because he had to rely on his colleagues. But he was also probably working slower than he usually does, too: turning to a dictionary or a coworker to figure out a spelling or an awkward sentence. The dread of retyping to correct errors is enough to make everyone more thoughtful. Typing on a manual typewriter is hard. When everything from editing to typing is physically and mentally exhausting, you become more careful and it shows in the results. It's not that more work is done, it's that less work is necessary after the fact. There's less need to make micro edits after a piece is written.

While using the old tools gives us a better understanding and appreciation of our current tools, it also tempts us to limit ourselves. This is dangerous. Too often, creators who dabble in the old ways see them as perfect and look no further. They will stay stuck in an era and ignore many of the functions of their new tools. 

For example, working in radio, I'm grateful I had to learn analog editing. Linear editing instills a perspective that affects how I record and mix the pieces I do for work and for fun. But I was fortunate enough to learn digital editing simultaneously. I don't lean on the attitude that I can fix things in postproduction, but I'm aware that there are far fewer limits to what I can do on a computer than to what I could do with magnetic tape. Like with Photoshop and In Design, modern audio software has two sets of features. The larger and most popular set is made up of the digitalized and streamlined versions of analog tools: cut, paste, fade, mix. The second, smaller set is a completely new toolbox: noise reduction, 90-track mixes. When you're used to only the old set, or when you see no reason (other than the time and money advantage) of using the software over its analog equivalent, you ignore the potential for innovation. Sure, you're more free to innovate when you can try anything and undo it, but unless the new features are utilized, nothing will sound truly new. Radiolab would sound completely different if it were done on tape and not in ProTools.

Unfortunately, the boundaries of good taste are always short of the boundaries of technology. Look at 90s album covers, magazines in the first decade of this century and almost every David Bowie video. There's plenty of truly abysmal, instantly-dated digital artwork. It's the result of overindulgence, which, in many cases, is itself the result of a lack of appreciation for the old ways.

This isn't new. There has always been trash. Over time, the crap that anyone can create with the latest means of production is filtered out. This is why it's easy to think of the fairly recent past as time when so much media was good. The truly awful became camp and the good stuff stands out. Eventually, news stories and novels typed at 120 words per minute will be brilliant. Eventually, the technical limitations of blogs will be apparent in the newest form of news. Eventually. Until then, I'm glad I have kets for 1 and delete. 

*Point two seems a little off. The tools they used were the modern conveniences of their day and (especially in terms of design) they put limits on what could be done. Nostalgia will ruin the news media because at some point, a huge number of journalists decided the field peaked decades ago and therefore any advances beyond that point are blasphemy.

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Bob Woodward came to Louisville last week and set aside a few minutes for the local press. He's no media theorist, but I expected someone with his experience and stature to have some interesting thoughts on the future of news media. I was disappointed. He (and a lot of people) can't seem to imagine a world where there isn't a newspaper in every city that supplies (or tries to supply) all news to all people in print or online.

In his latest blog post, Clay Shirky points out that newspapers are failing largely for the reason that they're newspapers, and the newspaper model doesn't make sense anymore.

Here’s what the newspaper business sounds like: the modestly talented son of the founder can generate double-digit margins based on little more than the happy accident that there are people who like football and buy cars living within 30 miles of his house.

That’s the newspaper business, or at least it was until recently. The average US paper runs more soft than hard news, uses more third-party content than anything created by their own staff, and reaches more people who care about local teams than local zoning. Telling the publishers of those papers to create a digital product so extraordinary that readers will pay full freight is a tacit admission that they do not know how to make such a product today.

...

Buy a newspaper. Cut it up. Throw away the ads. Sort the remaining stories into piles. Now, describe the editorial logic holding those piles together.

If you’ve picked a general interest paper, this will be hard. I recently learned, from a single day’s paper, that a bombing in Kirkuk killed 27, that Penelope Cruz has only good memories of filming Pirates of the Caribbean while pregnant, that many U.S. business hotels are switching to ‘shower-only’ bathrooms, and that 30-year fixed mortgages fell from 4.63% to 4.61% the week before.

The rationale for creating such a bundle went something like this: “We will print enough content to fill the hole left after we’ve sold the advertising space. We will include content proportional to the amount and intensity of reader interest, modified somewhat by editorial judgment. Overall, the value of the bundle will be more than the sum of its parts.”

...

Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.

There's been a string of articles recently arguing that the newsmedia landscape of the future will be a collection of small, specialized outlets with either specific points of view (like newspapers used to be) or full-on transparency (reporters' biographies include all possible conflicts of interest, political belief, etc). This puts the onus on the reader to seek out a full range of opinion or to vet reporters and decide whether the coverage is really fair (I'm a firm believer that even the most radically political person can right a fair and accurate news story). 

This is all fine, but every argument leaves out the people who can't afford the time or money to seek out multiple sources or read reporter bios with every story. Broadcast news is still popular with busy and low-income audiences, but commercial TV or radio news suffers from the opposite problem as newspapers. Rather than finding stories to put around advertisements, the news content is compressed to accommodate more commercials. At this point, there are plenty of great places to find news, but nothing equivalent to the penny newspapers. 

Whenever I think about this, I think about the publisher/futurist who came to lecture one of my senior year journalism classes. "Revolutions require unprivileged masses," he said. "The real internet revolution will happen when internet access is free or as close to free as it can be." He followed that up with a quote from Back to the Future. "Then you'll see some serious shit."  (That's the good kind of shit. Shit meaning stuff.)

