mbf tod@y

Dealership Rocks (literally)

This version of Major Tom is simply amazing.

Lots of gems here.

And here

Between Brooklyn and San Francisco there is “something sisterly."

Between Brooklyn and San Francisco, Ms. Levine said, there is “something sisterly." Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa. Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argues that urban renewal is sparked by high concentrations of high-tech workers, artists, gay men and lesbians, ranked San Francisco No. 1 on his “creativity index” and New York City No. 9. Although Mr. Florida did not break out data for Brooklyn, “anecdotally it has a large concentration of creative people who have moved from Manhattan and elsewhere,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I am confident if such data existed, Brooklyn would do very well.” (Noham Cohen, The New York Times)

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(Image source: The New York Times)

Syntax Era: Remix64 Volume 3

"The Remix64 series returns to its roots with its third volume, Syntax Era. Channelling top Commodore 64 tracks through the sounds of 1980s chart toppers, leading remixers in the C64 music scene have joined forces to create an inventive, vibrant album that showcases a huge range of talent and styles during its 70-minute two-pronged trip down memory lane. During the 1980s, many C64 owners listened to chip tunes influenced by the tracks of the day, but with Syntax Era you can finally hear what Depeche Mode might have produced had Rob Hubbard ousted Alan Wilder, how Matt Gray’s influence could have rubbed off on The Sisters of Mercy and The Shamen, and what Martin Galway would have sounded like as one of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. And coming full circle, the album concludes with an entirely C64-originated cover of Yazoo classic Only You with vocals by Eliza Zoot. Produced by Markus ‘LMan’ Klein (Remix64) and with contributions from Marcus ‘Makke’ Nilsson (It’s Binary, Baby!), Thomas Detert (Remix 64 V2: Into Eternity) and Chris Abbott (Back in Time), this unique release, available in CD and digital formats, is a must-have for fans of retro music, chip-tunes, and 1980s chart-toppers alike."

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But is a remake a good idea?

"Cinematic history teems with directors who have gone to Hollywood and made lamentable versions of their own films. Even Hitchcock's 1956 reworking of The Man Who Knew Too Much (first filmed in 1934) has been derided. Buffs will tell you about the shabbiness of Hideo Nakata's US remakes of his Ring movies, and the pointlessness of Takashi Shimizu's remakes of The Grudge horror flicks. Then there was poor old George Sluizer, the Dutchman induced by Hollywood to tack on a silly, cynical happy ending to the 1993 remake of his thriller The Vanishing. "I was aware of all these terrible films," says Haneke. "But I was convinced that I could hold on to control of my film in the way that many of these directors did not." How, then, has he found the experience of working in the US? He struggles with his German translator for the right English word. "Cumbersome," he finally offers. Why? "Because they always try to get to influence you. They don't listen. I say 'No' but they ask me the same question the next day. I had to fight hard to get what I wanted, in a way I wasn't used to."" (Michael Haneke talks to Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian)

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Wii Online: a Smashing Failure

"In games like Wii Sports have taught the joys of gaming to a wide variety of would-be players: women, little tykes, grandparents, even the Queen of England. There's one place, however, where Nintendo actively discourages its fans from enjoying each other's company. Hop online to play along with your Wii-owning friends, and you're guaranteed to be disappointed. The current gold standard of online gaming services is Microsoft's Xbox Live. Xbox owners can download classics like Paperboy and Street Fighter II, games that include the option to compete against other players online or compare high scores. It's easy to keep track of your friends via their "gamertags," online identities that include a profile photo and a list of game-related achievements. The Xbox 360 also has a wireless headset that lets players communicate before, during, and after every online match. [...] The Wii, by comparison, doesn't have a consistent online network, forcing each developer to devise its own solutions [...] In fairness, you must invest in a premium membership, at a cost of $50 a year, to use Xbox Live's online multiplayer functionality. All of the Wii's online services, by comparison, are free. But the Wii's threadbare online system is terrible even taking into account that it costs nothing.." (Jack Patrick Rodgers, Slate, via Kotaku)

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Game Over for Malpensa Airport

