blackrimglasses.com

This Monday, in accordance with what I stated in the previous posting, I gave a presentation at UCSB about how we value digital information, and how value is directly related to the degree of abstraction the piece of media afforded. The presentation went OK, but I would not say that it was a stellar performance on my part. I was thrown off by the lack of people in attendance (its easier to speak to lots of people than to few) and I just felt off my game.

I suppose a large part of that was being back in Santa Barbara. I hadn’t been in SB since the precise day we moved out of our apartment, which happened to be the day after I graduated with my MFA. I do not know why I hadn’t been back, it just never happened. Driving up to Santa Barbara though I was reminded about why I wanted to leave in the first place.

Santa Barbara is a beautiful city, and a beautiful area. Living up there is tantamount to having a permanent vacation. The days blend into each other, weekends are endless and the weather never, ever changes. Amy and I had no regular schedule and so we rolled with the things put in front of us rather than plan and predicate decisions on end goals. The problem with this is self-evident. In an environment like this, progress is hard to come by, as there exists no external stimulation to drive one out of comfort.

The cities of south Santa Barbara County are a pocket of civilization in the middle of gorgeous nothingness. Its a self-contained environment, similar I guess to towns in the midwest, but altogether dissimilar from Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles for 6 months now, I’m accustom to frenetic energy, movement, blurred boundaries and this never-ending question for the eternal Something rather than contentment for Nothing.

Being put in this environment again, then speaking to 35 students who live there was strange, as I felt we were on completely dissonant wavelengths. I spoke, they didn’t listen, or didn’t register what I was saying. When I taught at UCSB, I suppose the experience was the same, but I was in the same school of lax thought that they were. This time, I felt like I was pulling weights behind me while speaking, exasperated by the lack of involvement people had in anything.

I did however get to see Marko, who even though was in my wedding, I haven’t seen since June. He has an adorable 9 month old baby which I am glad Amy didn’t see, as she would want one right now. Not that I don’t want kids mind you, just not yet. Little Boris, so cute.

I think what my visit to Santa Barbara did is remind me on a fundemental level that my life is completely removed from the past. I can mark my three years in Santa Barbara as a time of growth in distinct ways. I went up there just dating Amy, and left married. But it is the past, and I suppose being back in that environment made me realize that I can’t really go back to the years of 23-26 anymore than I can to 18. And neither would I want to. I’m six months into an amazing job, thinking seriously about having kids, buying a house, etc. The life I lead has no direct correlation to the one six months ago as these decisions are now possible to make.

Santa Barbara to me will always remind me of a time in my life that external influences were subjugated beneath my need to find myself and my place within the larger framework of the world as a whole. I figured out who I was, and then I left. And I think that now I just AM. I’m 26 years old, which statistically (and genetically) means I have maybe 60 years on this planet to do something.

And that something started out as soon as I drove down the 101. Permanent Vacation? Got to get away.

I guess. Murmurs had about 10,000 today, this site had only 130 or so. So be it.

For you newcomers, allow me to introduce myself: I am Ethan Kaplan. Former Webmaster for the Orange County Register (1995-1998) and Online Community Director for Freedom Communications (1998-2001). Former MFA and MA student at UC Santa Barbara as well. Currently: Director of Technology, Warner Bros. Records. Owner: Murmurs.com. I like art, computers, movies and music. It’s nice to meet you all.

Monday, as in the 28th, I go up to Santa Barbara for the first time since I left on June 14 to lecture to a class of 200 people about digital media, copyright, reductivity, etc. Basically the theory of binary as applied to the mutability of media artifacts. Which, essentially, is a nice way of saying that I’m lecturing on Walter Benjamin, Deleuze, Derrida and Barthe with examples from Apple/MySpace/BitTorrent rather than from post-structural texts.

Which is to say, I hope it isn’t boring.

More importantly: I’m going back up to Santa Barbara. It is strange that a place I didn’t want to leave is also now a place I have not gone back to. While I can say I was busy (I was), I was also trepedatious for the sole reason that I loved it up there, and I miss it. I miss the weather, the way that the days kind of bled together so that the weekend didn’t matter. I don’t miss a lot about it, but I do miss the permanent vacation (gotta get away) feeling.

Monday should be good. I love lecturing, and its the reason I wanted to teach. I’m also damn good at it, I must say. I once lectured in a ski-cap that said “I am Vibrating at the Speed of Light” on a day that was 90 degrees out. Because I had a bad hair moment. True story. Also, the last time I lectured up in Santa Barbara was ten minutes after I got the call that I had gotten hired at Warner Bros. Records, which meant I eventually was going to have to remove myself from Murmurs a bit. While that didn’t happen as planned, it did effect the lecture, as it was all about REM, Murmurs and fanatacism.

