Brain Shavings

In recent years, the biggest story surrounding the Washington Redskins has taken place off the field. Dan Snyder, quickly making his claim of being the worst owner in modern sports, has been embroiled in a public battle over the offensiveness of the team’s name. A less-idiotic businessman would, after some public hand-wringing, have changed the name to something inoffensive, and then cashed in on the flood of new merchandise sales, multiplying good publicity with a tidy profit. Instead, he has bitterly clung to the name, in the face of outrage and protests from every corner of the country.

Recently The Daily Show ran a segment where fans of the team who were against a name change participated in a roundtable discussion where they presented arguments for keeping the name. During the panel, they were interrupted by a group of Native Americans that The Daily Show had brought in, and the ensuing discussion went about as well as you would expect given that one side’s entire argument is based off nostalgia, one of the more dangerous emotions to productive discourse. While the segment was interesting, there seemed to be a more compelling story lurking beneath the surface, and an account of the day’s panel and the following day’s trip to the team’s game from one of the Native Americans who participated in the show seems to bear that out:

There were points during that hour-long experience where I actually was afraid for my life. I have never been so blatantly threatened, mocked or jeered. It was so intense, so full of vitriol that none of the footage ended up being used in the segment. I’m a big dude—6’1”, and a lotta meat on the bones. But a blonde little wisp of a girl completely freaked me out as I waited in line for the bathroom. “Is that shirt supposed to be funny?” she asked motioning to my satirical “Caucasians” T-shirt. And then she said, “I’ll fucking cut you.” Actually, she didn’t scare me so much as the wannabe linebackers standing behind her who looked like they wanted to make good on her threat.

View The Daily Show's segment at Comedy Central.

The Criterion Collection (previously praised here) released Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ to home video earlier this month. Having never seen the film before, I came away from my viewing in awe, and actually turned around and re-watched the film immediately, just to make sure it wasn't some delirious fever dream.

The film, based partially on director Bob Fosse's career as a choreographer, director, producer and dancer, stars Roy Scheider [JAWS (The film, not the Bond villain)] as Joe Gideon, a pill-popping, womanizing hedonist who is dealing with the stress of creating a new stage show while also editing a film, each with its own producers and demands. Add to that the stress in his personal life, and Gideon proceeds to careen headfirst into a physical breakdown. The film features sequences that are at turns sublime and surreal, doused in dark humor. To advertise the release, Criterion posted the first sequence from the film online, and it is included below.

The film is a masterpiece and has quickly become one of my all-time favorites. Sadly, it's not available through any of the streaming services, but you can pick up a copy from Amazon here.

Steven Soderbergh is a mad genius. From SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, to a five-hour biopic of Ché Guevara, to a remake of SOLARIS, to MAGIC MIKE, to the OCEAN'S trilogy (of which the middle film, OCEAN'S TWELVE, is an all-time favorite of mine, but that's for another piece), his career has been marked by both his choice of subjects as well as technical presentation. Often pulling double or triple duty as editor and/or cinematographer in addition to his directorial responsibilities, Soderbergh has been one of the most visible advocates for digital cinema, shooting almost exclusively digitally since 2005's BUBBLE, while also filming CHE with then-prototype Red One cameras.

The huge digression aside, Soderbergh is the business, and his involvement in anything will pique my interest. This week, he released, via his personal website (where you can also purchase a Bolivian liquor he's helped import into the country), a version of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as a silent film, also drained of its color, in order to study staging and composition. With a different soundtrack also laid over the film (mostly from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score to THE SOCIAL NETWORK), it's interesting to see how much RAIDERS works even without any of its dialogue or iconic John Williams score.

From Soderbergh:

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).

A great review of the capabilities of the camera housed in the newest iPhones. Photographer Austin Mann took the devices to Iceland and posted an extensive report. The most surprising part was the demonstration of the autofocus on the new phones, and how much faster they are than even the year-old iPhone 5s. The article will also contain your daily recommended value of horses galloping majestically in slow-motion. Recommended viewing on a computer, as my iPad seemed to eat itself everytime I tried to bring up the page due to its Scrooge McDuck levels of media richness.

This summer, I was able to experience two of the best meals of my life at places that sit nearly one whole United States away from each other. One of those meals was at Rose’s Luxury, located right down the (heavily congested and/or constructed) road in Washington, DC, which is troublingly close to me. Recently lauded as the best new restaurant in America by Bon Appétit Magazine, one of the restaurant’s signature dish is a delicious mix of pork sausage, lychee and about a dozen other ingredients. After taking a bite, I wanted to fill a swimming pool with it and live inside it forever. Or at least until it spoiled.

Fortunately, for those who can’t make it to DC, or who don’t want to brave the sometimes lengthy lines for a table (the restaurant doesn’t take reservations), Bon Appétit also published the recipe for the salad and a few other beloved items from the menu.

