“It may be time to start addressing our President as ‘Barack Milhous Obama.’ What did he know, and when did he know it?”
— Rush Limbaugh, today.
“Barack Milhous Obama”
— Headline, Ed Driscoll.com, this past Friday, May 10th.
(And we previously used it as a headline in October of 2011.)
Update: As the Professor writes, “The Boston Herald Goes All In On The Obama Scandals;” read the whole thing.
John Hayward of the Breitbart.com group blog explores “Six Degrees of Steven Seagal:”
Could Steven Seagal be any more awesome? I’ll bet every major event in human history can be linked to Seagal by no more than six degrees of separation. Okay, maybe seven for the stuff that happened before he was born. Well, the date he claims he was born. I’ve seen period art from previous centuries that included background figures who looked suspiciously like him. Especially during eras when ponytails were common on men.
“Every major event in human history can be linked to Seagal by no more than six degrees of separation.” Including PJ Media; I was assigned to interview Seagal for Guitar World — yes, Guitar World in late 2006, and having realized that I had reached the apogee of old media, I thought that clearly this was the moment to bow out on top, and maximize my efforts in the Blogosphere.
(That, and Roger Simon called, and asked me to produce PJM’s podcasts and Sirius-XM radio show.)
Click to enlarge. (If you think you can handle the awesomeness of it all, that is.)
Here’s the page in the February 2007 issue of Guitar World in which the article appeared. I had two other articles in the magazine that month, but they pale in comparison to experiencing the power and the six-strong glory of…Seagal:
I wonder if I have the tape or the WAV file of the interview I did with Seagal? It felt very much akin to interviewing Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now; Seagal whispered every answer; I kept waiting for him to say, “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of my Stratocaster. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a Stratocaster … and surviving.”
Fortunately, I survived this one as well. At least I think I did.
L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.
Today is the first anniversary of the death of the ultimate happy warrior, Andrew Breitbart. I met and interviewed Andrew on several occasions from 2005 until his death last year at age 43, which was the very definition of the phrase “untimely passing.” Last year, shortly after he passed away, I dusted off the cassette tape of the first interview I had with Andrew, recorded a couple of weeks after meeting him for the first time at the PJM launch in Manhattan on November of 2005. We discussed his first book, Hollywood Interrupted, for quotes and background material for an article on Tinseltown’s woes that I was writing for Tech Central Station. What follows below is the post I wrote last year, when I originally ran that interview.
* * * * * *
Early on in Chris K. Daley’s new e-book, Becoming Breitbart: The Impact of a New Media Revolutionary, there’s a great quote from Mickey Kaus, on the power that Andrew Breitbart had quickly acquired, very early in his career:
In retrospect hitching his star to Drudge was a brilliant decision. This was hardly a given in 1995. Political blogger Mickey Kaus, someone who understood the power of the Internet, recalled, “I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts.”
The power of Drudge Report comes from the large audience it has generated. By 2007 it was regularly attracting over three million unique visits. The average visitor spent an incredible one hour and six minutes on the site, an eternity in Internet terms. The average visitor went to the site 20 times a month. The Washington Post, a popular link for Drudge, noted in 2006 that its “largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”
And not coincidentally along the way, as a headline at Andrew’s Big Journalism site gloats, “Newspapers [have become] America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry.”
Flash-forward to the fall of 2004, and Andrew’s behind-the-scenes power was very much in evidence, this time changing the face of television news. As Scott Johnson of Power Line noted at the start of the month:
I learned in the course of [my week-long visit to Israel in 2007 with Breitbart] that it was Andrew who changed my life in 2004, linking to our “Sixty-First Minute” post early that afternoon with the screaming siren on Drudge. He confided that Matt Drudge did not like blogs, but that he (Andrew) was a fan. On September 9, 2004, he was following the action online. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for everything.
But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted. As I mention in the podcast below, I met Andrew in person for the first time the week of November 14th 2005, during the launch week of PJ Media in New York. After we both had returned to California, on November 28, 2005, I interviewed him by telephone for an article I was working on for Tech Central Station, now called Ideas In Action TV.com, about Hollywood’s box office woes, which was published a week later and titled, a la Woody Allen, “Hollywood Ending.”
