Coffee snobbery: we’ve all experienced it. We’ve all been frustrated by encounters with our own personal Ravens. Few of us know how to respond with anything other than withholding a tip. But Jeff Simmermon’s epic “Hold that espresso between your knees” rant on the subject, following an encounter at Arlington’s Murky Coffee, is now the stuff of legend (bonus points for the Five Easy Pieces pull).
Coffee snobs are everywhere these days, and Murky’s owner is just being honest about being one of them. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, my first job was as a Starbucks barista. I worked the morning shift almost exclusively - getting up before 5 AM, driving through the dark and dodging the backroad wildlife, downing a quad shot, setting up the store in time for the first arrivals, who stumbled in like clockwork. I actually chose mornings, because I liked the customers better: fewer snobs. If you worked in the afternoons, you’d get middle aged parents, kids in tow, who thought they knew everything about coffee. They’d ask for shots pulled to ridiculously specific seconds, and temperatures of milk as hot as the fire of the sun.
I remember one customer in particular, a middle aged woman who talked a great deal about her cat, who insisted on 12-13 second shots, and half-skim, half-2% milk heated to exactly 180 degrees in her latte. The first time I worked an afternoon, she came in when I was on bar. I couldn’t believe she would actually want this drink, but I made it anyway, to her specifications. She walked away, took a sip, and immediately turned around.
“You didn’t make this right,” she said. “The shots are wrong.”
“Okay, how about I make it again?”
“The milk tastes bad. I think you’re using bad milk. Throw out that batch and use something else.”
“I’ll make it again.”
I made it again - this time, I pulled the shots to a more normal 18 seconds (thankfully, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t crane her neck around the bar) to see. I heated the milk to 140. I gave her the drink. She tasted it with a scowl.
“Oh, this is much better!” she said. “Yes, I think it was the milk you used before - be careful to check the date!” Then she smiled at me: “You’re lucky you’re new, and I’m a good customer, or I’d be more mad about that.”
Milk, I knew, scalds at 180 degrees.
She would come back again and again, and next time requested that I make her that special drink, since I did it right. Everybody thinks their drink is unique. But she’d just ordered a very simple, standard latte.
I loved mornings because of the absence of this customer type. Nobody is awake enough to complain about seconds or ten degrees one way or the other. They want to wake up, and they want to wake up fast. You are the avenue to them waking up. And here, try a lemon knot. By the end of the first month, I knew everyone’s drinks from open to about 10 AM - I could run bar without asking for orders, making the same drinks before they even called them out. It was excellent. When I left Starbucks after a little more than a year to head off to college, customers brought me going away gifts - including one sweet woman who brought me a lovely book of stories by Turgenev.
These days, I still go back to that Starbucks on occasion - of all the megachains, I still prefer their unground beans the best - and I use French pressed coffee pretty much exclusively. I use this for espresso. But I’m not above stopping in a diner when I’m on the road - even that’s better than nothing.
But even I have limits. I have to confess, I don’t like Murky Coffee. I’ve been there twice - the Arlington shop has a good location, you’ve probably driven past it a hundred times if you’re local - and both times, I found the coffee to be … subpar. As in, filtered through sweaty handmade socks subpar. I get that some people like this stuff. But that’s the whole damn point: it’s okay for them to like it, and okay for me to not like it. This isn’t a debate about something serious, like faith, politics, or game consoles. It’s just coffee. It’s not wine, it’s not cheese, it’s not even bread. Baristas learn their trade in a week of trial and error, not a sommelier school.
The mistake Murky’s owner makes in his response to the customer is referring to what they create at his coffee shop as “art.” Wake up, people: it isn’t. Good coffee is beautiful because its taste is perfect, well-crafted, and memorable - because it reminds you of a place or a feeling, of a conversation with friends, of a time in your life. That’s not art. That’s just good food.
This is America. As Chef Gusteau would say: anyone can make coffee. And they can make it the way they like it. Even if they really do figure out that they want 180 degree lattes, god bless their scorched tastebuds. There are better things to be a snob about.
I am not supposed to be happy about what Josh Hamilton did the other night. At least, not if I read the sports blogs out there. I’m supposed to put on my shiny pretentiousness hat, given out with every .com purchase on GoDaddy, and approach Hamilton’s story with sarcasm and ridicule for the man’s faith. Maybe dismiss him as old news. Maybe put up an old mugshot from his crack-addicted days and mock him as a jackass. Maybe make some crack about how he’s going to give that worship up since he didn’t win the Home Run Derby, and that he’ll keep switching religions til he does. He just hit 35 homers, yeah, whatever.
But I’ll leave that to the commenters at Deadspin.
I remembered seeing a TV interview with Hamilton when he was drafted 1st overall in 1999, watching it in my college dorm and realizing he was my age - and that he looked like just a good, All-American kid - and I remember reading about how it all fell apart. How he made it all fall apart. How he blew all his money, got kicked out, driven down. How he disappeared.
