From September 1964.

I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14—I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But 14 is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my 14 was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent. –“Diary,” Jenny Diski, London Review of Books

Let’s take a step back first, as I had to in the original article, to explain a literal red herring. Before modern refrigeration and speedy transport, fish could not be got to customers more than a few miles inland before it went bad. Various methods were invented for preserving them, using salting, smoking or pickling. Kippers are herrings that have been split, salted, dried and smoked. Yarmouth bloaters are made by a variation on kippering but are whole fish and do not keep so well. Arbroath smokies are smoked haddock. Red herrings are a type of kipper that have been much more heavily smoked, for up to 10 days, until they have been part-cooked and have gone a reddish-brown colour. They also have a strong smell. They would keep for months (they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but in this state they were inedible and had to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be heated and served. –“The Lure of the Red Herring,” World Wide Words, Michael Quinion (via)

“I don’t know why it’s like this, but it’s a rule: never ever approach the gallery directly. Never ever. I didn’t make this rule and I don’t want the world to be like this, but it is. Don’t ask for a studio visit, don’t ask to show them your work, don’t do anything. Sooner or later something will happen.” –“How to Make It As An Artist In New York 101,” Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer

Advertisement, January 1948.

“If you build a bridge to nowhere, that might be a bridge that you’re going to use that I’m not going to use,” said Ed Pound, spokesman for the government board charged with investigating waste and fraud in the stimulus package. “That’s not a call we’re going to make.” –“Eye on the Stimulus: Stimulus for cotton candy, tango and a fish orchestra? Wacky, or actually worthy?” by Michael Grabell, ProPublica

The Kcymaerxthaere is a vast alternate universe created by Eames Demetrios, a California-based artist and filmmaker who began installing the plaques in 2003. The premise of the project is that the Kcymaerxthaere exists as its own parallel world, but its remnants are often visible in our own, “linear” world—intersections that Demetrios endeavors to commemorate by physically marking their presence. He has already installed over sixty of these faux historical markers, and hopes to increase that number to seventy by the year’s end. Most are in the United States (that is, Kymaerica), while others dot the globe, materializing in Singapore, Spain, Dubai, and Australia. This August, Demetrios even lowered a plaque onto the ocean floor, under forty-five feet of water in the Garvellach Islands of Scotland. In addition to the plaques, there are lectures, websites, travel guides (including Discover Kymaerica), and bus tours. He funds the project through gallery shows that display photographs of the plaque sites, as well as “texture flags”—dense images of physical objects that he says are carried by the people of the Kcymaerxthaere as their national banners. Demetrios calls the project “three-dimensional storytelling,” and says that he hopes to mark some two thousand sites before he is through. –“Discover Kymaerica,” Michael A. Elliott, The Believer

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolaño. –“Bolaño Inc.,” Horacio Castellanos Moya, Guernica

Advertisement, October 1955.

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device. Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them. If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth. On Tuesday, a guard and a driver for The New York Times, both licensed to carry firearms, drove through nine police checkpoints that were using the device. None of the checkpoint guards detected the two AK-47 rifles and ammunition inside the vehicle. –“Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless,” Rod Nordland, The New York Times

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever. This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn’t make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind. –“How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon: The perverse allure of a damaged woman,” Johann Hari, Slate

This doesn’t lead to “writing by committee.” My experience is that four minds are four times more inventive in a team than if each works alone. But this requires a conductor to keep the voices to tempo and tune, and the key to this is the showrunner—the head producer who has creative control of the series. Showrunners like David Chase (Sopranos), Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) or John Wells (ER) helped carve out a space for collaboration. Time and money is also invested. In the US, beyond your individual scripts, you are paid a salary to come into a “writer’s room” and help the work of others. The Wire is a good example of the result. Conceived by David Simon, a former journalist, and homicide detective Ed Burns, the collaborative ethic allowed them to bring in voices from film writing and crime fiction­—such as Richard Price and George Pelecanos—without losing coherence. This ethos has made US television the preferred destination for a generation of great writers. After winning an Oscar with American Beauty, Alan Ball eschewed the big screen and created Six Feet Under for HBO. In the DVD commentary to the pilot, he describes handing in the edgy first draft to the head of the channel. Having been through the Hollywood studio mill, Ball expected the worst, but the only note he had back read: “Can you make it more fucked up?” Although we are blessed with a tradition of great television dramatists, there’s no way that Alan Bleasdale, Dennis Potter or Jimmy McGovern could have written a dozen episodes of a show alone. We have recently imported the idea of showrunners for the resurrection of Dr Who and Survivors, but their power is limited, and the principle of collaboration doesn’t penetrate the lower echelons. Script editors and producers take a dim view of you talking to another writer without tight supervision. There is no financial incentive either. Why make someone else’s episode great when it might make yours look less good? Given that the running order can be changed at the last moment by management fiat, those collectively crafted character developments and story arcs will be binned anyway. Just write your own episode and cash that cheque. –“Why Britain can’t do The Wire,” Peter Jukes, Prospect

From January 1964.

