tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67011852009-07-11T16:52:17.555-07:00D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.comBlogger711125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-80487308071845562802009-07-08T07:27:00.003-07:002009-07-08T07:35:43.171-07:00

How much do I love Soft Cell, Marc Almond, Marc & the Mambas? Too much, as anyone who has lived with me would tell you.Impossible to pick a fave track but here's a neglected gem, "Down in the Subway," from their guitar-oriented third album, This Last Night in Sodom. It was missing from the recent (generally excellent) Heat remixes collection and represents a nice diversion in the band's sound.

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-32856721191012070372009-07-03T09:25:00.002-07:002009-07-03T09:31:43.407-07:00

I'm so sick of this:MySpace victim’s mom disappointed by rulingThe girl was not a victim of MySpace. MySpace did not kill her or drive her to suicide. This issue is not MySpace.The issue is that a young girl felt so dependent on the approval of a boy and social group that she killed herself when she thought she'd lost it. The issue is that another's girl's mother was so crazily enmeshed in her

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-43978843202032908442009-07-02T08:21:00.001-07:002009-07-02T08:21:01.781-07:00

Me: Hon, what do you think of these as possible cover images for the story collection? (gestures to laptop showing shadowy pictures of broody men in urban settings)Husband: Uh, they're kind of bleak. Like your author photo. Don't you think you could find something a little lighter?Me: Hmmm, OK, let me look some more.(later)Me: Hon, what about these?Husband: (looking at new pictures) A man lying

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-55548381669777173952009-07-01T08:32:00.004-07:002009-07-01T08:32:00.600-07:00

"I had an immediate urge to fling off my bikini!"SF electro-art-pop posse Voice Farm (be sure to check out the cult-crazy video on their home page) put out their first album in 1982, the dark garage synth classic "The World We Live In." They've since gone through several styles, including an odd industrial phase, but they're perhaps best known for this sample-filled, sexrad classic.First time I

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-21614093687240880132009-06-30T09:34:00.003-07:002009-06-30T09:48:02.200-07:00

I'm not a big dance fan (or "movement" as we called it in the performance art world), but German choreographer Pina Bausch took my breath away, especially her film Complaint of the Empress, which convinced me that dance could be cinema. Sad to learn today that's she's gone.

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-87831373745964909662009-06-26T09:25:00.004-07:002009-06-29T09:00:22.616-07:00

Rereading and revising the past 20+ years of short stories, sudden fiction, and performance texts has been an experience. And somewhat uncanny doing it in the month before I turn 40.I had completed a manuscript for a story collection a couple of times in the past. The first time, my agent and I decided to focus on shopping around my second novel instead, as story collections are a harder sell,

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-65154930752000654022009-06-26T09:00:00.005-07:002009-06-29T09:00:22.616-07:00

So this week I sent off the manuscript for my new story collection, Love Hard. (Btw that title is sort of humorous -- you can read it in the sexual sense of "hard loving" -- and, although there is sex in the book, it's really much more about how love is difficult. Imagine hearing the title grunted in a gruff, masculine voice like Frankenstein's monster: "Love hard.")(Begging the question, do I

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-27377905686321937692009-06-26T08:41:00.000-07:002009-06-26T08:41:01.482-07:00

Was forwarded this yesterday -- a striking color optical illusion reposted at the Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine. Somewhat shocking demonstration of how the eye and mind process information about color -- great example for teaching ideas of "reality" defined by sensory perception. (Would've been apropos at the Media Ecology conference).Also good for teaching 1960s abstraction, and not

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-46982440228164373122009-06-25T08:05:00.006-07:002009-06-25T08:35:36.714-07:00

So this was the other show I checked out at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Carey Young's Speech Acts. Young is a UK conceptual/installation artist who does work on business and globalization, among other things. The Representative was a small, furnished sitting area with a red phone and two snapshots, one of a man, one of a woman. They were actual can center employees (American), to

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-32960692245860252092009-06-23T20:05:00.003-07:002009-06-23T20:05:00.889-07:00

French! Fashion! Cigarettes! Ambiguity! Irony! And a super-catchy jazzy tune, what's not to love? Apparently this was a big Euro hit in '85 -- I first heard it on a mix tape sent to me in '96 by my first-ever 'Internet friend,' a new wave geek in Germany. Thanks, Martin!And, according to one translator, the lyrics are as weird as I thought they were:LazyIn fact, she is lazyIs it really lazinessOr

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-34513916456804006052009-06-23T09:53:00.006-07:002009-06-23T16:48:07.922-07:00

I love this picture. Sorry it's a crappy camera snap, I couldn't find it reproduced online or in any gift-store books: It's from the Missouri History Museum's exhibit on the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial / World's Fair. It's on the wall devoted to the workers who constructed the fair: this handsome man was photographed a few months before the fair opened. I love his expression, the angle of

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-63033692116185438612009-06-22T14:24:00.004-07:002009-06-22T14:34:02.887-07:00

Is reporting on the use of Twitter in the Iranian protests overinflated?Wired: Iran: Before You Have That Twitter-Gasm…. a quiet little piece compared to the Israeli conspiracy kerfuffle going on elsewhere..