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This Post:

• Is a response to this post
• Is also a response to this post
• Is about photography

When I finished the last photo in my first 365 project, I decided not to try another picture-a-day venture in 2011. I thought there was too much filler in my 2010 attempt. It made me a more selective photographer, and I learned how to use my DSLR and Hipstamatic app (I know, I know) to take better photos, but I don't think it improved my skills otherwise.

Linda finished her project this week. She's going to try it again. When she looks at her photos from the last year, she sees something that was missing from mine–a record of day to day life. I don't think most of my photos from 2010 say much about the circumstances they were taken under. I really like several of the pictures, but, really, the Flickr album is a collection of odd things I saw or ridiculous angles of mundane things I saw. Only a few photos highlight the most significant thing I did that day (most of these were taken on assignment at work), and even fewer remind me of the entire day. In fact, only one really does. This one:

I know I was in Nashville with friends when I took this. We ate breakfast at a downtown restaurant. The waitress let us go upstairs to look around the historic part of the building. This mask was hanging on a door. I remember the door, the hallway, the restaurant, the drive back and the night before. This is the type of photo I should've tried to take more often. Rather than highlight something interesting, I should try to summarize my day. I know this won't always be possible, and I know I won't remember everything about a day just by looking at a picture, but I can try. That's what photos are for. That's why it's a project. But it should be more a documentary and less an experiment. 

So I'm going to try again...starting with today with this picture of a giant moth that was in the park.

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Here's the story.

Here are the tweets:

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This post

• Is about media
• Is about a book about Marshall McLuhan
• Ends up being about the technology I used to read the book
• Probably reaches a bit at the end
• Doesn't mention that McLuhan spent some of his formative (academically) years in St. Louis
• May have too many parentheses

I mostly post about media here. Sometimes I focus on ethics or aesthetics, but it's media nonetheless. No matter how much Lacan I pretend to understand (and the much more I roll out in certain social situations because I am that guy), the patron saint of all over-thought (and under-theorized) media writing is Marshall McLuhan.

So I read Douglas Coupland's new book, "You Know Nothing of My Work!" It's a McCluhan biography (and an Annie Hall reference), but–and this is a flat-out guess–it's a biography McCluhan might have enjoyed, if only for its presentation. Coupland has sometimes struck me as too precious (the cover of this book shows HTML tags of the title on a CRT TV with rabbit ears and a two-button mouse attached) or too willing to be weird for the sake of being weird, but his style works to great effect in this situation. His prose is clear and his flourishes are appropriate. For instance, he publishes map website directions between two important locations in McLuhan's life. It's extraneous, but informative. It's also something that, right now, has crossed from technical innovation to extremely useful novelty. The latter term is a contradiction that's almost the exclusive to this time in the web's history.

Coupland expresses a certain Canadian, media-obsessed, meticulous kinship with McCluhan, but he's also honest in a Kill Yr Idols (aesthetic, approach and definition) sort of way. He points out McCluhan's worst qualities: his bad attitude; his homophobia; his penchant for BS; his contradictions. It's all there, in a pocket-sized book that feels like a cross between a well-sourced Wikipedia entry, a pretentious message board post, a YouTube comment and a love letter. 

The real point to this whole setup is that I read the book electronically...on the Kindle iPad app. It wasn't meant to be read this way. (There are no special features inherent to the medium. Apart from bibliography links in the text, it was a lot like reading a big Word document.) But there is one feature of the application (programmed by Amazon, not written by Coupland or chosen by the publisher) that changed my interpretation of the book...social highlighting.

Like Apple's iBooks, the Kindle application lets readers highlight and write notes in the text. The Kindle app takes this one step further, though, and lets readers see what other readers have highlighted. I had this feature off on my first read through, but I've switched it on and I feel like I need to read the book again. Here's what I highlighted in the text:

Marshall was interested in the way modern culture homogenizes and renders modular all the things it touches–something as simple as time, for example. Before clocks, there was sunrise and sunset, but there was no way of standardizing time. With clocks, time was reduced to discrete hour chunks like hamburger patties, the same no matter where you go on the planet or, for that matter, outer space or even another galaxy. With music, there was the invention of the musical score, which turned religiously felt psalms into mere notes on a page. And of course, farm animals such as cows were homogenized into...hamburger patties.

In a way, McLuhan's ideas become like a song we all know the tune of but not the full lyrics, and so we read into him whatever comes to mind. Forget poor-players and strutting; twenty-first-century life is karaoke–a never-ending attempt to maintain dignity while a jumble of data uncontrollably blips across a screen.

"Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas." Alfred North Whitehead

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." Marshall McLuhan

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think." Marshall McLuhan

The first three quotes help make sense of McLuhan's work. The last two are interesting. But that's my opinion. Here are the most highlighted segments (and the number of readers who highlighted them) from the app, as of March 13th 2011:

The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing. (3)

"Terror," he went on to say, "is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time...In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture." (3)

"The medium us the message" means that the ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world. (4)

And he saw the world as a book created by God, and believed that there is nothing in it that cannot be understood–and that we fail to try understanding it at our peril. (3)

A belief in the existence of a master plan largely underpinned Marshall's adult thinking and behavior, both privately and publicly. His unwillingness to keep specialized realms ghettoized defined him giving him public fame and academic sorrow. (3)

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." (3) [This is a G.K Chesterton quote]

Along with Father William McCabe, there was father Walter Ong, a young Jesuit whom Marshall tutored. (3)

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." Marshall McLuhan (3)

"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of profound despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition." Marshall McLuhan (3)

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think." Marshall McLuhan (4)

I agreed with two of the ten most popular highlights, and those two are the quotes that have little to do with McLuhan's most famous work, and more to do with their potential to be recycled into conversations. This makes me wonder what I or the other readers must be missing. Why are the excerpts I highlighted to point out underpinnings of McLuhan's theses not popular? Further, why is a piece of information about Jesuits McLuhan worked with so popular? I say it's popular because three people highlighted it, and, at most, we know that five people have read this book electronically (the four who highlighted two of the quotes and me).