There has been much hand-wringing over recent years on the idea of cross-platform app development for smartphones. With two dominant players in the market (participation ribbon for Windows Phone), developers must decide whether simultaneously maintaining both an Android and iOS app is worth the trade-off in capital. One of the biggest factors to consider in all this is the reality of the Android device market, which, due to the sheer number of manufacturers and configuration options, has resulted in a market flooded with different devices. As opposed to Apple's opinionated design, with Android there is almost literally a device to suit whatever preferences that a buyer has over screen size, number of cameras, price point, etc.

OpenSignal, developer of an application that shows the strength of cellular signal for popular carriers in any given area, recently released a report that throws into relief how many devices must ultimately be considered when creating an application for the Android market.

We have seen 18,769 distinct devices download our app in the past few months. In our report last year we saw 11,868.

Compare that to the 8 different iPhones released by Apple since the device's introduction in 2007, and all of a sudden it's easy to see the perspective of articles such as Semil Shah's "iOS First. Android Much, Much Later".

Since its inception in 1984, The Criterion Collection has been a vital voice in the home video distribution of films. From silent-era classics all the way to overlooked modern day releases, nearly every film in the company’s library is essential viewing (yes, including THE ROCK). While many of its films are available to stream through various services, the physical media editions of their films are so jam-packed with special features such as commentaries and interviews that even a small slice of their library is still a font of film knowledge. Every once in awhile, the company partners with Barnes & Noble to sell their films at half-price, which is almost crazy-making, since the films are usually worth the full list price. Running from now until July 28, the trickiest part of the sale is sometimes winnowing down what to buy, but fear not! If you’re the type of person who trusts me, here are some of my favorites from the company, in no particular order. Screenshots from DVD Beaver, a great site for reviews and comparisons of Blu-Ray releases.

Onward!

Previously, in podcast news, I've shamelessly plugged My Brother My Brother and Me and Welcome to Night Vale. Today, I come to you with a recommendation for a specific episode of a series. While the entire short-run series The Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project, in which TV's Andy Daly (star of the fantastic Comedy Central series REVIEW) and Matt Gourley present potential podcast concepts with characters voiced by Daly, Gourley and an assorted mess of their comedian friends, is great, there is one episode that stands above the rest. The Travel Bug with August Lindt features a cavalcade of German accents, as Andy Daly voices host August Lindt, a pretzel maker and world traveler who adores every place he visits on Earth, as he welcomes other famous Germans to offer their opinions on world travel.

Matt Gourley voices H.R. Giger, the artist most famous for his design of the worlds of the ALIEN film franchise, Matt Besser voices former Pope Benedict XVI and the omnipotent Paul F. Tompkins Werner Herzog, director and real star of the film JACK REACHER, and the results are frequently hilarious. Everyone gets a chance to contribute, whether it's Lindt's relentless enthusiasm, Giger's low testosterone levels, Herzog's relentless fatalism or the former Cardinal Ratzinger's newfound love of pot, the show is frequently punctuated by Tompkins' off-mic laughter, which is almost as funny as the proceedings themselves. And that's BEFORE Lindt's wife and children make an appearance. It's rare that I'll go back and listen to an episode of a podcast again, but I've gone through this one a few times already, and it's become one that I'll frequently turn to whenever a laugh is needed.

When it opened for service in 2011, Chicago’s Next brought with it something even more inventive than what was being served on the plates. Conceived by chef Grant Achatz as a restaurant that would have a rotating thematic menu, Next has so far explored everything from turn-of-the-century Paris to the street foods of Thailand, to a menu inspired by renowned restaurant elBulli. In that time, Next has also introduced its patrons to the idea of booking a table at a restaurant via a ticketing system, much as you would buy a seat for a sporting event or a film.

An issue that had arisen at Achatz’s previous restaurant, Alinea, was the sheer amount of human hours it took to handle booking tables for customers. Given its popularity, a disproportionate amount of time was spent informing customers that, no, the table you want for tomorrow night at 7 isn’t available, and so on. Another side issue is that with no consequences to canceling, customers would book tables for larger parties that might never show up, creating losses both from wasted materials and from the empty seats that could have been utilized for other customers.

In an exhaustive study, Nick Kokonas, who is chef Achatz’s business partner, writes on the process behind finding the solution to their dilemma, the logistics of pricing, its practical effects and benefits and the challenges of introducing it back up to Alinea. It’s a great peek behind the curtain of an emerging trend in fine dining, as Kokonas uses real-life data from sales to talk about all of the consequences of the decisionmaking process in opening Next:

This is my attempt to outline exactly what we’ve done with restaurant tickets, why it’s interesting, and the results of the experiment… along with real data from our restaurants.  People tend to treat business data as something that shouldn’t be shared, but I don’t really see the harm in openly examining the data.  So the numbers provided are the real numbers from Alinea, Next and the Aviary.

