Unrequired Reading: Jewel Eye

It’s time for another month’s worth of my tweets from twitter! First the retweets (the ones that begin with RT) and then the marginally more original ones! Remember, you can get these regularly by following groth18!

In honor of July 4th, we’ll start off with a bang!

RT @felixsalmon (Felix Salmon):

 

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RT @radleybalko (Radley Balko) – Letter from Cory Maye

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RT @sharilynj – Read about @marcmaron‘s powerful keynote address, opening up this year’s #JustForLaughs #jfl

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle van Blerk) – A bear. Made out of 20,000 zip ties. As you do.

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RT @susanorlean (Susan Orlean) – Wonderful!! “@NewYorkTheaterNiagara Falls lit with colors of rainbow on 1st day of N.Y.’s Marriage Equality

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RT @LettersOfNote – There’s so much to love about this photo of Jimi Hendrix

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RT FishbowlDC – Find out how the bridge of someone’s nose figures into The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle’s (@asymmetricinfo) interviews.

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I don’t have kids, and that’s why I side with #GayTalese on dropping serious cash on clothes: #notthatIspendTHATmuch

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Because I don’t like kids, that’s why.

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Heartbreaking article about treating vs. screening #DownSyndrome

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Chinese govt. tries to disprove adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity: #weallcrashedthetrain

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The art of #RickyGervais.

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The #JewishAutonomousRegion sounds like the Off-World Colonies in Bladerunner: #Jewsinspace

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A Bentley SUV? But what if the NBA lockout doesn’t end soon?

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I’m disappointed the Hercules machine isn’t on this list: #pinball (Hercules is over here)

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Beetlejuice in NJ, via @nycscout

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I thought #PillowTie was the best Skymall product ever, but it’s no match for #DribbleBib

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Oh, look! It’s the scariest goddamned thing ever! #dummyland #ventmyrage

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Oliver’s Army is here to stay: #andiwouldratherbeanywhereelsethanheretoday #cromwell

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Timmy, have you even been in a Norwegian prison?

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The Midgard Serpent sleeps below Park Ave.

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Just #FranLebowitz and her awesome car

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@SimonDoonan on getting married to Jonathan Adler.

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A “thoroughly generic bookstore” (as per my 40th bday post) is closing: #bookberries

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Euroleague’s greatest hoopster is from West Memphis. #MarcusBrown

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Freelove: sister of Increase, mother of Wealthy: #nydutch

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“I’m looking for something hipster-y“: http://nyr.kr/p5opGB

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Can you tell us more often in 1 article that there was no internet in 1981, please? #shittywriting #tigerwoods

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Set taser to #KTFO: #zotz

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The #StopMakingSense fashion collection: #thisisnotmybeautifulcoat (does @davidbyrne know about this?)

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To quote #Nirvana, I think I’m dumb.

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(Hilarious) summer fashion trends, courtesy of @simondoonan.

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Leopard goes ape: #donotconfrontangryleopard

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5 major factors in the #Borders collapse: #bookswithoutborders

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Speaking of: Proving that people surrounded by books can still be total retards: #bookswithoutborders

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Bob Colacello, whose #Warhol memoir Holy Terror I enjoyed the heck out of, auctioned off his portrait by AW.

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On escaping and not escaping #Auschwitz

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Interview Your Own Damn Self!” the #Nabokov way: http://bit.ly/nrtMZQ

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Boy, #SeanBean sure does get killed a lot.

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Transocean: the “I didn’t do it” kid of the gulf oil disaster

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#WoodyAllen on Rilke, selling out Hannah & Her Sisters, and that new movie of his

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Lovely photos of writers & their dogs by #JillKrementz (no greyhounds, I notice)

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“Using .NET is like Fred Flintstone building a database”: Why #Myspace went boom

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Why is weed wacky? #potluck

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M(ormon)BA: Mormons are the new Jews? #wedressbetter

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Does the mind rule the body, or does the body rule the Ren? #renandstimpy

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Holocaust theory: #saturdaynightreading

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Busch-basching: http://buswk.co/pJrg9k

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Peter O’Toole on being awesome. #doublephallicname

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Nothing harder than getting laughs from a room full of comedy writers: http://bit.ly/poW20I

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I miss Karen Allen, but I’m still glad I skipped that last #IndianaJones flick.

