In 2005, Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. (TDI) petitioned the FCC in the U.S. to update and extend its captioning requirements. Among many issues was a request to impose quality standards in captioning. A red flag to someone like me, shurely?! Not really. As part of a longer-term plan, I decided to just wait and read what everyone else had to say first (and also await an FCC decision, as yet unreleased).

The 1,663-strong list of interventions is available in an extremely large (4 MB) Web page that you should only load if you really know what you’re doing. (You can look at just the first hundred to start.) Each of the document links is actually a CGI call that will ultimately send a PDF to your browser with an unhelpful filename; I’m not even going to bother individually hyperlinking these entries to a page that is so manifestly anti-Web. (I dispute whether a page like this actually complies with 508.)

What did some of the major intervenors have to say? [continue with: Notes from FCC interventions →]

(Pace Jeff Jarvis.) For two months straight, I have received weekly inquiries about South by Southwest: Was I going? Or, as it was more commonly expressed, wasn’t I going?

No, I’m not. I’ve been there twice, presenting on both occasions, and, while I have admitted that it SXSW is a great time in which one is surrounded by friends, the conference is fundamentally exploitative. You pay your way and pay to get in. If you’re permitted to speak, you pay your way and don’t pay to get in. In either case you’re out-of-pocket, significantly so if you’re a presenter.

My anonymous detractors, like stopped clocks, are occasionally right: I do make money from public speaking. It has something to do with being a good public speaker, having expertise on topics few people do, and, in nearly all cases, custom-crafting a brand-new presentation for each audience. You get what you pay for. I get paid well and I deliver.

I can afford to attend SXSW. What I can’t afford is the opportunity cost of the payments I’d ordinarily receive for giving a presentation. I lose two ways: I pay the better part of a grand to get myself there and put myself up, and nobody pays me for my preparation or presentation time. You get paid for what you do, right? One of the things I do is present, and I need to get paid for that, too. This is a concept that is hard to get across to some people, all of whom earn money for their work while implying that I should not.

(Question, though: Are Malcolm Gladwell, Ana Marie Cox, and other keynote speakers paid to attend? If so, does this not imply that Kottke will be paid this year for interviewing Heather Armstrong in a keynote? Is this a viable alternative to blog micropatronage?)

Of course many of my readers will present at SXSW for free and love it. Of course you’ll think it’s an exciting opportunity, an honour, the gathering of the tribe, and suchlike. And of course you’ll be right. You’ll also probably claim that, even if you aren’t getting paid, it’s good for exposure. Freelance writers say the same thing about signing away their electronic rights; as I was the first person in Toronto to receive the Globe and Mail rights-grab contract that later prompted a class-action lawsuit, is it just barely possible that I know what I’m talking about when I tell you that people die of exposure?

South by Southwest lends itself to Marxist economic analysis. If you present there without getting paid, you really are working for the Man. You are enriching a giant moneymaking machine that has done a superb job of tricking you into believing that working for free is actually of benefit to you. For me, it isn’t, and what I’m telling you is that for you it isn’t, either.

If it is the quintessential New York story to pack up and move from Idaho to a cold-water tenement and a life in the theatre, and if it is the quintessential British story to leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case –

– then surely it is the quintessential Toronto story to ride one’s bicycle in mid-winter past a lakefront beach barely dappled with snow only to encounter a disused front-end loader with rear auger attachment hiked up on its haunches on the sand.

David Kamp “with” Lawrence Levi, Le Dictionnaire du film-snobisme (q.v.):

Maddin, Guy

Winnipeg-born director, often referred to in priggish film-crit circles as a “fabulist,” whose genuinely strange movies combine a GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM–informed visual sense with an arch sense [echo sic] of humour and a Farrelly Brothers–like fetish for disabled and deranged persons…. The director’s column in FILM COMMENT, “My Jolly Corner,” in which he breezily celebrates such obscurities as NICHOLAS RAY’s The Lusty Men, is the best thing in that otherwise-mirthless magazine.

