Hacks & Hackers, or, as it is unpronounceably and unparsably written, hackshackers, is one of those fun emergent online clubs, in this case uniting journos and programmers. I credit the adorable Jenny 8 Lee, a girl so smart she took the Times’s buyout offer while still in her 20s, for giving H&H whatever profile it has.

Last night we had a mixer for the Toronto chapter, whose very existence surprised and delighted me no end. It’s a great idea: Journos who think a computer is a machine that runs MS Word gain skills from programmers who can’t write their way out of a paper bag. And, quite possibly, vice-versa.

Our first mixer should be our last, as last night’s soirée hewed to the pattern of all Toronto media events: Sinecurists eventually get tired of pretending to care about people they don’t already know or work with or have worked with or for and congregate in impenetrable knots. (Which perfectly nice and reasonable communities editor of which recently-redesigned paper politely excused herself the instant she noticed the arrival of that freelance columnist for said paper?) If you want to cling tightly to people in your own social circle – hacks with day jobs – do it somewhere else. We’ve got work to do here.

Additionally, I was not expecting Craig Silverman’s eyebrow stud, large chest, or alpha-like bonhomie. Though that shirt needs tucking in. By whom is, I suppose, the question.

Topics on which I am more than happy to present

Just me, though. These aren’t transferable ideas and they aren’t open-source. (I was given a minilecture last night, here in my 20th year online, on how wonderful it is to give away ideas. What goes around comes around, I was essentially told. Sorry, but expertise is personal; it isn’t “a marketplace of ideas.”)

• For hacks only: Becoming functional in Unicode
• Just enough semantic markup to keep you out of trouble
• Guided tour of the Hacks & Hackers glossary (which simply does not work as the endless printed document it is)
• Things you didn’t know you could do with a browser
• Unfucking your PDFs
• Turning an InDesign layout into a real Web page

Note that these are not related to what I would call classical database journalism of the sort pioneered by Holovaty or Willison, both of whom I’ve met. This is to be expected, as I am not a programmer. I can think of a few more ideas, though, like what RSS is and does and explaining the technical underpinnings behind something like Flipboard. But let’s start small, shall we?

There was also a call for suggested meeting locations. Surely there are enough media outlets reasonably downtown with boardrooms we could borrow. Or those outlets could pony up a hundred bucks twice a year to rent a reasonable room. Or ten sinecurists could PayPal ten bucks each. The idea that anything should be delayed while somebody half-assedly hunts around for free meeting space is ridiculous for this clientele.

Toronto on Film is a book published by the Toronto International Film Festival, a very world-class institution that just opened its own Modernist film shrine. The book is more or less readable yet has no real reason to be a printed book, except of course for the fact that printed books are classy and intellectual, two perennial pretensions of Toronto cinema.

An appendix offers a claimed “175 Key Toronto Films.” The number is derived from Toronto’s age, not because there really are that many films of interest.

There’s a director and year credit for each title, plus a short graf about each. This, at the very least, should be available in its entirety online – and not as a shitty PDF export, either. So let me make this standing offer to TIFF: Send me a PDF with live text, or the Quark or InDesign file, of this appendix and I’ll convert it into semantically perfect HTML for TIFF’s and everybody’s benefit.

They won’t, of course. They’d prefer this information to be locked up in a monograph available at a single public library in Canada – Toronto’s (five circulating copies).

While we’re waiting, here’s the title list. It’s OK if you’ve never heard of half of them. These are, after all, not just Canadian films but Toronto films, hence why should anyone, least of all anyone actually in Toronto, have actually seen them? [continue with: ‘175 Key Toronto Films’ →]

Craig Morgan Teicher is the latest to complain that poetry has lousy “formatting” in E-books.

E-books do not contain “formatting.” As they are miniature Web sites, what they contain are structured markup and presentational instructions, i.e., HTML and CSS. One cannot “format” an E-book; this isn’t MS Word, and we are not dragging a cursor through a line of text and hitting a little box with a B in it.

Josh Tallent’s code sample is, predictably, invalid (you can’t run STYLE on top of elements in BODY), though that is merely an error of excerpting; the ePub file is valid. Now, this also isn’t the way I’d do it, but I can’t say it’s actually wrong. Nonetheless, Teicher recapitulates the tendency of delicate artistique types to freak out at the sight of any form of markup: He dismisses Tallent’s tiny sample as being “swamped in code.” (It uses P and some classnames. Clearly this guy has never seen real tag soup.)

