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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Some More Stuff and Nonsense
While we're on the topic of imagination and truth, here are couple of historical validations for Gilliam's message. From Francis Bacon's first essay, On Truth:
A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
Or, as the Italian popular phrase puts it -- a phrase I discovered in college and kept repeating to myself throughout my final exams -- Se non e vero, e multo ben trovato. (If it is not true, it is a happy invention)
And as I said to my friend Rich tonight in a discussion about children: all kids lie. Or rather, they construct their own truths about everything. They do so with glorious, unabashed creativity. When they grow up, those with passion and sense discover the safest avenue for creative truth, the cloak that covers our finest lies. It's called Fiction.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 27, 2006
Alone With the Muses
To the Victoria & Albert for the first time. It turned out to be a calm oasis of eternal culture in South Kensington, and another very good reason to love London despite the cold and the evil bare trees. Fell in love with a couple more paintings from Burne-Jones, an artist who never fails to affect me. The three muses dancing to a tune by Apollo by an old mill at sunset tore my heart out. Something this Victorian mind saw that is lost to us, something about essential impermanence and slow grace, resonates in every drop of paint on his canvas, every pencil-soft grey outline of a sad, shimmering pale-gold girl. His characters always seem in danger of fading away, as if the overpowering beauty of his landscapes is sucking the life out of them.
And the advantage of doing London museums on a cold Monday in February, I see now -- I had the paintings, the muses, the mechanical gidgets of three centuries and some outrageous chandeliers practically all to myself.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 26, 2006
Stuff and Nonsense
I do love me a bit of Terry Gilliam. The Brothers Grimm, which I brought over on DVD and just this minute screened for a delighted audience, my Camden flatmate for the week, is another one of those terrific and grusome Gilliam riffs that probably won't be fully appreciated for the genius they are until the director dies. True, Heath Ledger and Matt Damon do distract with their fake British accents as much as they help with their madcap Brad-Pitt-in-Twelve-Monkeys-ness. But the tale they enact is strangely scary (in classic Grimm style; just about every phobia you can think of is stuffed in here somewhere), a nice mash-up of the elements of every Grimm tale into a fantastically fantastical tale of the tale-tellers as they most definitely were not.
It's also packed with delicious metaphor for the modern world. Cold military logic, in the form of Jonathan Pryce's Napoleonic general, is ruthlessly attacking the forces of imagination and enchantment embodied in a folkloric forest in occupied Germany. We, the inhabitants of the age of reason, burn down forests. We set fire to folklore. And we lose. The spark of storytelling triumphs.
Quite a preachy tale to swallow? It would be, in the hands of anyone but Gilliam, who can't resist poking fun at anything and everyone, a list that starts with himself. In every frame, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so, is the kind of Fellini-esque grotesquerie that makes the world around you look such an eye-openingly laughable place after you stagger away from the credits. Stuff and nonsense, says he, is key to the whole picture. That message is just what I need on a taking-stock vacation like this. Don't forget the spark, the stuff, the nonsense, when envisioning your big picture.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 25, 2006
How Do I Feel?
I feel like my left arm has been kicked by a horse, which is what the nurse warned the diptheria and tetanus injections would feel like in a day or so. My right arm, where I got the MMR, has had a recurrence of the brief RSI-like twinges that caused me to run to a chiropractor a couple of months ago. Probably coincidence. Still, I hope you appreciate what I'm going through for you, America. And why I might be giving London wistful looks. London never made me get jabs.
(Sidenote: which country calls injections "jabs"? My muddled American English/English brain has forgotten. I thought it was the Yanks, but come to think of it, it does sound British. This kind of question is cropping up more and more often, as I get more and more linguistically bipolar).
Lest this entry sound too miserable: I'm fine. Really. Got a bit of a hangover, and residual euphoria, from a night of drinking and dancing at Dublin Castle, a pub in Camden where I caught up with one of my oldest friends.
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 24, 2006
On the Town
Most Americans are surprised to learn that I'm not from London, and that I've never really lived there. I don't know why this should come as such a shock. There are approximately 58 million people in the UK, and only 10 million of them live in the capital. So instantly suggesting that any Briton hails from London is the conversational equivalent of playing Russian Roulette with five loaded chambers -- or assuming that an American comes from California.
