I have read Generation X and all the English-language nonfiction books by Douglas Coupland, declared by some groups to be the voice of another group’s generation. (There’s a Japan-only book almost nobody over here has read, including me.) I read Microserfs, and the considerably superior short story of the same title in Wired. I enjoyed City of Glass, a return to glib throwaway folk etymology (Vancouver condos are see-throughs), and I like both volumes of Souvenir of Canada.

You will have heard of the documentary based on those books, directed by Robin Neinstein. It is flatly awful, and it has pushed me well past my limit of tolerance of this doughy drumstick masquerading as an intellectual. [continue with: A balls-out takedown of Dougie Coupland →]

I think we need more of D. Washington acting less like an African monarch and more like a guy with a chip on his shoulder. Out of Time by Dave Collard, opposite Dean (“haffu” ハッフ) Cain:

— You know, I could almost respect a man who had the balls to confront me, tell me “Yeah, I’m banging your wife.”

— Maybe this – this guy, maybe there’s nothing he would rather do than, you know, than tell you that you’re a lousy husband and that you don’t deserve Ann. Maybe there is nothing he would rather do than to walk up into your face, look you right in the eye, and say “Chris, I’m banging your wife – good.” [Chris scoffs] Maybe – you know, maybe your wife won’t let him.

— [Chuckle] I’d respect him, at least. And if he did that, then I’d go up to him, look him in his eye, and I’d say “Just come near her again and I’ll kill you.”

— Wow, Chris. Wow. You’re talking to the wrong guy, Chris, because as a police officer, I can’t let you go around threatening people’s lives. I mean, if you’re serious, then I would be obligated to do something about it.

— Really.

— That’s right.

— Thanks for the beer. And the conversation.

— Thanks for listening.

— OK.

I am told that heterosexualist males call this “butting heads over a chick.” Really, why do they bother?

Gary Shteyngart (q.v.), Absurdistan, pp. 87–88:

“I know you and Alyosha[-Bob] love this song,” she said. “I’ve been playing it over and over. It’s so much better than techno and Russian pop.”

“In terms of popular music” – I spoke now with the authority of a former Multicultural Studies major – “you should listen mainly to East Coast hiphop and ghetto tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically. Even so-called progressive house!”

Shteyngart on Studio 360: “My physique is not so wonderful, and yet I love to, in a sense, metaphorically speaking, take my shirt off and bare my chest and maybe beat it a little bit, and, you know, I think men and women [and women?] aren’t really supposed to do that anymore in terms of letters.” I think he also said something about punching above his weight. And how, tovarishch!

Last five entries on this Weblog

1. 2,500-word exegesis on Monocle
2. Nomination for news photo of the year
3. Complaint about Towleroad and Michael Goff
4. Documentation of details in important public-sector contract
5. Complaint about serious oversight in newspaper’s hiring of new journalists

As a quick indicator of standards compliance:

• Number of validation errors: Nil
• Number of heading elements: 22 (for 5,625 words on homepage without markup)
• Ads (external – yes, I am promoting my own micropatronage program, to the annoyance of Michael Goff; then again, “annoyance” from him is like getting gummed by a three-toed sloth): Nil

Last five entries on Towleroad

1. Compilation of links from Towleroad
2. Compilation of technology-related links
3. Compilation of YouTube-style clips
4. Compilation of links on British art installation
5. Compilation of links on priest set to marry his homosexualist partner unit

As quick indicator:

• Number of validation errors: 437 (5,200 words)
• Number of heading elements: 9
• External ads: ≥23

I want everyone to stop underestimating Tyler Brûlé because he’s dashing, supercilious, and rich, or because of the multiple accents in his echt-Canadian bilingual name (final syllable strongly stressed). It is easy for commentators who take themselves seriously, foremost among them straight guys, to shrug off this square-jawed fashion plate because he created a magazine apparently devoted to glossy Modernist surfaces. (Or, if you’re anticorporate, you might dismiss him because he sold the whole thing to a company ultimately controlled by a bastion of bad taste, AOL.) Everybody needs to cut that shit out.

I realize only now that I’ve spent the last 20 years involved in magazines. (Eighteen, actually.) I just went and measured and I have 36 linear feet of magazine back issues. For a decade, I wrote for magazines – about 30 of them, until they all more or less simultaneously began extorting copyrights from freelancers, an action later declared illegal by the Supreme Courts of the U.S. (fully) and Canada (partially). I understand the magazine concept. I don’t make the mistake of assuming that magazines are simply read; I know they have different uses, which explains why something like Details (“for men”) is itself dismissed for all the wrong reasons. (Have you not sat at a large corporation’s lunchroom one day and watched glammed-up admin assistants attack an inch-thick copy of Vogue, chewing gum and speedily flipping pages by folding the upper-right corner with a nail-extended index finger? That is how Details [“for men”] is used.)

Some magazines are read, some have a use, some are looked at (Colors). Some, like newsweeklies that aren’t the Economist, have no apparent readership or use. I do not really have a category for graphic-design magazines, which seem to fit none of those categories and are more like advertorials or, in the case of Eye, graduate theses. (Print is structurally closest to a “magazine.”) Some purported magazines are actually book series, like Granta and McSweeney’s. (Were they honest, they would have ISBNs along with ISSNs.)

