Someone to go to the farmers market with
Physical contact
I'm allowed to stare.
Another kind of shampoo in my rotation
Lazy Saturdays
Help on Restaurant City
Cooking from recipes
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Summer's Nights
There's no common time so romantic as a summer's night. This is even more true in Davis, where night is the only comfortable time of the day. You may think I'm being dramatic, you may think I'm not being fair, but it's been true to me for years. Ignoring human-made holidays and momentary variances in weather, when you're really talking about the time and not anything else, there is nothing so persistently magical as when the land is cool and dark. The possibilities for mischief and holy moments stretch out like fingers across a wide, rounded back.
My obsession with music has passed. It came to me in the morning, ravaged me all day, and went along its way in the evening. Now that it's night, I'm not sure I'm sad it has gone nor am I convinced that it won't return, but I'm glad it came and left me full of color and taste. I'm haunted by its echos. Not the myriad minor bands that I strove to categorize and appreciate, but by the great bands, the bands that formed the only recognizable soundtrack to my college experience.
I'm finally riding my new bike Smoky again. He's inky black like night and dirty like me in summer. Road bikes are such a pleasure to ride. The other bikes get you from place to place, but without the exhilaration of Mercury's speed.
There's something creepy about the progression of summer nights from late spring to early fall. It likely has to do with the apprehension I've viewed the end of all things with, particularly things so open and beautiful as summer. Even now, I'm sensing the approach of September in the dark air. A sweeter smell, maybe? Not like spring's heady pollen, but a deeper, melancholy, more earnest kind of sweetness that has replaced high summer's smell of baking dry tan grass.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
On Media
This post is not inspired by the death of Walter Cronkite. In fact, he can be only viewed as the catalyst of this post in the most roundabout of ways. I've been planning on writing this for a long while, and the last person I planned on mentioning was the iconic anchorman of someone else's generation. I am, after all, generationally-minded, and this is a commentary on the media of my generation, not my parents'. However, it would not have been without Walter Cronkite's death that Jon Stewart would be named America's Most Trusted Newscaster, and if that isn't a headline worthy to catalyze this post, I don't know what is.
When I started high school, I started to read the Los Angeles Times. I read the front page and the funnies practically every day for those four years. I'd delve deeper into the paper as time permitted and every week I read the Food section. The Times was one of my great high school loves.
With a firm understanding of political events gleaned from the paper, I started to watch the Daily Show my senior year. It inspired me to pay attention to mainstream TV News when my parents watched it. I finally had an explanation for why public discourse was so stilted and myopic. I realized that the events told in the Times were only half of the story, how events were extruded through televisions into people's brains was an incredibly important component to understanding public opinion. You see, most people's only source of news comes from the major TV News networks.
Never mind the "rich people control the world through media" bullshit, TV News is just not very informative. I never really watched it because it was boring. It took five or ten minutes for the TV to tell me what I could have gleaned in thirty seconds from skimming a news article. During "breaking news", a similar quantity of information is conveyed over the course of a few hours. Worst of all, the feedback between giving the people what they want and people wanting what they know produces what's known as the news cycle. And of course like a sorority house, all the networks' cycles sync up so that every channel provides a practically identical set of stories.
This willingness to follow results in a hulking mass of media might that answers to the whims of chance or whoever is smart enough to lead it around, and this kind of media tends to amplify the public's natural fickleness and retard their critical thinking. The truth is that mainstream media does not appreciably help the left nor the right. Rather, it changes the rules by which they play. If a trumped up scandal can be dropped on one's opponent at the opportune time, such that that is all anybody's talking about on election day, plus ten points for you!
Thus, it came to pass that I blamed the media more than the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq. I watched coverage of Hurricane Katrina with disgust. I found the overplayed empathy obnoxious. Anderson Cooper should try harder to be an anchorman, not a saint.
When it comes down to it, it's the show that once followed profane puppets that tells it like it is and challenges both the people they report on and the populace they serve to think. It's not surprising that the Daily Show's preeminence is not obvious to everyone. The show's reliance on the world to provide material means that it is inconsistent and there's always plenty of low brow humor, but damn, when John Stewart went on Crossfire, I was starry-eyed with admiration. The man single-handedly had a show cancelled, but it wasn't his power that impressed me, it was his unabashed intellegence and his willingness to call a spade a spade on the rare occasion it's necessary. It was the same qualities that make him a such an amazing interviewer. I won't pretend like all of his interviews are riveting, but at their best they are the most intelligent conversations on television.