I saw a picture of him in a magazine in 2003. This was the new Josh Hamilton, staring out of sullen, sunken eyes - a picture that said drug addict, bust, failure. He didn’t look like The Natural - he looked like any other Crown Royal-swilling crack addicted piece of white trash - covered in tattoos, garish and ornate, demons and patterns, his skin telling of late nights and drug fueled blackouts and lost memories. As Dave Sheinin wrote: The Devil and the Son of God, waging war.
There’s a plot twist to this one, though. The Devil lost.
It’s funny the way you start paying attention to an athlete - one who’s never played on any of my teams, or even in the same state. But for the past several years, every roto league I’ve been in, I’ve drafted Josh Hamilton. First it was just the last pick of each round - like he was a mascot or something. Then earlier. Then this year, I took him in the sixth round, knowing the eyebrows of others would rise…and at the halfway mark of the season, he’s ranked 4th in points among all Fantasy Baseball players.
He says he made the long road back out of the blackness thanks to his loving family and his Christian faith. He says it’s saved his life. And he’s not shy about it. He wants to tell everybody. He knows where he’s come from, and what a gift this second - or is it third, or fourth - chance is.
I get a lot of abuse in visiting cities, but it only bothers me when people are vulgar around kids. The rest I can handle. Some of it is even funny. In St. Louis, I was standing in rightfield when a fan yelled, “My name is Josh Hamilton, and I’m a drug addict!” I turned around and looked at him with my palms raised to the sky. “Tell me something I don’t know, dude,” I said. The whole section started laughing and cheering, and the heckler turned to them and said, “Did you hear that? He’s my new favorite player.” They cheered me from that point on.
So I’ll leave it to more jaded writers to mock how Hamilton said he’d dreamed of this moment - of stepping to the plate at Yankee Stadium, hitting in the Home Run Derby. How he’d dreamed it two years ago, when the whole thing seemed like just a fantasy, an impossibility for a former drug addict whose best hope was a minor league career and a steady paycheck. How his faith led him back from the brink - faith not in his own ability, but in something greater. They can mock. It’s what they do.
As for me, if I’d been in the park the other night, I would’ve been chanting his name with all the rest, realizing that, whatever Hamilton’s career in the big leagues turns out to be in the years ahead, for this night - in this moment - we were all witnesses to a resurrection.
The internet is flooded with movie lists. Search for virtually any variety, any theme, any mishmash of tags and qualities and plot twists, and you can find a top 10, top 20, or even top 100 list. The best Top Films list, by my measure, can be found over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They – but one of the reasons it’s the best is that it can shift and adapt with time, based on the shifting opinions of critics, writers, and the internet populace. Of course, I fully expect that in the ever more wiki-friendly existence of the future, where everyone’s an equal critic, Battlefield Earth will champion all such lists. So here’s one more static one, purely subjective in every way, of what I consider Ten Beautiful Films You May Not Have Seen.
There are plenty of beautiful films that are quite popular and successful – from the old black and white classics to the Technicolor epics to the modern masterpieces. Many of them are found on lists like this one, from the French magazine Cahiers du cinema.
I thought it might be useful, though, to consider a few films that probably won’t make it high on any list like that one – whether it’s because even if they’re visually impressive, they’re flawed in some obvious way, or have a script that can’t match their cinematography, or they’ve got some unforgivably irritating element that overwhelms the good in them. For the record, I think this describes just about every movie Guy Pearce has ever made – he had a good six films that I considered but rejected for this list, none of them because of him.
There are other beautiful movies that I considered and rejected – usually because they’re too popular (see: Godfather, The), too CGI or effects-heavy (see: Lord of the Rings – it’s great, but this is animation, not reality), nothing that’s only noir (I love dark movies, but something like The Third Man or Thief may be intense and powerful, but since that’s all they do, they can’t really qualify as visual beauty for what they don’t show), or so iconic that anyone who’s a student of cinema has already seen them (hence why there’s no Hitchcock on this list, nor any of the other old classics). Films that missed the cut for the aforementioned reasons include Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben Hur, Patton, The Natural, Night of the Hunter, The Big Sleep, Charade, Roman Holiday, Manhattan, Bullitt, The Getaway (Ali McGraw never looked better), Mystery of Rampo, Blade Runner, The Sand Pebbles, Chinatown, The Sting, Apocalypto, O Brother Where Art Thou, North by Northwest, Miller’s Crossing, Branagh’s Hamlet, The Abyss, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fountain, Sexy Beast, The Last Emperor, Empire of the Sun, George Washington, The Rules of the Game, Heat, Unforgiven, Dark City, The Painted Veil, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Breaker Morant, The Battle of Algiers, The Incredibles, The Mission, Layer Cake, La Roue, Napoleon, and Metropolis.