All of which ranting is merely to say that London is an unfamiliar and exotic place for me, too. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the city, and I was reminded of that today, traipsing around the Oxford Street area for my green card interview and embassy-mandated medical appointment on what surely must be the coldest day of the year. The wind was a bitter one, throwing grit into eyes already watery, and not even three thick layers was enough when the snow started falling while I waited in the 9:30am appointment line outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
The place, I have to say, couldn't look more like the compound of a military dictatorship if it tried. I pity the poor embassy workers, who are really pleasant people and must be quite embarrassed to go to work every day past the concrete bariers that have effectively closed off the entirety of this beautiful Georgian Square and park, through the acres of barbed wire, past the machine gun-bearing guards -- the fact that they're British bobbies made it more sinister, somehow -- and past the potential immigrants made to wait in a mismanaged queue outside, all of them cold, many of them pushing to the front, as if they have to go through an enforced training session to act like huddled masses, poor, tired and hungry, before they can enter the land of the free.
On the inside, after I was forced to surrender my Palm at the third and final security check, all was smiles and efficiency. I barely had a moment to crack open my book before I was called. The woman behind the first bullet-proof window and I had a nice conversation about her daughter wanting to be a journalist. The guy behind the second window asked just one question -- how long had I been working for Time Inc. -- before approving the green card application, pending medical exam. I was almost disappointed. Aren't you going to ask me lots of delicate questions like whether I plan to become a citizen, and what it is I do that's so special? Don't you want to take a look at the hot-off-the-presses magazine cover I edited? Here, check out my lapel pin: the stars and stripes and the Union Jack entwined.
It all seemed a perfect metaphor for post-9/11 America. Those on the outside experience nothing but the scary machine guns and the barbed wire. Within, there are droves of perfectly decent and often exceptional human beings, but they toil in obscurity. Most aren't even aware that they present such an intimidating face to the rest of the world.
Then it was back out on the bitter streets of London, with four hours to kill before my check-up. There's only so long you can sit in Selfridge's nursing a pot of tea. So I walked the streets, cursing the howling wind and the growling, smelly diesel taxies. What a dirty, overcrowded, endlessly badly-planned town London can seem sometimes. How often it strives to hide its immense wealth of culture and history behind crumbling or concrete facades.
But then my wandering took me up Marylebone high street, and the sun broke for a moment over a row of Georgian terraces, and I passed an antique shop called Blunderbus, whose old-fasioned bottle-glass windows displayed Napoleonic hats and swords, and I marvelled that the shop next door could stay in business -- had, it seemed, stayed in business since Victorian times -- selling nothing but ribbons.
In a matter of minutes, I had left the London of muggles far behind, and was browsing in a bookshop that looked halfway between a library and a church organized around a large and delightful stained-glass window. A woman was doing sums with her daughter -- not homework, mind you, but mental sums, just for fun -- and the air was thick with whispered literary anecdotes. Yes, I thought, it's possible I really wouldn't mind living in London.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 23, 2006
What Did I Tell You?
LONDON -- Wet snow. If ever there were proof of the non-existence of God -- the kind of God that controls weather, at least -- it would be this awful wet, slushy snow. What kind of loving deity would ever make snowflakes fall from the sky only to cheat us at the last minute, to deny us the beauty of a white blanket over everything and instead throw piles of grey nastiness in our paths? What possible use is slush, in the grand scheme of things?
Yes, wet, slushy snow and a nightmarish wind-chill. Welcome to the worst of my country. The flight was okay, thanks largely to Ahmed, the charmingly inquisitve kid in the seat next to me whom I helped with the harder questions in his BA-issued puzzle book. But now I'm tired, I'm crabby, I'm cold, and I'm certainly not in the best mood for a green card interview. Why the bureacrats had to drag me all the way back here for this rigmarole, I'll never know.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Meeting the Saber-Toothed Tiger
Here I am lounging at an exit gate at SFO, watching through a giant window as the sun sets behind my plane, and feeling that marvellous sense of peace you get when all the packing is done, and if you forgot something, as you undoubtedly did, well, it's too late now. Not your responsibility any more. Alea jacta est, as they say, which roughly translates as "the suitcase has now been checked in. Please proceed to the departure lounge and buy overpriced wi-fi."
I leave with mixed feelings, many of them about the weather. The sun that just set so artistically has been gracing San Francisco with its presence nonstop ever since I booked this trip; taunting me, almost. Who knows, I suppose, it could be this nice in London. If so, I will get down on my knees and thank the gods for CFCs. But February is not a month particularly known for its beauty in my country. If March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, as the saying goes, then February spends its whole time prowling around like a saber-tooth tiger. A really, really mean one with blood on its fangs and hunger in its belly.
