So Then I Became A Talking Head, Part II
By Nick | March 4, 2010
Last Friday I stomped my way through the snowstorm to appear, again, on Clayton Morris’s Fox News show, “Gadgets and Games.” Unlike the first time around, I braved my own shyness and actually managed to watch about five minutes of the show afterwards. Note to self: intake of roughly a liter of highly caffeinated coffee before television appearance translates into way too many hand gestures.
In any case, video of the show can be found here (and also on iTunes).
Meanwhile, my taped segment from Feb. 21 with Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey can be found here. [Requires subscription]
Or you could just entertain yourself with a $12,000 phone.
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I Bet Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon Will Fistfight In Hell
By Nick | February 20, 2010
There is shock value in the bull’s head resting in a gold-plated tank filled with formaldehyde: Damien Hirst’s “End of an Era” (2009). You circle around the installation, noting how the combination of death and chemicals makes the head seem deflated, like an old basketball: the eyelids are heavy, and droop; the cheeks and neck are soft and nearly liquid; the thick white hair worn to gossamer threads. The whole room glitters faintly, from the gold cabinet behind you filled with manufactured diamonds. You move to the doorway, and observe this glittery bit of Ecce bovinae carnum, this freeze-frame Grand Guignol, this dichotomy like an autopsy table placed front-and-center in a Louis Vuitton boutique, and you think: This? I traveled forty minutes uptown on a Saturday morning for this?
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Future Video Games From Great Literary Works: A Modest Proposal
By Nick | February 17, 2010
So a couple of weeks ago, a video-game company made literature professors’ heads everywhere explode by releasing an exquisitely gory third-person adventure game based on Dante’s Inferno, which transforms the retiring, middle-aged poet into a ‘roided-up action hero who takes on Hell’s demons with a cadre of weapons, including Beatrice’s Holy Cross and Death’s Scythe. If this particular Death to Culture proves a hit, no doubt it’ll lead to the frantic mining of other literary greats for video game franchises. Video-game designers of America, I have some ideas for your next great lit’rary mining job** — you can thank me later with millions of dollars in royalties:
As I Lay Dying: Move over, Oregon Trail: Why have a game centered on crossing the Wild West in a covered wagon when you can play as the Bundren family trying to transport their dead matriarch to Jefferson, Mississippi? While it may be impossible reproduce Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness narration in a game format, players of all ages can have fun with a variety of in-game puzzles, including building a coffin, burning down a barn, and typing, “My mother is a fish” over and over and over again.
Hamlet: The game version of one of the Bard’s most famous works (available for PS3, Xbox and Windows PC) spares us all the Prince of Denmark’s namby-pamby moral dilemmas and cuts right to the not-so-proverbial chase, i.e. ruthlessly hunting down everyone responsible for his father’s death. Be sure to upgrade to the quad-barrel explosive crossbow before facing mid-level bosses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or they’ll defeat you with their Flipping Coin Attack. A hidden in-game Easter Egg lets you use an AK-47 for the big final battle with Laertes and Claudius.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: Winston Smith, downtrodden no more! In this first-person-shooter “reimagining” of a classic, the worker drone breaks free of the dreaded Room 101 and takes on an empire. Muscled up to truly Schwarzenegger-esque proportions for a 21st century audience, and armed with enough guns to make the protagonist of the “Doom” game series look like a doddering pansy, Smith shows how a socialist oligarchy and thoughtcrime ought to be dismantled…with lots and lots of bullets and rocket-fire.
Ulysses: This eighteen-episode MMO (that’s massive multiplayer online game, for you non-World of Warcraft fans out there) lets you choose one of several characters from James Joyce’s most famous work as your personal avatar for navigating the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904, including Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan. Each episode, be it “The Oxen of the Sun” or “Circe,” offers the opportunity to clad your character in either period dress or else something truly outlandish, like a rhinestone-studded leather teddy. (Game release pending lawsuit with the Joyce estate.)
Une Saison En Enfer: Who needs Rambo when you can have Rimbaud? Plunge into hell with everybody’s favorite hallucinogen-chugging French poet to battle The Infernal Spouse, the tortures of the damned, and a creeping sense that all hope is lost… with one of five weapons including Verlaine’s Hopelessly Inaccurate Pistol. (Gamer tip: If your hit-points become depleted, hit X, Y, Y, X in order to activate Enfant Terrible mode, which will render you temporarily invincible but totally uncoordinated.)
** This post actually started as an article for McSweeney’s, which was rejected with extreme prejudice.
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Doubledown Media, One Year Later
By Nick | February 8, 2010
One year after the fall of Doubledown: my former colleague Chris Gillick does a summation for Folio; and former company president Randall Lane publishes a book about the experience, entitled ‘The Zeroes.’ I wrote my own recount of the company’s collapse amid the Wall Street meltdown here.
Sic semper speculative bubbles.
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The iPad Will Not Cure the World’s Ills. At Least, Not Until v2.0.