I loved Hollywood, Interrupted, and I was certainly aware of Andrew’s backstage work at the Drudge Report and the celebrity-oriented Huffington Post. So I definitely wanted to get his take on how the movie industry, a medium that we both loved, had been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the better, since its golden era of the 1930s through the mid-1960s.
This interview was originally recorded onto a cheap mono tape recorder, originally for the purpose of pulling quotes for my Tech Central Station article. And while I’ve done a considerable amount of restoration work (employing both extensive amounts of Izotope’s RX audio restoration software and the noise gate plug-in built into Cakewalk’s Sonar program), it’s still much cruder sounding than the podcasts and radio shows I’ve produced for PJ Media in the years since. But with Andrew’s passing, I thought it would be worth sharing. So apologies for the sound quality, but I think hearing Andrew riffing on the topic of how the Hollywood of old became, as he would say, Interrupted, is well worth listening to.
There are several observations that Andrew makes here that have withstood the test of time. Early on, there’s a grimly hilarious remark by Andrew concerning his ailing grandmother, who emitted a piercing primal scream of terror, whenever anyone attempted to change the TV channel from her beloved CBS, the only channel she apparently ever watched, in sharp contrast to today’s world of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and millions of Websites and blogs. At about 17 minutes into the interview, he mentions the punitive liberalism and growing nihilism of Hollywood’s product, the latter of which being a topic I discussed extensively with Thomas Hibbs last month, the author of the definitive look at Hollywood nihilism, Shows About Nothing. And two minutes later, Andrew makes a great observation on the popularity of today’s show-biz-oriented reality TV shows as a sort of payback by the American people for today’s drug-addled screw-up stars abandoning the glamour they maintained during Hollywood’s earlier era. Near the end of the interview, you can sort of hear the Big Hollywood Website starting to coalesce in Andrew’s mind; a topic he and I would discuss a few years later on PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show in 2009.
A transcript of this interview, which I originally typed up in 2005 as raw material for my Tech Central Station article, and thus paraphrases some of Andrew’s more stream of consciousness remarks, follows on the next page.
Click below to listen to the podcast:
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(28 minutes long; 26 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 8 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
I have a lengthy article at the PJ Lifestyle blog on the books that I would love to see in the Kindle (and/or Nook) format. It’s also a pretty good insight into my own rather idiosyncratic interests, given that these are all books listed are titles I’ve enjoyed for one reason or another over the last 25 years or so.
Obviously, I’m hoping that perhaps Amazon, and/or the book publishers will come across the piece, and get cracking in getting some of these titles ported into ebooks. On one level, it’s a long shot of course, but perhaps this is a good omen: while I was assembling the list of books for the article, I discovered one of the titles I had planned to include is now finally available for the Kindle: Thomas Hibbs’ Shows About Nothing, his trenchant and insightful look into modern Hollywood’s passionate love affair with nihilism. For my podcast interview with Hibbs from early last year, when the latest edition of his book appeared in dead tree format, click here.
As I said, this is my personal and very idiosyncratic list. If there are books you’d like to see in the Kindle format, click over and add them in the comments.
When PJM began planning for their 1,723,987th site redesign earlier this fall, the in-house art department came up with a redesign of the logo that Stacy Tabb originally designed for me back in 2005, but this time, with my photo built into it. I did not want to stare for 12 hours a day at my mugshot (at least not that mugshot), so I sent in the above as an alternative, which I had mocked up on Photoshop. It’s based on a previous Photoshop I made back in early 2010, inserting my face, with a little touch-up via Photoshop’s paint function, into Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” for my Twitter account’s background page:
click to embiggen.
My sincere apologies to the ghost of Edward Hopper — but then, from the Simpsons to Star Wars, who hasn’t parodied or mucked about with “Nighthawks” in the last 30 years or so?
I’m not sure how long it will last, but that’s the story behind the banner du jour.
Looking for a lengthy review of Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst? Of course you are!
