Category: Shallow

Dear Newspaper and Magazine Headline Writers,
Hi. How are you? (I know you can’t answer questions posed in a letter, but I want you to know I’m wondering how you are.)
We gotta talk (er, ‘write,’ whatever). I know I’ve made fun of you guys in the past, and I know that’s totally uncool. I was, like, in a bad place then, guys. I was just lashing at you for problems I was having with myself. Can you forgive me?
But, listen up. You gotta stop using GALLO’S HUMOR as a headline for Brown Bunny reviews, okay? I’m talking to you, New York Post, and whoever the hell you are, Zap2it.com. And, this sort of hurts me to say it, but you too, New York Times Magazine: I loved you the most.
Oh, come on. Don’t cry. Please, please. Stop. I’m not just here to criticize, I’m here to offer help. If Vincent Gallo ever convinces international financiers to fund another film for him, you can use these headlines, okay?

Earnest Gallo Whines
Heaven Vincent
Gallo Blows
Vincent, Man, Go!
A Vince Among Men
A Gallo Down Dirty Shame
Vincentient Being
My Gallo Friday
Lather, Vince, Repeat

They might not be perfect, but who is, right? (Pobody’s Nerfect!) I still think you guys are great. BFF?
Yours,
Matt Haber

In today’s excitingly fresh edition of the New York Times’ Circuits section, reporter Rachel Dodes has put together a charming little piece about iPods and the way in which they’ve begun changing music fans’ listening habits. In “Tunes, a Hard Drive and (Just Maybe) a Brain”, she presents a cute anecdote about a Columbia University grad student who threw a delightful dinner party while entertaining his guests with music played in a random order from his library of digitized music files, only to have the partiers erupt into laughter when the Shuffle-Button-as-DJ transitioned from Guns N’ Roses into Elton John, which was apparently quite embarrassing.

“Such are the perils of using Shuffle, a genre-defying option that has transformed the way people listen to their music in a digital age. The problem is, now that people are rigging up their iPods to stereos at home and in their cars, they may have to think twice about what they have casually added to their music library.
Shuffle commands have been around since the dawn of the CD player. But the sheer quantity of music on an MP3 player like the iPod – and in its desktop application, iTunes – has enabled the function to take on an entirely new sense of scale and scope. It also heightens the risk that a long-forgotten favorite song will pop up, for better or for worse, in mixed company.”

Well, it certainly hasn’t heightened the risk that a not-so-long-forgotten article from the Times’ family of newspapers might be repurposed by the parent company. Writing for the Boston Globe on April 7, 2004 – a whopping four months ago – writer Joseph P. Kahn entertained readers with his “iPod Shuffle revolutionizing listening habits”, which, you guessed it, discusses iPods and the ways in which they’ve begun to change music fans’ listening habits. Or, in his own words, since the “Circuits” section’s editors felt a literal transcription to be unnecessary,

“Even more wondrous than its sophisticated technology, though, is how the iPods and their ilk are changing the way music is being experienced, or reexperienced, by all sorts of audiophiles in all sorts of settings, from health clubs and school cafeterias to malls and subway cars.
…
When thousands of titles are transferred onto the machine’s hard drive and in rotation, users say, what happens on the listening end can be aesthetically stimulating, even liberating. This is not necessarily because the tracks are unfamiliar, but because the software’s shuffle-play capability juxtaposes them in intriguing ways, not only across an entire 5,000-track collection but within, say, a compilation of blues tunes or Broadway melodies, or even shuffling through only the tracks played in the past 90 days.”

For what it’s worth, we, too, are guilty of repurposing our own content, in the sense that we’ve already made light in the past of the Times’ short institutional memory.

What exactly happened on that PT Boat? Only Lt. Cmdr. McHale knows for sure.

“USA’s Kerri Walsh, bottom, and teammate Misty May celebrate after beating Brazil in the gold medal beach volleyball finals during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games at Faliro Beach Volleyball Stadium in Athens, Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004. (AP Photo/Adam Butler)”
(Thanks to Jessica B.)

1. The U.S. basketball team lost in the first round to Puerto Rico, which is apparently some sort of American colony. This was very humiliating.
2. The American softball team took the gold. Softball is played by women. I have no idea what is happening in the baseball realm.
3. I think I saw something about some tremors or an earthquake of sorts striking Athens. That, or I might have been having flashbacks to The Day After Tomorrow.
4. The newly-sovereign state of Iraq sent a team of soccer players to the games this year, alongside one swimmer. I like to imagine that this waterbound fellow is the ultimate Pixies fan and is known to pump himself up before meets by singing “Ride a tire, down the River Euphrates…” He has not stated for the record, however, his opinion on Trompe Le Monde, though I’m fairly sure he would agree that “Alec Eiffel” is a great track.
5. I miss Greg Louganis. That was a human interest story that I could really wrap my head around.