By Nick | January 31, 2010
People keep asking what I think about the iPad, Apple’s latest wonder-gizmo unveiled last week in San Francisco. In turn, I find myself asking other people, as a sort of conversational icebreaker, what they think of the device. I suspect that, whatever the tablet computer’s eventual real-world merits, its first and most vital use will be as conversational fodder for Manhattan’s chattering masses.
I’d written, very speculatively, about the iPad in the months leading up to its release. But on the day that Apple CEO Steve Jobs actually unveiled the device, I was on a nearly deserted island in the Caicos Passage, on the beach, adding seashells and assorted flotsam to a giant driftwood statue at the high-tide line (there is no better way to unwind, de-stress and reorient your soul than creating massive art installations; this is one of the reasons, I’m convinced, that visual artists who don’t die by misadventure early-on have a tendency to live until their 80’s and 90’s). Consequently, I didn’t see whether my theories as to the device’s ultimate form were correct until a day later.
I was wrong in my previous assumptions. I thought the iPad’s screen would be smaller, the price-point higher, the GUI more adventurous. I don’t think I’ll buy one, personally, when they roll out two months: the two features I wanted were the ability to sync the tablet with my MacBook, to create a second screen, and some sort of handwriting app that would translate my chicken-scratch into editable text (which would save me hours’ worth of transcribing my notebooks into a Word document). Maybe someone will design a third-party program to address that second point, but even so—I already have three laptops, along with a galaxy of smaller communication/media devices, all of which basically means I’m tech-saturated.
But it’s interesting to wonder whether we’re collectively on the hinge of a paradigm shift at the moment, with regard to personal computing. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I saw a variety of manufacturers pushing any number of e-readers and tablet PCs—all of them either running a proprietary OS or else Windows 7—that they hoped represented the future of everyone’s silicon lives. Despite this push, though, I have a hard time finding civilians who express a fervent desire for a tablet computer, which makes me wonder—where is this push coming from? Did those manufacturers see the sales numbers for smartphones like the iPhone and the Droid, and figure that everyone who gravitated towards those devices would be equally enamored of something larger?
I don’t know yet, although I’ve been talking to some of those manufacturers (along with a handful of software makers) lately in an attempt to assemble some sort of Grand Unified Tablet Theory.
Four weeks into the New Year, and it’s Clips Time:
My most recent iPad pieces can be found here and here.
New Thrillist piece, on Casualty Clothing, can be found here.
The final cover of the Playboy Book of Cigars will be much better than the version currently posted on Amazon.com. (Okay, okay, I’ll stop posting about it. I swear. No, really.)
(It’s not a new piece by any stretch, but ReadOz has posted the Private Air issue with my Craig Ferguson interview from Dec ‘08/Jan ‘09, found here. Notable if only for describing the physiological effects of being trapped in a small Cessna, 15,000 feet over Los Angeles, with a late-night talk show host joking about stalling.)
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Things I Learned Today
By Nick | December 10, 2009
Item One: Apparently, rubbing your body with charcoal eliminates your natural scent to the point where you can sneak up on nearly anything, including (supposedly) guard dogs.
Item Two: Barnes & Noble employees are surprisingly fast and strong. I learned this after wandering into their Union Square location to snap a few photos of the Nook for a slideshow/review, figuring I would save myself some time over having one of their PR people send me a review device. I managed to snap around five photos of the sleek, white little bugger before a random B&N employee advanced on me, muttering, “You can’t take photos inside the store!” and “I don’t care what you’re trying to do.” Fail. Epic fail.
Item Three: Apparently, when the NYPD meant Zero Tolerance about quality-of-life crimes, they weren’t kidding. Next they’ll start popping jaywalkers.
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A Shameless Plug to Pre-Order My Book on Amazon.com
By Nick | December 3, 2009
So the mass-market edition of the coffee-table book I co-authored, titled Playboy: The Book of Cigars and branded with the instantly recognizable Playboy Rabbit, will be published on June 1, 2010. I actually wrote my part of the massive tome January-March 2009; unlike magazines, where you can see the editor-mangled results of your hard-earned labor within weeks, and unlike Web sites, where your article is often posted within minutes, a book can take months and months to reach stores. The waiting part of it drives me a little nuts, but I’ve always been the sorta-impatient sort.
But here it is, The Thing Itself, available for pre-order on Amazon.com (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). I also have 25-or-so comp copies stacked in cardboard boxes in my apartment; which means that, if you know me personally and you’re interested in depriving me of the royalty-payment equivalent of a Sprite from the office vending machine, you could always just ask me for a copy. If you’re lucky, I might even sign it.
In the meantime, I just finished the draft of a novel after nine months of stop-and-go writing. I’m hopeful that with judicious editing (re: I burn half of it), I can have the manuscript in tense, bloody, melodramatic shape by the end of the year.
Speaking of “melodramatic”… (and a little terrible.)
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So Then I Became A Talking Head
By Nick | October 25, 2009
I ended up on television twice last week. It was decidedly nifty, if a little hair-raising. I still can’t watch the clips themselves all the way through; I get shy about viewing myself, the same way I rarely read anything I’ve written after it’s been published.