The lecture I’m giving is in a blog post about four entries down, about the value of a ringtone vs. a digital download, and the concept of abstraction effecting inherent value. I have to do my Keynote presentation and get my visuals together. Now that I have readers, maybe some of you can read through the post and see if it makes sense? Maybe if you’re in Santa Barbara you could come to the lecture? Pretty please?

Ethan Lecturing About Stuff
Monday, November 28, 3:30PM
IV Theater 1, UCSB Campus, Santa Barbara, CA

Drinks and refreshments will be consumed afterwards (hopefully) in downtown Santa Barbara, probably at Firebird or Blue Agave.

Yesterday was a bit weird. I can’t say about what went on at work, but it was quite strange. However, after work a few of us went to Motorola’s 7th anniversary (why 7th?) in Hollywood, celebrating 7 years in Hollywood. Seemed kind of random to me. Our aim in going was to promote the 888-2CONFESS line (call you fools) and also to see Trent from Pink Is the New Blog, who I work with a bit.

We saw Trent, and pretty much the entire Us Weekly batch, including Nicole Ritchie, Zach Braff, Paris, etc.

The best part of the night I think was how random some encounters were. Was that Mark Cuban slam dancing? Why yes. Steve-O? Omarosa next to Amy? Yup. Also Hal Sparks hit on Amy, to “give him something to confess about.” We also saw Lloyd from Entourage, which just was amazing. Best thing as well is that made Pink!.

This weekend is family stuff, working on a new business venture, working on Murmurs and thats about it.

I have always believed that the true character of a city only reveals itself in the hazy morning light, just before sunrise. It is in that time that the air hangs thick, the world has yet to wake up, but the city itself is starting to shift, to breath and to rise. Deliveries are being made, shops are not open, but movement can be glanced behind the panes of glass. It’s like the world is standing, yawning and stretching.

Whenever I go to a new place, I always try to make it out into the city, the town or what not at this time to see what the world is like in that state between dreaming and wakefullness. In New York, its the momentary respite before the resuming of chaois. In Colorado Springs it was a quiet so deep that it hurt. Oxford, Ohio was just the wind and the birds. Athens, GA feels primeval.

Pasadena is between Athens and New York. This morning I went to the gym at 6:30AM and walked a bit through a city in that sleepy eyed state, and it was great. I myself of course was in the same state upon entering the gym.

Now for the gym. I have never really been in shape in my life. I was never overweight or anything, just kind of never in shape. I never ran, never worked out (ocassionally) and my brief stint in sports (tennis) ended when I broke my elbow, rollerblading, at 11 at night. Don’t ask. When I moved down to Pasadena to, I guess, start life over a bit, I decided that it was time to change that. So since we moved down I have been heavily training on both weights and cardio.

Now, I actually am in shape. Today I did interval cardio training, which is a combo of running at 7mph and walking at 4mph for a half hour, for a total distance of 2.4 miles. Then I did some all body free-weight workouts and abdominal exercises. I actually think I may keep training to do a marathon. That is stange, no?

So anyhow, I leave the gym and the world is different. The sun is peaking through the buildings, there are cars on the street and that lazy quite is replaced with a crescendo of life and activity. I find it nice to wake up with the world, even if it means less sleep.

Well, my trip back did not go as planned. It took a long time to get a cab out of the city to Oakland. The travel agency at work booked me to Oakland for some reason, instead of to SFO. The cab ride made the ultimate cost more expensive. Anyhow. After about 45 minutes, I got into a cab, at 7:00PM, when my flight was at 7:35PM. So I missed my plane, and the other planes to both LAX and Burbank were overbooked. So I had to fly into Ontario and I’m staying at my parents.

The flight was fine. I actually fell asleep on takeoff and woke up when the wheels touched ground. That is the world’s best flight, I think.

I will recap the conference soon. I’m still kind of trying to digest everything, and I have a lot of work to do with followups on contacts, etc. I do want to talk about identity culture vs. interior culture as well, in respect to ringtones.

For those that started reading this blog at the event: thanks! I never wanted to be a blogger. I run this big REM site and work on that a lot, and its enough pretty much. The only reason I used to blog was to just externalize my brain, but it got kind of strange. So now I like being a bit more cynical, less emo and hopefully funnier.

I enjoyed meeting everyone at this event, and I hope you all keep reading. I’ll try to keep it interesting as both a day by day from my life in the entertainment industry, as well as my observations on the Internet and tech culture.

tagged: web2con

Something that JotSpot’s head man said: we don’t do beta anymore, we go straight into GA release. I like that, but you can’t do that too early!