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-69579807645232394112009-06-22T13:18:00.003-07:002009-06-23T16:48:07.923-07:00

LA Times:Eastman Kodak Co. announced today that it is retiring the 74-year-old Kodachrome color film as photographers gravitate to digital cameras and newer films. About 70% of the company’s revenue now comes from its digital sales.Kodachrome sales had plunged in recent years to less than 1% of Kodak’s total film sales. Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan., the only lab worldwide that still processes

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-69625767007691319132009-06-19T16:32:00.012-07:002009-06-23T16:48:07.923-07:00

Snuck out of conference at lunch to go see 2 exhibits at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (fuzzy but kinda fun phone snaps below). An installation of Chantal Ackerman began disappointingly, with her recent Les Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women of Antwerp in November). Like all the work at this exhibit, it was an installation-ization of traditional films, explorations in moving cinema into a

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-3287934447538487552009-06-19T16:27:00.005-07:002009-06-22T13:20:49.436-07:00

The conference started yesterday, but I couldn’t attend because I’ve been taking a summer seminar for the last two weeks in multimedia/multimodal scholarship at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. (You can check out my class project, the presentation for this conference, done in Prezi Flash instead of Keynote/Powerpoint.)Anyway when I got here this morning, the woman working the registration

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-41021183410314308752009-06-19T08:08:00.003-07:002009-06-19T08:15:42.561-07:00

Thought of my friend Alina when I saw this sign on my way to catch the bus to the conference this morning. Last month at the International Communication Association, she not only took public transportation to just about every major tourist attraction in the city, she did it with her 6-year old daughter!So, when I had a mini anxiety twitch this morning -- some bus signs looked like this, others

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-19858735827786937932009-06-19T08:04:00.002-07:002009-06-19T08:07:57.434-07:00

I’m in St. Louis this weekend for the Media Ecology Association conference. I decided not to stay near the conference but instead in the historic Soulard neighborhood. It kinda reminds me of Galveston: old red bricks, lush green overgrowth, heat and humidity, lazy ceiling fans, commingling poverty and gentrification, bars, bars, and more bars.

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-48671498517984591002009-06-18T07:48:00.000-07:002009-06-18T07:48:02.474-07:00

I'm actually linking to WIRED.Bruce Sterling does 'Dead Media Beat' on MySpace's reported plan to cut 30% of its workforce:"I’m thinking we need a different model here, a social-good model. If we really want to spend all our time socializing on networks, and we don’t want to spend any money doing that, and it isn’t a profit center for anybody, and it only lasts five years tops, no matter how big

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-68878050703943406452009-06-17T11:29:00.000-07:002009-06-17T11:29:00.212-07:00

Ok so I am a huge gaywad with no taste because my favorite Cabaret Voltaire album is Groovy, Laidback, and Nasty - an almost universally reviled effort from 1990. While fans had tolerated the band's gradual development from hard industrial to electrodance, this album took things too far. Vocalist Stephen Mallinder actually sang instead of doing his usual whisper-hiss vocals, and the whole thing

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-37913939879596233292009-06-17T07:55:00.003-07:002009-06-17T08:28:30.215-07:00

Yes, the Iranian election protests are wonderful (coulda used some more of that in '00 here), but, more importantly, how does it affect my morning viral browsing?YouTube actually has interesting content front-and-center again - nice to see some social activism alongside product promotions and teen diaries. (That business model is working out so well for MySpace.)- Spotlight: Democracy Challenge-

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-54277793849377283202009-06-17T07:43:00.002-07:002009-06-17T07:47:49.426-07:00

Hey, our getting married is on par with incest and our core nature is so inherently repellant we should kick gay Arabic translators out of the army, but if you're a federal employee, well, OK, we'll let your partner get bennies.NYT: U.S. to Extend Its Job Benefits to Gay Partners:"It is the most significant statement [Obama] has made on gay issues, and it comes as he faces intense criticism from

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-10846550334336162612009-06-14T10:41:00.002-07:002009-06-14T10:52:45.376-07:00

Obama DOJ lies to Politico in defending hate brief against gaysby John Aravosis (DC) on 6/12/2009 01:26:00 PMBen Smith at Politico just reported the following statement from the Department of Justice over their brief, filed last night, comparing gay marriage to incest:As it generally does with existing statutes, the Justice Department is defending the law on the books in court. The president has

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-47783403032847027122009-06-11T14:23:00.001-07:002009-06-11T14:26:20.775-07:00

Go Frenchies!Daily Mail: Internet access is a fundamental human right, rules French courtOngoing coverage.

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-55647606142937879302009-06-11T08:13:00.000-07:002009-06-23T16:48:07.924-07:00

After meeting Ben Peters at ICA and talking about his work on Soviet computing, I got to thinking of this old post from the always wonderful Oh Haigh on Soviet architectual phtographs, and the Shostakovitch movie musical Cherry Town as well, so just thought I'd throw them all together in a general post of retro Soviet goodness....

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6701185.post-37995199057878674572009-06-10T08:29:00.000-07:002009-06-10T08:29:02.177-07:00

Client's lead single "Can You Feel" from the recent album Command.Don't get me wrong, I like this, and I like the overall sound of the new album more than the previous Heartland (although electro groups, from Ladytron to Eurythmics, feeling the need to rock out around the third album always irks me a bit -- relax, you don't have to prove anything).But when I went back to list to the first two

D. Travers Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06849434936025186635dtraversscott@gmail.com0