Am I misunderstanding McLuhan's philosophies or are they? Are any of us? Perhaps I just found different parts of the book interesting. Either way, it's possible that everyone who read this Kindle book found the quote about mass transportation interesting and worth noting. That tells us something about the people who have read this book, and it's made me think about the text differently.

The insights I've gained aren't exclusive to electronic books, but they are rare in print. To know someone else's favorite excerpts, I would have to

Borrow a copy of a book from someone who freely marks in their texts

Join a book club or otherwise discuss the book with peers

Neither would give me a global perspective, though b might if I joined an online book club. Neither option protects anonymity entirely, and neither allows the reader to be passive and still see what others have highlighted. The electronic version of the text is, for all purposes, like a new print copy. Someone with no friends and no desire to discuss a book online can now know what other people found most interesting or worth remembering; they can have an instant insight into the popular interpretations of books. Perhaps highlights will be like sharing or liking a link on Facebook–some people do it to further the conversation, others to show agreement, others to seem informed and keep up appearances. Maybe highlights are already like that. 

Maybe it's the fact that I'm thinking about McLuhan, but I think this is much bigger than it's made out to be. Books are now a two-way street. It's not the fact that an e-book requires no paper or printing press, the true revolution of electronic books is that the fundamental function of the book can be changed with a simple user preference. The printed word was once a way of distributing one idea to many people. Now, many ideas can be presented as one, indicated by a dotted line below a sentence. 

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This Post

• Is about comics
• Is about all comics, but mostly deals with comic strips
• Is also about the media 
• Deals with satire as well
• May contain references I am embarrassed to make, because they acknowledge my love for bad newspaper comics
• Was inspired by my love of good newspaper comics
• Treats comics as both a singular and a plural. The former describes the medium, the latter the media. 

We are not paying enough attention to comics. They're everywhere. If we define any sequential art as comics (apologies to Scott McCloud), then there are comics in airplanes, on the bus, at the hospital, in the grocery store and in the newspaper--but not just the funny pages. Comics tell us how to build our furniture and where pharaohs are buried. The medium of comics is more prevalent than any other but text. Comics can be found in more places than televisions, and there are TVs everywhere. Heck, comics are on TV. 

Comics give us information. The USA Today may not print Garfield or the like, but multi-panel infographics are comics (and the whole damn thing is basically one big cartoon anyway). 

But enough of this "stereo instructions with pictures are actually comics" nonsense. I'm saying we don't pay enough attention to regular comics. To capital-C Comics. To newspaper comics.

On the CBC show Q this month, host Jian Ghomeshi described the strip Doonsebury as "a satire of day-to-day life, delivered in real time." In real time. That is the advantage of comics over every other media, except the most modern medium (the internet), and two television shows (Daily Show and Colbert Report). But before those, what other form had the potential for such fresh critiques? Who else but cartoonists had the opportunity to create meaningful art that would be wrapped up and thrown at millions of people every day? 

Newspaper writers (and journalists--like me!--in general). 

It's impossible to divorce newspaper comics from the paper. Journalists can do great things, but they're limited to words and the occasional photograph (which they often don't take). There's room for subversion on the editorial page. There's even more in the comics section. A well-written story or column can plant an idea and water the seed, but it may take 500 words to do so. A comic strip can do the same in four panels. What's more, the comic can do it without you noticing. 

Too bad it rarely does. Some political cartoons are downright bad, and the worst of them show the burden the editorial cartoon format puts on an artist. It's all metaphor, but everything has to be labeled. The cartoon must be a single square. It's a tough gig. Cartoonists who are fortunate enough to get into the comics section have more room and more tries, though they usually don't take advantage of either. 

Books have always been blocked or banned in America, but they've never been taken to the mat en masse the way their funny-book cousins have. Congressional panels were established to review and censor violent comic books shortly after the hearings on Communism and before anyone raised a fuss about rock and roll music. In 1954, the nation was outraged over violent comic books. Hand wringers saw poison for youth in True Crime comics. It was a medium perverted, they said. It was media that--through new printing techniques and mass-market appeal--could create real danger to the USA. But at the same time, other comics were being rolled up and dropped on countless doorsteps across the county. Those who tied comic books to juvenile delinquency based much of their argument on form, rather than content (though content was still the main concern), as if sequential art was a highway directly to readers' subconscious. There were comics that promoted morality and harmless newspaper comics, but if you follow the logic of many of the detractors, all comics had an above-average power to mold impressionable minds. 

The power of this dual personality hasn't gone unnoticed. Doonesbury and Bloom County won Pulitzers for their real-time satire of daily life. (Doonesbury is in my spell check, even.) Calvin and Hobbes is lamented as the last true art to have graced the funny pages. And, now more than ever, Peanuts is praised for bringing sophisticated, psychological (and truly depressing, at times) humor to the masses. 

But these are isolated examples. And while we, the people, may deserve a light chiding for ignoring the potential of a powerful medium these last six decades, the creators, too, deserve some harsh words for not living up to that potential. Beetle Bailey never took the risks MASH did, even though Mort Walker had thousands more chances. Mallard Fillmore is quick to echo the latest Limbaugh-approved talking points, but the horrible art and inelegant presentation (it's embarrassingly clumsy much of the time) makes the strip seem like little more than doodles in the margins of a manifesto. 