My goal with the stuff I do is to be quick and agile and not overthink things. I used to do software that was all designd, never actualized. I stopped doing that when I was at the Makrolab in Venice. I just sat down and started programming, kind of like sitting down and just painting.

Since I started WBR though, I haven’t had time to do that. I’m going to try to get back to that point, and program instinctually. I do wish that I could design instinctually though.

About hiring: No false positives hiring philosophy: I agree with this as well.

Never get anyone in the company who is not successful. Even if it means rejecting a lot of candidates that would work.

It is like our philosophy: We only hire rock stars.

Interesting point just made: Venture Capital is not always the best option. I agree with this as well. Why inflate something that is essentially only a feature, or a single product into a company? It need not be. Target getting acquired, be flexible, be agile. Does a single feature need a sales and marketing VP? Does a single product need an entire business devlopment team?

tagged: web2con

2000 party over its out of time. Doo doo, doo doo doo

So yes, it was the party. The party of the century! The last century! With different sites!

Javascript! AJAX! CSS! XHTML! Black Rim Glasses on geeky boys who looked out of place drinking beer….!!!!!!!

My god was it fun.

So it was this party, it was at a bar, it had maybe 3000 people crammed into a space the size of a phone booth. Thank god hygene improved since the first dot.com boom. God, parties then like this were kind of smelly.

Scenario:

Geek: “I just spent 35 hours debugging an AMAZING fucking Java class! It’s a multithreaded worker factory! Holy shit!”

Me (bigger geek): “Great. You smell.”

Tonight was much better than that. There were celebrities there in the form of geeks with high page-ranks. I actually, I swear to god, saw a PR8 there. He was walking around like he owned the place, with hot babes on his arms. And I swear a PR9 was doing lines of Claritin in the bathroom. Dust, you know.

I met a fair load of people, including the crew from Slide including a good friend from High School who I haven’t seen since June of 1997, Johnnie Manzari. Crazy. I am probably the worst person ever for keeping in touch with High School friends. Literally, school ended, I left. I saw one person at Bridge School 2001 (I hated her). She actually asked, while I was standing next to an REM band member if I was still an REM fan. True story. I also do run into ocasionally another high school friend because our moms are good friends (hi Elene).

Anyhow, I hated high school. When I left I kind of did what I usually do: this is over, next thing now, bye. Running into Johnnie was cool because well, we were both uber-geeks at a Web 2.0 party. He works at Slide, I’m at WBR. Funny how things work.

Other fun: running into an old Stipean friend, meeting some cool folks from Adaptive Path, my friend Brooke and free drinks/food.

OK, back to the other stuff. This party reminded me heavily of parties from 1999. I know I wasn’t the only one that tought so. The money is back, in some way. Some people will get rich (I hope to be one at some point), but I’m beginning to think that right now we’re in this state of optimism, and that is a dangerous place to be.

The problem with these parties, and even these conferences, is that the segment of the market that they appeal to is so narrow and self-congratulatory. It is wonderful that del.icio.us is doing so well, but I swear to god that site is just like a dance on a Linux cruise. Sure, you’re on a cruise, and you might get laid, but you’re all geeks. del.icio.us is brilliant, but it hasn’t hit that tipping point yet. For one, how do you tell people the URL? I can’t get my parents to type http://mail.murmurs.com as they think they need the www. Slim fucking chance they’ll use del.icio.us.

A lot of the things that we’re seeing here are like that, and the parties and the conference don’t help. We are reaching a new state in the Web, one that is born out of the desire to finally reconcile the role of people within the data they create implicitly and explicitly. The problem is, while we can create companies around this fact, and throw nice parties, the fact is that the audience so far are fellow geeks for most of these things.

Weblogs Inc succeeded because their market segment extended to everyone through their deliberate obfuscation of technological sophistication. MySpace succeeded because you could be a moron and make a webpage (Geocities model). Then they threw music on, and boom. These services reached a tipping point because they fulfilled a need, filled it well, did it with style and minimal fuss.

Parties like tonight seem a bit premature. They are fun, they are geeky as hell (I saw so much open, public Treo sex that I felt dirty and unclean) but they also are kind of geek pride meetings. And hell, I’m all for geek pride, but I’m also for quite revolutions. I wish this one stayed quiet, but I know that money follows noise.

So I guess I should make some noise, eh?

Well, the party was fun all in all. I met interesting people and observed interesting primal behavior among a very interesting group. It was very different from LA parties, I’ll tell you that. In LA, cultural cache is not your inbound links in Technorati. And Technorati people do not lounge like male lions after a hunt.

The party though, was loud and kind of crowded. I lost my voice, so at that point I left. I did meet someone from Corante, Stowe Boyd in fact, the president of that company. That was cool.

Tomorrow I go home, and next week I come back up. San Francisco, how I do love you.