On a more somber note, my first media love is dying. The LA Times is smaller every time I go back home. I hear the quality has suffered too. When I left for school, I planned to read the Christian Science Monitor online in lieu of the Times. It's a well-written, relatively unbiased (certainly more neutral than the Times) and most importantly free online newspaper for those of you raising eyebrows at the name. Unfortunately, school was distracting and reading online just wasn't the same. I mean it's great if you want to google current events for something specific, but to get a good, reputable overview is a little trickier. Maybe I'm being picky or maybe the CS Monitor just isn't as good, but I think I'd read the news more if the Los Angeles Times was delivered to my door, skinny or not.
I think what will really happen is that smaller papers will stop printing altogether and having the paper delivered to your doorstep will become a luxury. I don't think the fee vs advertising business model question has been settled, but I and my age bracket certainly prefer advertising, so I hope time will see that win out.
Amateur blogs like this aren't a good source of news, but they're a nice digestion point, and some blogs like the Davis Vanguard are going professional and competing with established newspapers for quality reporting. I think a little turnover will be beneficial to everyone except some mediocre newspapers.
When I started high school, I started to read the Los Angeles Times. I read the front page and the funnies practically every day for those four years. I'd delve deeper into the paper as time permitted and every week I read the Food section. The Times was one of my great high school loves.
With a firm understanding of political events gleaned from the paper, I started to watch the Daily Show my senior year. It inspired me to pay attention to mainstream TV News when my parents watched it. I finally had an explanation for why public discourse was so stilted and myopic. I realized that the events told in the Times were only half of the story, how events were extruded through televisions into people's brains was an incredibly important component to understanding public opinion. You see, most people's only source of news comes from the major TV News networks.
Never mind the "rich people control the world through media" bullshit, TV News is just not very informative. I never really watched it because it was boring. It took five or ten minutes for the TV to tell me what I could have gleaned in thirty seconds from skimming a news article. During "breaking news", a similar quantity of information is conveyed over the course of a few hours. Worst of all, the feedback between giving the people what they want and people wanting what they know produces what's known as the news cycle. And of course like a sorority house, all the networks' cycles sync up so that every channel provides a practically identical set of stories.
This willingness to follow results in a hulking mass of media might that answers to the whims of chance or whoever is smart enough to lead it around, and this kind of media tends to amplify the public's natural fickleness and retard their critical thinking. The truth is that mainstream media does not appreciably help the left nor the right. Rather, it changes the rules by which they play. If a trumped up scandal can be dropped on one's opponent at the opportune time, such that that is all anybody's talking about on election day, plus ten points for you!
Thus, it came to pass that I blamed the media more than the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq. I watched coverage of Hurricane Katrina with disgust. I found the overplayed empathy obnoxious. Anderson Cooper should try harder to be an anchorman, not a saint.
When it comes down to it, it's the show that once followed profane puppets that tells it like it is and challenges both the people they report on and the populace they serve to think. It's not surprising that the Daily Show's preeminence is not obvious to everyone. The show's reliance on the world to provide material means that it is inconsistent and there's always plenty of low brow humor, but damn, when John Stewart went on Crossfire, I was starry-eyed with admiration. The man single-handedly had a show cancelled, but it wasn't his power that impressed me, it was his unabashed intellegence and his willingness to call a spade a spade on the rare occasion it's necessary. It was the same qualities that make him a such an amazing interviewer. I won't pretend like all of his interviews are riveting, but at their best they are the most intelligent conversations on television.
On a more somber note, my first media love is dying. The LA Times is smaller every time I go back home. I hear the quality has suffered too. When I left for school, I planned to read the Christian Science Monitor online in lieu of the Times. It's a well-written, relatively unbiased (certainly more neutral than the Times) and most importantly free online newspaper for those of you raising eyebrows at the name. Unfortunately, school was distracting and reading online just wasn't the same. I mean it's great if you want to google current events for something specific, but to get a good, reputable overview is a little trickier. Maybe I'm being picky or maybe the CS Monitor just isn't as good, but I think I'd read the news more if the Los Angeles Times was delivered to my door, skinny or not.
I think what will really happen is that smaller papers will stop printing altogether and having the paper delivered to your doorstep will become a luxury. I don't think the fee vs advertising business model question has been settled, but I and my age bracket certainly prefer advertising, so I hope time will see that win out.
Amateur blogs like this aren't a good source of news, but they're a nice digestion point, and some blogs like the Davis Vanguard are going professional and competing with established newspapers for quality reporting. I think a little turnover will be beneficial to everyone except some mediocre newspapers.
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