Comics creators may first say that lead times have destroyed the strips' freshness. Each strip is drawn weeks in advance. How can the artists (perhaps since artists also write their strips, we should call them auteurs) be expected to stay on top of the issues? I understand this point, but Trudeau's Doonesbury and others have overcome this gap. 

The auteurs may also say they can't get away with most things. This is a valid point, but it is also one that powerful creators could overcome. Watterson  had a tough time getting papers and syndicates to accept his frame-breaking art, but he was popular, talented and dedicated enough to conquer them. Yes, it is hard to get your comic published, and it's harder to make it popular, but it's also hard to get your movie, TV show or book made. It's hard to break into any business, and it's unfortunate that so few comics artists take full advantage of their skill, success and power. They often opt for merchandise money instead of artistic or social instigation. 

Maybe they only want to entertain. This is respectable. Not everyone wants to change the world. But considering how attached readers are to comics (literally thousands of letters are sent when a single paper changes the funny pages) and considering the medium's power, it's surprising there aren't more revolutionaries in the newspaper comics business. Sure, readers may not see comics as more than reliable quasi-entertainment, but publishers and artists aren't doing much to make them think differently. 

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I’m still searching for that wonderful pen line that comes down — when you are drawing Linus  standing there, and you start with the pen up near the back of his neck and you bring it down and bring it out, and the pen point fans out a little bit, and you come down here and draw the lines this way for the marks on his sweater and all of that. This is what it’s all about — to get feelings of depth and roundness, and the pen line is the best pen line you can make. That’s what it’s all about. If there’s somebody who is trying to be a cartoonist or thinks he is a cartoonist, and has not discovered the joy of making those perfect pen lines, I think he is robbing himself — or herself — of what it is all about. Because this is what it is! The time you make these wonderful pen lines and make them come alive.

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This post:

• Is about my 365 photo project
• Is kind of a year-in-review post
• Is as close to a year-in-review post as I'll do

I finished my 365 project on Friday. I didn't take any photos on Saturday.* I didn't want to take any photos on Saturday. I didn't want to take any on Sunday, either. That's my way of saying I'm not doing another 365 project.

The project started with a fair idea: if I could prove that I was dedicated enough to photography to practice every day, and if I could get better at it, I would buy a better camera. I started out happy with my pictures, but quickly ran out of ideas. There was no time to take a photo before work and I was out of daylight by the time I got home. I liked taking pictures with my iPhone, but eventually I ran out of ideas. 

Despite some odd and downright bad entries in my 365 project, I realized my lack of inspiration could be blamed on geography. In five months I had concluded that, despite my job as a journalist, there are  not enough exciting things that happen to me to make a 365 project worthwhile. Maybe it was because I'm a journalist that I ran out of things to take pictures of. I travelled during the day to interesting places, but the end result was usually the same--a few minutes watching someone at a podium or sitting in someone's house, followed by a rush to get back to the office and file my story. After work I was too tired and it was too dark to take more photos. 

But because I was trying, and because my photos improved, I upgraded to a DSLR. Then I upgraded lenses. Then I got a bit too into looking at new gear and backed off a bit. That's when I think I hit my stride. Not all of the pictures ended up looking better, but I found a comfortable routine. I wasn't hungry for more gear and I resolved to get as much as possible out of my camera. Sure there were photos that were last-minute, uninspired and confusing (or were they art?!), but the average quality improved because I was making myself be content with what I had. I was focusing more and exploring all of the features of not only my DSLR, but of my point-and-shoots and iPhone (which I still love taking pictures with). Instagram got me back into iPhone photography late in the year, but at that point I had already decided not to repeat my project, because I knew a flashy new technology wasn't going to sustain me for another year.

There was too much filler. No matter how hard I tried to find interesting subjects, I couldn't escape that those subjects were in the same places I went to every day. How many shots of things in my apartment can I post online before I realize I'm just trying to fill up my memory card? It's like letting your iPod play without headphones plugged in just so you can charge it later, because it's already down to 15% and you don't want to leave the house later with it any lower than that. (I'm not the only person who does this, am I?)

So for this year, I think I'll take a photo of the week. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll just post whatever photos I like, and only take pictures when I feel like it. I used to criticize Linda for deleting photos she didn't like immediately after she took them while I left my camera in burst mode and sorted it all out later. But now I'm left with a bulging hard drive and a lot of lackluster jpegs of the same old stuff. 

I guess my 365 project did make me a better photographer. It taught me scrutiny and quality control, even if it took all year for me to finally practice it.

*A friend points out that I did, in fact, take photos on Saturday. I guess it was automatic. I didn't realize I was doing it. I think the post still holds up. 

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This post

• Is about Christmas songs
• Deals with the intersection of Christianity and emo music
• Was researched, but may get something wrong (let me know)
• Could make a comparison someone finds offensive, but was checked for blasphemy by both a Christian and an emo person
• Doesn't say it, but I'm agnostic or whatever...I guess, maybe

I just listened to the Bright Eyes Christmas Album. Yes, it's as ridiculous as it seems. It's emo holiday music. 

But as silly as the music and concept may sound, it's possible that Bright Eyes does more to convey the true intended meaning of nativity-themed holiday songs than any other artist. Consider the story of Christmas: A child is born to a virgin in a barn. The child is God. If anyone tried to push this today, we'd all think a group of nuts in Bethlehem were running some kind of cult or scam. But in the story, people come to worship. Members of a persecuted minority accept this child as their savior. No matter the religious connotations, this is an interesting story about some hardscrabble folks taking a leap of faith. Maybe that's why it's so often echoed and retold in modern movies, TV shows, etc., because it couldn't happen on such a scale now. New religions don't take.