The other thing is, and I don't know if you've noticed this, all the fun parties and events only happen the instant you leave town. Much to my chagrin, I'm missing two great parties on 3/3 -- one for the SF Writer's Grotto, the other for people who turn 33 this year. A multiple Jesus year celebration, in other words. (Speaking of JC, you must watch this music video. Warning: you will probably go to hell for the giggle you get at the end.) When I tell SF friends my date of return, they exclaim "March 13?" in the same tone of voice they'd use if I'd just said "2013." It's only two and a bit weeks, but what with the short month, it's the calendar-based equivalent of an optical illusion.
But yes. I return March 13. Which means I get to fully experience the lion and have to skip the lamb. Shame. I do like a bit of lamb, especially on a skewer.
Don't worry, loyal Blah readers. I haven't forgotten my commitment to you. Every day, I promise.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 21, 2006
London APB
Attention London-based friends: I'm heading your way. Yes, the Green Card people have, in their infinite wisdom, decided (after many months of waiting) to give me an interview time at the U.S. Embassy in London at almost the last possible minute. So I fly in on Thursday morning and I'll be around at least through the weekend. Apart from getting asked petty questions by petty bureaucrats and getting jabs at an overpriced medical facility, the only one officiall appointed by the embassy -- in a no-bid contract, no doubt -- I have no plans. So let's get together and soak up some of that fabulous February London weather!
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 20, 2006
Perfectionism: the Final Word
If you live by just one quote, if you tape only one printout to the refrigerator in your lifetime, make it this one. It has made, and continues to make all the difference to me, whenever I chance to remember it.
"I beg you ... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." -- Rainer Maria Rilke
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 19, 2006
And Speaking of Perfectionism ...
I noted this one because it could just as easily apply to me, but still, see if you can guess who the author is talking about. (Hint: I've written a lot about him).
"His personality thrived on scarcity and adversity, but struggled with abundance and ease. Obsessive perfectionists are in constant need of severe constraints and hard deadlines. They need limits that force them to choose, commit and move on. Otherwise they can be paralyzed by their powers of self-criticism or, alternately, overwhelmed by the excess of promising ideas that they can envision." -- Alan Deutschman
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 18, 2006
Commonplace Book: On Writing
Here's a little piece of writing advice I wrote down some years ago in my commonplace book -- book of favorite quotations for the ignorant -- and have been trying to live by ever since. Those who know me, and know my inherent, immaculate perfectionism, will understand why doing so is the hardest task I could possibly set myself.
There are fundamentally two kinds of writer, just as there are two kinds of monogamist: the immaculate and the infallible. For the immaculate, every sentence must be perfect, every word the inevitable one. For them, getting it right is the point. For the fallible, 'wrong' is only the word for people who need to be right. The fallible, that is to say, have the courage of their gaucheness; they are never quite sure what might be a good line, and they have a superstitious confidence that the bad lines somehow sponsor the good ones. -- Adam Philips
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 17, 2006
Lazy Muncie
Tired of watching white guys faux-rap about their favorite beverages, mapping services and entertainment? Hold on, pardner, we're just getting started. Here's Lazy Muncie, the official Midwest response. It's a lot more watchable than Lazy River, the previous Midwestern entrant. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that with its unabashedly long intro and break for a surprise celebrity appearance -- it's an appropriately bland celebrity -- Lazy Muncie kicks this whole thing up another notch.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 16, 2006
You Wanna Get Fried With That?
Remember that potato experiment you did in school where you stuck pieces of copper and zinc in a spud and proved that it can conduct electricity? This guy claims he powered his stereo system using 500 lbs of potatoes in the back of a U-Haul. Helpfully, he adds, "do not eat the potatoes after you've used them as a battery."
Why is that, I wonder? Are you sucking out their life essence when you use them to power your music? Have you transformed them into evil taters, apt to zap your mouth with as much voltage as they can muster while the remants cackle evilly on the plate? Or does saccharine pop music actually infest your pommes de terre with more refined sugars than anything in Ray Kroc's wildest dreams?
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Pillow Fight
The first rule of Pillow Fight Club is that you do not talk about Pillow Fight Club.
The second rule of Pillow Fight Club, especially when it takes place in Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero just next to your workplace, is that you do not tell your co-workers about Pillow Fight Club, for fear of looking insane.
The third rule of Pillow Fight Club is that if you do not attend Pillow Fight Club, because, say, you had to run home to clean it up in time for a Valentine's Day party you were hosting, then you must spend the next morning looking longingly at pictures of Pillow Fight Club on Flickr until you can taste the feathers in your teeth.
