Geeky Chic

I started work today, and it involved mostly training. Even once things ramp up, however, I don’t plan to blog about my internship. So, that will filter out a good chunk of my day.

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With a slow Internet connection at home and the failed re-routing of my magazine subscriptions, I feel a little out of touch with what’s going on outside of SF right now. I have a vague sense of peace in the Middle East, bad crop of films at Cannes, still no progress on providing services to Baghdad, etc, but the specifics elude me. This is a little unsettling; I only have superficial, immediate observations.

It’s finals time, and I just lost my first attempt at this post, because I forgot to put in a title.  But, I want to alert you to the fact that June 2 is D-Day — the day when the FCC announces its new media ownership caps in local markets.  Professor Lessig is charting the mobilzation to counteract increasing the percentage caps on his blog, and he details the dangers of further deregulating the ownership rules.  Believe me, the effects of further media consolidation, which he describes, read like a horror script, so you shouldn’t let Michael Powell give away your local news to the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

As the SF Bay Guardian, an indie weekly in SF pointed out, when the FCC held a hearing on the ownership caps in SF on April 26, none of the major news outlets in the Bay Area, covered the event.  As it stands, the only daily paper in San Francisco, The Chronicle, is owned by the Hearst Corp, which will stand to benefit greatly from further deregulation.

Also, I just wanted to point out the Clear Channel example of how deregulation of radio, under Clinton, has killed off the diversity of radio in America.  The fact that this started under the last president, shows that neither party has clean hands in this matter.

In this article, Steve Lohr seems to ignore the increasing social value of the Internet. He writes off new media, and cites Barry Diller, who regards “searching and shopping” as the only functions of the Internet. In doing so, he ignores the potential and power of blogging (believe, me, I am cringing, as I note my cheesy enthusiasm in this sentence). Perhaps, I’ve bought into Dave’s vision of the world. It appears that the FCC is close to allowing big companies to take up larger ownership stakes in local media markets, further reducing the diversity of news services available to the public. This prospect unnerves me, and the idea of community bloggers who mobilize to provide local news coverage, offers some hope.

I sold back a couple of casebooks from last semester yesterday. When the bookstore manager flipped through one Book to check on its condition, he asked, “Wow, did you even go to class?” after spotting clean page after clean page. I meekly replied, “Uh, not really.” Then, he went through the other book and said, “Well, at least it looks like you went to this one.” This shows what a good outline can do. It’s a shame that I don’t have one for Copyright, and am thus “fixing an original work of authorship in tangible form,” for that class.

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It is difficult to concentrate on studying, when I think about the free time that I have coming up. I have 10 days off before my summer associate program begins, and asides from unpacking and making my room liveable, there are so many things that I want to do. For instance, I want to spend an afternoon or two, playing the flaneur, and document what everyone who passes by me is wearing. Ideally, this would happen at a sidewalk table of a cafe. I want to try a different neighborhood each day though, to figure out what subtle changes have happened in SF over the past year. Also, I want to gorge on bad television and bad movies. I feel that I need to bring my SciFi-ness up to speed, and watch Bladerunner and X-Men, and re-watch the Matrix. And two other vacation constants will enter into the picture too; breakfast with my grandmother and reading. On Monday, one of my friends asked what the last book I read was. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall that it was White Teeth, and that bothered me. Next on the reading agenda: Henry James’s The Ambassadors and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Two weeks until my next meal at Restaurant Gary Danko.

As some of you know, I do not own a TV, so I have no idea that kind of media blitz the two sequels (sequel seems like the wrong word to use, when there are two) are receiving on the small screen this time around. However, I presume that the airwaves have been completely saturated with images from the forthcoming release. I can remember back to my first encounter with the movie, a commercial that appeared during the 1999 Superbowl. I remember that Nori and I felt whatever the Keanu “Whoa!” encompassed after we saw the clip. A few months later, we were blown away again (at the White Marsh Theatre?), when we were forced to watch it from the front row on opening night (afterwards, we commented that the dizzying angle from the front row added to the movie’s effects).

The print and electronic media have jumped on the Matrix bandwagon, and have decided to interpret the American public’s anticipation for the movie.

Salon has decided to use the 4 year gap between the first and upcoming installments to provide an autopsy for the dot com era. The article focuses on how the audience of programmer boys no longer have much hope in our muted economic climate. Essentially, they want to party as though it’s still 1999.
Slate takes a different tack, and celebrates Neo as an “Evernerd” in its piece. To Slate, the Matrix is a technological utopia for geeks. Instead of pining for an earlier era, the Slate article focuses on a way of resolving conflict in the Matrix, to make technology and humans cheesily live in harmony, the way that they never could in the Terminator series. Is it me, or does idea carry the scent of Mr. Gates?

Finally, the Times gives its two cents with a Matrix Fashion Show. All I can say, is that every guy I know wanted to give Neo a “You da man” pat on the back, everytime the mustard (or was it purple? my memory fails me…) lining of his of his impeccably tailored black suit flashed in the original film.

From time to time, I have blogger’s block. I attribute this symptom to the finals looming over my head, and my inability to process any leisure reading. Eh, I have no idea why this preamble is here…

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Would you like some mold with that Ritz? Apparently, the Ritz Carlton luxury condos in DC have a bit of a toxic mold problem.

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Hm, there have been a series of articles in the S.F. Chronicle about the death of the Bay Area recording and local TV production scenes. These eulogies complain about the blandness and homogeneity caused by consolidation and big media. However, the newspaper doesn’t offer any solutions. Why? Because the Chronicle is a product of local consolidation (SF is now a one-newspaper town), and is owned by a large corporation, based in NYC, the Hearst Corporation.