I had a hard time with The Life Aquatic, this blog’s namesake and perhaps the last good Wes Anderson film we’re going to get now that he’s actively declared war on the concept of plot (here’s hoping that’s not the case), but ultimately decided it was too much of a picture book. Besides, everyone’s seen it.
I struggled with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America – but ultimately decided it’s too well known, you’d recognize all the people in it, and as wonderful as it is, there are so many other films that capture New York City.
And then there was the hardest one for me to cut of all, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans – a gorgeous and underrated film which manages to be both the perfect chick flick AND the perfect guy movie all at once – I can see it now, the women walking out of the theater saying, “She threw herself over the edge – so sad, and so romantic!” as the guys say “Did you see that? He chopped that guy in half with that axe thing! It was awesome!” But it will make a prominent appearance on the next list I’m planning, and it was quite popular, so you’ve probably already seen it, too.
So that leaves us with these, in no particular order.
The New World
Just unbroken cinematic beauty, from the first note to the last. When they initially planned to film this movie, Terence Malick and his crew assumed they’d have to find somewhere remote, outside of the United States even – but on a lark, they decided to scout the Tidewater area, and took a trip up the Chickahominy. They ended up realizing that the location near Jamestown was largely unchanged. And so the forests you see are the forests they saw, give or take 300+ years.
Not everyone liked Malick’s film. But the people who liked it seemed to love it, too. I’m glad it has such a strong place in the heart of a few critics, like Jeffrey Overstreet, and I recall Ross Douthat loving it too (but his review, on the old American Scene blog appears lost to the sands of the unsearchable net). It reminds me, as it did him, of the old Robert Frost poem, The Gift Outright.
What’s more, I’ve felt on repeat viewings that the underlying story – the tale behind the gorgeously filmed surface of this movie (all natural light, almost all 65mm stock) – goes much deeper than you might think. The relationship with Pocahontas can be viewed as an allegory for the foundation of America. Bear with me now, it’s not as silly as it sounds: Comparing the personality types of the courageous risk-taking Discoverer in Colin Farrell’s John Smith and the steady, uninspiring, yet tough and reliable Farmer in Christian Bale’s John Rolfe, and you see the two personalities that made the nation possible – the explorer and the maker. Smith, the unreliable rascal whose fear and shady past motivated him to head toward the far reaches of the known sphere, discovers Pocahontas. But you cannot trust this man to build a country, to have the wherewithal to work the land, endure hardship, and make a life worth living in this new world – to be faithful, committed, and make something out of it all. Something like America.
The Searchers
I don’t think it’s all that pretentious to say that if you are an American film buff of any significant level, you’ll have seen The Searchers. Merely a modest commercial success in its time, the respect for this film, its influence and appeal have only grown, chiefly because of a change in understanding of a key relationship and plot point – never spoken of aloud, only implied.
Not the perfect western by any means – it plods and halts at points – this is nonetheless a movie of great, epic, expansive beauty. You must see this film, even if you skip all the others on this list.
City of God (Cidade de Deus)
You’ve probably heard of this one. City of God is tragic, ruthless, violent and unforgiving. Only one professional actor is in the whole thing – it’s all on the edge, and there’s no games in this thing. The youngsters that populate this tale are murderous and plotting, and you understand why they have the strength of will to run a profitable drug trade, if only for a few years.
Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, the tales in this story are continued in City of Men, at least in spirit. But the original film is still the piece of moviemaking that will haunt you for days after you view it.
The Red Violin (Le Violon Rouge)
This is not a particularly successful movie. It tries to do too much – using a violin, its music, and its ownership as the major pieces in an across-the-ages plotline that is a tad ludicrous. The bodice-ripping tendencies of the second act – with the usually superb Greta Scacchi (if you can, dig up her excellent little turn as Lady Macbeth) and the “he’s better as a funny guy” Jason Flemyng – are laugh inducing. And the whole thing seems overwrought and gimmicky, sort of what you’d expect from a director who made his name doing Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
That said, the cinematography is flat out gorgeous at points. The use of color is brilliant, particularly in the flow of character-types through the ages, and the seamlessness of some scenes. The soundtrack, played by the brilliant Joshua Bell, will blow you away. Don’t think too hard about the story – just get swept away by the experience of a beautiful piece of modern cinema.
Barry Lyndon
I never really liked this as a movie – I confess, I don’t love post-black & white Kubrick as much as I should, I still feel like The Killing, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove are just all-around more watchable and engaging films than 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket – but I swear, Barry Lyndon is just gorgeous to behold. John Alcott’s work on the film is the stuff of legend (as far as I know, this film still features the use of the biggest aperture in movie history).
It’s still kind of amusing that Ryan O’Neal got this part because he was considered a bigger star at the time than Robert Redford, so it’s the only way Kubrick could get the movie financed. Later, it would turn out that Kubrick offered the part to Redford anyway, only to be turned down. But O’Neal’s not the reason to see this. These beautiful scenes are.