Hopefully there will be a next time ...
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 14, 2006
The Dems' Unhappy Valentine
Never mind Dick Cheney shooting his 78-year-old hunting buddy in the face. The Democrats just did a far, far worse thing, politically. At this stage, the party's foot is so replete with self-inflicted wounds you've got to wonder why they don't just hack the gangrenous thing off; nevertheless, they just went and sprayed it with buckshot again.
Remember that hugely popular Gulf War II vet running for the Dems in Ohio -- Paul Hackett, the most appealing candidate the left has found since Barack Obama? Well, he's just dropped out of the Senate race, citing pressure from party grandees in Washington. They want him to step out of the way of Sherrod Brown, a guy with lots of appeal in Ohio but zero national name recognition.
Hackett's not taking it well. Nor should he. He called the pressure a "betrayal", and the group of 56 other Gulf veterans the Dems have running across the country said they "got a chill." This makes me want to take Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, the grandees in question, and beat them over the head repeatedly with a very large Gallup opinion poll.
Gentlemen: You have veterans clamoring to join your ranks, offering their unimpeachable muscle to help get the incompetent donor-shooting bastards out of power, to beef up the one part of your portfolio where you look like 90-lb. weaklings to most of America. You should not only be inviting them into the tent, you should be unzipping their sleeping bags and hugging them so closely it hurts. Who cares if it gets a little Brokeback Mountain in there? That's nobody's business but yours.
But no, you think you can run politics by numbers, don't you? You think it's all strategy and money and algorithms. You think America is the Internet, and you're Google. Well, that strategy has served you brilliantly so far.
No. Politics is about emotion. If you can get the emotional tone right, if you can feel it in the guy, the strategy and the money and the algorithms will follow. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is a business for alpha males. We regular humans forgive alpha males a lot if they make us feel safe. Just ask Uncle Dick, who probably won't even be prosecuted for doing the modern equivalent of flinging his alpha male feces in the face of another tribe member.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 13, 2006
All the Nonsense that's Fit to Print
Hey, kids, fed up with your Wikipedia amendations being overwritten because of other Wikipedians relentless (and boring!) insistence on "facts"? Try the Uncyclopedia instead. Not a word of truth to be found in the thing. (That is, until some trolls from Wikipedia start hacking into it -- but you're on whimsy's territory now, knowledge boy).
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 12, 2006
Trusting the Court Jester With the Crown Jewels
There's a nicely measured, fairly comprehensive Time cover story on Google from old business hand Adi Ignatius. It doesn't tell me a single thing I don't know about the company and the guys, but it's not aimed at me. It's aimed squarely at the middle. The thinking is not especially deep, and it may not be clear to many whether the cover line -- Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets? -- has in fact been answered. There has been an increase in recent years in cover lines with question marks, and a concomitant decrease in the number of cover line questions that are answered in cover stories, pointing no fingers.
But Adi does capture the disarmingly childish quality of the boys and their grown-up that you feel in their presence, even as he's baffled by it. (I've seen this bafflement time and time again in my bicoastal days -- it's hard for New Yorkers to get the Silicon Valley ethic, to grasp that you can be a successful multibillionaire and care more about Lego than flashy Italian neckties, that your questing mind can think more about space elevators than how you're going to screw your competitors).
The overall effect is kind of sedative, kind of nicely soporific. Can We Trust Google With Our Secrets kind of morphs into the question: Can We Trust the Court Jester With The Crown Jewels? And the answer is: yeah, sure. Why not? He cares less for wealth than for our edification. He might do something magical with them. Let's see where he's going with this.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 11, 2006
Video Blogs: A Guide
And while we're on the subject of video blogs like Rocketboom, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Kathleen's guide to the best free Video Podcasts is pretty damn comprehensive. That lady is getting pretty prolific at husband Dan's old stomping ground, Wired News. Which is A Good Thing, because there's precious little else worth reading over there these days.
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 10, 2006
Cookies: An Apology
In an article yesterday on Daily Blah, we mistakenly implied that the excellent cookies emanating from the Anderson household had something to do with Ms. Diane Anderson. Our youngest reader has since pointed out that the manufacture, licensing and distribution of said cookies is in fact the sole responsibility of Story Frances Lehrer Industries. Daily Blah regrets the error.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 09, 2006
Of Cookies and Rockets
My friend Diane recently told me she was going to make it her mission for the year to get mentioned in Daily Blah. I ruminated on this for a while, wondering what I could get in return -- she does bake excellent cookies, and a Blah entry has got to be worth at least a dozen hefty gift baskets of them. But what if the press found out? Do I really want to get sucked into some sordid blogging-for-cookies scandal? No, sir, I do not. For the sake of my journalistic ethics, and my waistline, I shall now grant her wish.