For all its no-nonsense masculinity, Hawksian cinema has always been very stylized. His array of adventures make their stoical gestures in an enclosed world where such gestures are sufficient unto themselves. Unfortunately, about half of “Red Line 7000″ consists of real footage of apparently suicidal stock-car racing in America, and it is harder to believe in the validity of stylized stoicism as a direct statement on the modern world. Hawks, unlike Preminger, has taken his studio-conditioned out-look out into the real world and there is consequently a fatal disharmony between the old movie myths he seeks to perpetuate and the insistent iconography of the modern world he is unable to ignore. Unlike Antonioni, Hawks believes that the sentiments of 1935 are appropriate to the cybernetic ’60s, but “Red Line 7000″ fails to establish his thesis. If Hawks has represented much of what I like in the cinema, Warhol represents much of what I resist. We live in an era when many people are as pathologically frightened of being put on as of being put down. Magazine articles are written to warn us of the perils of alleged artists who do not take their audience seriously, and Warhol is usually cited as the worst offender. I have found in the past that with me a little Warholian cinema goes a long way, but it suddenly strikes me that I have never seen anything by Warhol entirely lacking in interest. I happened to stumble into the Cinametheque one night in search of his Fire Island opus which is reportedly too salacious even for the American Civil Liberties Union. As a last minute replacement for the mysteriously unavailable Fire Island film, the management reprised “The Life Story of Juanita Castro,” which I had never seen, and it shook me up considerably simply by making me laugh for long stretches of time, not so much at it as with it. –“Clip Job : Sarris Considers Warhol,” Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, from December 1965

Marx never wrote about cellulite, though I am quite sure he suffered from this “unsightly condition.” He endured several excruciating physical ailments throughout his lifetime: carbuncles, insomnia, bronchitis, a bad liver, pleurisy and haemorrhoids. If he were alive today I am sure he would definitely have a few more “backaches” to contend with, the current cellulite epidemic being one of the many. It might be very much lagging in order of importance, but nevertheless an examination of this modern phenomenon vividly illustrates the manipulative powers of both advertising and marketing, two wasteful and exploitative processes which are an integral part of capitalism…. Advertising and marketing constitutes part of the modern system of production and consumption. Advertising in particular is the dominant cultural form in capitalist society. It mimics and subverts every genre of art and cultural practice to enhance and alter the meaning of lifeless objects. But advertisements do more than exaggerate the basic function of a product. They imbue products with all kinds of social abilities. Marx called this process the fetishism of commodities. But surely people buy a particular soft drink or breakfast cereal because they like its taste and are thirsty, hungry or want to keep regular: they are not hypnotised into thinking that they are going to be or have the beautiful woman in the TV commercial? But advertising does not adhere to such a crude formula. Utilitarian items such as food or drink become exaggerated props in advertisements that subtly portray or imply an ideal lifestyle. This ideal is not an outlandishly glamourous way of life. It is a comfortable and customary one which we can all realistically aspire to, one which the product will bring us nearer to. But some commodities bring us nearer to this coveted lifestyle than others. –“Marxism and Cellulite: A consumer’s guide to marketing,” Catherine Lyons, Red Banner: A magazine of socialist ideas

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, “The Fenimore Cooper Indian” (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson’s sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen. –“American Pastoral,” Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books

From May 1897.

What is claimed is: 1. A method of producing an advertisement with thematic content from a television program, comprising: incorporating thematic content comprising a plot advancing element of a television program into a product or service advertisement to form a program-integrated product or service advertisement, wherein the program-integrated product or service advertisement is broadcast in between segments of the television program, before a time slot of the television program or after the time slot of the television program, wherein the plot advancing element promotes the plan or pattern of events or the main story of the television program. –“Method and system for producing program-integrated commercials,” John L. Makowski, et al., (a patent on commercial product placement) U.S. Patent Number: 6859936, November 20, 2001

Every type of content has some quotient of participation value. At the bottom of the spectrum are games/shows/movies/events that you watch or attend by yourself, and you have no interest in telling anyone about. Those shows have zero participation value. They could be Perry Mason reruns or shows you watch when you have nothing better to do. At the top of the scale are games/shows/movies/events that potential viewers have predicted to have high participation value. These are events that we look forward to not only watching or attending, but that we plan in advance how we are going to extend our participation. We may plan on tweeting about it or posting a facebook update because we know our friends are there and we are bragging to each other, while at the same time showing off to friends who can’t be there. Think going to the opening of Cowboys stadium, or going to a concert or opening night of a movie, or watching the big game…. The higher the participation value, the shorter the shelf life. The role of the Internet for high participation games/shows/events is not to show them, its to enable the participation. The explosion of Social Networking and social networking enabled games and applications has strengthened this as the internet’s role. Its improving TV ratings of shows with high participation value. –“Sports Ratings Records and what it tells us about the Internet,” Mark Cuban, blogmaverick

My wife and I chose to settle in our Los Angeles neighborhood because it had everything a young family would want: shady, tree-lined streets, charming cottages and bungalows, lots of kids with involved parents. My instant affection for the place was based on all of those domestic details. And one summer several years ago, it turned into full-blown love when I went to my first neighborhood happy-hour playdate….You brought your kids. You brought some food. And you brought your poison…One neighbor specialized in gimlets, another in craft beers, and yet another in cult bargain wines….There was the secret smoker’s club, a group of people who perched on the perimeter, furtively sharing a single cigarette, ready to stamp it out if a kid approached. And then there was the secret pot club, a group of recreational stoners who had more vigilant security procedures. They would collectively disappear entirely, smoke in shifts, and return to the party. I once observed a mother/lookout stopping curious kids from finding the pot smoker’s circle in a side yard by intercepting the kids with a platter of cheese and crackers. Paranoia makes perfect. –“Vice is Nice,” Hugh Garvey, Cookie

Charles Bronson on Mandom