Think about the Little Drummer Boy. Here is a poor boy who walks across the desert to offer all he can give to an infant who may or may not be anything more than a baby in the hay, born of hucksters. How is a well-trained, be-robed chorus singing this story in a song supposed to convey the risks, the poverty and the leaps of faith? Maybe it would work better if a sad midwesterner half whispered it through a distorted microphone channel.

Sure the music sounds a little silly, but when you're dealing with stories that involve trusting that something is more than it seems, emo is the best way to tell it. Emo thrives on making more of emotions, thoughts, events and conversations. It's paranoid, neurotic and depressed. It turns soft, forgettable feelings into loud earworms. Emo albums sell well because enough people are convinced that their emotions are somehow more--that it is as bad as it seems and so much worse. Religions gain and keep followers in part by promising that there is something more. That insignificant actions can be the hand of God at work. That an infant who has done nothing but cry and sleep in a barn in the desert can be both God and the Son of God. It's all about finding more in the ordinary, believing you are right and holding on to that.

Maybe, then, the lines in God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen about saving the world from Satan work better when an angsty 20-something grits his teeth and says them in time with his acoustic guitar. This is the same guy who has crafted song after song about seemingly short-lived relationships. 

Maybe. Maybe the whole thing is silly. Maybe Weezer will really humanize Santa's journey in a charity single next December. 

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This Post:

• Is about music
• Is about drummers, in particular
• Acknowledges jazz and other genres I like, but is really only about one genre
• Links to a page full of YouTube videos

I've been reading about drummers lately.

It started about a week ago, when I started on Keith Richards's memoirs, Life. Every page that mentions Charlie Watts glows. Richards calls him "the bed I lie on" and makes it clear that the drums drive the Rolling Stones. Charlie Watts came out of the jazz world, and Life spends a few pages explaining how he hesitates before hitting the high-hats, then crediting the subsequent swing for laying the essential groundwork for the band's overall sound. Later in the book, Richards praises Steve Jordan, who played in the David Letterman band and then with Richards in Hail Hail Rock and Roll and the X-Pensive Winos.

I took a break from reading Life to read a short essay on another British Keith in the New Yorker. James Wood's insights into Keith Moon double as insights into the rock and roll attitude. He goes into mild technical detail discussing how every space around Moon's place on stage was occupied by a drum. He says the drums are the most direct instrument, because you simply hit them--there are no keys, no frets, just pedals and sticks and skins. Wood calls Moon's drumming enjambment, because he just has to fill every musical space with drums. He fits it all in, often at the same time.

Wood also goes beyond the Who. In crediting Moon for driving the Who's sound, he points out that had Moon been stolen away for Led Zeppelin in the late 60s, the band would have sounded completely different. In fact, the Who sounded different after Moon died. The energy wasn't as apparent. Wood breaks down drumming to a formula. Drummers perform fills at the end of musical phrases. Moon's enjambment means he ignores those phrases, which many drummers are reluctant to do. Wood compares the fills on  the Beatles' original "Carry That Weight" and Phil Collins's cover to illustrate his point about drummers defining the sound. Ringo Star, he says, is more modest than Collins, and it shows in the fills. Starr hits an eight-note pattern and Collins tours the set, hitting toms, the snare and everything in between (literally).

But I think Ringo is a good drummer. He is modest, but he's also tasteful. I've never heard a Beatles record and thought "that's some outrageous drumming!" I suppose that's too bad for Starr, since other instruments stand out, but if you follow the premise that the drums define the group, then Starr's restraint makes sense. Think about what drummers have brought to various groups. Where would the Ramones be without that persistent snare/bass combo, which feels slightly slower than the guitars? What about how Rush sounds big and overblown because the drums are big and overblown? John Bonham's drums were big, technically accurate and not at all modest, just like Zeppelin. The uptight drums on the early (read: good) REM records are among the best in new wave. And then there are the jazz drummers who were stars unto themselves, and whom jazzheads can pick out of any combo after hearing a few measures. That's definition.

I could spend another few paragraphs praising drummers that are either dead or unemployed (kudos to Charlie Watts for being the oldest, most steadfast and most alive drummer mentioned), but it doesn't mean much anymore. As Wood points out in his profile, you can find hundreds of videos on YouTube of people playing with the energy and proficiency of anyone I've named. You can also find faster runners now than you could decades ago. Does that mean people now are better than people before? No. And that's my point. Music is more than technical proficiency. There are thousands of insanely talented players out there. There are unsigned musicians who are better than even the most critically-acclaimed stars. There probably always have been (though there are probably more now because of technology, lower instrument costs, social acceptance of rock, access, blah blah blah). You could say it's songwriting that drives great rock acts, but some truly wonderful and genius songs aren't really that great (Maxwell's Silver Hammer). There are also some great songs that are not well-produced (Guided By Voices). I'm not trying to dissect what makes a great rock song or a great rock act. Like with all music, it's relative to the listener and it's undefinable. 

Now, this is all a bit scattered and bizarre. First there's this talk about drummers defining bands, then all this rambling nonsense about the intangible qualities of great rock music. That may be true. But go listen to these isolated tracks for Gimme Shelter and tell me I'm wrong.

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The Beatles are now on iTunes. After twelve hours of downloading, here is the chart for the most popular songs:

1. George Harrison
2. Paul McCartney
3. John Lennon
4. Paul McCartney
5. John Lennon

Lennon and McCartney each get two, George gets one. To make it even more fair, neither Lennon nor McCartney has taken the top spot.