There are many things I could say about Diane "Mad Dog" Anderson, ace reporter, Industry Standard veteran and mother to the world's most adorable five-year-old girl, Story (so named because, of course, everyone loves a good story). I could tell you, for example, about the time we went to the Google media holiday party and she earned her nickname by assaulting Larry Page with questions about hybrid cars the second I introduced her to him. The poor guy never stood a chance. But that was all off the record, and besides, I'm saving it for the tell-all biography.
Nope, for now I'll confine myself to the relatively minor fact that Diane was the one who introduced me to Rocket Boom. Yes, the geek hipsters among you are probably rolling your eyes at the fact that I didn't know about Amanda Congdon's daily broadcast already. I've been skeptical about the very concept of video blogs for the longest time (not to mention that hideous condensed term "vlogs", which I guarantee will never catch on). But a single Rocketboom erased my doubts. This is the virtual equivalent of having a friend come over and show you half-a-dozen of the latest weirdest and wildest Internet memes and news items. All done with a distinct arch of the eyebrow in three minutes flat. Nothing captures the zeitgeist of my ADD, quirky-smart generation better.
Yesterday was Rocketboom's eBay auction, in which the site cannily sold off the rights to the first advertisment on the show -- the content of which will be determined and produced by Rocketboom itself -- for $40,000. This could be the start of something big, or it could be the start of another promising piece of subversive entertainment selling out. Either way, however, I think Ms. Anderson has the potential to be twice the video blogger Ms. Congdon is. Diane's got more looks, more smarts, and way more experience than a 24-year-old actress who got the job by answering an ad on Craigslist. Which is why Mad Dog and I will shortly be dipping our toes into the wild waters of podcasting. $40,000 ought to buy a lot of homemade cookie ingredients. Stay tuned.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Under the Weather, Underwear
A rotten day of bedrest, my second of suffering from another bout of that nasty feverish cellulitus thing that makes my lower left leg balloon up from time to time (this is the fourth time it's happened, and the reason appears to be a mystery to the best medical minds at UCSF). To make matters worse, the weather is taunting me -- we appear to be having an Indian summer in February, and there's nothing I'd like more than to take a stroll, or at least a hobble in it. But merely limping down the stairs to meet the pizza guy at the door is about all the adventure I can manage for now.
Only two things have raised a smile in the last couple of days. One was watching old Arrested Developments on TiVo, and the other was discovering that my boss has been interviewed on the subject of his and his wife's underwear, and the result is rapidly making the rounds in Silicon Valley. Those geeks really need to get a life. Still, as Josh knows, there's really no such thing as bad publicity.
And before you ask: yeah, I'm in the boxers camp too.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 07, 2006
From the Archives: eBay essay
One of the up-sides of keeping a blog (the downside being that it's like a marriage you never signed on for) is that if I suddenly get a surge of pride about something -- a moment of "hey, I wrote that, and it's pretty neat" -- I've got carte blanche to inflict it on you, dear reader, at length. Because what are you going to do? Complain? No, you're going to get sucked into the pretty neat prose too. And like it. So there. (Which all recalls one of the many, many wise things my J-school guru Judith Crist taught me -- you've got to have an ego the size of Norman Mailer's to be in this business, because why else would you want to inflict your prose on innocent strangers who never did you any harm?)
Here, for example, is an essay I wrote for Time Europe about eBay back in 2001 (and never posted before; I don't think American readers would have had a chance to see it, and given poor sales of Time Europe at the time, few of my British friends will have seen it either). It's another one of those I-capture-the-zeitgeist kind of dealies that Time does so well (and it illustrates the difference between my job then and now; then I was supposed to capture the zeitgeist, now I'm hunting down the next zeitgeist). I've long known that journalism well done is the first draft of history; well, here's a page or two of the several dozen I'd like to contribute to that first draft. None of what is below will be news to you now, of course, but it was then, and I hope you'll get a sense of the almost boyish optimism that one company could do so well in the middle of such hideous dotcom decline. Remember, this is back when people thought no dotcoms would survive the turmoil.
