I was telling my Dad about the show tonight, and happened to do some googling for audio-visual illustration. I found this surprisingly good audience-shot footage of Costello ripping it up on “Cowgirl in the Sand”:
I’m usually disappointed by the grainy, shaky video and tinny sound from this kind of audience recording, but this video actually looks and sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
On a related note, I was delighted to discover this bootleg recording of the entire concert. It doesn’t sound as good as the video, but it’s always nice to have an audio archive of a concert you’ve seen. And it’s certainly better than nothing.
I make a practice of looking scornfully at the cover of Cosmopolitan and other magazines of its ilk in the line at the grocery store. It’s my job, after all, as a modern man.
In fairness, I also scorn Maxim. I used to read it when I was younger and stupider, but I’ve graduated to the slightly more sophisticated (and, frankly, gayer) Details and Esquire.
I was busy queuing and scorning the other day, clutching a package of tofu burgers, when I got curious about the language on the covers of these magazines. What are, in aggregate, the messages of Cosmo and Maxim?
So, I made some tag clouds. I typed up all the headlines on the covers of three years of Cosmo (2007 to 2010) and Maxim (for obscure reasons, 2005 to 2008), and generated tag clouds out of the results. Can you guess which is which (click for largeness)?
I tweaked the text to merge plurals with singulars, or vice versa, and to combine variations of words like ‘sex’, ‘sexy’ and ‘sexiest’.
Armchair Sociology
Having looked at all those covers, I made some observations. First, about Cosmo:
In Cosmo, there are more headlines about sexual proficiency than anything else. These usually take the form of “please your man, and get yours, too”. For example, “Be a sex genius! These brilliantly naughty bad tricks will double his pleasure and yours”.
Nearly ever cover promises a story on sexual positions.
In the bottom right corner–the least important quadrant of the cover–there’s either a women’s health issue (“Critical new facts your gyno forgot to mention”) or a man problem story (“The silent way he shows he’s whipped”).
There are at least two numbers, and often more, on each cover. For example, “20 ways to make the good stuff in life even better” or “16 new and sexy hairstyles”. The most common number is 50.
The word ‘sex’ (or ‘sexy’) appears at least once on every cover. This is also almost always true for Maxim.
Celebrity profiles generally promise a story of how the celebrity rose to fame and secured a man. For example, “Anna Faris: The balls-out confidence that landed her the job and her hubby”.
There are many articles about decoding what men want but aren’t asking for.
Because I’m a nerd with screencast software, I created a short video that scrolls back and forth through the 36 covers I transcribed:
It really highlights the prominence of an article about sex in the upper left part of the cover, and the badge design element in the upper right. It’s also remarkable how precisely positioned each model’s head is. If you watch their eyes, they barely shift from cover to cover.
For Maxim:
Maxim’s covers are a little more diverse than Cosmo’s, but there are consistent messages about acquiring money (“Filthy, stinking rich: cash so quick it’s like stealing” and plenty of attention paid to stuff, such as cars and gadgets.
Topics–women, cars, gadgets–are often described as ‘hot’.
The headlines about the women on the cover are pretty banal and generic, such as “Jennifer Love Hewitt:
America’s sexiest girl next door is back”.
Maxim also emphasizes partying, and party travel destinations.
There are relatively few headlines emphasizing health or improving one’s body. When there are, they’re related to another topic, such as “Wanna get hockey tough? Drop the gloves with our NHL enforcer”.
While the covers’ time period doesn’t overlap exactly, the only women featured on both magazine covers were Fergie, Kristen Bell and Jessica Simpson.
Do the clouds provide any great insights? Not really. They do emphasize just how essential the topic of sex is to both magazines. I was also surprised by how little body-related headlines there are on the covers. The cliche of “a sexier six-pack in seven days” is actually quite rare. What surprised you?
Bonus: Cosmo in the Seventies
Out of sheer curiousity, I dug up about a dozen Cosmo covers from the 1970s, and produced a tag cloud for them:
It’s interesting to see how much fiction was featured on the cover during this period. Heck, there was even a story by Joyce Carol Oates. You may also note the prominence of the term ‘husband’, a word which only appeared on modern Cosmo’s in the context of celebrity profiles. ‘Lovemaking’ is also pretty common–another term that’s gone out of fashion.
I was also surprised by just how risque the 1970s covers were. Consider this cover featuring Renee Russo, for example.
The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.
It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.
It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.
And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.
I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.
In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?
Two years ago, almost to the day, we moved from Malta and Morocco. We lived in Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. We rented a lovely riad (according to Wikipedia, “a traditional Moroccan house or palace with an interior garden”) called Dar Zahira (caution, autoplaying Berber music ahead).
The owners of Dar Zahira recently produced a great-looking four-minute video on the city. It really captures the mood of the place. Here’s the video, but it’s worth watching it in HD:
Somebody recently pointed out to me that ‘Essaouira’ has all the vowels except for sometimes-y.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
I’m working on a new project that has some particular requirements. They’re not that unusual, though, and surely others have already solved this set of problems:
We need to sell online videos (of, say, 20 to 30 minutes in length). They’ll be viewable online, behind a some kind of password protection, or available for download as well (again, with password protection).
Users will choose from a menu of videos, add them to a cart, pay for them and then get access (through streamed videos, downloads or both) only to those videos.
Ideally this happens within our own site, or something we can tweak to look something like our own site.
No, we haven’t branched out into pornography.
I checked out some courseware systems, but they’re really about delivering structured multi-part classes. I’m also aware of E-Junkie, which is what Common Craft (among many others) use to distribute their videos. They’re a good option for downloadables, but don’t offer flash-based video for viewing only.
I’m happy to pay for a turn-key solution, assuming it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount of money. That’s preferable, actually, to messing around with Drupal or whatever. All suggestions welcome.
Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ‘street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
There’s something lovely and ephemeral about this ‘live’ video for Lisa Hannigan’s “I Don’t Know”. It’s shot through the window of a snug in a bar in Dingle, with the patrons (and their kids) looking on with a particularly Irish kind of quizzical indifference.
Ms. Hannigan is obviously easy on the eyes, but there’s more to the video’s success than that. The band is packed into this tiny space, her grinning, bald drummer is playing a piece of newspaper and everybody seems to be having a bloody good time. You can easy forgive that she comes in on the tambourine at the wrong moment. I wonder what number take this is.
We saw Lisa Hannigan live at SXSW and, I’m sorry to say, I was underwhelmed. The je ne sais quoi that makes this video so great was nowhere to be found.
