stevenberlinjohnson.com

Virtual Paris

I'm sitting at the Air France Lounge at Charles De Gaulle, pulling down episode two of Studio 60 over the wi-fi so I can watch it on the flight back, and figured I'd do a little blogging while I'm at it. I've been in Paris the past two days to do a speech for Disney, which means, of course, that I fly all the way from New York to Paris and then I'm immediately taken to Paris Disneyland, where they've put me up in the "New York" hotel. Of all the Baudrillardian ironies...

I've done a lot of these two day trips to foreign cities in recent years: Lisbon, Hong Kong, Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London many times. They can be a little exhausting, but I've grown fond of the routine. There's no time to actually try to see anything systematically, no time even to really acclimate to the place. So I basically just try to take a half day and evening, and just walk around with no real destination, letting the natural flow of the city direct me. In cities that I know quite well, like London or Paris, the fun of it is in figuring out the limits of my knowledge, in others it's more of a process of discovery. And I always try to have some new music that I've just downloaded, to listen to on the iPod as a soundtrack. It embeds this lovely -- and enduring -- connection between the music and the memory of a place...

But enough about all that -- SARAH JESSICA PARKER is sitting right next to me in the Lounge!! Does Gawker have a Paris edition?

Ghost Map Trailer

Here's a first in my publishing career: Riverhead has put together a little mini-Ken-Burns documentary for The Ghost Map, with me as the sole talking head. It's a nice little preview of the book and its themes, with spooky music thrown in for good measure....

Hey kids, I'm doing a talk with the excellent Henry Jenkins, author of the superb new book Convergence Culture, at the Museum of the Moving Image this Wednesday, the 27th at 7 PM. (Tix are $10, but free if you're a museum member.) Come out and see the show! It may be the last public talk that I give for a long time that doesn't mention cholera...

I've said it many times before on this blog: no one is going to report to work in the Freedom Tower. This is one of those things where we're going to look back in five years, if the thing actually gets built, and say: "What were we thinking?" It obviously needs to be an Eiffel Tower-like symbolic structure, not a working office building. Maybe if enough stories like this one run, they'll finally get wise:

Employees of state and federal agencies that may be among the first occupants of the Freedom Tower said yesterday that for many of them, horrible memories of Sept. 11 were still too fresh to consider a return to ground zero. Their emotional responses indicated that engineering a government-led reoccupation of the site may be more difficult than public officials recognize.

Studio 60

I have a weak spot for narratives about male friendship that aren't conventional buddy films (I still think about the slowly evolving friendship between the two brothers in Six Feet Under season one), and so I'm naturally predisposed to like Aaron Sorkin's new series, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, given its focus on the working friendship of Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford. For the most part, I was completely delighted with the premiere last night; it's stylized and not entirely believable of course, just like The West Wing: everyone is just a tad too clever, and of course everyone talks too fast. But if we're going to have fictions in our fictions, I'd rather they revolve around people being too clever, rather than, say, being genetic mutants with superpowers. (Paddy Chayefsky's Network, which gets several explicit nods in Studio 60's premiere, suffered from the same problem, if it is indeed a problem.)

But I do think there was some irony in the rampant television-bashing that ran through the episode, and presumably will continue through the season. Alessandra Stanley got it exactly right in her review in yesterday's Times:

“Studio 60” is a polemic about television as a cultural wasteland at the very moment the industry is entering a new golden age. There is a lot more television than ever before, much of it bad, but it is hard to remember a time when there were so many good shows pushing up against the worst. Dramas especially, whether on cable or on broadcast networks, have never been as beautifully or thoughtfully made; few Hollywood movies come close. And “Studio 60” serves as exhibit A...

Status Update

So it's been a ridiculously long time with almost no posts here. Somehow the combination of new baby, pre-book launch planning, a little end-of-summer travel, and a bunch of speeches conspired against the poor neglected blog. I'll try to be better, but scanning the calendar for the next month, it doesn't look promising.

A few updates on my activities:

1. Last month's Harpers has a fun roundtable discussion on video games and education that I participated in a few months ago. (It also included the excellent Ralph Koster, whose book A Theory Of Fun is a must-read for anyone interested in the gaming culture.) Annoyingly, the forum is not online, but Ralph's got a few followup responses on his blog.

2. I did a little roundup of the top five books about plague and epidemic for the Wall Street Journal last weekend, as a preview of some of themes in The Ghost Map.

3. I've just started teaching a seminar this semester at NYU Journalism on public intellectuals -- revisiting one of my all-time favorite seminars from my school years, a seminar that Edward Said taught at Columbia while he was writing his Reith Lectures (and subsequent book) Representations of the Intellectual. If you're interested in reading along, the syllabus is here.

iTV Arrives

Apple's iTV announcement pretty much exactly followed the script that I'd described a few weeks ago in Slate: it's not a mechanism for putting your whole computer on your TV; it's just a way to get the relevant media from your computer onto your TV. As in this quote:

“Putting your computer next to your entertainment system is not the way to go,” Apple’s Joswiak said. “We try to match the behavior that people already know — if you want to play a DVD, you need a DVD player; if you want to play iTunes content, you need an iTunes player. It’s simple for users.”

The boldest thing about this is that it really signals that Apple isn't going to bother competing with TiVo and Media Center and all the other DVRs -- it's basically going to bet that the whole programming grid is over, and people are just going to download the shows they want to watch directly. They're going to do to TV programming what the iTunes store did to CD packaging. As long as they can figure out how to get HD-quality video into the store, I'm ready to switch today...