And there is one other taxonomy of interest, which I reductively call sui generis. They are magazines that appear out of the blue and have their own topic, style, voice in a combination nobody managed to fit together before or since. Sui-generis magazines don’t come along very often, they die young, and people never stop talking about them. You cannot knowingly create a sui-generis magazine, which explains why the Fast Company of the mid-’90s, with its Yahweh-like incantations of “free agency,” grated, appalled, failed, and withered, then did us all a favour by finally dying. Might just didn’t rate in this context, sorry. Dwell had a few good months (I bought all the back issues to check) but devolved into a glossy magazine about furnishing your alternative home, a parody of its ostensible purpose.

Mid-century Life was an example, though now a too-distant one. In the lifetimes of people who have seen the entire development of the Web, I can point to a few cases you’ll agree with, like Spy and Sassy, of which I have nearly all issues. You may distantly remember Omni, which I am about to start collecting. But I can also nominate an example you may disagree with: Wallpaper, or, as I like to render its official name, Wallpaper^<asterisk>. There was nothing like it – and, as with the posthumous body, once its soul was removed there was nothing but a husk left over. (We learned that after the Funny Years of Spy.) Nor could you transfer the soul to sibling bodies (derivatives Spruce and Line simply did not work). That soul was haughty, holier-than-thou Tyler Brûlé. [continue with: Monocular →]

By Paul. J. Lawrence, Toronto Star, 2007.04.24 (p. B3):

An air ambulance arrives to rush an SUV driver away with head and neck injuries after an accident near Pt. Union Road closed all eight lanes of [the] 401 heading east for over an hour yesterday. A blowout caused the woman’s SUV to skid across four lanes, then roll several times after clipping the back of a pickup truck.

This is really a case of being in the right place at the right time – just as the chopper takes off and a fireman and some kind of plainclothes-cop type in a Kevlar look quizzically at the camera.

The air ambulance is often seen at my latitude of the city and I do the same sort of thing I do when I see roadkill: I say a little benediction (not exactly prayer). You know I went through engineer school to work in automotive safety, right? It requires bloodlessness on the one hand and barely-controlled wincing and cringing on the other, often in response to actual blood. If I ride alongside your car in midwinter and holler “Seatbelt!” through your closed window, do as I say.

Last night, I received this message via electronic mail (excerpted):

Greetings blog.fawny [who?]

Help us out and we’ve got 1 MILLION AD IMPRESSIONS on Towleroad.com to Promote your site*

(2,000,000 if we agree on a charity!)

Yes, we have one million impressions (Throw heads back. Pinky to mouths.) to give away in a drawing among sites who change their links to our new one for Towleroad: http://www.towleroad.com

If you’re getting this letter it means you have links to our old url that we really would appreciate if you changed and it means you’re eligible.

So how about you go change the links to the new base url http://www.towleroad.com real quick, and come right back. […]

Seriously though, as thrilling as this is with a glamorous contest and all, it’s made us think a lot about links and sites and blogrolls and such. And in the very near future we’re going to be implementing some new features on Towleroad that we hope you’ll give us feedback on and participate in. [Continues for some time. – Ed.]

Since I cannot fucking stand Andy Towle and his second-rate blog, my response was as follows: “No, assholes. Learn how to redirect your old fucking URLs. Stop being such queens and learn how the Web works.”

I was just now corrected by the mighty Michael Goff, former limerent object of Roger Black, that TypePad does not permit .htaccess-style Redirect 301s. True. I then told him to just live with his old links, because there’s nothing in it for other people to update their own sites to change links that currently work to links that somebody else prefers.

This was not, however, the end of the goffing:

Rest assured we’ll do all we can not to bother you again. It is ironic that you hit up folks visiting your site for donations so you can write “How to” manuals teaching people how to make the web more accessible.

A bit of fact-checking could be useful there, Mike. Use those skills you learned at Microsoft Sidewalk!

And not just because you’re a natural for teaching, but we would have gladly put double the ad impressions toward your effort if you had been in the drawing and won. Good luck with your important work. And we know who are the naturals to end up teaching.

I don’t do ad impressions, and I don’t teach.

Also from your site, it would seem that your reaction might actually be part of some 13-year grudge over a perceived slight when I didn’t speak to you at a party at the Gay Games in 1994?

Wait, did that happen? Drawing something of a blank here. No… no, if I were to maintain a 13-year grudge at all, it would be over Goff’s failure to greenlight an illustrated feature for an issue in the inaugural year of the magazine he edited, Out, entitled “How to Spot the Miatafag.” Would have been a classic, immediately fridge-magneted from Chelsea to Provincetown. One has other vegan fish substitutes to fry.

As it is, Goff has unwittingly reproduced a Peter Lorre moment: “You despise me, don’t you?” “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.”

They just redesigned the Globe and Mail. Can’t say I like it much. Every new font for newspapers now looks like a derivative of Swift. Or Scala Sans.

Anyway, “Fast Eddie” Greenspon wrote:

News flash: The Globe and Mail has just recruited 30 additional journalists.

And why the fuck isn’t Weisblott one of them? What are you waiting for, a singing telegram?