Author Archives: Steve Mays

Inside the Beltway

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Dave Winer shares a thoughtful post on whether Barack Obama will turn into an Inside The Beltway guy if he gets elected. Dave, like the rest of us, has seen bright young idealistic people get taken over by the systems they proposed to dismantle.

"I don’t want to be an insider, I don’t want the insiders to rule, I don’t want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears."

"The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you’re immune? Think again."

I’ve long thought –but could not put into words– that the Internet might somehow be our salvation. I still think that. 

Microsoft’s Ballmer on future of media?

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“In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion. Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

[from an interview -video/text- at washingtonpost.com]

J. Michael Spooner – Visual Development Design Consultant

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Michael Spooner has worked in the animation industry for twenty-five years with such notable studios as Walt Disney, Warner Brothers and DreamWorks.

Michael’s professional career in art began in 1976, when he was invited to join the faculty at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, after graduating with distinction. He taught for twelve years, simultaneously working as a freelance illustrator for clients that included the Public Broadcasting System, Zondervan Publishing House, Masda Motors, the National Football League, NBC Television, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox.

Michael ventured into animation as a Layout Artist with Ralph Bakshi’s feature production of Tolkien’s, Lord of the Rings. Shortly after he worked with Filmation Studios on He-Man, Bravestar and Fat Albert and on the Bagdasarian feature, The Chipmunk Adventure.

Joining the Walt Disney Television Animation team in 1988 as a Visual Development Artist and Production Designer, Michael set the style for such episodic shows as, Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers, Talespin, Goof Troop, The Little Mermaid, New Bonkers and Aladdin. He also worked on the direct-to-video production of Aladdin and the King of Thieves.

In 1994, Michael and his family moved to Paris, France, where he headed up the Production Layout team for Disney’s feature film, A Goofy Movie.

Returning to Los Angeles in 1995, Michael Co-Art Directed Warner Brothers first full-length animated feature, Quest for Camelot. Following that he worked independently as a Visual Development Designer Consultant on Disney’s Dinosaurs, The Emperor’s New Groove, Treasure Planet and Lilo and Stitch. Michael also assisted on early development design of Dreamworks,’ Shrek.

Michael moved to the Chicago area in 1999 to become Vice President of Visual Development and Artist Education with Big Idea Productions, home of the popular 3D animated video series, Veggie Tales. There he developed and headed up the Visual Development process in Story, Concept Design, Modeling and Layout. He also served as Art Director on various productions and as an Art Direction Consultant on Big Idea’s first feature animated film, Jonah.

Today, Michael owns Spoonerville Animation Design, an independent visual development studio, providing both traditional and CGI design concepts for clients such as Big Idea, Inc., Star Farm Productions, ReelFX Creative Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

He lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his writer-wife Beverly, and son Philip.

Michael is a visiting artist and lecturer, presenting in universities, art schools and animation studios throughout the United States.

You may reach him at: spoonerville1@sbcglobal.net or 630 301-0895

“Waning Days of the Road Warrior”

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I hate air travel. Not “white knuckle” hate, but “hassle hate.” Fortunately I don’t have to do much of it any more. But lots of people in our company do and I feel for them. I also wonder how much of it is really necessary. Usually while playing with iChat and live video streaming.

Latest issue of Business Week has an article titled, The Waning Days of the Road Warrior (Why the current slowdown in business travel may not end when the economy recovers).

“For years, Irv Rothman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard’s Financial Services division, traveled at least once a quarter—top three lieutenants in tow—from his New Jersey base to HP’s Silicon Valley headquarters. After enduring Newark airport hell and six-and-a-half hours of stale, germy air, the team would arrive, strung out, to meet with their boss. For one hour. Then they would turn around and do the whole thing all over again.

The super surge in oil prices and resulting spike in airfares is just one reason companies are ordering their road warriors home. Factor in, too, the misery of modern air travel, which has de-glamorized the business junket. HR types also have a new appreciation for how the frequent-flier lifestyle can wreck executives’ health and family lives. And they have come to realize that jetting off for a one-hour meeting, while instinctual for corporate strivers, is rarely productive.

So, if managers aren’t flying to meetings, what are they doing? Using newfangled technology that is finally delivering the kind of Star Trek-y, space- and time-shifting experiences that tech executives have blabbered on about forever. Videoconferencing, Web-enabled meetings, online collaboration tools—all are giving workers the ability to dart around the globe from their desk chairs.”

The article reminded me of driving from Jefferson City, MO, to Dubuque, IA (9 hours?) to call on a station manager who really didn’t want to see me. To get the appointment I said something like, “All I need is a minute of your time.”

When I walked into his office and started take a seat, he reminded me that I had said I only needed one minute and that’s all that I had. So I stood there with my little briefcase in hand and told him what our network could do for his station. (I didn’t sign him up) Today I might have just sent him a Quicktime file or made my “pitch” via iChat. No less effective and a lot less costly.

Videoconferencing and related technologies really only work when both parties want to hear what the other has to say. How many meetings take place because it was the only way the “prospect” could get the sales rep to leave her the fuck alone? (Wonder if there’s any data on that)

These days, most of the people I deal with in remote locations want to talk to me and I want to talk to them. And, increasingly, they have the tech skills to do a quick face-to-face.