While others may disagree, I truly believe this is the most visually appealing movie Kubrick ever made. And that’s something worth seeing.
Kagemusha
This had to be on here. Yeah, I know that Ran is a better movie – but the first time I saw Kagemusha is still clear as crystal. I’m still torn about which one deserves to be on this list, but I feel like Ran is more popular. Maybe I should just leave it at: see them both, and decide for yourself.
Ronin
Ah, a beautiful car chase movie – and not a stupid one, either. One of the best casts you’ll ever see onscreen at the same time: De Niro, Reno, Skarsgard, McElhone, and a total of three Bond villains – Bean, and Pryce. This movie has characters, yes – but it is all about the cars. Car chases in Bullitt are classic and American, car chases in The French Connection are blunt and urban, but car chases in Ronin are brilliantly varied and elegantly European.
The camera work in this film is excellent stuff, edgy but not overdone. Parisian cinematographer Robert Fraisse, who has a rather odd filmography, makes some excellent choices, elevating this piece far above the realm of the normal shoot-em up. And if this is the last adrenaline rush for De Niro, who hasn’t made a single good action film since (though I’ve got my hopes up about the Michael Mann-helmed Frankie Machine, due out in two years – that is, if he survives what looks like the very flop-worthy Righteous Kill), it’s a classic one.
This is Frankenheimer’s best cinematic work since The Train, and it’s got a pretty good story (albeit MacGuffin centered – but c’mon, even Hitchcock used that) with a great script, though I’m sure all the best parts are from the (uncredited) David Mamet edits. If you’re a guy, you’ve probably seen this already. If you haven’t: grow a pair and do it now.
A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles)
So let’s follow the car chase movie with snappy Mamet lines with a French romance war epic. But it absolutely deserves to be on this list. The trailer is here, but there’s a clip below that’s better for not having the “I’m the important voice trying to sell this to American audiences” voiceover.
I can’t say anything about this movie that does justice to it as a work of art. Just – watch a few scenes. You’ll see it. Oh, and: eat your heart out, Atonement.
Road to Perdition
For being the most profitable film on the list, this is not a great movie. Tom Hanks is poorly cast in it, and uncomfortable with the part of father/heavy. The kid is an irritation. Daniel Craig is one dimensional. Sam Mendes’ directing is decent, but not really that imaginative. It’s based on a comic book and feels like it. It is a cold movie, and a wet, wet movie – dripping with rain. If you want an Irish mob movie, see Miller’s Crossing.
But let me tell you – visually, it’s like watching Edward Hopper brought to life. Conrad Hall won the Academy Award for Cinematography – his first came for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He was a genius. And this is just masterful.
For that fact alone, if this is Paul Newman’s last on-screen part, he can be proud of it. “There are only murderers in this room, Michael. Open your eyes. This is the life we chose. The life we lead. And there is only one guarantee—none of us will see heaven.”
Before the Rain (Pred Dozhdot)
This was the film that started me thinking about this whole concept, when the alert came across my watchlist that Criterion was releasing a newly restored version of Before the Rain on DVD (at last). I saw it years ago in a screenwriting class, and it amazed me at the time. Unlike some of the other films on this list, all aspects of this effort make for a worthy achievement.
It’s hard to make a film about ethnic conflict in the Balkans that speaks to the unending, self-perpetuating, and convoluted nature of these deadly clashes. It seems like so many of the locale-centered movies that you see in America today are in the same places – New York, Los Angeles, the same backgrounds, the same forests, the same hills – to the point where you can go see an average flick like Mission: Impossible 3, and you’ll spot the same bridge setups and Euro backgrounds you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. It’s almost comforting, like seeing the same set week after week on your favorite sitcom, nothing disturbed or out of place, and all the furniture undisturbed.
In a movie like Before the Rain, you may recognize all of one setting or location, and probably only one actor: Rade Serbedzija, the figure at the heart of the sad story. But the performances are complemented by a sense of scale and land that is memorable and striking, and the camera work here – for an inexperienced writer/director in Milcho Manchevski – is just an amazingly well-crafted thing, giving the viewer the impression that they are caught in an ever-swirling trap of time and land and culture. In real life at least, there is always an opportunity to break out of this whirlwind – but not in this film.
Video game ads can be, quite frankly, terrible. If you’ve watched any TV appealing to the nerd demographic, you’ve seen them. Horribly forgettable and captive of their genre, they use the same crunching music over and over again, the same jumpy cuts from one FPS kill to the next. Even good games can be made to look uninteresting and cliched - while great games, like the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, just aren’t the sort of things that play well in the 30-second ad format. It’s similar to movie trailers that way - the more features, the more complexity, the less ability to simplify and sell - so a crappy and formulaic genre film paired with a recognizable drumbeat, an ominous voiceover, and a quick jump cut at the end is transformed into nicely motivational preview, while plot-heavy indie films can be harder to scale down. Sometimes impossible.
