- I awoke this morning upset that the sky was clear and blue– it was that way 6 years ago, too. The position of the sun, low in the sky, with bright blueness, scares the hell out of me.
- Here’s a 2-3-4 obit lineup from the NYT:
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese Nationalist Leader, Dies at 79
(Sept. 2, 1969)
Frank Capra, Academy Award-Winning Director, Dies at 94
(Sept. 3, 1991)
Albert Schweitzer, Doctor Who Won Nobel Peace Prize, Dies at 90
(Sept. 4, 1965)
- Virginia Heffernan is one of the best critics thinking about culture writing today.
MTV -TV – Column – New York Times.
As a result, their fans follow their antics in an unbroken line from television screen to computer screen to supermarket checkout line, and the MTV brand goes with them. They are powerful characters who are complex but clear-cut — Lauren, the lonely moralist, and Heidi, the doubt-plagued fame seeker — and who, in trading stories by text message, e-mail and cellphone in the action of the show, model for viewers exactly how the “Hills” stories ought to be consumed and (here’s the interactive part) embellished. (Fans take sides; they copy the girls’ styles; they make tribute videos; they participate in discussions so endless that they seem to constitute fan fiction.)
The way Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” showed early viewers of MTV how to enjoy the channel, “The Hills” suggests to new audiences how to watch MTV now. With “The Hills,” they use a master story (the fight between Lauren and Heidi) to propel themselves through narrative tributaries that might take them onto other platforms and technologies (message boards, aftershow discussions, video-sharing, music-download sites).