And if I need to send them a url or an image or any other kind of file for that matter, it’s easy to do.

Old Schoolers will talk about body language and non-verbal communication and “pressing the flesh” and all the other arguments for being in the same room.

We’ll talk again when that airline ticket to the coast is $2,000.

The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters

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I’m reading (for the 4th or 5th time) The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. One of the minor characters in the novel, written in 1991, is Johathan Water, the black president of the United States. Here are a couple of paragraphs from page 120:

“President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society.

The candidacy of Jonathan Water succeeded on the premise that all Americans could live together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man’s black and the black-man’s white… and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation.”

“No one’s in heaven here, but no one’s in hell”

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I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sadder love song than We Just Get Along by the Evangenitals.

I gave it some thought before I wrote that. I tried to remember some of the saddest love songs (are all sad songs love songs?) I’ve heard in the last 40+ years. Don’t worry, I won’t try to list any here. My list wouldn’t look anything like yours.

Themlalouise

How sad and achingly beautiful is We Just Get Along? Do you remember the moment in Thelma and Louise when Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are sitting the car near the edge of the cliff with the cops coming for them and they look at each other with perfect understanding? It’s that sad. And just a little bit sadder.

I’m nothing like her
Which may be why he likes me so much
I don’t have her power
I don’t have her touch

No one’s in heaven here
but no one’s in hell
We just get along

Naw, that doesn’t cut it. You gotta sit in the dark with that last beer, remembering. Remembering a time when you were in love and they weren’t.

As I listened to the half dozen cuts from the CD (Everlovin’) I kept wondering, “Why aren’t these songs hits?” But that’s just the old DJ/Billboard Hot 100 coming out. We don’t need radio to make hits anymore. The songs –if they’re good enough– take on a life of their own and roll across the Internet, from one link to the next.

Old dogs and new tricks

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Mindy McAdams (Teaching Online Journalism) always seems to have fresh insight into the state of journalism:

“I see a few people in almost every newsroom (usually less than one-quarter of the staff) embracing the new ways of communication and trying to spread their journalism and enhance their organization’s outputs via new channels and techniques. I see a lot more people who are worried, even frightened, that there will be no place for them in this new world.

The latter group interests me a lot more than the small number of chained-to-the-barricades dinosaurs (who also exist in every newsroom) — because they are very different from the dinosaurs. They are not resistant because they think the Internet is a short-lived fad, or because they fail to see its potential, or because they are in love with the smell of ink on paper. Rather, they are resistant because they don’t know how to train themselves — they are waiting for someone to hand them a tool and show them how to use it.”

This is a point I tend to overlook. And journos –if I may generalize– aren’t the type to admit they don’t know how to do something and ask for help.

My Favorite Depressing Songs

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It occurred to me today that some of my favorite songs are pretty depressing. I wondered how many I could come up with off the top of my head. Real quick. 

  • Table for One -Liz Phair
  • At Seventeen – Janis Ian
  • Picture – Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock
  • Space Oddity – David Bowie
  • Dark End of the Street – Veronica Klaus
  • Streets of Philadelphia – Bruce Springsteen
  • Fuck ’em All – Evangenitals
  • A Thousand Kisses Deep – Leonard Cohen

This is just a starter-list, in no particular order. And I’m willing to bump some if you can come
up with some that I like as well but still make me want to blow my
brains out. Ten would be a good number, don’t you think? Comments are open.

When is it time to unplug?

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From a Reuters story about a new grass-roots movement in which tech geeks, Internet addicts, BlackBerry thumbers and compulsive IMers are unplugging (if only for a day)

“I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube.

“I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk.”

“I have dream blogged. I have surfed the Internet in my dreams sometimes. If I start hearing imaginary incoming message chimes on my computer when I am out in the back yard, it tells me I have spent too much time online.”

I’ve posted before that I can’t quite remember what I did before I started blogging. And it’s even harder to recall what I did before the Internet captured my attention (and time). That’s probably not a good sign. But what was I doing with my time before I got my first computer, sometime around ’85 or ’86?

Perhaps I’m just rationalizing, but I think the time I’ve spent online, blogging or reading blogs (and news), has been positive for me.

I’m less argumentative. Perhaps because I dump my views and opinions here and, somehow, feel less need to yak about them. I’m better informed about many more topics. I watch less television.

Some of my best friends are people I’ve met online.

But the greatest personal benefit has been the creative outlet. Bearing mind that “creative” is relative.

[Thanks, Chuck]

Right of the Dial (The Clear Channel Story)

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I’ve been around radio most of my life. My dad was a radio guy. I became a radio guy. And I was doing affiliate relations for our radio networks when things started to change in the late 90’s, when federal media ownership rules were relaxed and companies like Clear Channel started buying up hundreds of local stations.

BustedradioAlec Foege has written a book –Right of the Dial– that tells the Clear Channel story. According to the review in the New York Times, Foege tried to give the company the benefit of the doubt.

“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”

The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”

The Internet and iTunes and all the rest were going to have a big impact on radio, no matter what. But I have to wonder if local radio stations might not have been better prepared for the challenges if they hadn’t been gutted and commoditized by the Clear Channel’s.

Nawww.

[Thanks, Henry]