A devious little ad promoting the online multiplayer capability of XBox Live, set to the creepy strains of “Teddy Bear Picnic.” Frank Budgen has done some great work on this front - he worked on at least three of the ads on this list, besides his work for Nike and other big names.
9 - Gears of War: Mad World
This is on here mostly as a contrast with the kind of FPS game ad I noted before. It’s similar in some respects to this ad for BioShock set to “Beyond the Sea”, but the Gears ad featuring Gary Jules’ Mad World has an enduring following, and hits the right note for Gears’ post-apocalyptic environment.
8. George Plimpton doesn’t know Henry Thomas
This ad just gets more bizarre every time I see it. George Plimpton was the spokesman for Intellivision, and made a host of good ads for them, but the humor here is that Henry Thomas had just finished making E.T. - the idea that Plimpton wouldn’t recognize him was just ridiculous.
7. Pole Position
Turn your speakers down for another throwback. “Hey! You look like a real jerk!” “Well, I am a corporate executive…”
6. Mountain
Another multiplayer ad, with much the same feel as the XBox one, albeit for a different system. But I love this one more, not just for the soundtrack, but the perfect encapsulation of the exhilarating feeling you’ve experienced if you’ve ever broken into a national Top 100 list (I’ve only done this once - Warhawk, right when it came out) on a multiplayer game.
5. Ratchet and Clank
The Ratchet and Clank ads were ahead of their time in their Youtube-esque feel. I always liked the one with the gravity boots best. Also, Cloverfield is totally a ripoff of these ads.
4. Halo 3
These are all ads from the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign, which are just a phenomenal representation of the war documentary feel. I wish the game was as good as these ads - but I’ve always loved the initial teaser, which ran during the Super Bowl, even better:
3. PS9
Now this is a classic. There is still a minor cult around this ad - and a running joke that whatever console problems there are, they’ll be fixed at the PS9 stage - and the design in it is excellent. The only problem: at the rate we’re going technologically, I doubt we’ll have to wait til 2078.
2. “Banned” XBox Shooting ad
I still kind of doubt that this ad was actually “banned”, as opposed to just released as a bit of internet fodder. But it does take me back to the days of running around the backyard with fingers raised or nerf guns, and the inevitable arguments that would emerge about whether someone got hit or not.
1. Double Life
By far, the best ad ever done for any game system ever. And one of the few bizarre ads created for Sony (and there have been a lot of those, many of which are magnificent triumphs of awful) that actually works. This doesn’t just work: it speaks to anyone who’s ever played a game and loved it so much as to enjoy “a life of dubious virtue.”
Not those books: these books. The brilliant Michael Lopp’s extensive ruminations on the perfect notebook may seem odd to some, but to people who still can’t get through a day without jotting down their thoughts, it’s an excellent piece:
The primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way… to disappear. It does this by perfectly fitting into your writing situation. How accessible does it need to be? What notebook tangibles do you need? How will it withstand a beating? By fitting into how you write, a notebook becomes invisible. It wastes none of your time because any moment you spend noticing the notebook is a moment you could be noticing something else, and writing about it.
But that’s not what makes a notebook truly sexy.
I have years of experience with some notebooks, weeks with others. As you can see, I’ve explored a wide variety of notebooks. The photo above is ordered chronologically, with my oldest journal on the bottom and my newest discovery, the Field Notes brand, the notebook in which I’m writing the first draft of this article, on the top. Like The Gel Dilemma, I’ve evaluated notebooks according to specific buckets of criteria.
He proceeds to evaluate the different brands, based on a variety of factors. I agree that paper weight is the Achilles heel of the Moleskine brand, thought the Cahier pocket size is quite durable in my experience, and is the notebook I’ve used the most simply because it’s inexpensive and easily replaced if you drop it somewhere or spill coffee on it.
My problem with notebooks is that they don’t have quality paper. But that creates another problem: the ones that do, such as a nice notebook I bought in college from Cavallini & Co., are just too nice to actually use. I feel guilty, like it’s bad to mix up the To Do list and callback numbers with random thoughts that will turn into unsuccessful proposals or unimportant blog posts across paper that is at least 90# stock. Thus, the nicest notebook I own - a handmade leather bound embossed hardback I got from London, which looks like it should contain lengthy discourse on Thucydides or at least a good poem or two - is still unused. It sits on my desk in its wrapping, mocking me on a daily basis with its tobacco colored spine. I’ve had it for almost five years, and it is waiting for me to write in it.
This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.
It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad - albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:
The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising
Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.
From Gio’s Bio:
Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media
Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.
As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.
Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.
Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.
If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?
Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.
This little icanhas-friendly banner was inspired by the announcement yesterday by the McCain campaign that you can create, for a mere $250, a banner expressing your unique satisfaction with John McCain. I’m not sure what to say to this idea, but it reminded me about how aesthetically unappealing presidential campaigns tend to become - their logos the product of hours of debate and committees populated by people who’ve never designed anything worth emailing.