Which is why, in addition to all of the usual political stuff here, I have just such a review over at the PJ Lifestyle blog. And yes, in case you’re wondering (and aren’t you astute for even pondering this topic!) there are plenty of comparisons to the original 1986 edition of the book.
(And yes, I am making up for my late 1980s obsession with modern art. I have to put those pretensions to work somewhere, right?)
Steve Sabol, the scion of the founder of NFL Films, passed away yesterday at 69 of a brain tumor, an age that’s far too young to die these days. I grew up about 20 minutes from the NFL Films offices in Mt. Laurel, NJ* and in 2003, took a tour of their ultra high-tech facilities — which make the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise seem laughably antediluvian in comparison — as part of the research that wound-up doing double-duty at the start of the following year for articles in Videomaker magazine and Tech Central Station. The other half of my prep work for those two articles involved interviewing Sabol on the phone. As he told me at the start of our conversation:
Steve Sabol: There’s an old Indian proverb that I’ve always believed in, and that’s ‘tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. Tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever’.
And that’s been one of our mottos, is telling a story. And the story telling is basically done through the editing. It’s the cameraman’s job to come back with as much material—story telling shots, action shots—as he possibly can. Then it’s up to the editor to tame and to shape the raw vision of the cameraman.
I started out as an editor, and then became a cameraman. But that’s really job of the editor. It’s so critical, and it’s one of the most overlooked artforms or disciplines in filmmaking. Most people don’t understand about editing; they understand writing, they understand music, they understand cinematography. But when it comes to editing and the selection and order of the shots, that’s the key to storytelling.
Driscoll: Did being an editor first influence you when you became a cameraman?
Sabol: When I started out as an editor, and tried to tell stories, I realized that there were certain gaps; that you couldn’t tell a story with just action shots. You needed shots that showed the passage of time, the sun shining through the portals of the stadium. You needed close-ups to show the reaction of the players to the game. You needed shots of the audience and the fans. You needed locator shots as well call them, that set the scene. What’s the stadium look like? Is it a full stadium? Is it an empty stadium? And you need shots that can move the story along. It might be a pair of bloody hands. It could be cleat marks in the mud. It could be a crushed water bottle on the sidelines. It could be a flag whipping in the wind. These were all things that were in important.
I was an art major in college, and Paul Cézanne, the famous French impressionistic painter, once said that “all art is selected detail.” And I felt that that was one thing that was missing in sports films were the details. And when I began as a cameraman, that was all I shot, was the details. I filmed the first 15 Super Bowls, and never saw a play. But I could tell you what kind of hat Tom Landry was wearing, how Vince Lombardi was standing in the fourth quarter, if Bob Lilly had a cut on the bridge of his nose. Those were the things that I remember in the Super Bowl. I don’t remember any of the plays. I was just what we call a weasel.
Driscoll: What is a weasel?
Sabol: Well, we have three types of cameramen: we have a tree, a mole, and a weasel. A tree is the top camera. He’s on a tripod rooted into a position on the 50 yard line, and he doesn’t move. A mole is a handheld, mobile, ground cameraman, with a 12 to 240 lens, and he moves all around the field, and he gives you the eyeball-to-eyeball perspective. A weasel is the cameraman who pops up in unexpected places, to get you the telling storytelling shot—the bench, the crowd, all the details.
So those are the three elements. When you blend them together you get the NFL Films visual signature—when you blend together a mole, a tree and a weasel.
You have infinitely more than that of course – NFL Films revolutionized how sports are covered by film and television, and transformed the National Football League in America’s leading sport. And as Sabol told AP when his father was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, “We see the game as art as much as sport. That helped us nurture not only the game’s traditions but to develop its mythology: America’s Team, The Catch, The Frozen Tundra:”
When Ed Sabol founded NFL Films, his son was there working beside him as a cinematographer right from the start in 1964. They introduced a series of innovations taken for granted today, from super slow-motion replays to blooper reels to sticking microphones on coaches and players. And they hired the ”Voice of God,” John Facenda, to read lyrical descriptions in solemn tones.
