The Rage Diaries

And our faces ... brief as photos

Tucked upstairs in an old footlocker: two scrapbooks, one from each grandmother. Tiny lines of script flowing over the page; one grandmother had a handwriting that could have been engraved plate, while the other had a crabbed and angular script.

But, oh, to have had them on videotape telling their stories. My Nana would tell me how her dad forebade her to wear safety pins because only the fast flappers did that. My Grandma would tell me how her dad would walk five miles for a bushel of cucumbers, then make good German pickles on a hot August day.

How lovely it is to see someone just a decade younger than they telling his stories online. Geriatric1927 has a series of brief videos on YouTube, and they are charming. The British widower mixes old photos, blues music and spoken narrative to tell his life's story, and he talks to his YouTube audience with a sweet cordiality.

Also of interest: how he's become the focal point of a YouTube community of admirers. In many ways, YouTube feels like a reflection of the Web back in 1994 or so, when people were totally geeking on each other's honest impulse to create.

What I read last week: the Pleiostocene edition

"Oh, look," said Phil. "It's a John Varley book you haven't read yet."

For a brief, 48-hour period, he was right about that. Then I finished John Varley's Mammoth. I'm not sorry to be done with it.

I once read a website where someone wrote something like "If Neal Stephenson wrote about going to the grocery store, there would be helicopters involved." It was funny because it's true. And in John Varley's best books, it would not be inaccurate to say, "If John Varley wrote about going to the grocery store, the trip would involve a lot of improvisation and only slightly less sex." This is the thing I've always enjoyed about his books: the characters are resilient, left-brainy, problem-solving dudes (even the XX contingent), and they have no hang-ups about having a good time.

What I read TWO weeks ago: return of the blog adaptation edition

I have been remiss and I am sorry! Last week was kind of nuts -- cross-country flights, crazy amounts of cooking, the mom getting married, blah blah blah. Anyway. Here's what I would have written last week ...

Changing seasons, changing budgets

One of the most enjoyable parts of the day job is keeping track of Americans' spending trends. I have been watching the back-to-school predictions with some interest, because I am wondering whether gas prices will dent shopping in Q3 and Q4.

The National Retail Federation has predicted that the average American family will spend $527.08 on back to school shopping this year, nearly 19% over the year-ago amount. It sees electronics and clothes driving the increase; since this is the first year of what is expected to be a multi-year shift toward a completely new fashion silhouette ("A New Stretch for Fashion," WSJ, Feb 6, 06), sales are expected to be good.

Or are they?

In praise of filters

NEW: EDIT to the bottom of the post -- LAS, Aug 30, 06

Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don't) want to hear. The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate. Pitchfork is a small site: The traffic it draws is too tiny to be measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. But like the indie bands that are its lifeblood, Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others.

-- "The Pitchfork Effect," Wired, Sep 06

When proponents of DIY media talk about how the Web is eliminating the "traditional" closed world of media, one of the things they tend not to bring up is that the Web is actually helping cultivate a commercial market for voluntarily-closed media entities. As Dave Itzkoff argues above, people like having reliable sources that sift through a media genre. These sources usually have a few things in common: they know their stuff, they have authority derived from a combination of knowledge plus personal approach, and they have whittled an overwhelming amount of media into a human-scale aggregation.

Raise your hand if you saw this coming

The biggest problem with bringing books on airplanes is that you run the risk of finishing the book before finishing the flight. Since I hate to stash anything in my carry-on that I cannot use on the whole trip, I usually pack my books in the checked luggage, then stock up on disposable reading material for the flights. This way, I can pitch the magazines at the end of my departing flight, and stock up anew as I wait to board my return leg.

Here are some of the magazines I read as I flew to D.C. and back: The Economist (who wouldn't want to read a report about how their industry may be doomed?); Utne Reader (who wouldn't want to read about comedy in America?); Vogue (who wouldn't want to use their fashion rag as a biceps-toning device?); Shop Smart; (who wouldn't want to see how Consumer Reports enters the shopping-mag space?); In Style (who wouldn't want to find out what random publicists celebrities find sexy?); and US magazine (because, really, who wouldn't want to see if the article on Kate Hudson's purported affair with Owen Wilson includes the phrase, "Can you blame her? Look what she's married to.")

(I did not read Scientific American, Cooks Illustrated, Sunset or Entertainment Weekly, because those all got delivered while I was away and I do not pay twice for magazines.)

(Also, while I considered Blueprint, I think that's going to be a "flip through it on the newsstand" number for a while.)

I spent a fair amount of time staring at the titles on the newsstand, deciding what was worth my time. And you know what I passed over every single time? Weekend magazine (which I have discussed before) and Shop, Etc. (which I have also discussed before). I just never clicked with either magazine.

Neither did the rest of America. I found out today that Hearst is closing up both Weekend and Shop, Etc. (" 'Weekend,' 'Shop, Etc.' Closing Up Shop," Media Buyer, Aug 25, 06; "Hearst Closes Up Shop Etc., Weekend," Fishbowl NY) I am not at all surprised by the Weekend shuttering -- it didn't provide readers with a compelling reason to buy it in addition to -- or instead of -- other similarly-positioned mags like Real Simple or Blueprint.