Really.

And what exactly are some of those bons mots?

• November/December 2005: “As an admirer of [the Brothers Quay’s] animated work – Street of Crocodiles, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Comb, et al. – I was struck rum-giddy by their workspace, crammed as it was with all the miniature sets and puppet stars of their cherished masterpieces, and seemingly everything else these twin directors had ever put into their brains along the way to becoming the sovereigns of such intensely scrimshawed dreamscapes.”
• September/October 2005: “Lubricious and poignant jollity is mine whenever I think of Jean-Claude Lauzon, my contemporary and compatriot who directed and breathed with such a frightening ferocity he was doomed to flame out early and spectacularly – and so he did, crashing at the throttle of his own plane after completing just two films, one of them the masterpiece of childhood autobiography reconfigured as poetry, Léolo.”
• July/August 1005: “Joy, joy, joy is mine when I get to behold, in Robert Siodmak’s The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, the usually-ennui-enervated and -irony-fumed George Sanders creating a character of complicated sensitivities and sympathies – a vein of talent rarely tapped by the actor, who preferred to mine his mother lode of dispassion and stuffiness for roles of Nabokovian villainy in All About Eve, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a million stylized others.”
• March/April 2005: “Beluga-roe bliss to me is this continentally suave 1939 Mitchell Leisen romantic comedy [Midnight], a version of the Cinderella tale given so many glosses by the great screenwriting team of Brackett and Wilder that even the famed out-on-your-can 12 chimes at the end of the balltime seem to gong themselves out elsewhere, and mutely – perhaps on another back lot, behind some trademark closed door supplied courtesy of Paramount head Ernst Lubitsch.”
• January/February 2005: “With foggy jollity do I proclaim Random Harvest my favourite amnesia melodrama of all time! […] Those who deride these plots as melodramatic corn forget the amnesias that have clouded the world today, the era of great political forgetfulness!”
• November/December 2004: “Blissfully blitzed am I by [Jam Session] – Anatole Litvak’s zippy swing noir singularity, a kind of musical I Vitelloni about the fraternity of a jazz quintet riding out its hunger on the rails that connect the jitterbug venues peppered across the grimy Warner Bros. map of Depression-era America.”

Incidentally, the now-standardized typography of unligated, too-large Adobe Garamond with BALD CAPITALS as cross-references (MC5? WIP?) works no better in this book than the first one.

(NOW WITH UPDATES)    As improbable as it seems to at least one old fart in the accessibility business who has sent me hate mail in the past, I really and truly have been interested in the field for over 25 years. I think it’s actually 27 years, because I can backdate it to receiving a letter from the Caption Center on my birthday in 1979, a day made additionally memorable because it involved a solar eclipse. I had already been watching The Captioned ABC News for up to two years before that time, although I cannot pin it down exactly.

The Caption Center at WGBH claims to be the world’s “first” captioning house, and that is surely correct. The problem is that it pretty much does not exist anymore. Between November last year to January this year, WGBH Boston laid off nearly all its captioners at the original Boston office. According to a report, approximately 1½ staff positions remain in offline or prerecorded captioning, down from over a dozen (possibly 16). The online or real-time captioning division has also been gutted.

Why did this happen? Media Access Group at WGBH – which, according to another source, never earned more than 3% to 4% profit margins – simply wasn’t making enough money to satisfy WGBH managers. Now, keep this in mind: The operators of a large nonprofit organization forced the gutting of a nonprofit operation allegedly because it wasn’t earning enough money. [continue with: Gutted →]

Not as bad as the last time, but still rather formidable.

Light-reading-for-a-Saturday-night kind of thing.

In a previous era, I was able to photograph the rarest of police vehicles, the stealth cruiser (reproduced here).

Sort of like putting a studded collar on an accountant, it is now possible to photograph a stealth minivan.

Plantin Bold, Futura Black, Serif Gothic Light.

I smell Letraset at work.