Until he landed the rights to chronicle the 1962 NFL championship game, Ed Sabol’s only experience filming sports was recording the action at Steve’s high school football games in Philadelphia.
* * * * *
He was the perfect fit for the job: an all-Rocky Mountain Conference running back at Colorado College majoring in art history. It was Sabol who later wrote of the Raiders, ”The autumn wind is a pirate, blustering in from sea,” words immortalized by Facenda.
The Sabols’ advances included everything from reverse angle replays to filming pregame locker room speeches to setting highlights to pop music.
”Today of course those techniques are so common it’s hard to imagine just how radical they once were,” Steve told the AP last year. ”Believe me, it wasn’t always easy getting people to accept them, but I think it was worth the effort.”
Indeed it was. RIP, Steve Sabol.
* But then, all of South Jersey is 20 minutes away from the rest of South Jersey.
We’re back in our P-51 Mustang, after our tour of duty on the bridge of the mighty USS Instapundit — a big thanks to Glenn Reynolds for allowing me to sit-in this past week, and a big thanks to my co-bloggers, whose posts were always a joy to read. As with the blog here at PJM and all of the great names I’m surrounded by, it’s quite an honor to share space with those whose blogs and articles I’m reading all of the time when not sitting in for the Professor.
And a big thanks to Glenn’s readers as well — checking Glenn’s Gmail account, one of the secrets of Instapundit quickly became obvious: in part, it’s a heavily edited and carefully selected version of Glenn’s email account. Glenn’s readers send him great material, making it easy for me this past week to cull it all down and put up all sorts of links to great articles.
As soon as I’m done removing the turret, glove-box refrigerator, Sidewinder missile launchers and flamed paint job from Glenn’s RX-8 before he notices, we’ll be back shortly with our usual assortment of posts on the news of the day. But if you missed the interviews and video that went up this past week, timed to coincide with our week on the big stage, click below for:
Back with more in a bit.
Not surprisingly, it takes six or seven people to fill the job that Glenn Reynolds does single-handedly; he was kind enough to ask me to be amongst that group sitting in this week while he’s on vacation. Watch for most of my blogging over there this week. But we’ll also have a few surprises over in our little corner of the Interwebs as well….
In the meantime, I need to get started converting Glenn’s RX-8 into the Deathmobile. Ramming speed!
If you haven’t seen Whit Stillman’s latest film, Damsels in Distress, over at National Review Online, Thomas Hibbs has a great review:
Stillman has a knack for dialogue that exposes hollow, modern clichés. Concerning the supposition that great works of the past are irrelevant to the contemporary world, consider this exchange from Metropolitan. When a male character asserts, “Almost everything Jane Austen wrote, looked at from today’s perspective, is absurd,” a young woman counters, “Has it ever occurred to you that today looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective would look even worse?” On the admonition that the most important thing in life is to be true to oneself, consider this confessional speech from one of the characters in Disco:
Do you know that Shakespearean admonition “To thine own self be true”? It’s premised on the idea that “thine own self” is pretty good, being true to which is commendable. What if “thine own self” is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Would it better, in that case, not to be true to “thine own self”? See? That’s my situation.
Much of the humor in Damsels arises from the arcane, oddly formal way the young women speak and from their naïve idealism. Rose, for example, has picked up a British accent and expresses her suspicion of nearly every male by accusing him of being a “playboy-operator type.” One of the ways Violet and her friends show their commitment to others is through their volunteer work at a Suicide Prevention Center. As they approach the center in one scene, Violet picks up the sign reading “Prevention” and relocates it between the words “Suicide” and “Center” and comments, “We’re trying to make a difference in people’s lives. And one way to do that is to prevent them from killing themselves. . . . Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Prevention is nine-tenths the cure?’ Well, in the case of suicide, it’s actually ten-tenths.”
Read the whole thing, including one of the male students’ ruminations of “The Decline of Decadence.”
And then click here for my interview with Stillman himself, over at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
(Incidentally, I interviewed Hibbs as well, earlier this year. Tune in here for that one.)