The top albums list for today shows Abbey Road at #6 and the White Album at #9. Since no Beatles tracks have cracked the top ten individual songs, and since the digital downloads have been such a long time coming, it's probably safe to assume that die hard fans already have these tracks in their libraries (if they use iTunes at all). Perhaps we can use these downloads as a metric to fuel Paul vs. John debates in the new century.

But why debate? John wins.

Actually, I typed that, then decided to look at my own play counts in iTunes. The Ballad of John and Yoko (Lennon) is the most-played Beatles track in my collection, and the 9th most-played track overall. Behind it is Dear Prudence (Lennon), then two McCartney tracks, three Harrisons, then two that Ringo sings (but only one he wrote). The White Album is the most-played Beatles album (3rd overall), followed by Abbey Road (5th overall) and Rubber Soul (15th overall).

Most of these songs are officially "Lennon/McCartney" compositions, and while the primary songwriters have been identified for most tracks, the whole band deserves credit for performing, tweaking and recording them, etc. 

In case you're wondering, What's New Pusssycat? is the most-played song in my library. One of the plays was me listening to it and realizing it's a completely insane song. The next ten or so plays were me trying to convince other people that the song is completely insane. The next 50 were me leaving it on repeat to mess with Linda. 

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For some reason this week, I searched for the Godzilla Vs. Charles Barkley Nike commercial on YouTube. I remember this ad being a big deal when I was a kid.

From Wikipedia:

Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley was conceived by advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy and produced by Industrial Light & Magic. It was originally intended for Japanese audiences, but Nike was impressed enough to use it in the United States, where it debuted on September 9, 1992 during the MTV Video Music Awards broadcast on MTV.

The commercial required eight days of filming during the first two weeks in June 1992 and four weeks of editing thereafter. It employs suitmation techniques, which were still being used in the Godzilla films being made by Toho. Clint Goodman of ILM explained, "The idea was that we would show a modern look, but not with total 'ILM realism'. It just wouldn't be true to the subject matter." The Godzilla costume comprised many foam rubber pieces, and puppeteers produced the monster's facial expressions with radio control devices. Some of the building props in the commercial were originally used in the 1984 film Ghostbusters. The special effects team used mattes to create the illusion of a larger city.

I don't watch much TV these days, so I'm not sure if ads are ever the events that Godzilla Vs. Barkley was. This commercial was so big, it even had a commercial to promote it. And the promotional commercial was as long as the actual commercial. That's like a 90-minute movie trailer.

Crazy.

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I'm changing my homepage. This Posterous blog (which has all my old blog's archives in it) will be my regular blog. GabeBullard.com will be an aggregate of all my internet activities, including this site. If you're an RSS subscriber, then you shouldn't notice any change. If you want to be safe, make sure you're subscribed to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GabeBullardIsOnTheInternet

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How's THAT for a pretentious title? 

I am surrounded by boxes. Linda and I moved earlier this month, and we're still unpacking. We're mostly finished, but parts of certain rooms in our new apartment still look cluttered. Books are piled instead of shelved. Tables have been set in the middle of rooms and stacked with mail, headphones, picture frames and other odds and ends. I didn't think we would be able to fill up an apartment so much larger than our previous one, but I also hadn't realized how concentrated the old place was. The apartment didn't look messy, but deciding to move was like pulling the pin on a clutter grenade.

The old apartment had large closets for storage. I had pushed junk into boxes, then packed those boxes into larger boxes and sealed them in the closets. There were things under the bed, behind the dresser and on top of the kitchen cabinets. We opened the closet doors and poured possessions into the living room. We sorted through everything, filling moving boxes and trash bags at an equal pace. I've always rolled my eyes at others' claims that we live in a wasteful society. But my goodness are we messy.

Much of the closet space in the old apartment was taken up by unpacked boxes from my move to Louisville. I found college notes and paraphernalia. Pens, Post-Its and playing cards branded with WEBSTER UNIVERSITY. I found folders of resumes and spindles of CDs with my portfolio on them. A box of clippings from places I had been published was on top of an envelope full of old birthday cards. These items were almost all trashed. I have digital copies, photos or other memories. At first, it was hard, but once I realized how much of the mess was memories I had forgotten about, I got into  garbageman mode. The cards relatives sent when I turned 22 were sweet. They don't do me any good, though, sitting in a closet. No one will know if I throw them away, and even if the senders find out, I doubt they would be hurt. So the cards and clippings and college gear comprise one category of clutter--the disposable made permanent. The sentiment isn't lost or wasted, but it won't become any more or less meaningful if the physical form it takes is boxed up or destroyed. Please continue to send cards on my birthday. I like them. I just may not keep them for the whole year.

The next category of junk is the most immediately useful, yet temporary--information. I found enough file folders full of paperwork to wear out the blades on a shredder. Fortunately, none of it needed to be shredded. There were instructions for building furniture I don't own anymore. There were instructions for building furniture I still own. There were instructions for every electronic device I've purchased in the last three years. These were all recycled. Any relevant information in them is online. I also found paperwork documenting things that had no business being documented, like the brochure and handbook that came with my glasses. As I dropped the books into the recycling, I had my first serious feeling of guilt. Someone at Ray-Ban headquarters (probably a team of people) worked hard to photograph, write, layout and print these pamphlets. I appreciate their work, even though it didn't do me any good. I felt bad getting rid of it. As someone who grew up around graphic designers, I didn't think it was fair to destroy it, but then again, most people toil over the temporary. I'm a news reporter, after all. A radio news reporter. Sure, my stories and related recordings are posted online, but for the most part, I'm doing important work that's useful for only a few hours or days. Even the most breaking, hard-hitting story vanishes. The gist of it remains. The effect is still there. But the wording and sound bites are forgotten. The radio waves may reach distant planets, but they will have long served their purpose on earth.*

Once the old apartment was empty, it was a revelation. I've never thought of myself as a minimalist. (I'm not a packrat either.) As I looked over those empty rooms, I realized how little I could have and still be happy.