If you want a sign of how conventional politics is, and how the innovation of the Obama campaign really is finally catching up a national campaign with the design trends of the ’90s, check out this collection of presidential bumper stickers, 1960-2008. I particularly love how Fred Thompson’s sticker is crowded, illegible, and the color of prune juice, as if designed for the Law & Order-watching retirement communities of Florida in which he put so much hope.
The best part of any designed branding, though, has to do with the font choice of a campaign. Ah, these are some doozies. And 2008 is no exception - as one of my favorite typography blogs Ask H&FJ recently pointed out. The originators of the Gotham font so famously used by The New Adonis, they even mocked up graphics with the Hillary and McCain fonts in their proper place:
Nor were these designers alone in their fascination with these choices. The New York Times hosted a roundtable on McCain’s font, the overused 90s relic Optima (which nonetheless still has some gravitas, since it’s the font displaying the names of so many heroes on the Vietnam Memorial). The descriptions can get a little silly, but there’s truth in this ridiculousness:
While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.
The designers questioned have some interesting thoughts - some like the selection, most hate it, but many concede that it’s a choice that has a good deal in common with McCain’s personality. The newest entry in the presidential stakes, Libertarian Bob Barr, has a font that seems like a solid midwestern pro-American creation, suitable for a beer can or a local sports bar - neither of which, I think, would meet the approval of the Prohibitionist candidate for President (yes, there still are those). Chuck Baldwin, the televangelist Constitution Party candidate, has a logo that looks as if it should grace a can of Play Doh or silly putty. Over at the Green Party, the colorful logo of Cynthia McKinney pits an offkilter insurgency against a staid old Nader logo that looks not unlike his original presentation more than a decade ago. It’s honest, at least - even his logo looks like dried-up ’80s-era socialism.
Asking whether this odd grabbag of out-of-touch designs are any more a sign of what lies within each candidate than Obama’s famous O logo illustrates how foolhardy this talk is: football players don’t pick their NFL team based on the logos on the helmet, or pick a sport based on whether they want to wear Nike, Reebok or adidas. All that Obama’s campaign has done is recognize that they should start abiding by the rules of a different game - not the tired old design choices of prior candidates, with the same color arcs and blocky typefaces, but with the attitude of tried and true corporate ad agencies. Sell a candidate like you’d sell a good pair of shoes, and the same people tend to listen and react.
Of course, if you want to see real font-leveraging in action, you have to go back to the good old days, when things were cool and slick. Yes, the glory days, before everything had to be grungy and worn-in: the 1980s. Watch this first.Read this second.
For a presidential candidate who has based so much of his message on an appeal to a new generation of voters thirsty for hope and change, Barack Obama said something a few weeks back which almost seemed – dare one use such an epithet – uncool.
Speaking to an audience in Indiana, Obama talked about the latest national ill he hopes to cure from the Oval Office: the scourge of video games, embodied by the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. Admitting that he was only prompted to make the remark based only on a morning news report about how the game will “break all records and make goo-gobs of money for whoever designed it,” Obama spoke in the stilted, uncertain tone politicians tend to use when they’re describing a subject with which they have little familiarity. Here’s a hint to listening: it has the same false certainty of Republican Senator Ted Stevens when he infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”
“These video games are raising our kids,” Obama said. “Across the board, middle-class, upper-class, working-class kids, they’re spending a huge amount of their time not on their studies, but on entertainment.”
Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election. In February he urged University of Texas students to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,” in another dated reference. And in 2006 Obama rather rudely returned a donation from Doug Lowenstein, then-president of the game industry’s Entertainment Software Association.
Obama isn’t alone in his dislike for gamers – during her time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would’ve expanded the regulation of game sales and imposed heavy penalties on stores who accidentally sold the game to underage customers. And more than a few politicians in both parties took to the airwaves in anger in response to the release of one of Rockstar’s previous iterations of the GTA series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game that could be unlocked within modified versions. But it’s clear that when it comes to video games, there are far fewer Republicans who have a problem – this is a Democratic issue.
What is it about video games that infuriate so many Democrats? What is it about these games that make them emulate ambulance chaser Jack Thompson, the ever-present clownish Florida attorney who would probably find a way to blame video games for acne and crabgrass? And why is it that these political leaders refuse to acknowledge the plain truth: that the video game industry as a whole has undergone a massive change for the better in the years since Tipper Gore’s crusade against the evils of Ice Cube?
Over the past eight years, the Federal Trade Commission has significantly stepped up their monitoring of the video game industry. The unspoken message: shape up, or we’ll start cracking down. And to their credit, the industry responded as we would hope responsible members of the marketplace would: they stepped up their support for self-regulation, they made the rules clear for gamesellers, and they made a sustained effort to educate parents on the ESRB game ratings that are now the industry-wide standard.