For a more palatable series of food — and drink — recipes than the topic we’ve been discussing for the past week, I have an interview over at the PJ Lifestyle blog with Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin, the co-authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men, available on dead tree and Kindle. Light up a Lucky, break out the Canadian Club, and tune in here to listen.
I stopped by Jimmie Bise’s podcast “The Delivery” last week to natter on about Mad Men, Richard Nixon’s TV-savvy ’68 campaign (it’s coming — did you catch Bert Cooper mentioning it on this past Sunday’s episode?), and television in general. Pick up your suit at J. Press, stop by Paul Molé for a shave, slap on the Brylcreem, and tune in here to listen.
We’ll get to what’s in the above photo, in just a bit. But first, since I didn’t link to James Lileks’ review of Mad Men’s season five kick off last week, here’s a belated link, in case anyone on the right is still watching the show after the sucker punch hit to Romney’s father. (From the character who’s working for John Lindsay, who will soon run Manhattan deep, deep into the ground.) Also, after Lileks’ recommendations over the years both at the Bleat and at PJM, I went back and rewatched the first season of Michael Mann’s Crime Story series from 1986-’87 on Netflix, which Lileks once described as the dark Deep Space Nine to the sunlit Vice’s ST:TNG. Crime Story had great drive to its stories, and much more consistent writing than Vice, even if they tended to be somewhat formulaic cops-versus the mob at the core. But Dennis Farina and Anthony Denison as Elliot Ness and Al Capone Mike Torello and Ray Luca are classic cop and gangster adversaries. And the season finale is…explosive, to say the least. (The show’s Wikipedia page gives it all away, if you’re interested.)
Last September, when the networks were all rolling out their Mad Men rip-offs (did any of these survive past 13 weeks?) Crime Story would have been the easiest high-concept series to pitch to a network: “Boys! It’s Mad Men with guns!” “Sold—give me 13 weeks; let’s hit the links!”
As I mentioned when my mom passed away at age 87 in mid-February, I brought a treasure trove of photos and memorabilia back to California from her home in New Jersey. (Dad passed away in 2006.) And speaking of the Mad Men era, after the page break, which I’m putting in to ease page loading, and to not waste the time of those who are here (understandably) just for politics and the like, here are a few snapshots of mom and dad from the Mad Men era, followed by the matchbooks from a few of their favorite restaurants in the ’70s and early ’80s.
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From the January 12, 2009 edition of PJM Political, our radio show that aired from September 2007 through the end of 2010 on Sirius-XM’s POTUS channel, here’s my 15-minute interview with Andrew on the launch of Big Hollywood, which was then the latest edition to the Breitbart Big empire. Since I’m traveling today and may or may not be able to post much, hopefully this will hold you over in the interim, along with, I assume, frequent updates from the latest iteration of Breitbart.com, and of course, Instapundit.
(Want to download instead of streaming? Simply click here then.)
At his American Power blog, Donald Douglas links to yet another terrific observation by the late Andrew Breitbart.
And since I haven’t linked to it here, Breitbart was the topic of the first half my interview with another Andrew — Andrew Klavan — in a podcast we recorded on Sunday, and now online at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
(Via Theo Spark.)
Ten years ago at Ed Driscoll.com, A blog was born — after first stumbling across something called Instapundit.blogspot.com in early September of 2001, a story I’ve told before, and can be found here. But since my first post consisted of this, allow me instead to reprint an article I wrote in February of 2002, which went online in March of 2002 at the libertarian Spintech Website, which is now sadly offline. It was titled “The New, New Journalism,” and began by channeling the ghost of a 1960s-era critic of new technology, last seen being plucked out of a Manhattan movie line in 1977 by Alvy Singer…
Marshall McLuhan, the nerdy but influential pop prophet of the 1960s, who coined those hip aphorisms “the global village” and “the medium is the message”, would probably love today’s phenomenon of Web logs. In fact, I checked with him, at my last séance. Here’s what he had to say:
Web logs make the reader both author and publisher in tendency. The highly centralized activity of publishing naturally breaks down into extreme decentralism when anybody can, by means of Web logging, assemble printed, or written, or photographic materials which can be supplied with sound tracks.