"Milan's Malpensa airport is set to lose its status as an international air hub on Sunday [...] Alitalia, currently in takeover negotiations with Air France-KLM, is cutting 14 of its 17 inter-continental routes, keeping only New York, Sao Paulo and Tokyo. Some of these routes will instead originate from Rome's Fiumicino airport "Alitalia no longer has a hub at Malpensa," said Giuseppe Bonomi, president of SEA, which manages Milan's three airports, in an interview with the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore." (Reuters)

Milan becomes even more irrelevant in the global scenario: its main airport, Malpensa has lost international status as Alitalia shrinks  and is sold to the Air France. As of today all flights from/to  New York Newark, Boston, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Central Africa, Asia, Cracow, Lisbon, Geneva, Marseille, Munich, Nice, Malta, Sarajevo, Stuttgart, Stockholm, Valencia, Mumbai, Delhi, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Osaka, Zagreb, Shanghai, Strasbourg, Skopje have been canceled. Ironically, Malpensa just "celebrated" its tenth anniversary, Even more ironically, "Malpensa's link to the Turin-Milan highway was to be inaugurated on Sunday after a delay of several years". That's so Italian - being out of sync with reality.

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Will Wright and Stwart Brand at Yuri's Night (April 12, SF)!

See them at Yuri's Night 2008

"Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration—and mankind’s curiosity, scientific ingenuity, technical achievements, and spirit of collaboration that have made it all possible.  This year, NASA’s 50th anniversary, the Bay Area will be home to the largest Yuri’s Night celebration ever, with 8,000 people joining astronauts, artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians to pay tribute to our global space heritage and to celebrate how much more is out there to be discovered!  Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 will feature talks by Will Wright and Stewart Brand; art and sculpture by The Flaming Lotus Girls and Michael Christian; live acrobatic and modern dance performances by Capacitor; musical performance by Amon Tobin and the special debut of the new band Telstar, featuring Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead; and much, much more!"

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Italy: The Crooks in Control

"Last year, Italy seemed to wake up to the problem of the Camorra—the Neapolitan equivalent of the Mafia—in the form of 2,700 tons of garbage. On the nightly news for several days running, TV viewers stared with a mixture of wonder and horror at mountains and mountains of garbage—some of it wet and stinking, some of it on fire and spewing toxic fumes—on the streets of Naples and nearby towns. All but one of the city's garbage dumps had been closed for safety violations, and when the trash was left to mount on city streets some residents set it on fire in attempts to get rid of it. The illegal burning of waste created so grave an environmental disaster that many towns had to shut down their schools. [...] Hollywood, Saviano finds, has supplied the models for the Camorra lifestyle. He describes the female bodyguards of a female Camorra boss dressed up in yellow tracksuits like Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. The villa of one of the chief Camorra bosses of Casal di Principe was modeled down to the smallest detail on the villa of Tony Montana, the chief character (played by Al Pacino) of Brian De Palma's Scarface. Camorristi repeat monologues from Pulp Fiction and police keep turning up DVDs of famous crime movies in the hideaways of fugitive gangsters. By aping Hollywood, Saviano argues, the Ca-morra tries to create a kind of "culture" and give itself legitimacy. Identifying with Hollywood gangsters and the winner-takes-all, dog-eat-dog ethos they project, the camorristi (and their counterparts elsewhere) come to believe that enjoying unlimited wealth and the power of life and death over others is worth risking their own early death or life in prison." (Alexander Stille, New York Reviews of Books)

Italy aka an ongoing disaster.

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Related

The Pleasures of Uninterrupted Communication

"The mature information worker is someone who can manage his queues effectively, prioritizing and re-prioritizing as new items crop up, doing the fast-context-switching necessary to respond to an email while waiting for a file to download or a backup to complete. It's a little like spinning plates, and when you get the rhythm of it, it can be glorious. There's a zone you slip into, a zone where everything gets done, one thing after another clicking into place" (Cory Doctorow, Internet Evolution)

I am very immature.

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The Soccer Player's Soccer Players

"Three Major League Soccer players and one coach discuss the M.L.S stars they most enjoy watching - the maestros, the villains and the magicians." (New York Times)

Totally rad. American soccer players display a level of enthusiasm for the game that the super-stars of Italy's Serie A have lost a long time ago

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PS. Related

PPS. Soccer vs. Football