Marc Maron and Ira Glass, WTF?
if you haven’t listened to marc maron’s WTF podcast yet this interview might be a great place to start. i wasn’t expecting much b/c during the past year ihad stopped listening to “This American Life”. for me the show had become to precious; everyone learns a lesson, peoples lives are changed, all loose ends are tied up, but after listening to this interview i might give it another chance sometime in the future.
what was most fascinating about the show was how marc maron was able to get ira glass to open up about his creative process and even getting him to talk about how making a “This American Life” show is sometimes a drudgery (by sharing a great insight on how retelling a story based on work of an investigative reporter is as best like doing a very complex and time intensive ‘cover version’ of the original) it was also fascinating how Ira was also able to deconstruct what makes marc maron’s WTF podcast show feel so authentic.
overall an it was amazing conversation between two of the best ‘mic guys’ on the air/interwebs today. listening to them shooting the shit about the one thing they have in common; that they both only feel comfortable (and self actualized) talking to people from behind a mic.
marc maron interviews ira glass
listen to it here
you might want to check out marc maron’s interview with carlos mencia. it’s a pretty amazing q+a with mencia who over the course of two podcasts slow melts down and basically admits to stealing jokes and reveals himself as a narcissistic asshole who’s whole career has been built on manipulating his friends and fans.
it’s the type of content that you would never hear on radio.
carlos mencia and marc maron, part I
carlos mencia and marc maron, part II
“the rest will take care of itself”
“don’t worry about who you are, get rid of who your not, and the rest will take care of itself”
link: Tumblr
jim earl via marc maron’s WTF Podcast, Episode 73 May 17th 2010
well… utter emptiness
really enjoyed last week’s marc maron’s WTF podcast in which he interviews bob odenkirk. besides talking shop about the entertainment business the conversation turned deadly serious near the end in which they covered some real big life issues (happiness, meaning of life, recovery…) usually most podcasts are as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper but i did transcribe a few quotes and bits of their conversations.
“you can only do a certain amount promotion and politicking, but at the end of the day you just have to do it”
“if you aren’t lucky enough to die young and be get to be a flaming asshole you will be humbled and people who carry on with their insanity without being humbled you become broken”
“someday you will always have to confront those things that you always knew (that are self destructive)”
“it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s what you do. you can only get a certain amount of appreciation from your peers and fans. who you are is not your work”
“marc: what do you feel when you really detach from that?
bob: well… utter emptiness
marc: do kids make it better?
bob: I don’t think it’s a soul hole filler”
Bookmarks for November 2nd through November 6th [del.icio.us]
![Bookmarks for November 2nd through November 6th [del.icio.us]](http://www.paulbailey.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/51UxzILIxzL._SS500_1-150x150.jpg)
Bookmarks from November 2nd through November 6th:[del.icio.us]
- Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » Streaming -
“Ownership is for pussies. Oh, don’t e-mail, you same people who said we should save the album. Notice what a few years do? Radiohead says no more albums, Rush the same thing. So, when your favorite acts give up on the long form format, don’t you too? I know you do. Because you’ve stopped sending me hate mail in quantity. If I write the album is history, I now only get a couple of e-mails complaining. Whereas I used to get hundreds! How many years until when I say streaming is the answer that I get the same miniscule response? How long until you nod your head and say I’m right? The major labels are confused. They were for streaming a decade ago, then they were for ownership, and now they’re afraid somebody’s gonna come up with a streaming solution and become the new MTV and have all the power. But maybe not all the profits, the majors are investors in Spotify.”
- Your Carnitas Wonderland – Los Angeles Area Digest – CHOW
“Metro Balderas is a family operation with four locations in Los Angeles, each run by a different member of the family. exilekiss visited the Highland Park branch, run by Jasmine Guzman. Every Saturday and Sunday, Metro Balderas offers eight types of pork carnitas in the Distrito Federal style for a barrage of carnitas taco glory.”
