Media Mindfulness

“The only thing Americans recycle is fashion.”

I just learned some shocking news that my friend and colleague Alex Magocsi was found dead in his car in Santa Fe. Alex was my editor at the Santa Fe New Mexican for many years when I was a music and arts writer for its weekly entertainment supplement, Pasatiempo. We shared a passion for music [...]

Excuse me while I cry for a moment. Some poor cad in London was hauled in by the police for singing along to The Clash’s London Calling, which begs the question: Had punk been invented today, would it be considered a terrorist movement? Can paranoia withstand the leitmotif of our era, “irony”? Speaking of irony, [...]

OK, the phenomena of Tila Tequila caught my eye (literally), giving me pause about the nexus of celebrity culture and social networks. Her bio reads like a manifesto of post-irony, the sad, commodified afterlife of punk’s impact on capitalism.

As you can see in the comments below from her MySpace page, she bemoans the shallowness of [...]

Two words: Humpty-Dumpty.

Implicit in the following LA Times story is a lament from the industry (yet more evidence that all media do is report on themselves) that the era of an informed citizenry is a thing of the past because there will be no infrastructure for information gathering. Corporate media love to think of themselves as the [...]

This is a summary.