lee crane

I’ve had Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains on my phone for a nearly three years, but I just haven’t been able to finish it. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s longer than this video.

I’ve been riding my bike a lot lately. While I’m not exactly calling it training the end result does end up looking very much like this classic Kids In The Hall skit.

Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers with a road version of the Hall and Oates‘ classic pop groove I Can’t Go For That.

[Link: Boing Boing]

Looking forward to seeing this Salton Sea documentary Bombay Beach, especially as a sidecar for William T. Vollmann’s Imperial. Southern California culture at its nadir.

[Link: Bombay Beach]

It’s going to take me a while to come to terms with everything that Steve Jobs made possible for me and my family. Simply typing this and posting it here is one of them, because Lord knows I would never use a PC. Thank you.

I’m not as big a fan of The Onion as I should be, but today (as they often do) they nailed down print media’s desperation with a story titled: Failing U.S. Economy No Reason At All To Stop Investing In Print Media, All Experts Agree.

In explaining print media’s remarkable appeal, the entire financial community said citizens rely, and will continue to rely, on printed newspapers to keep them not only informed about current events, but better prepared to function as the kind of knowledgeable citizens a robust democracy requires. Others pointed toward people’s deep emotional attachment to print media and the loyalty readers have for the treasured publications as a financial guarantee. In addition, investors from every major financial firm strongly noted that newspapers are an integral part of the ongoing American story that is written each morning, chapter by chapter, on black-and-white newsprint by decent, hardworking men and women who live in the very communities their newspapers serve.

It reads like the media kits of some of my favorite action sports titles.

[Link: The Onion]

It’s been a painfully slow summer for literary fiction. One look at the NYT Best Sellers List explains it pretty well: crap. That’s why, even though it seems that summer has gone by far to quickly, I’m looking forward to fall when a trifecta of potentially great new books drops.

1. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (August 30, 2011)
After epic stories of middle-aged couples lost in suburbia, like his previous books Election, Little Children (both turned into movies) and The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta’s sharpens his skewers up a bit with a book about the truly lost souls left behind after all the good people are taken to heaven in the rapture. Perrotta is one of those writers (like Eugenides, or Jonathan Franzen) whose books I will read no matter what they’re about because with their writing it really doesn’t matter.

2. The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides (October 11, 2011)
As a follow up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides has written another coming-of-age story. Reportedly set in the early 1980s, The Marriage Plot features a college English major who is “writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot” and the two of the guys in her life. It’s about time for a good old-fashioned, new story about marriage. Isn’t it?

3. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (October 25, 2011)
With Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Kafka On The Shore Haruki Murakami proved that he is one of the few writers who can offer Westerners an emersion into the hyper-accelerated cultural consciousness of modern day Japan. This 944 page book was originally published in Japan as three separate hardbound books, but all three have been pulled together for this English language translation. The title is reported a play on the way 1984 is spoken in Japanese, and tells the story of a young boy and girl. “And they fall in love. From that point of view it’s a simple story. But something happens and the two of them go to the dark side of the moon,” according to the author. Or moons, as the case may be. We’ll see.

Yes, 2010 was a great year for advertising according to the Pew Research Center’s “Project For Excellence In Journalism” 2011 report. Aside from the sad little newspaper industry everything is up, up, up. Even magazines were up 1.4 percent in revenue. The stat that I found most telling, however, was the percentage change in audience.

The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010, every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the internet. Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels.

When marketing people ask me why I think they should be spending more money online in the next 12-24 months, I think this is the first chart I’ll show them.

[Link: All Things D via @Bradmcdonald]

Mammoth Mountain just released the first in their “History of Snowboarding” video pieces. If you look carefully, you might catch me flying by on a Kemper Freestyle, doing some “reporting,” or hanging out in the background. Seems like only yesterday. Crazy.

The lineup for the 2011 Coachella Music Festival was announced yesterday. After crushing some numbers, my enthusiasm for the April 15-17 events looks like this:

Ruling out (for a moment) the amazing introduction to new music that Coachella is, it’s not looking like this year is worth bothering the babysitters.

[Link: Coachella]