Plus--Maybe we just want to make Hillary suffer a bit.

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Instapundit effortlessly spans present, past, and future to cover the Lapham's Quarterly launch party, Laphamistiically.** ... When I worked at Harper's, after Michael Kinsley took it over from Lapham,*** one of the editors had a shorthand name for Lapham's pretentious, opaque, you-can't-quite-understand-this-so-I-must-be-smart prose style: "The Caravans of the Mind." Wagons. ho! ...

**--This is not the "worst media party ever" referred to in the headline. That would be this party.

***--When Lapham took over the magazine again after Kinsley's departure, he fired the Kinsley people, including me. A perfectly reasonable thing to do. I wouldn't have wanted to work for him anyway! The transition was accomplished seamlessly, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of civility. He's still on my s-list for life. You should know that. ... 10:46 P.M.

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Strike-bound Rob Long is blogs semi-apocalyptically about the future of Hollywood. Sample:

The truth is, the web--that thing that brings us email and MySpace and cats playing the piano on YouTube--has a kind of Wal*Mart effect on the entertainment choices offered to the audience: there's a lot more to choose from, most of it's pretty awful, and all of it is going to be a lot cheaper. When you combine the digitization of content with unlimited bandwidth, what you get is a cheaper, more efficient system. And Brentwood was not built on cheap, or efficient. This town--and all of us who work here--all of us, writers, agents, actors, lawyers, studio executives, all of us here in the second grade classroom called Hollywood--have a stake in preserving this great big slushy inefficient mess of a system, that makes pilots that never get aired, buys scripts that never get produced, makes movies that no one sees, produces series that get cancelled.

Long is such a good writer/ talker he can even be forgiven for saying that Marc Andreessen "gets it"--though if you read the strike analysis on Andreessen's blog it will save you hours and hours of unenlightening MSM coverage over the next few weeks. ... 10:25 P.M.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007