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A stoic and a zen buddhist walk into a bar…

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Neat profile of @MaerRoshan that i missed till now: #offmyradar #harhar

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#Hitchens, on the Gandhi myth

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Mob scene: #mafiaTV

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Psst! It’s a secret bookstore! #brazenhead

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Pad See Yew Later, Addiction! #ThaiRehab

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Writer procrastination: (I bought a super-cheap PC laptop and deleted everything but @ommwriter) #mustdisablewifi

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Final meal . . . Cajun-style! (via @wadecortez) http://bit.ly/rukM1M

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Signal-to-noise and old-cooterism, by @binarybits: onforb.es/nRWJTq

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Crisis in Swedish Ballet Training: #WhyILoveMonocle

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The next generation of painkillers will come in small nuggets that you heat up in a pipe and inhale. #drugdelivery

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I still think that #CCTV building’s gonna tip over

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I guess it’s a good thing Brooding Persian isn’t on Twitter. #associationsanddisassociations

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Hegemony from column B: http://bit.ly/ott95H #SinoTheTimes

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Chimpanzee that! He’s a photographer! #GoApe #monkeynews

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@SimonDoonan on the Cute & the Savage: #notanewsoapopera

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Sometimes the gorilla gets the banana, and sometimes the banana gets the gorilla. #GoApe

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Nowhere, special: #NoUtopiaWithoutToddRundgren

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Orwell vs. God

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Building the perfect #KingLear: #Shakespeare

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#WinstonGroom on #TrumanCapote: #getyourmindouttathegutter

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I just want to stay ahead of my illiterate dad: http://bit.ly/kuJPUt (okay, here are all the books I’ve read)

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Chess computers are using PEDs?

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High school time capsule, courtesy of #BourgeoisSurrdender

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In this particular instance, I’ll chose NOT to #belikeMike, thank you: http://bit.ly/iYSriE

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The accordion market gets squeezed: #bwahhaha

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John Lindsay: one suave mofo: #mayorofcool

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To end this month’s installment, I offer 1 Lap of Manhattan in 26 minutes (soundtrack set to Underworld, of course):

Ad It Update

A day after I finished my ramble about how advertising tends not to get mentioned in articles about The Future Of Magazines, I read the following passage in Holy Terror, Bob Colacello’s “insider’s portrait” of Andy Warhol. Mr. Colacello ran Interview magazine for about 11 years, shortly after its launch.

Selling advertising also helped me become a better editor: It forced me to focus on what kind of readers we wanted and how to get them, to see the magazine as a complete process, with editorial feeding circulation, circulation feeding advertising, advertising feeding editorial, rather than separate parts working against each other. That didn’t mean doing everything the advertisers wanted, though we did a lot, and Andy would have had me do more. It did mean that a certain kind of reader led to a certain kind of advertiser and vice versa. And in explaining the magazine’s editorial policy to advertisers, I was also formulating it for myself — defining it in sharper, clearer terms, giving it direction, identity, finding not only its niche in the market, but also its place in the culture. There was another thing I liked about selling advertising: Success could be measured in dollars and cents, pages and half pages and quarter pages, and like Andy, I was soon counting them and measuring totals against the previous year’s. I liked the feeling of building something from the ground up.

As an editor who is involved in the advertising side of a magazine (trade, not consumer), this entire piece resonated with me. Except my boss doesn’t wear an outrageous white wig and invite me to parties with Bianca Jagger.

What It Is: 8/2/10

What I’m reading: Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, Bob Colacello’s bio of Andy Warhol. I also updated the On My Nightstand page, if you’re interested in seeing other books I hope to get to. Here’s a little bit from Mr. Colacello’s book:

Sometimes I wonder if Andy wanted it to work. I wonder if any of it — the video projects, Interview, even the movies, anything other than the art and the selling of the art — was meant to be serious. Paul was serious about the movies, Glenn and I cared about the magazine, Vincent was committed to coming up with a TV show that worked — but was Andy? He certainly never minded the typos and other mistakes in Interview. “Why do you have to spend so much time proofreading?” he’d always ask. He liked things to be “bad,” he liked things to be “boring” — concepts that may or may not have worked in the realm of art, but were not of much use in the movies, magazines, or television. Sometimes I found this attitude refreshing; other times it was just discouraging. If Andy didn’t really care whether anything came of our efforts, then how should we Maybe all these side businesses were just a way to keep himself busy, to surround himself with creative young people, to put friends on the payroll, to run up expenses and tax deductions against the art profits, to promote the sale of art and make Andy more famous, to spend the days and kill the nights, to ward off his fear and anxiety and emotional distress, to not be alone.

