Author Archive
Karl Lagerfield – interviewed by Bruce LaBruce
When Vice [Magazine] called me last month with an out-of-the-blue offer to fly to Paris and interview the Kaiser himself, Karl Lagerfeld—creative director of the $10 billion Chanel empire, the house of Fendi, and his own eponymous line—I jumped at the chance. I have to confess that I wasn’t an expert about the fabled fashion […]
Google ‘leaves’ China over censorship
Good on Google for deciding that censorship was dodgy. It was always, always dodgy,* but perhaps the ‘commercial imperative’ had driven the free-thinkers at Google to submerge their outrage. ( — which is NOT a long term strategy, as we have discussed in relation to an example closer to home.) From the Google blog today: A […]
Fearless: Margaret Moth RIP
Margaret Moth was the trail-blazing, globe-trotting photojournalist and camera operator whose jaw was blown away by a sniper’s bullet as she and her CNN news crew were traveling through Sarajevo’s infamous Sniper’s Alley in the early 1990s. Terribly injured, she recovered and eventually went back to work, doing what she did best with tenacity and […]
What new media needs to learn from old media
COURAGE . What journalism should be: Dogged and fearless Wise words from one of my former editors, Don Rood, reviewing Nothing but the Truth by Anna Politkovskaya on Radio NZ this morning. Yeah! Damn right. Dogged and fearless. To proudly call yourself ‘new media‘ and talk about freedom of speech is good. But recognise that […]
Eloquent beyond words
The image in that last post reminded me: I stood in front of this sculpture in NYC a few years ago on my way to see Leonard Cohen in concert at the Place des Arts in Montreal. (Not my first trip to New York.) Its power exceeds and surpasses logical argument … if you’re open […]
Why ‘legal action’ can be sooo dangerous …
Look at the sort of thing comes out in the wash: For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them […]
The truth is disturbing. Who is paying attention?
Fantastic article and video of 60 Minutes on Michael Lewis Wall St meltdown here. “I’m afraid that our culture will come to the conclusion, ’cause it’s always the easy conclusion, that everybody was just a bunch of criminals. I think the story is much more interesting than that. I think it’s a story of mass […]
Murdoch: It’s not old media versus new media …
… it’s about how the content is produced and who is paying for it.” Paraphrase: “Google do not have the right to scrape our very expensively produced content if we want to stop them.” I see content scraped from news sites and reproduced in its entirety on discussion forums and blogs — with a credit […]
Farewell Charlie Gillett – Mr Eclectic
We’ve lost Charlie Gillett — longtime advocate-promoter-svengali of ‘world music’ … rock ‘n’ roll historian, and the supportive champion of so many different types of music. Not so much a gatekeeper as an enthusiastic enabler, Charlie helped so many careers and helped people get ‘heard’. I loved his BBC show. You never knew what you’d […]
A tale of woe … or fevered imagination?
The vast majority of the world’s population will NEVER visit an online discussion forum. They don’t care. (More important things to do etc.) Those who do (visit, and care) can be divided into a few categories from lurkers (who look but don’t post) to occasional and regular posters, to fanatical networkers and naked self-promoters who […]
Now Attack ads?
This fantastic spoof of a political attack ad just works. Excellent! Like Fake Steve Jobs, it’s brilliant satire — all with the ‘aim’ of getting 37Signals’ new book REWORK ahead of Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight on the best-seller lists. I love the sunrise and the uplifting music […]
Scoundrels
I’m reading a version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to my young son. This neat interchange caught my eye: Soon the Captain waved his hand for silence and we all stopped talking, except for the good doctor, who went on speaking loud and clear. The Captain glared at him and commanded —”Silence below decks!” […]