Even somebody who wears a beret to the indie coffeeshop to scratch despondent musings in his Moleskine can be taught structural markup. Teicher’s attitude of “It’s Greek to me!” isn’t helping, is it?

Erin Cech and Tom J. Waidzunas’s paper “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students” (PDF) summarizes the results of surveys and interviews in 2008 with 17 queer engineering students (11 gay, four lesbian, two bi) at “a major US college we call ‘Gold University.’ ” In short: [continue with: Gay engineers →]

Christopher Hines’s documentary The Butch Factor – as writer, director, producer, coeditor, DP, and narrator, it really is his – finally showed up from the library. Good concept (gay males and masculinity), perfectly reasonable execution, no goddamn captioning, even passable typography when you get right down to it.

Who are the people in this neighbourhood? [continue with: Personages of ‘The Butch Factor’ →]

Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, pp. 13–14:

I would sit in the Porsche I’d leased for the summer in a Bridgehampton parking lot waiting for the liquor store to open, usually sharing a cigarette with Peter Maas, who was awaiting there too. I had just broken up with a model over a bizarre argument while we were barbecuing mackerel – she complained about the drinking, the spacing out, the exhibitionism, the gay thing, my weight gain, the paranoia. But it was the summer of Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous homosexual/cannibal/serial killer from Wisconsin, and I became positive that he had been under the influence of American Psycho, since his crimes were just as gruesome and horrific as Patrick Bateman’s. And since there had been a serial killer in of all fucking places Toronto, for Christ’s sake, who had read the book and based to of his murders on scenes from it, I made a number of frantic, drunken phone calls to my agent at ICM as well as to my publicists at Knopf to make sure this wasn’t the case (it wasn’t).

And yes, it was true, I had gained 40 pounds – I was so sunburned and fat that if you had drawn a face on a giant pink marshmallow and plopped it in front of a laptop, you could not have told the difference between the two of us. And of course, being this out of shape, I was prone to skinny-dipping in the Atlantic just 50 yards from my $20,000-a-month cottage, and yeah, I had also developed a minor crush on a teenage guy who worked at Loaves and Fishes. So Trisha’s leaving me was semiunderstandable. Calling me a “fucking lunatic” and speeding away in that leased Porsche was not.

Half Empty is the hot new book by hot Hebraic homosexualist writer David Rakoff (no relation). The title, which arguably needs a hyphen, refers, he told us in radio interviews, to the book’s exegesis of the power of defensive pessimism, a concept introduced to him by Julie Norem in The Positive Power of Negative Thinking.

A sparkling, immediately useful concept, brought to us by just the right neurotic source. Spoiler alert, though: It makes for a better radio segment than it does a book in part because it’s barely in the book. It’s discussed over a few pages and that’s about it.

I complain endlessly about the apparently completely absent editing of modern books. Not just typography and copy-editing, marginally less bad here than usually found in U.S. publishing. (It’s set in Adobe Garamond, a typeface that book designer Michael Collica probably got for free with Photoshop. Some typos, e.g., errant space. Use of only two f-ligatures suggests this is yet another book typeset on Windows, a self-defeating exercise, or Quark, a masochistic one.) (Collica: “Abode Garamond is from the Adobe Font Folio and the book was set on a Mac with InDesign.”)

Here I am talking about an editor, or more likely editrix, who cracks the whip and demands Rakoff stop being so parenthetical, discursive, tangential, self-indulgent.

No such editor was involved. [continue with: Half-fulfilled promises of ‘Half Empty’ →]

Esteemed television commentator Bill Brioux calls the only interesting Canadian series, Being Erica, a muddled ratings failure.

• Yes, it’s a tough timeslot. Dancing with the Stars is huge Tuesday nights on CTV — over 2.1 million viewers tuned in last night according to overnight estimates. Over at Global, NCIS: Los Angeles arrested 1,867,000 viewers.

  Is Being Erica exceptional in having been pitted against popular American shows, or is that merely the inevitable consequence of a TV system built on simultaneous substitution?

• Over 60% of Erica’s modest audience is 50+. Young women – the audience the show should be connecting with – are just not into her.

  Except the “young women” who watch it via TiVo, iTunes, Bittorrent, or later DVD. I know we have the new, improved people meters now, but they still don’t count the way this group watches television. Brioux is making the same argument CBC made when shitcanning jPod: Not enough of the right people are watching it. Except they are – where nobody’s counting them. Besides, all CBC shows skew old.