Forget about black monoliths. If the late great Stanley Kubrick had known what was going to be really cool by the year 2001, his seminal movie would have opened with 25 million ape-descendents clustered silently round an awe-inspiring and somewhat unreal auction house. Then to the tune of the Blue Danube, we’d see some amazingly diverse items shooting weightlessly through the ether– Sterling silver Jaguar cars, Sherlock Holmes first editions, Xerox networked printers, a pair of Madonna concert tickets, an ostrich-egg incubator – moving at a rate of five million purchases per day. The climactic scene, perhaps, would feature astronaut Dave and arrogant computer HAL bidding furiously against each other for a highly collectible Beanie Baby.
The unreal auction house in question is, of course, eBay, and it is in many way the most powerful pure-play Internet force on the planet Earth in 2001. It has recently become the top e-commerce destination, growing at a rate of roughly one million users per month. While its brethren in the legendary website club (namely Yahoo and Amazon) suffer alarming slowdowns in growth, eBay posts quarter after quarter of stunning profits (its latest: $21 million, an increase of more than 150% on the same time last year).
It has done so on the back of a few phenomenally simple ideas, all of which owe allegiance to capitalism in its most raw and ancient form. Anyone can be a buyer and anyone can be a seller. Price is determined by the number of buyers and how much they’re willing to pay. Haggling is not only mandatory, it’s automated. Sales have a deadline; everything must go. And most importantly, the quality of the bazaar increases exponentially with its size. There are rival online auction services – Yahoo and Amazon again – but eBay still has the lion’s share of the market, about 85%. Put simply, they maintain the lead because they have the lead. If you’re a seller, there’s nowhere better to go.
Unchecked by any complex laws of economics, eBay spreads itself like a virus. There are few geographic restrictions; Australian, Austrian, British, Canadian, French, German, Irish, Italian, Japanese, New Zealand and Swiss-specific versions of the website are available. There are practically no legal restrictions, especially since a San Francisco court recently declared the auction service could not be held responsible for pirated or bootlegged music sold on its site (Napster should be so lucky). Its name has entered the global lexicon; “I bet you’ll find that on eBay” has become the punchline to a thousand jokes. For the media, eBay is a bottomless treasure trove of news items, from the boy who tried to sell his soul to the convicted killer who capitalized on his rapidly evaporating minutes of fame by trading in his follicles and calluses. You could argue that such disreputable excess is bad publicity. Then again, there are a million corporations out there that would kill to have such anecdotes attached to their name – to be known as the place you can buy absolutely anything, and at potential bargain prices.
Which helps explain why corporations from IBM to General Motors are falling over themselves to do deals with the web auction giant. Disney auctioned off the “D” from the original Disneyland sign. Technology titan Sun Microsystems sold server hardware on the site with million-dollar starting prices. Yet despite such big-league partnerships, it’s still the little guy that counts here. Unlike your local mall, eBay would not survive for a second without mom and pop operations. Its entire success is predicated on extreme diversity. And you can forget about the pernicious influence of Madison Avenue here. In this hypermodern arena of hardcore capitalism, big business is forced to squeeze its wares into the same one-line classified ad as the rest of us. The site’s internal search engine is the kind of leveling tool Karl Marx never conceived of. Ask for an automobile and eBay is just as likely to turn up your neighbors’ five-year-old Pontiac as GM’s latest top-of-the-range four-wheeler. The effect is as pleasing as browsing a bookstore where new and used titles mingle democratically on the shelves, arranged by their content and not by the glossiness of their covers.
The average eBay user stays on the site for an hour and a half, which is an extraordinarily long time by Internet standards (considering even the bookish Amazon.com user only hangs around for 18 minutes). That’s because they don’t just bargain-hunt or post pictures of their mint-condition pool table; they build communities. Trust is a tangible thing in this world, with each seller receiving an all-important democratic rating based on how often they delivered the goods as promised by the agreed-upon date. When suspect auctions like supposed organ sales slip unseen into the massive melange, it isn’t eBay staffers who spot them first – it’s the auctioneers, vigilantly policing their own neighborhood. More controversially, veteran buyers employ special software that helps them jump in and snap up items in the last seconds of an auction. But mostly the instinctive acquisitiveness of the denizens forms the kind of lasting bonds that are too often lacking in offline society. They meet and swap tips in the chat rooms, they build friendships over sales, they sometimes even wed. Spend any amount of time hanging out here and you’ll get the impression of a vast, virtual citadel under rapid construction; a tower of Babel with street hawkers on every level, most all of them kept honest by the gaze of their neighbors.
