PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

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Linking

• Phil Gyford, wearing his finest pair of Tufte trousers, takes a chart of the FTSE that the Guardian ran on Saturday and places it on a scale that shows the fluctuations of Friday's market compared to the full value of the index.

  This particular annoyance is the graphs of share prices in the press and on TV. It is standard practice to start the y-axis at a number much higher than zero, in order to magnify the ups and downs of the market.

  (link)

• In a recent column, ESPN sports writer Bill Simmons shared his list of best sports pieces ever written. Max from The Millions took Simmons' list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.

  (link)

• Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn't go over too well.

  With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.

  That seems about right.

  (link)

• This collection of letters written by Norman Mailer over the course of the last 60 years is a revealing portrait of the author and an interesting look at the history of the last half of the 20th century.

  I'm rather depressed these days. It's been years since anything I've done has turned out successfully -- with a few rare exceptions -- and I'm falling into the thing which afflicted you a couple of years ago -- a failure of the will, shall we say. My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character, and I think of this enormous novel I'm now starting, which could well take ten years, and if done properly, it must be unpublishable except in green-backed French "dirty" editions, and I'll be middle-aged when it's done, and somehow I just don't believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn't even seem terribly important. I'm beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated -- people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable -- after all, I say to myself, I haven't done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them.

  I particularly like the letters written to William F. Buckley, Jr., a man whom Mailer called a friend but with whom he disagreed vehemently on political issues. Don't see much of that today, publicly at least.

  (link)

• After posting about the Metropolitan Life Tower the other day, I was looking through some recent email and discovered one from a week ago that by chance contained a very unusual story about the building. Filmmaker Pes was researching for a film in Woodlawn Cemetery when he came across the odd tombstone of a 15-year-old boy who had died on his birthday:

  LOST LIFE BY STAB IN FALLING ON
  INK ERASER, EVADING SIX YOUNG
  WOMEN TRYING TO GIVE HIM
  BIRTHDAY KISSES IN OFFICE
  METROPOLITAN LIFE BUILDING

  A NY Times story from February 16, 1909, Stabbed to Death in Office Frolic, reveals how George Millitt died.

  Yesterday he came down and remarked that it was the anniversary of the wreck of the Maine. He explained that he knew it because the ship had been blown up on his birthday and that he was 15 yesterday.

  At once the girls began to tease him. They told him that on such an occasion he desereved a kiss, and every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year that he had lived. He laughingly declared that not a girl should get near him, and was teased about it all day.

  As 4:30 o'clock came, and the boy's work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so.

  "I'm stabbed!"

  A blade used for scraping ink was in Millitt's breast pocket and caused the mortal wound. (thx, amid)

• This NY Times article about Shopsin's is full of wisdom and bullshit (sometimes both at the same time) from owner Kenny Shopsin.

  "I dedicate myself to consuming all sorts of ideas," says Shopsin, an avid reader and Internet crawler. "Eventually something inside me, probably skewed by my erotic feelings about breasts and things like that, assembles a product and just shoots it up." For example, a recent item on the food blog Serious Eats about foods on a stick led to the State Fair combo plate: corn-dog sausage, s'mores pancakes and chicken-fried eggs. New dishes are printed on the menu the same day: "I spent almost $3,000 on toner in the last three months," Shopsin says.

  Love it. Check out the video of Shopsin cooking his mac 'n' cheese pancakes.

  (link)

• If kottke.org had a movies and TV store, here's what I'd be selling today:

  - The Dark Knight on Blu-ray or DVD. Out Dec 9.
  - Wall-E on Blu-ray or DVD. Out Nov 18.
  - The Wire: The Complete Series on DVD. Out Dec 9.

  (link)

• In a 1999 essay about The Sopranos written after its first season, Vincent Canby suggested that the show was an example of a relatively new form of television, the megamovie.

  "Berlin Alexanderplatz," "The Singing Detective" and "The Sopranos" are something more than mini-series. Packed with characters and events of Dickensian dimension and color, their time and place observed with satiric exactitude, each has the kind of cohesive dramatic arc that defines a work complete unto itself. No matter what they are labeled or what they become, they are not open-ended series, or even mini-series.

  They are megamovies.

  That is, they are films on a scale imagined by the big-thinking, obsessive, fatally unrealistic Erich von Stroheim when, in 1924, he shot "Greed," virtually a page-by-page adaptation of Frank Norris's Zola-esque novel, "McTeague." Stroheim intended it to be an exemplar of cinematic realism.

  Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society -- there's more going on than just the plot -- without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes. They're shot cinematically and utilize good actors. Plot details sprawl out over multiple episodes, with viewers sometimes having to wait weeks to fit what might have seemed a throwaway line into the larger narrative puzzle.

  Episodes of these megamovies, Canby argued presciently, are best watched in bunches, so that the parts more easily make the whole in the viewer's mind. For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows. If stamina and non-televisual responsibilities weren't an issue, it would be preferable to watch these shows in one sitting, as one does with a movie.

  Since The Sopranos kick-started things in 1999, the megamovie has become a far more common occurrence on TV. Virginia Heffernan recently stated that the creators of nearly all hour-long dramatic series are aiming to make megamovies. I've collected a few examples of megamovies accompanied by their total running times below. The list is incomplete but represents several of the best-known and -appreciated megamovies out there.

  The Sopranos, 81 hours 46 minutes
  Lost*, 61 hours 59 minutes
  Mad Men*, 18 hours 6 minutes
  Six Feet Under 57 hours 45 minutes
  Deadwood*, 36 hours
  The Wire, 60 hours 45 minutes
  The West Wing, 111 hours 56 minutes

  For The West Wing, that's 4 days and 16 hours of continous watching. An asterisk marks megamovies that are as-yet incomplete. In the case of Deadwood, it's as if the film projector broke about halfway through the movie, only no one got their money back and eveyone left the theater pissed.

  Update: In his review of the third episode of Mad Men this season, Andrew Johnston talks about the two dominant forms of TV drama and how The Sopranos and Mad Men fits in. (thx, stephen)

• By substituting "independent video game" for "short story" in The Ambition of the Short Story, (mashedmarket) turned the essay into a manifesto of sorts for indie game developers.

  The Triple-A game is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the Triple-A game, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The independent video game by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the independent video game can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the Triple-A game -- after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that's left.

  (link)

• A collection of artworks featuring Kate Moss, including a self-portrait drawn with lipstick.

  (link)

• Conventional wisdom and prevailing opinion among hardcore Boston Red Sox fans is that LA Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez finally sulked his way out of a Boston Red Sox uniform by basically phoning it in and causing trouble for his team for a couple of months earlier in the season, which phoning and trouble resulted in a trade of Ramirez to LA for very little in return. Two rebuttals have surfaced recently that seem more plausible to me. The first is Facts About Manny Ramirez by Joe Sheehan. Sheehan uses some of those pesky facts to illustrate that on the field, Manny played as well or better during the supposed phoning-it-in period than he has in the past.

  When he played, Ramirez killed the league. He hit .347/.473/.587 in July. His OBP led the team, and his SLG led all Red Sox with at least 25 AB. The Sox, somewhat famously, went 11-13 in July. Lots of people want you to believe that was because Manny Ramirez is a bad guy. I'll throw out the wildly implausible idea that the Sox went 11-13 because Ortiz played in six games and because veterans Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek has sub-600 OPSs for the month.

  Four days before he was traded, Manny Ramirez just about single-handedly saved the Red Sox from getting swept by the Yankees, with doubles in the first and third innings that helped the Sox get out to a 5-0 lead in a game they had to win to stay ahead of the Yankees in the wild-card race.

  In Manny Being Manipulated, Bill Simmons attempts to answer the question, Ok, so why did Manny suddenly want to be traded and, more importantly, why did the Red Sox actually oblige? Simmons' answer: Scott Boras, Ramirez's agent and "one of the worst human beings in America who hasn't actually committed a crime". According to Simmons, it all boiled down to mismatched incentives and following the money.

  Manny's contract was set to expire after the 2008 season, with Boston holding $20 million options for 2009 and 2010. Boras couldn't earn a commission on the option years because those fees belonged to Manny's previous agents. He could only get paid when he negotiated Manny's next contract. And Scott Boras always gets paid.

  Boras could only get paid for representing Ramirez if Manny signed a new contract. Which he will next year because as part of the trade, the Dodgers agreed to waive his 2009 option and allow him to become a free agent. And the Red Sox went along because they decided they'd rather have a good relationship with Scott Boras going forward instead of a weird relationship with Ramirez. As for Manny, he gets paid either way, rarely appreciated the weird pressure/adulation put on him and every other Red Sox player by Boston fans, and, I get the feeling, likes swinging a bat, no matter what team he plays for.

  (link)

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