Or maybe Andy genuinely believed that if we took ourselves too seriously, fretted and sweated and tried to be professional instead of just doing it fast and easy and cheap, the end result would be stale and dull instead of turning out different and modern, magic and new.

What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot, Rattlesnakes, You Could Start a Fight in an Empty House, Night Work, Walking Wounded, We Are Born, and Spirit of Radio.

What I’m watching: Zombieland and A Single Man. Reviews tomorrow!

What I’m drinking: Stella Artois, and 209 & Q-Tonic, although I didn’t drink much last week.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Hiking! To Ramapo Lake! And Monksville Reservoir! (and then sleeping a lot.) And getting into their first-ever fight on Sunday! I fed them and went downstairs to read, figuring they’d follow me down after they finished. Instead, I heard loud barking. Near as I can tell, Rufus, as is his wont, finished his bowl quickly and headed over to Otis’ to get whatever bits his brother left behind. Maybe he pushed for the bowl a little too early, because it seems Otis wasn’t having any of it. By the time I ran upstairs, Ru was standing in the middle of the living room, with a little nibble taken out of his cheek, tail pretty firmly stuck between his legs. I looked them both over for any other wounds, but didn’t find anything. Ru hurried down the hall and stayed with his mom for a while. I’m glad Otis stuck up for himself, because I’m always telling Ru to leave him in peace when they’re eating. Sigh.

Where I’m going: Scotch Bowl next Saturday! Charity bowling night for our greyhound adoption group, Greyhound Friends of NJ!

What I’m happy about: Taking last Thursday and Friday off, and not once looking at my work e-mail, checking my voice-mail, or otherwise staying on top of work.

What I’m sad about: I’m going back to the office today.

What I’m worried about: The dogs will eventually figure out that jumping into the back of the car sometimes leads to long-ass, overheating hikes, and they’ll stop being so willing to head off on any old adventure involving the Subaru. On the other hand, my wife is pretty sure Otis is flat-out retarded (this post convinced her), so the chances of them figuring this out are pretty slim, I guess.

What I’m pondering: Undertaking another ruthless purge of my bookcases. Is it an overreaction to my impending 40th birthday, this compulsion to look at a stack of books and tell myself, “You will never have time in the remainder of your days to read (or re-read) this book”? How do other people deal with their mid-life-thing? I sure don’t want to end up like Stewart Lee.

What It Is: 6/28/10

What I’m reading: Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis. Blech. Also, I read a really wonderful interview with Bob Colacello, the former editor of Interview. I’d like to it, but it’s from the new ish of Fantastic Man, and they don’t post content online. (!?) But Colacello was so interesting that I ordered a copy of Imperial Bedrooms, his book about Andy Warhol.

What I’m listening to: We Are Born, in which Sia goes adorably disco. Also, Blood Like Lemonade, in which Morcheeba was so happy to have Skye singing for them again that they made a record that sounds an awful lot like Skye’s 2 solo albums. Meh. And Walking Wounded. Guess I oughtta check out those Tracey Thorn solo records sometime.

What I’m watching: 44 Inch Chest (it’s no Sexy Beast), Michael Jackson: This is It, and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. The MJ pic was okay, but that Rush documentary was A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Go grab the DVD on Netflix. NownowNOW!

What I’m drinking: DH Krahn’s & Q-Tonic.

What I’m smoking: I had an Arturo Fuente Single Chateau during our company picnic on Friday (I had to get work done and showed up around 4 hours late, but I still got to spend 2-3 hours at the picnic). It was the first cigar I smoked in years and, boy, was it good.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: The usual: discovering a snake, charging a deer, and otherwise just trying to stay cool.

Where I’m going: A couple of July 4th weekend parties.

What I’m happy about: The end of my big-ass Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma issue is in sight! Only 3 more profiles to write, after which I’ve gotta lay out all the pages, but it’s actually coming together! I think I’ll actually be able to finish it by Thursday! Whew!

What I’m sad about: The state of the pharma industry.

What I’m worried about: What effect the above is going to have on my livelihood in the next few years.

What I’m pondering: Why Rush isn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That’s a goddamned embarrassment.