If this is a flea market, as some detractors say it is, it’s the most extensive flea market in human history, covering most of the planet’s surface and many centuries of our past. Our collective memories are inventoried here, albeit briefly. A quick search reveals current auctions for an ancient Roman coin, a chunk of the Berlin Wall and a Florida voting machine. They won’t stay there for long. Items on eBay move at the speed of humanity. We may not be flying Pan Am jets to the moon in 2001, but with eBay’s help we’re constructing something much more meaningful to the average ape-descendent.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 06, 2006
From the Archives: The Mick Jagger Visa
Holy cow, what happened to this blog entry from summer 2004? Did it never get published? Apparently not, since it's still sitting in my drafts folder, and it seems I did publish an entry immediately afterwards that talked about "the Stones fan," which must have confused any readers actually paying attention. Anyway, it certainly deserves to be published; especially in the last paragraph, it's a nice little record of the post-9/11 paranoia of the first Bush term. And it's appropriate timing, since I'm about to go back to England for my green card interview at the U.S. Embassy in London. Let's hope I end up dealing with people as nice as the Stones fan.
Today's Daily Blah comes to you from a postmodern hotel room in Toronto, where I'm awaiting the return of my passport from the American consulate. Knock on wood, it'll be ready this afternoon with a brand new O-1 extraordinary alien visa stamp in it. "Ah, the Mick Jagger visa," said my friendly interviewer at the consulate. He proceeded to give me a potted history of the O-1; the Stones were about to embark on one of their American tours and applied for H1-Bs, but the bureaucrats had run out of 'em (H1-Bs are numerically limited, thanks to US anxiety about letting too many talented workers into the country). It took an act of Congress, creating the O-1, to let the Stones play. "We've had Sir Mick in here a couple of times," said the interviewer, warming to his subject. "Nice guy. We bring him in at night, of course. Last time he was here, we took his fingerprints twice, and he said, 'why twice, mate?' Quick as a shot my supervisor replied: 'so we can sell the second set on eBay.' He laughed and said he didn't mind, so long as he got a cut."
I laughed myself, of course. It was quite a relief to be talking to a human being at last, even if it was a dizzyingly surreal conversation with menacing overtones of fingerprinting all foreigners. The morning had been one of wearying security paranoia and cattle-like lines; everything I'd dreaded since making this appointment months ago. You'd think when the INS approves you for an extraordinary alien visa, that would be the end of the matter. But no, that would be too easy. Bureaucrats would be out of jobs. You have to go present yourself at a consulate outside the US for the actual passport stamp. Before you can do that, said consulate sends you a letter with an intimidating list of requirements, some of which you cannot hope to fulfill. (How on Earth am I supposed to prove financial ties to the UK, for example? I haven't worked there in eight years.) This letter also warned that, post 9/11, the consulate wasn't able to process the visa stamp in one day any more. This came as a nasty shock, as I'd already booked my nonrefundable ticket, returning tonight. (The Stones fan said he'd see what I could do; hence here I am knocking on wood.)
Further heightening my anxiety this weekend was this highly disturbing tale from a Guardian reporter about being handcuffed and sent to a Guantanamo-like detention facility for not having the proper journalist visa. I challenge you to read this article and not think something has gone terribly wrong within the Homeland Security apparatus. Journalists are not constricted like this in any other country in the developed world; how ironic to see the US placing itself in the same category as countries like Iran and North Korea. The US, as the American Society of Newspaper Editors says, has "lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe." It is starting to treat its friends (and potential friends) like viruses, swarming us all with antibodies.
You see it in little ways; you see it in the faces of the subcontracted security guards, who puff their chests out and stare down at each applicant as if they were Osama bin Laden. You see it in the fingerprinting machines and terrorist mugshots stuck up next to glossy tourist posters. You see it in the overprotective procedures and repetitive paperwork. America is starting to close up like a clam, and nowhere is it more obvious than in the middle of an otherwise eminently friendly global city like Toronto. Thank God that human beings are still occasionally part of the process; at the end of the process you're chatting with a Stones fan, even if he is on the other side of bulletproof glass.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 05, 2006
How to Get More Humans
Thank you for clicking on Daily Blah. Your click is important to us. Please stay on the site, and the next available reader service agent will be with you momentarily. Your surfing may be monitored for NSA training purposes. Your estimated wait time is ... two ... thousand ... hours. If you'd like to leave a number where you can be reached, please press 1.
READER: Get human.