When your primary duty as a tech writer is covering Microsoft, and Microsoft decides to launch its biggest product in years (that’d be Windows 7, for everyone who’s been hiding under a rock), your stock value as a guest commentator has a tendency to rise however incrementally.
The first taping came during the actual Microsoft launch party at a SoHo loft, when the Associated Press crew cornered me after CEO Steve Ballmer’s speech. The YouTube link is here. Yep, that’s my slightly freaked-out mug.
The second appearance was an hour-long one on Clayton Morris’s “Gadgets and Games,” on Fox News. That took place on Friday afternoon. The link to that one is here.
My actual eWeek article about the launch event can be found here.
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Hey, I Thought It Was Pure Comedy Gold
By Nick | October 12, 2009
I’m not sure if The Globe and Mail thought my Microsoft Watch blog posting constituted the “insightful,” “colorful,” or “just plain weird” part of its round-up, but they quoted me talking this week about Windows 7 and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:
“What new features await you with the Steve Ballmer edition of Windows 7? For starters, when you open the box, it yells, ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!’ at 200 decibels. And then it tries to smash any iPhones in the vicinity.”
– eWeek Microsoft Watch blogger Nicholas Kolakowski jokes about the special features of a limited edition of Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system. The special edition – in reality, just Windows 7 Ultimate in pimped-up packaging and autographed by the Microsoft CEO – is being offered as a perk to people who volunteer to host a house party in celebration of Windows 7’s launch on Oct. 22.”
Actually, I’ll just opt for “weird” on my part. Or maybe, “moderately caffeinated.” I say “moderately,” because when I become “overly caffeinated” (i.e, three giant cups of coffee instead of one, from the shop across the street whose brewing urn hasn’t been cleaned since the Nixon administration), I start imitating Robert Downey Jr. in this. And that’s just not good for my office furniture.
In other exciting news (well, exciting to me, but I don’t see any other bloggers here, so pipe down), I received my advance copies of the special edition of the Playboy Complete Guide to Cigars, a massive coffee-table dome that feels (at least from my perspective, as co-author) that it’s been in development for the last ten thousand years, even though the actual writing took around three months. The mass-market edition should be out at the beginning of Q2 2010.
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Jim Carroll, Alas
By Nick | September 20, 2009
I interviewed the late Jim Carroll three years ago, for an article in AARP the Magazine. It was a phoner that had been scheduled far in advance, which gave me time to read ‘The Basketball Diaries’ and some of his poetry.
He was more than a little amused (it must be said) about being interviewed for AARP. “I saw they had a piece about Debbie Harry,” he said, referring to the former lead singer of Blondie. “Could you get me that issue?”
I could.
“So, what’s this article about that you’re working on?”
“Diary-writing.” Obviously, the 20 million readers of AARP the Magazine would not use their own journaling to document a descent into New York City’s hard-drug culture, as Carroll did so famously; but my editor was on orders to imbue the magazine with a hipper theme, i.e., just because you pop blood-pressure medication like Skittles doesn’t mean you can’t still rock out like it’s 1968.
Now, most celebrity interviews follow a very particular pattern. The celebrity in question often only has 30 or so minutes booked to interact with you, the ink-stained wretch; although as I learned early on, showing up at the interview with a bottle of decent scotch will exponentially increase the chances of your little meeting extending far into the night.
Anyway, point being, said Celebrity often has absolutely no idea of you or your background when you step into the room. “What magazine do you write for?” Bigshot movie star will ask, his brows colliding in confusion, as your jetlagged and over-caffeinated self seriously considers collapsing face-first onto the table.
But Carroll was different. Gerald Howard, in a Sept. 18 piece in Slate, called him “a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is.”
I learned this firsthand during the interview.
“So,” Carroll said, and I imagined that I could hear him smiling through the phone. “I found one of your short stories online… Nighthawks?”
If my cerebellum had been the interior of a submarine, that would have been the moment that the crew would have started screaming, “Incoming torpedo! Abandon ship!” The burst of adrenaline shooting down my spinal cord, the equivalent of a hundred sailors running for the escape hatches hollering, “Danger stations! It’s time to kiss our ass goodbye!”
‘Nighthawks at the Diner’ was a story that I wrote one afternoon my sophomore year that, despite its clunky prose, ended up in one of the campus literary magazines, conveniently searchable via Google. Not my best work ever. Certainly not something I’d want seen by someone who published their second book of oft-quoted poetry by the time they turned 21.
“Yeah, um, I wrote that in, um, college,” I said. Gulp.
“Yes, it seemed like a college story.”
He laughed. I laughed. The one and only time I ever had an interview subject flip the whole situation and start delving into my work.
We talked for an hour after that. I sent a few copies of the Debbie Harry issue to his assistant. The interview itself, in that way of magazine publishing, was reduced to one paragraph within a larger piece.
Interesting guy. Good writer. Rest in peace.
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