I am, however, a little more surprised that Shop, Etc. sank so quickly. People love to shop, and I think there's space in the market to position oneself as the alternate to Lucky. As drunken monkey astutely noted in the post "You just can't have nice things," In Style does a nice job of the "Look! Lots of stuff to buy!" feature. Clearly, there is demand.

Perhaps for both magazines, developing a unique editorial voice might have saved them. Blueprint seems to be working because it's adapting the Martha Stewart tone; Shop Smart has its own adorkably didactic delivery that reminded me a little bit of the wry yet sincere food geeks in Cooks Illustrated; the text Lucky prints is rooted in a distinctive derivation of English.

If readers can figure out where a magazine stands relative to its competitors, then it's easy to triangulate where that magazine's coming from relative to your perspective.

Why you want me to come to your next wedding

My mother got married today. It was a small wedding (the bridal party outnumbered the guests). It was a charming, low-key event -- bouquets made by the bride and her daughter 90 minutes before, readings by beloved daughter- and son-in-law, everyone in sentimental tears through the recital of the vows, the priest positively singing with happiness as he introduced the new husband and wife.

And then afterward, as we were assembled on the stairs outside the church and smiling for a friend's camera: The imp of the perverse prodded me, and I did say, loudly, "At last, you've finally made us children legitimate."

I swear, you can't take me anywhere.

Neither really simple, nor on target

We have had a logistically complex summer. So that we might minimize -- nay, eliminate -- the kind of scheduling snafus that happen when two people in deadline-oriented occupations happen to toss a two-month remodeling project, baseball season and a pending wedding-reception-hosting into the mix, I went out and got us a calendar. The idea was we could write down all our commitments on the house calendar instead of checking in with each other via e-mail and mobile phone all day.

It was quite a calendar, this Real Simple weekly calendar, available at Target. Three-quarters of the page was taken up by a vertical arrangement of the days of each week; the remaining quarter was made up of a to-do list that you could detach and carry around, if that was your thing. In theory, this calendar could hang on your fridge thanks to two magnets affixed to its sturdy cardboard back.

In theory. For the past two months, I have had the once-weekly experience of walking in to find the calendar on the floor and one of the magnets still on the fridge. It happened again this morning as I walked into the kitchen. And I figured, if gluing the magnet back on isn't going to do the trick, to hell with the calendar. Real Simple's calendar is getting Real Recycled tomorrow morning.

So I added to my own low-tech To Do list for the day, Write Target and Real Simple; tell them about magnet problem on calendar. Because I live in 2006, I figured it would be so easy as finding a customer service e-mail on their sites and moving on from there.

Ah .... no. Follow Real Simple's "Contact Us" link, and there is no information about whom to contact if you have a punky Real Simple product. And if you look on Target's "Contact Us" page, it's not exactly offering up any place for people to correspond with the chain. I do not see any point to any link labeled "Contact Us" if there is no actual means by which to write to the company.

(Side note: I see ads on Real Simple's site, yet there is no snail mail address to which to send my mail. This irritates me, because it's like, "So you can't find what you're looking for? Well, what do we care? You just boosted our impression rate!")

So now I have to take the time to track down Real Simple's mailing address (I have Target's -- it's Target Corporation, 1000 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55403), write two letters, and drop them in the mail. I had thought the calendar I bought was going to manage my time more efficiently. Instead, it's only adding to my (non-magnet-affixed) To Do list.

Speaking of shopping idiocy ...

Talbot's recently conducted a national fit survey of more than 2,200 women ages 35 to 65. The results are not surprising, but they do confirm how warped our logic is when it comes to getting dressed:

• 85% of women determine whether something fits based on the size tag rather than appearance.
• 62% of women surveyed said they consider items only in their specific size.
• 94% of the women surveyed do not wear all of their clothes on a regular basis. 40% admitted to buying clothes they planned to fit into when they lose weight; 33% have clothes in their closet that are too small; 36% own unworn apparel that needs to be tailored.

-- "Sizing Up How They Shop Can Put Women in the Right Frame of Mind," PiPress, Aug 18, 06

How, in this era of well-documented sizing inconsistencies from brand to brand ("0 is the New 8," Boston Globe, May 5, 06), can anyone think the size tag is anything more than a suggestion?

You just can't have nice things

Okay, I freely admit that I have aged out of Lucky's target demographic. However, that has not stopped me from reading it. I dig the ads, I use the little stickers as page tags in everything from repair manuals to telecom dictionaries, I occasionally find stuff I like to buy.

But one of the reasons I used to like reading Lucky was because it recognized that not everyone is shopping with a fat wallet or sky-high credit. Bitch magazine made this point a few years ago: in its earlier incarnations, Lucky was appealing because it was capable of distilling trends, then offfering a variety of options along a wide price range.

Note how I'm talking in the past tense? The Sep 06 shoe guide has sent me over the edge. How far over? I actually made an Excel spreadsheet so I could confirm that I wasn't just picking out random numbers to make a specious point.