After a week in which:

- A men's rights activist (sorry, had to remove my autocorrect that changes that phrase to "scumbag") took out his anger over being constantly rejected by murdering people around the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

- Football player Ray Rice held an astoundingly tone-deaf press conference where he AND HIS WIFE FOR SOME REASON apologized for his (alleged) beating of her to the point of unconsciousness back in February, while his employers the Baltimore Ravens employed a real human being who posted this:

Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident.

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) May 23, 2014

A few weeks ago, I posted a mash-up from comedian Neil Cicierega of John Lennon's "Imagine" and Smash Mouth's "All Star". Little did I know that that song was a taste of a full-length album of mash-ups of songs that you barely tolerated when they were released. Containing other timeless classics as Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas' "Smooth" and "Theme from Full House," MOUTH SOUNDS will at the very least excite you for the day when we can selectively wipe things from our memories. And that's BEFORE the "Lou Bega Interlude" which is when I slipped into full-out delirium.

Enjoy the album and a bonus Elton John/System of a Down mash-up here, or head to Cicierega's site to download yourself a copy.

Look, let's just get this out of the way right now: MACGRUBER is a masterpiece, and is, on most days, my favorite comedy of the last decade. Directed by Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island fame and starring Will Forte, MACGRUBER first took life as a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Essentially a spoof of MACGYVER where the lead was wrecklessly incompetent at his job, MacGruber would consistently fail to disarm an explosive device in increasingly absurd ways in a series of vignettes that would air over the course of a single episode of SNL. After an appearance in a series of Super Bowl ads for Pepsi in 2009, an odd-at-the-time decision was made to turn the sketch into a feature length film. But rather than rehashing the premise, Taccone and Forte (with John Solomon as a third co-writer) turned the film into a deconstruction of the biggest tropes of 80s action films, as well as one of the oddest, most demented movies in recent memory (Val Kilmer's villain is named Dieter von Cunth, in case you were wondering where this was going). Also, the film featured various WWE wrestlers as MacGruber's crew of elite murderers, so the film's really hitting all of my pleasure points.

Last year the film screened, for reasons I still don't really understand, at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, which meant that I had to take a field trip to see it. The most surprising part of the event was that over 3/4 of the audience had never seen the movie before, or were even unfamiliar with its premise, which made for a great, slightly uncomfortable viewing and subsequent Q&A experience, as many in the room were unprepared for just how much screentime Will Forte's butt receives. Recently the film was featured at Art of the Title, where Taccone and title designer Ryan McNeely spoke about the origins of the film and the process of creating the beginning and end title sequences for the film.

Inside an unassuming house in Brooklyn, some of the best audio components in the world are created by the folks at Grado Labs. Originally in the business of phono cartridges, Grado later expanded to headphones, one of which, the MS-2i, I'm proud to be wearing right now. The headphones have a really beautiful, distinct style, and sound great with just about every kind of music you can throw at it, with guitar and female vocals performing exceptionally well.

A multigenerational family business (the building previously housed the family's fruit shop until the late 50s), many of the components are constructed directly on premises, and nearly all of their products are hand-assembled inside the building. TechCrunch recently took a tour of the building and spoke with some of the people involved in the creation of these devices, and We Shop American, which focuses on products crafted in...wait for it...America, recently interviewed Jon Grado, VP of marketing.

Link: Grado Labs

Link: TC Makers - A Walk Through The Amazing Townhouse That Grado Labs Calls Home

At noon today, ESPN and Nate Silver turned the lights on FiveThirtyEight, a relaunch of the site originally started by Silver that was until recently under the purview of the New York Times. While the site gained notoriety for its analysis of electoral data in contrast to the "gutfeel" and intangibles analysis of dumber other writers, the relaunch of the site, as well as the financial backing of the ESPN/ABC/Disney hydra, has allowed Silver to broaden the scope of the site to extend far beyond polls:

From the site's opening manifesto:

Still, I would never have launched FiveThirtyEight in 2008, and I would not have chosen to broaden its coverage so extensively now, unless I thought there were some need for it in the marketplace. Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics. Furthermore, young people with strong math skills will normally have more alternatives to journalism when they embark upon their careers and may enter other fields.

Though the first in a recent wave of announced sites with a similar concept (single author given sandbox by media company, see Ezra Klein/Vox, David Leonhardt/NYTimes and Jim Tankersley/WaPo), FiveThirtyEight is the most compelling for me by virtue of Silver alone, as his approach tends to quantify or counter many old-school notions about sports, like "grit" and "toughness" as actual measures of performance for players.

Launch articles of note aside from the manifesto are the in-depth analysis of this year's NCAA men's basketball bracket as well as an appreciation of Steve Smith, formerly of the Carolina Panthers, which I enjoyed on a personal level, as someone who heavily relied on him in games of NFL 2K5 on the Xbox, which, for anyone keeping track, is still far and away the greatest football video game of all time. My love for it is almost entirely rooted in the custom soundtrack feature for the game, which allowed me to spend more time ripping CDs than actually playing football just so I could hear The Price is Right's sad trombone noise when I sacked someone.