- WitnessLA.com » Blog Archive » ON BEING BLUE: A Cop Talks About Cops – Part II -
2008 Witness LA interview with the new LAPD chief of police, Charlie Beck
- Benjamin Smith: Improvisations -
“Benjamin Smith is an improvisor currently living in West Orange, New Jersey. Smith ventures far beyond the standard idea of jazz improvisation, into a sound world equally influenced by modern classical. All of the pieces are free improvisations invented at the time of recording, and feature Smith alone at a Yamaha P-70 digital keyboard. He say…”
- Kalvos and Damian Show #557 with The Brick Elephant Festival of Firsts – ImprovFriday -
“David “Damian or is it Kalvos” Gunn traveled to Valley Falls, New York, to join M J Leach at the Brick Elephant for the “Festival of Firsts”. MJ co-hosted the K&D show for the four-hour concert that included music by Karl Korte, Dan Evans Farkas, Nicholas Chase, Alfred Brown, Al Margolis, Doug Van Nort, Petr Machadjik, Kjell Perder, Conrad Kehn, and Richard Lainhart — as well as David and MJ’s music. The show is up on the K&D site in four parts. http://kalvos.org/shows-2009.html There was a lot of interesting partial and full improv on the concert — full program is at ReSoundings.Net. “
- Newspaper first to go live with public Google Wave | Media Owners | Revolution -
“Following the hype around the launch of Google Wave, German newspaper Welt Kompakt has become one of the first to launch a public Wave, helping readers interact with the title”
- The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave -
The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
The Pulse of Minimalism: WNYC New Sounds (June 9th, 2009)
it was great to find out that my Music from Summerland was recently featured on John Schafer’s WNYC New Sounds podcast this past june
“The pulsing rhythms of minimalism, as heard in the music of English composer Michael Nyman, and fellow Brit Jeremy Peyton-Jones. Plus there’s music from trombonist/composer Paul Bailey and the “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble. It’s possible that we’ll also hear from guitarist Dominic Frasca and his takeoff of music based on Philip Glass, and more.”
The Pulse of Minimalism (June 9th, 2009)
at this point i feel very awkward on how to respond to these really thoughtful comments and reviews. besides a big thanks to john and caryn at wnyc . i think there are two bigger points that are worth making (and its that its nice to get a pat on the back when you are the least expecting it)
i’m starting to realize that although i might have moved on from a piece like retrace (i wrote in 2002) its pretty powerful and touching when somebody “gets it”. especially right now when the PBE is on hiatus and it’s going to be a while before we get out and perform again. i’m really happy that the music is out there. i guess i never had really thought much about music we weren’t currently performing (out of sight, out of mind?), but over the past few months i have really gotten back a lot from my friends about what the music and PBE means to them. i had never really contemplated that how some pieces take on a life of their own and means very different things to different people. amazing
kindle too?
admittedly i’m a pretty big tech geek and have been looking forward to using an ebook reader for quite some time. i commute by train and use much of that time preparing for lectures and have been looking forward to the day when i can replace many of my textbooks and reference materials with ebooks. on the other hand after getting burned a few too many times by new products i have learned to hold out for the 2nd generation so not to become an unofficial “beta tester” for when a company releases something that is not quite ready for prime-time.
with that out of the way i have to day i really like it and it easily succeeds at its main goal (as a device to read long form content). its already changing the way i read but i have to say this still feels like a 1st generation device. during the past couple of weeks i found myself looking for features that don’t quite work or are not consistently applied but i still think the possibilities are pretty amazing and could fundamentally change the way we read, catalog, and share information.
that is if they don’t screw it up.
