“We are becoming people of the screen.”
2. “Presidents of Colleges Give Back Some Pay”
“The median salary for public university presidents was $427,400, The Chronicle said.”
3. “Chain of Grief for a Flagship University”
“As prospective students and their parents toured the campus last Friday morning, a few people spoke in hushed tones about the pall that seems to be hanging over the university.”
4. “Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right.”
“Gilbert Gottfried, widely credited with being the first standup comic to tell a 9/11 joke (he complained 18 days after the attacks that he couldn’t get a direct flight to California because ‘they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first’), noted that his gun-shy colleagues, afraid of spoiling the love fest or being accused of racism, ‘continue to do Sarah Palin insults, and that really struck me as odd.’”
5. “Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace”
“Slow food advocates … believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul.”
6. “For a Thrifty Audience, Buying DVDs Is So 2004”
“Historically, the movie factories haven’t been terribly afraid of tough economic times. In fact, they have almost welcomed them. During the Great Depression, people continued to turn to the movies for escape. VHS rentals boomed during the recession of the early 1980s, while DVDs got a boost from the downturn earlier this decade.”
“The folks currently backing 3-D insist things will be different this time around, that improved digital technology on both the production and projection ends will make 3-D stick. (It’s true: though you still have to wear glasses, the eye strain-headache factor is reduced.) Nevertheless, there’s a cautionary tale lying in the historical record, which shows just how meteoric, how stunningly Sarah Palin-like, was 3-D’s original rise. And fall.”
8. “How Axl Rose Spent All That Time”
“All the labors of Mr. Rose and his various lineups, both inspired and overblown, come through the finished album. Mr. Rose and his co-producer, Caram Costanzo, just keep piling up the sounds. String orchestra? Toy piano plinks? Voices muttering in foreign languages? Harp? Drum machines? Choirs? ‘I Have a Dream’? They’re all there, along with indefatigable drums and phalanxes of guitars.”
9. “Never Forget. You’re Reminded.”
“The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?”
10. “The Screening of America”
“The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before — certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early ’80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the uniqueness of film, they also extended the power and pervasiveness of the movies, which never surrendered their position as the highest common denominator of the popular culture, the standard of visual storytelling to which all the others aspired. An unusually successful television show could be praised as ‘cinematic,’ while the sign that a movie had failed was that it went straight to video.”
11. “Questions for David Lynch: The Visionary”
What is that clock you’re holding in this photograph?
I just didn’t want to stand there like an idiot. It’s an old clock, but I am building this plastic bubble around it.
“Worst thing about job: It’s so easy to come up with a cool idea, and it takes so long to manifest it well. I worked on Spore for about seven years. The first two years were me doing research.”
“Nielsen Media Research tracks the cumulative audience for syndicated programming, including reruns, and among sitcom reruns, Seinfeld has remained in the top five such shows watched by 25-to-54-year-olds throughout its afterlife. On a recent week, it finished third, behind reruns of Two and a Half Men and Family Guy, with a viewership of about 4.9 million people.”
Q: Do you find TV-screen fame different from movie-screen fame?
A: TV fame is weird because you’re in the audience’s home. With film, they feel they can’t touch you. But there’s an intimacy to television. And it’s especially powerful with soap operas. My dad is a villain, Victor Kiriakis, on Days of Our Lives. He has had women come up to him to tell him a thing or two about a thing or two.
“Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no prime time. There’s no such thing as must-see TV. Everyone’s composing their own flow. And once you start becoming the composer of your own flow, you can’t go back. You’re like, Why would I have somebody dictate to me what I watch when I’m used to programming for myself?”
16. “If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That”
“Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they’re not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow. And a customer paying $17 a month for only one movie every month or two is at risk of canceling his subscription; the plan makes financial sense, from a user’s point of view, only if you rent a lot of movies.”