That attitude lasted for an afternoon. I had hoped to throw more things away while unpacking, but I couldn't get back into my garbageman mode. It takes a strong will to throw things out. But we can't help but accumulate things. The clutter in my home, my brain and everywhere else I look is the byproduct of everyday life.

Everything that survived the move is now essential to me. I've tried to take the E.B. White route, and throw one item away with every trip to work...and I can't do it. I can't convince myself that I won't someday need an antique cigar box full of bookmarks. But I contradict myself. When I walk in the door or sit in the living room, I can't help but see the things I don't use: books I don't read; CDs I can only play in the car; two extra stereo speakers; and a hat I will never put on. The most cynical among us sometimes say we surround ourselves with possessions for comfort, even if we don't realize we're doing it. But I don't get any comfort from these things. I know I don't need them, but I can't avoid having them.

*Yes, news reports are a valuable record of our time, but for every article used by a researcher or taught in a classroom, think of how many aren't. I'm still an advocate for preserving reports for future generations, but I'm also a realist. Most of what we broadcast and print today will be useless to our offspring. I'm not saying our work is useless--maybe it will inspire people or lead to big changes in government or society, but that doesn't meant the story will be remembered.

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Welcome to the new Gabe Bullard is on the Internet. 

I have moved the blog to Posterous. This is my new blog address. Please update your RSS feeds, Twitter alerts, town criers, etc.

If you'd rather not update anything, then don't. Posterous will auto-post to Wordpress, and my blog posts will still appear on GabeBullard.com. That site, however, will also become something slightly more "professional."

Why? 

I'm not sure. I like blogging on Posterous better, but I don't want to give up everything from my original site. I plan on posting some more information about my professional work over there, but don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not building a resume site. Rather, GabeBullard.com is now your source for all things Gabe Bullard. This site is now your source for my ridiculous thoughts on pop culture and other nonpolitical, non news-related things.

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This Post:

• Is about a book
• Is also about writing
• Makes me nervous, because if it's not well-written, it will be embarrassing

It's back-to-school time. Even though I'm entering my fourth year of real life, I still feel like it's time to study. That's why, every fall since graduation, I've revisited my favorite textbook--William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

I bought my copy of the 25th anniversary edition in the second semester of my freshman year of college. I got it used from a sophomore I met in the bookstore. They were out of Zinssers (as they called them) and the sophomore interrupted my conversation with the cashier to say she was changing majors and didn't need her journalism textbooks anymore. I traded her $5 and an outdated political science book for On Writing Well.

I got the book by luck, and forgot it on my first day of the class I needed it for. That day, the professor assigned the first twelve chapters and said the rest was optional, but recommended. I procrastinated. Then the professor told the class it was clear from reading our assignments that no one had read the text. I went home to study. I read most of the book that afternoon. It was easy to read and full of advice I had never thought about. Why was I trying to trump up my writing with unnecessary words? Why was I using "is" and a string of nouns instead of one good verb? Why was I cluttering up my assignments?

Of course, I was trying to sound smart. I was filling sentences with pretentious words to make them important. I was also packing them full of information, overusing commas, dashes and semicolons to cut down on the overall length if my assignments. I wanted to use as few sentences as possible to tell the story.

My writing wasn't necessarily bad, but it was what Zinsser called "journalese." Zinsser--and others--suggest people who write for a living reread The Elements of Style every year. I did. After graduation, I also decided to read On Writing Well again. I thought my writing was clear and organized, especially after years of school and professional assignments. I was wrong. I reread the first twelve chapters and realized clutter had crept in. I made corrections. I promised myself I would carefully read, reread and rewrite my stories. Because rewriting is the essence of writing, as Zinsser says. The following year, I reread Zinsser and found less clutter in my writing, but it was still there. I was writing hundreds of words every day at work, and I realized dozens of those words were unnecessary. Last year, I skimmed through my traditional reread, and made more promises to edit and rewrite more carefully.

So what came of this year's reread, which I made sure to devote my full attention to?

Nothing new.

I can't tell if I've reverted to my old bad habits. I think my recent writing has been clearer, but I could be convincing myself that my writing is better because I feel like it should be better. When I look back I argue (with myself) that extraneous words are necessary. I see awkward sentences and decide there is no other way to word them. I make excuses. I'm not rewriting, but I know I should.

I suppose this is growth. I can recognize when things aren't right. Then again, this isn't entirely helpful. I think the stories I produce for work are well-written, but my zeal to produce better pieces has trapped me in a pattern of near-constant self-review and criticism. I return to pieces I filed weeks ago and search for errors I can't—and shouldn't—fix. Just as I argue with myself that certain missteps aren't missteps at all, I second-guess quality writing, assuming it could be better, but not knowing how. That is growth. With every trip through On Writing Well, I learn something. This time, I've discovered I'm a lazy neurotic. Maybe next year's review will fix that. (Notice how I start so many sentences on this blog with But? Zinsser taught me that.)

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This Post:

• Is about a trend piece
• Is more personal than my usual posts
• Is like my other posts in that it's opinion, so feel free to disagree

Earlier this month, Linda and I celebrated our fifth anniversary. We're not married. We started dating in 2005.

We've spent most of our relationship apart. Weeks before our one year anniversary (it feels weird to call these anniversaries, but there's not really a better word), we moved to separate cities: she graduated and I took an internship. We spent some time together after I graduated college, but then she joined the Peace Corps and I started working. Linda moved to Louisville on our 4th anniversary. In about six months, the scales will tip and we'll be together geographically longer than we haven't.