But Web logging is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere, or this old technology.
OK, to be honest, I wasn’t rapping with McLuhan at some 1960s cultural icon séance. But this is a direct quote, although it was actually about Xerography, or photocopying, as we like to call these days. I just changed “Xerography” to “Web log.”
And like Xerography, err photocopying, Web logging is a revolution, albeit, at the moment, a minor one.
In the past, essayists and critics became figures of some importance, largely because the print medium was so expensive to operate. The end product (newspapers, magazines and books) didn’t cost the consumer much, but the production of it, via the printing press, wasn’t cheap. So anybody who was in print, expressing his views (as opposed to simply slogging it out in the trenches as a reporter), had to be, and therefore became a very serious and important figure.
Today, the cost of putting a Web site up ranges from free to a hundred bucks or so a month (that’s simply the monthly fee for a server such as Verio, Hosting.com or Exodus. I’m not talking about graphic design, content, etc.) Compare that to the late 1980s. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show in 1988, Ed McLaughlin, his producer, had to go from station to station, to get them to buy his show. In comparison, ten years or so later, when Limbaugh put up a Web site, he was able to reach a national audience (heck, a planetary audience, although I don’t know how well El Rushbo translates in other countries) simultaneously, for the cost of his Web server.
So all of a sudden, a whole lot of folks are running around, kicking up a storm on the ‘Net, expressing views that are not necessarily anywhere near being “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Ground Zero for the Bloggers
Ground Zero for all of these textual shenanigans is Blogger.com, the most well known of several providers of free software that allows even the technically and artistically incompetent to present their ideas in a pleasing and easy to follow format. It also provides instructions, encouragement and its own awards. It’s like a film school, a camera store and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science all rolled up in one place…for bloggers.
When the Web log concept first debuted, it was largely used for on-line personal diaries. Lots of “day in the life” stuff; lots of updates of family information; lots of photographs of nature and birthday parties; lots of nice pretty, stopping and smelling the flowers commentary by assorted emotional exhibitionists. And this is still a common use for Web logs.
Then September 11th happened.
One interesting byproduct of that awful day was that the servers on most major news sites (CNN, The New York Times, etc.) were blown out from over capacity. Since a big chunk of America either didn’t go into work, or left early that day, they went home, turned the TV on, fired up the computer, and wanted to know just…what…the…hell…was…going…on.
But with the Web sites of news biggies jammed to capacity, some people started going to alternative sites. Little funky one man or one woman sites. And some of those men and women, such as Virginia Postrel on her page, The Scene, and Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com, spent the day keeping the nation, hell, the world, just as informed as the traditional news sites people couldn’t get into.
Over at the Lifestyle blog, I have a really fascinating interview with frequent National Review contributor Thomas Hibbs about the latest version of his book, Shows About Nothing:
Click here to listen to the interview.
Over at the PJ Lifestyle blog, I have a lengthy-ish review of the tiny Roku XS set-top box, which can stream videos from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Beck’s GBTV and numerous other sources. The Roku is a glimpse at the future of the television; click here to read.
And if you missed earlier this week, click here for my review of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire; the first season of which is now out on DVD.
Boardwalk Empire is out on DVD, and I have a review over at the PJ Lifestyle blog. While I was away in November, first on the NR Cruise, and then visiting relatives in South Jersey, I found myself getting sucked into the recent HBO series, almost against my will. It seemed to be running in a continuous loop on the channel, which was available everywhere I was staying. And it didn’t hurt that I took plenty of trips to a far more clapped version of Atlantic City when I was kid, not to mention that in November, I was back in my old stomping grounds, an hour and a half away, while I was watching it. If you’ve seen the series yourself, or if you’re interested in the 1920s in general (or Hollywood’s often fanciful interpretation of the era at least), check out my review here.
OK, the trusty ol’ Shure-58 microphone seems to be working, and now that I’ve recovered from the fast-paced world of Insta-blogging (thanks again, Professor!), I’ll be back here at the usual haunt, in just a bit.
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