questions
overall the kindle 2 brings up more questions than it answers. and i think the future success in ebooks lies in the following questions:
the iphone is a great example of one direction that kindle/ebooks could develop. its mostly open and offers seamless integration and access to content on and off the device. (except for itunes, although interestingly enough amazon has created a pretty seamless workaround to get music on iphones and ipods through their mp3 downloader)
need access to an address in an old email? (gmail has got you covered)
want to check your online accounts? (mint has a solution for you)
looking for a great restaurant nearby? (yelp will help you sort it out)
reading and annotating content
so far the kindle has the right idea. i can highlight and annotate content while i’m reading (which is great preparation for my lectures) but once its tagged there is not an easy way to organize and access that information. to be useful the experience needs to become as integrated into services like del.lic.ious or evernote which give me the ability to tag and annotate anything i read online and then access it from any computer or iphone/smartphone. this is already changing the way i read and process information, especially in teaching and composition. creating twitter rss feeds based on the keywords “fired” and “job” allowed me to sort through thousands of twitter messages on my iphone to create my new electronic piece “not getting fired is the new promotion”
Not Getting Fired Is the New Promotion
book publishers need to understand that by opening up their content and allowing us share excerpts of their content with our friends will only help them out. sharing an interesting passage from neil stephenson’s anathem about parallel universes (which i am currently reading on the kindle) or sending back and forth great quotes from edward gibbons’s the history and decline of the roman empire with my friend john could be invaluable (who is currently using it as a source on a new project) . i already do this with video, audio, news and blogs that i find online and whether or not the kindle (and book publishers) embrace keeping the content open will be the primary factor on its fate.
with all of this talk of how integration, tagging and sharing is changing the way we read i have to point out that
podcasts and the iphone have already fundamentally changed how i read
like i said before the kindle 2 is great for reading any long form content (and i have to admit i have been reading less and less fiction over the last few years). reading newspapers and magazines on the kindle 2 is a pretty good experience, but after a few days i realized that preferred ‘reading’ the news on my iphone (through google reader rss feeds) or by listening to summaries of the news through podcasts (new york times, slate, the economist, la observed, kpcc radio, npr’s planet money…) i know for many podcasts (think tivo on the radio) still haven’t become mainstream, although last weeks podcast of the newly unemployed adam carrola and the king of podcasting’s leo laporte is a must listen if you want to hear the future of this technology. but when it comes to the news, i found i found that listening to the summaries of the daily news far more useful (while driving my car or riding on the train) than reading them online/kindle/paper. if something is really important or catches my eye, i’m more apt to bookmark it in my google reader (on my iphone) and then download it to the kindle 2 so that i can really ‘read’ it.
untapped potential
the potential of the kindle 2 and ebooks is pretty amazing. but here are a few innovations that could really make the kindle 2/ebooks better:
- i want to be able to click on any article and have it sent to the kindle 2. i’ll be happy to pay for it with micropayment or even pay a monthly subscription fee (like emusic) to a consortium of publishers to have this access (btw… your going to have to update your content throughout the day to stay relevant. slate is doing this well ($2.49 a month which i’m happy to pay for the convienence even though i can get it for “free” online), the and new york times (at $13.99 a month is not)
- i like reading magazines on the kindle, but the way the articles are presented, formatted and organized is very inconsistent between publishers. in general, browsing and reading articles on the kindle is very poorly designed.
- adding illustrations would help. they do it very well in the new yorker and many of my books. so why not in newsweek and the new york times? (although they seem to be adding more each week)
- i want to be able to tag and footnote what i read and integrate it into my social networking (delicious, digg, google reader) so i can easily share it with my friends while creating a library of bookmarks and annotations that are easily accessible for future projects.
update 031209
one big problem with the kindle 2 iphone reader is that you cannot sync any public domain books or .pdf’s (and newspapers and magazines that we paid for) to read on your iphone, this is a big problem. if we are going to be able to “sync” the device. we should be able to sync all of the content.
Minimalist Music Theatre: WNYC New Sounds Podcast (2008)
Minimalist Music Theatre (originally aired May 20, 2008)
“Hear some music theatre pieces on this New Sounds show. Listen to Philip Glass’s recent release “Waiting for the Barbarians,” adapted from the novel by the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Also, there’s music by Paul Bailey – his post-minimalist music theatre piece “Retrace Our Steps.” He describes it as a four act vocal/instrumental spectacle based on texts by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. The “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble performs the work. And more.”
222
Since January 2008 there have been 222 homicides in LA county. I’m not sure what to do about it, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It started when I came across the LA times Homicide Report (blog). For over a year reporter Jill Leovy and Rueben Vives had a simple and horrendous task, to [...]