According to the FTC’s 2007 report on their “mystery shopper” monitoring program, the area of greatest improvement over the past eight years has by far been the video game sector. In 2000, 85% of underage customers teens were able to purchase Mature-rated games – today, that number has been more than cut in half, down to 42%. By comparison, 39% of underage customers were able to buy an R-rated movie ticket – and that’s comparing a purchasing system with a stagnant model that has been in place for more than thirty years to one that has expanded drastically, rocketing to $18.8 billion in sales in 2007.
It’s not just the industry that’s matured, either. Gamers themselves are growing up – according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, over 35% of parents American play video games, and 93% of their children, numbers that will only increase in the future. Engaging systems like the Nintendo Wii and the vast arena of online play have taken video games from a pursuit for teens alone to a cross-generational platform for group entertainment. And as Harvard psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson find in their new book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, the overwhelming majority of young players use games not to play out violent fantasies, but to relieve stress and relax.
Obama’s tired anti-gamer rhetoric about slacking and laziness starts to sound particularly silly when you consider the creativity, ingenuity, and strong social conscience at the heart of the grown-up gamer community. For an example, one need look no further than Child’s Play, a charity founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade, which has given over two million dollars in donations from video gamers of toys, games, books and money delivered to more than 40 children’s hospitals worldwide. Not bad work for a bunch of underachievers.
If Barack Obama wants to take on video games as his latest straw man for America’s manifold problems, that’s his business. But he should be smart enough to recognize that gamers can’t be caricatured anymore: too many people have played these games without being inspired to do violence and mayhem. Gamers look increasingly like America as a whole, and they want to take responsibility for the upbringing of their own children. The same Hart study found that 85 percent of voting parents say that they – not government, retailers or game creators – are responsible for monitoring their children’s exposure to games. Sorry, Clinton and Obama – that’s one less area where voters want the government to play daddy.
Let’s give the Illinois Senator a pass on this one, though. It could be he’s just stressed out from the campaign trail. If he wants a break, he might consider a trip to Liberty City to blow off some steam. At least it’ll take his mind off of whatever Rev. Wright is up to today.
Michael Yon does not have time to talk to you. There are things going on. The front is ablaze with fire. The sound of gunfire is not distant, but down the block. And yet here he is, sitting down across from you, setting a bottle of scotch on the table, taking off his sunglasses to see straight into your eyes. He is tired, yes, tired of it all – but he has a story to tell you, a story you must hear, and you are damn well going to listen.
“There is a clear battlefield conversion from ink to blood, from blood to ink,” he says. And you understand.
Yon’s new book, Moment of Truth in Iraq, reads as this conversation would: the unflinching staccato of a man who has seen more than almost anyone else of this war, this absolutely necessary but unquestionably mismanaged war, and the men and women who fought and died to win it.
It is the story of Fallujah and Anbar. Deuce Four. The Welsh Warriors, Rorke’s Drift Company. The Holy Hand Grenade. How to Get Killed. Petraeus. The Surge. The Sons of Iraq. The Seven Rules. Farah.
Do not say another word about these things – do not write about them as if you know what you are talking about – until you read this book. Until you set yourself down and talk over scotch and sand as the explosions echo.
You will listen. Again and again, unwise policies devised by diplomats throw new perils upon them. Again and again, Yon heads out with groups of young men, soldiers who do know what awaits them, and yet conquer their fear, set it aside to do what must be done.
He checks the windows first.
If you are going on a combat mission and soldiers have not cleaned all their windows to a sparkle, do not go with them. Soldiers with dirty windows are not watching for tiny wires in the road, nor are they scanning rooftops. They are talking about women, football, and the cars they will buy when they get home. I will not go into combat with soldiers with dirty windows.
Clean windows, so they will see what’s coming. Sometimes they will stop it before it comes. Sometimes they will not. Yon is there for it all. He is determined that these stories – the stories the media at home will not tell you, the stories you must dig to find amidst the latest celebrity marriages, hot new gadget, and Hollywood gossip – will not go unwritten. He will write them himself, in the back of a Humvee, and send them back across the globe. And you will listen.
You cannot read Yon’s book in bed. I found it hard enough to read it sitting down – it rips out tales that will make you frustrated, then angry, then grateful, and then you weep. But clear your reading list. You must read it, because it is the most truth about this war that you will ever read, a tale of blood and sand and heroes and villains – and hidden underneath it all, hope.
The military is at war. America is at the mall…American combat soldiers don’t want pity. They’re ready to fight to the end; they just don’t want it to be for naught. They have been fighting for two nations, one of which didn’t seem to notice. The Iraqis noticed.
The reactions to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club were almost universal. Even commentators like Andrew Sullivan, who spent weeks arguing that Rev. Wright’s statements were either taken out of context or irrelevant to the discussion at hand, were forced to concede their indefensibility.