  (And don’t be handing Corpse mandarins specious reasons to shitcan TV shows. They came up with enough of those all by themselves to shoot down everything Chris Haddock made.)

• Each week is like watching another pilot. Characters come and go, families, boyfriends and workplaces keep changing. It can’t decide if its a comedy or drama. The character is supposed to jump back and forth in time, not the people making this show.

  Clever! And of course wrong.

  Nothing like Being Erica has ever been attempted: A show with a science-fiction premise that isn’t science fiction. It was written by, stars, and revolves around women. The last time we tried this, what we got was Quantum Leap – agreeable enough, but guyish and now passé.

  I’m as tired of the CBC’s all-girl lineup as the next fellow, but even I had to be honest about my reactions and admit, with no embarrassment, that I love the show. It’s still very strong, not to mention novel. It even dares to be set in Toronto.

If ratings were really a determinant, every Strombo show and the one about that fanciful Muslim enclave on a snowless prairie would have been shitcanned years ago. It isn’t about ratings. It’s about taste, and there Brioux has shown a lapse: He suggests CBC should throw its weight behind has-beens and retreads, namely Ron James and Rick Mercer. Both are aging and gumless, and one owns a manse in Playter Estates. (He and his husband are set for life.)

Advocating Rick Mercer over Being Erica is a display of bad taste that makes me wonder if Brioux also thinks Stargate: Atlantis is better than Caprica and really deserves more of a push.

Shorter Bill Brioux: The national governing broadcaster should cancel its sole dramatic series set in present-day Canada because he doesn’t get it and, infallible statistics prove, the wrong people watch it. But if the Privates – as they have done and are doing now – can keep Blue Murder, Murdoch Mysteries, Whistler, and that turkey Flashpoint on the air when “nobody” or “the wrong people” watch them, then Erica deserves a full run.

I do have one question: Why use this as a vehicle to complain about Being Erica when its egregious product placement is right there begging for a hit? An Irishman in a nail-polish-pink Fiesta uttering “Commando, actually” into a handsfree dashboard cellphone is, if nothing else, comedy gold.

Why, that adorable Michael Alig is almost out of the clink! It seems like only yesterday he was convicted of the manslaughter of Angel Melendez, whose dismembered body washed up on the shores of the Hudson River in 1996.

But I have an even fresher memory. It is of two filmmakers – and full-on Friends of Alig – named Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. In this memory, they jovially submitted to Q&A after a screening of their Party Monster documentary at the Inside Out festival years ago. “I’m conflicted!” one or the other of this interchangeable starfucking pair blurted. What Alig did was horrible, he admitted, but he’s my friend, he said. (Strongly implied: And he’s such a little rapscallion!) “I’m not conflicted,” a guy in the audience loudly countered.

I asked why the proceeds from the feature film the duo made of this kooky klub kid eskapade, also entitled Party Monster, couldn’t be directed to Rodriguez’s family. There was a nonanswer in which one or the other of them thought I was talking about the documentary we just saw (I clearly said “feature film”).

If you’re keeping track, then, Bailey and Barbato have profitted twice off the story of a killer who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1997.

In response to recent questions, Barbato refused to comment, but Bailey wrote: “I feel he deserves a second chance…. [T]he cinematic treatment of what he did in both the documentary and the film neither minimized [n]or downplayed his actions. Both focussed on it and tried to paint a fuller/broader picture of his life. I guess I’m not completely understanding your perspective.”

I guess you aren’t, Fenton! Because I don’t excuse, appease, apologize for, and minimize the harm done by killers just ’cause I think they’re adorable! or for any fatuous reason.

And the hits just keep on coming!

A site curiously named the New Gay conducted a breezy interview with Alig. Writer Jeremy Gloff admits “I… found myself enraptured by his story. Murder aside.”

Because why let something as trivial as manslaughter get in the way of a fun night out on the town in the very near future with somebody who really knows how to party? (“Here, Michael! You can use my iPhone to Google Gaga!”)

When right-wing assholes lambaste us for hedonism and amorality, sometimes they’ve got a point. They’re just looking in all the wrong places. Public Enemy Nº 1 is clearly Michael Alig, who will soon have done his time. Occupying the next slots on that list are his many supporters. Just as rich men thought Conrad Black had contributed too much to society to actually go to jail (one rich man told me that to my face), klub-kid manqués think Alig was just too fabulous to hit the slammer. (What are you waiting for? Like him on Facebook!)

What about Angel Melendez? How fabulous is he right now?

It’s trendy for gays to think gays who are menace to society should get away with it.