Now we both have full-time jobs. We live together. We're not engaged. We don't plan to be. We don't plan to break up, but we just don't want to be engaged or married either.

In other words, we are average twenty-somethings.

Two-thirds [of people in their twenties] spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

-The New York Times, August 18, 2010

Early marriage is part of the midwestern stereotype, and it's something I've been conscious about for the last three years or so. Linda (not a midwesterner) and I have been together longer than most of my married friends (mostly midwesterners) have known their partners. My oldest brother (midwesterner) was my age when he got married, but he dated his eventual wife (also a midwesterner) for years. My other brother (midwesterner, too) is older than me and single, but he's been dating his partner (midwesterner) for several years. My dad (midwesterner) was single when he was my age. When my mom (midwesterner) was my age, she was married (to my dad). My grandparents (midwesterners) were both married by my age. Linda's parents (not midwesterners) were older than us when they married. It's inconsistent in my circle, but I trust the Times' research, so I'll say Linda and I are average.

This post isn't about Linda and me and it's about marriage.

And on that topic, I say, Why rush?

The Times article I quoted was discussed on various radio shows and blogs. Several callers and commenters took issue with us young people. They said we were putting off adulthood, living in arrested development. I can understand their reasoning. Instead of sizing rings and thinking about nurseries I'm shopping for electronics and ignoring the "child safety" section of my car's manual. I'm more interested in watching Arrested Development.

But while I can understand people's decision to complain about nascent twenty-somethings, I can't condone it. At this point in my life, I can't see any benefit--to me that is--of marriage and children. I was raised (as a midwesterner) not to get into anything I'm not ready for. That's led me to avoid situations I don't think I can excel in (for the most part), or do my best at. I don't think my performance as husband would outweigh my performance as boyfriend. Marriage has legal benefits, but we're not at a point to realize many of them yet. Linda and I may very well get married someday, but only when I see opportunity beyond insurance, hospital visits and taxes. (This is probably a sign of immaturity rather than youth, but hopefully it's one of few.) I'm sure life with children is wonderful and rewarding, but we don't feel like we're capable of making the financial and emotional investment kids require. Why raise children if we can't give them the life we want to give them? Plus, there are plenty of children alive now, so as a personal preference I would endorse adoption before conception. (On a lazy 20-something note, I highly endorse Inception.) Plus, there's the D word. My parents and Linda's parents are married, but when I was in school, I felt like I was in a minority. Even in the midwest, the stigma of divorce has all but faded, and single and step-parents aren't anything to think twice about. But hearing friends talk about splitting time between their moms and dads has made me wary of matrimony before absolute certainty.*

That's not to say the opposite of our situation is wrong (unless you don't like Inception, though I guess that's okay too). When I see young people with spouses and children, I think of them the same way I think of anyone who has made different life choices than me (banker, churchgoer, acrobat): good for you. I don't judge. So you can tell me cohabitation is wrong on moral grounds or that I'm somehow negatively affecting the population (unlikely), but I'm not going to change my preference to match someone else's, especially if my preference is so innocuous.

And it is a preference. Everything that somehow defines 20-somethings (according to the media) is a preference. While there are certainly exceptions, I don't think this apparently-emerging lifestyle is the result of a series of strong convictions, though I/we have those, too, so much as it's the product of pragmatism. Times have changed and there's not much need to marry young and start a family beyond satisfying personal desires and aspirations. The job market is sparse, the economy is bad, the earth is (probably) melting and the air is full of pollution. Why bring someone else into this unless I really want to? I'm not saying there's virtue in unmarried, child-free life...there's just nothing particularly wrong with it right now.

To further quote the Times:

During the period he calls emerging adulthood, [psychology professor Jeffrey Jensen] Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their ideal istic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.

This is "emerging adulthood." It's new. That's why it's in the papers and on the airwaves and internet. But I can't help thinking the reason people complain about emerging adulthood (aside from the fact that, in many ways, we have it easier than previous generations and many members of our current generation**) is because there isn't an easy way to explain it. Language hasn't kept up with the times. I'm often at a loss of words to describe my situation. Linda and I are dating. We're technically boyfriend and girlfriend, but it feels like we're more than that. We've talked about calling ourselves partners, but that's a term many of our friends use because the law doesn't let them call each other spouses (being unmarried isn't always a choice in many places). We're childless, but that term doesn't fit either. It's our choice, but the term for it sounds like a condition. We wouldn't call the parents in a family "childed," even though procreators may occupy a shrinking portion our class and country.

So we're unmarried, childless and undefined (except in newspaper trend pieces). That works. We're also committed, optimistic, and we never have to worry about calling a sitter.

*This doesn't mean I'm not confident in our relationship. It just means we're not done working on the foundation.

**Because this is a concern of the relatively privileged.

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• Is about this blog
• Is short enough to not need a summary

1. I am a serious journalist, and that doesn't stop me from thinking about other things in my off hours.
2. I'm honing my writing skills by posting something new here every two weeks.
3. I'm not posting anything that would make anyone question my ability to be a fair journalist. I'm not on the DEVO and Buster Keaton beat, after all.

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• Is about movies
• References movies I haven't seen
• Was inspired by the series finale of the At The Movies TV show
• Acknowledges that it's kind of silly
• Has three footnotes, but two of them aren't necessary

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• Is about comedy
• Is mostly about Don Rickles, who is alive
• Is partially about Buster Keaton, who is not alive
• Is tangentially about artistic sacrifice and revenge
• Is slightly speculative and probably pretentious as all get out
• Has a footnote about Vietnam

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