And showing the kind of courageous leadership he has already become known for, Barack Obama knows how to respond when an opinion is poll-tested at overwhelming levels: he adopts it unconditionally, as if he has held it all along. As Rev. Wright, insightful political observer that he is, said yesterday: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”
Remember those fine words Sen. Obama shared in Philadelphia? How he could not denounce his spiritual mentor, the inspiration for The Audacity of Hope, without denouncing the entirety of the black church? Just a few weeks later, those words mean nothing. Or, the Obama campaign seems to be urging, perhaps in our cynicism we just misunderstood them. Sen. Obama does not flip flop. He has held the same position all along. It’s just Rev. Wright who’s changed into something “unrecognizable” to the Senator, after twenty years of friendship.
One wonders when, exactly, this alteration of character took place. Was it on one of those Sundays when Sen. Obama sat and listened as Rev. Wright launched into a tirade against the United States of America, when he tithed as they passed the plate and shook hands with important citizens after the service? Was it when Rev. Wright, as he later told the New York Times, acknowledged that the Senator would have to distance himself from their church in order to win the presidency? Or was it only when Rev. Wright appeared in front of the gathered cameras and stuck to his rhetorical guns, refusing to disavow his past positions? Those hot lights certainly bring clarity for the new Adonis who turns winter into spring, and the idea that churches are chosen according to the political benefit to a rising politician, not that incidental matter of beliefs, is looking awfully bad in hindsight.
Wright did not hide from the questions: he answered them frankly and honestly. He conceded the anti-Americanism of his statements, and more. When asked about the Senator’s Philadelphia speech, he responded: “[Barack Obama] didn’t distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American…We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”
The theology of Barack Obama is an intriguing one. Forgive my clumsy brevity of description, but: if we understand the theology of George W. Bush as one of a very New Testament-heavy understanding of God’s power of redemption – for the individual, for government, and for nations; and the theology of Bill Clinton was one of hands-off deism – where God forgives virtually any personal sin as long as your aims are noble; and the theology of Ronald Reagan as an Old Testament understanding of God’s hand moving invisibly behind the great clashes of good and evil empires…we must find Obama’s personal view to share the most in common with the theology of Jimmy Carter, circa 1976.
It is a kinship that Rev. Wright certainly believes exists between himself, the former president and others – at least on the subject of Israel.
“Louis [Farrakhan] said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter’s being vilified for and Bishop Tutu’s being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that’s what I think about him…Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color.”
Barack Obama is the evangelist of the betterment of man. His religion is one of an almost overriding humanism, to the exclusion of the divine: hope is his signet, change his golden cross. He brings salvation to the masses via the empowerment of government, government under his leadership. His followers are not the Southern pro-American Carter voters, and they may carry iPhones instead of the hoes of the agrarian south, but the message is striking for its similarities. Where Carter constantly used Protestant religious terminology to describe the healing that needed to take place in the wake of Watergate, Obama’s solution for the Iraq war and the other sins (as he sees them) of the George W. Bush administration is to say: trust in me – untested, inexperienced, poll-driven me – as you trust in yourself.
Yet there are small differences as well, and those are key to understanding the Senator. The language Obama uses may still be that of prayer, but it is prayer not directed toward a creator, but to his audience itself. Faith turns inward, and becomes an infinite loop. So Carter’s “We can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems” becomes “Yes we can.” And so the old sung tones of “Wait upon the Lord” morphs into “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” From Obama’s perspective, as opposed to Carter’s, it is only the bitter, the nervous, the threatened, or the uneducated who cling to religion.
We know how this ended the first time: the infamous malaise speech of 1979. As the eloquent Steve Hayward put it in his biography of President Carter, the man ran for office promising “a government as good as the people” ultimately ended his term in office by saying that the people were no good. If they took such bets in Vegas, one could get a fine margin on picking the month of his term where President Obama would announce the same realization.
It is a shocking sight for some. How could something this radical have stayed hidden for so long? And so all sorts of theories abound in the blogosphere that the Rev. Wright story has to be a creation of a political strategist, a planted story to allow for a Sister Souljah moment, a false-flag operation gone wrong, not the self-inflicted wound of a Chicago politician who needed friends like these to rise from the state senate to the presidential stakes in just a few years. It doesn’t really matter now, to be honest – if it was such a story, it has already spun out of the Obama campaign’s control, and their billion dollar brand is now in the lurch.
But we should not be shocked by this. We should not recoil from Rev. Wright for explaining his views. We should applaud him for his honesty and consistency. When the media came calling, he did not retract decades of radical speeches and remarks merely to satisfy the fashion of the times: he merely explained why he believed what he believed. He is not ashamed. He is a showman, not a scholar – and so his references for the belief that the United States government caused the HIV virus as a blight on the African American community are odd books and a view that “Based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
Indeed. Under a leader with the poll-driven doctrine of Barack Obama, who knows what it will be capable of doing – if, that is, America decides to find out.
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