ME: I'm sorry, I don't understand. If you'd like to leave a number ...
READER (with anger): GET HUMAN!
(Pause. Series of bleeps. Dial tone. Click. The sounds of a bustling call center)
ME (bored and chewing something): ThanksforcallingdailyblahmynameisChris. HowmayIprovideyouwithexcellentcustomerservicetoday?
READER: Hello. I'd like to know how to hack my way through voice mail hell and talk to human beings at a wide variety of large, soulless companies with minimal disruption to my precious time and state of inner peace, please.
ME: Alright, I can help you with that. Are you sitting in front of your computer at this time?
READER: Of course, you idiot. What do you think I'm doing, tanning myself on a beach in Bermuda?
ME: Alright, what I'd like you to do is go ahead and open a browser window, then go ahead and type in h, then t, then t, then p, then colon, then forward slash, then forward slash, then double-u, double-u, double u --
READER: Hang on. Can't you just give me a link to this website?
ME (pauses, chews some more): I'm afraid I'm not authorized to do that at this time.
READER (sighs): Okay. What's next?
ME: Go ahead and type in "gethuman.com". You'll find a comprehensive list of cheats for getting through various voice mail trees -- when to press zero, even if the robotic voice claims that's an invalid entry; when to raise your voice, which the computer will often recognize and put you through to a human faster, and when to yell "get human" at the top of your lungs, which is appropriate, existential, and highly satisfying.
READER (surprised): Wow, that's actually helpful.
ME: My pleasure. Is there anything else I can do for you today?
READER: Well, I'd like to transfer a large amount of money from my bank account into the Daily Blah Benevolent Bermuda Travel Fund, please.
ME: Alright, sir/m'am. I can help you with that. If you'd just like to go ahead and leave your account, routing and check number in the comments section, I'll take care of it.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 04, 2006
Blogging Bad Pitches
It was inevitable. Sooner or later, a journalist was going to start a blog blowing off steam at the less human types of PR flaks and listing the worst examples of their incessantly bad pitching. The Bad Pitch Blog is just that. I commend the authors, and would only say that if I were writing it, I'd not try to disguise the names of the pitchers and the companies they're shilling for. If you write a bad pitch, you deserve to be outed.
Meanwhile, some reporter friends and I are planning a series of top-dollar seminars for flaks on How Not to Pitch. Our company name: The Hand, as in talk to the. Watch this space for more information.
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 03, 2006
Knowing When to Quit
I knew I had to blog about Broke Mac Mountain the moment I saw the title. I mean, come on. Broke Mac Mountain. It writes itself. Guy who's having a hard time with a program on his Apple computer -- "I wish I knew how to quit you" -- falls in love with the tech support guy.
It's probably a lot funnier, though, if you've seen the original movie. Which I still haven't done, but ought to do before the Oscar hype becomes torrential (ie. when it wins). I wish I knew how to quit having my expectations for a movie raised to unrealistic heights. (And I wish America knew how to quit reducing movies to catchprases.)
Okay, quitting it now.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 02, 2006
The Google Future Goes Live
The only frustrating thing about switching to a monthly magazine is that I have to wait a lot longer before sharing what I've been working on with you, my loyal Blah readers. Now, at last, I can show you what I was writing in the fever-tinged days of late December: Google is Business 2.0's smart company of the year, and I wrote four scenarios of what might happen in Google's future. Here's the package.
The thing seems to be generating a lot of buzz. Readers have been writing in with their own scenarios. My predecessor at Time, who now works at Google, told me it was all over the 'plex, having been posted in internal message boards. This Google blog wrote about it, as did my dear friend Elinor over at CNet. What interested her, and those who posted comments on her piece, was scenario number 4 (Google is God) and its whiff of blasphemy. Clearly, we're on to some big buzz generation here. Perhaps the next cover should be "why Google is bigger than Jesus."*
*Note to humorless Christians: I'm joking.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 01, 2006
The Real Robot Dog Requiem
Life is full of coincidences, and this is one of the more painful ones. After I published that story last week about killing my Aibo back in 1999, Sony suddenly decided to kill the whole Aibo line. I couldn't be more distraught if Howard Stringer started shooting real puppies in the street.
Why, Howard, why? Sure, times are tight and you need to cut costs. And maybe Aibo wasn't raking in iPod-like profits (pretty hard when the damn thing still costs $2,000) -- but it was a loss-leader, a mascot, a symbol of Sony style. An icon of cool. And just too cute, too affectionate, too real to kill.
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