the romance of dead trees

If there is a “Crisis In Student Media”, maybe it’s this: student media has become the romance of dead trees. It’s a very good question why none of the student newspapers don’t have online presences beyond dumping grounds for rejected content. The official and internalised line is “It’s too hard,” but with a school full of IT students looking for work experience, that’s a copout: I suspect the real answer is that student media isn’t really about content so much any more: the newspapers tend to recycle the same thematic elements over and over, as noted.  & journals, well - they’re getting better. But they’re not nearly harsh enough, I think. There’s still a lot of pure junk in there sometimes. But all of this is totally irrelevant, because these things have transcended content. All that really, really matters is the production of the printed word, the nostalgic ecstasy of the production of physical objects.

Matt, in Thoughts on the Student Media Symposium, whose comments perfectly describe my forays into student media this year and last.

"The flip side is a simultaneous influx of reporters who don’t want anything to do with the city but feel compelled by the times to get a Detroit story under their belts, like it’s the journalistic version of cutting a grunge record"

Remember that Australian mix I made? Well the words that went with it are now printed up nicely in DrunkenWerewolf. If you’re from the UK you can grab a copy for free at local stockists; international readers and the terminally lazy can purchase them here (the price only covers postage). Validation, hurray!

roamin:

Boing Boing/Richard Metzger

“In 1975, when I was nine years old, I discovered Lou Reed from reading about him in CREEM magazine. It was probably the very first rock magazine that I ever bought. The article, titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves”really captured my young attention. It was the coolest thing I’d ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, conjured up a spectacularly ghoulish portrait of a totally disheveled, wasted and just plain old mean Lou Reed even as he hurled drunken druggy insults right back at him throughout the entire interview. The writing was sublime.

I’m not saying I realized this when I was nine, btw, but even that young, I knew I was reading the unfiltered thoughts and opinions of someone who seemed to know about, and feel passionately about, a heck of a lot of really cool things. In his writing on rock and roll, he could really convey strong emotions. Bangs didn’t hesitate to let you know where he stood on groups like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer (that would be two thumbs down) but when he loved a record or a group, his rhapsodic gonzo prose was worthy of being compared to Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. Sometimes his writing was even better when he hated a group!”

Lester Bangs Interview | Lester Bangs, King of the Noise Boys | Let Us Now Kill White Elephants

1:1 Ratio

fiddlersgreen:

A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.

Now, a good writer should be able to make anything — even his doubts about writing! — into good grist for his mill. But warning lights should start flashing when you find you’re hardly experiencing anything new because you’re so busy writing entertainingly about the few things you do still have time to experience.

—- click opera

This.

In 1996, Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, conducting a series of interviews with the author of Infinite Jest. (via suddenly: shorterexcerpts: davidfosterwallace)

What?

An Australian property developer has called on apartment designers to include gay-only, women-only and student-only floors in unit complexes.

Molonglo Group managing director Nectar Efkarpidis said the property industry should ”think outside the square” and break away from concepts focused only on the traditional family structure.

The Canberra-based developer said it made sense to provide levels where single mothers could access communal play spaces or childcare facilities, while university students who enjoyed loud parties should also have their own area.

”The needs of gay people can also be different,” Mr Efkarpidis told brisbanetimes.com.au.

However, the editor of gay and lesbian publication Queensland Pride, Peter Hackney, said devoting levels in unit complexes specifically to gay people could be problematic.

”In the gay community, how do you define strictly who’s gay?” he said.

”And what if they’re living on a straight floor and come out as gay?”

Mr Hackney said the idea might appeal to some gay people, but others would have a problem with excluding certain groups from the mainstream.

”Some people identify very strongly with whatever minority group they are a part of, but for other people their sexual orientation is no different from the colour of their eyes or hair,” he said.

… Mr Efkarpidis said he was not trying to segregate people.

”We’re not talking about discriminating - if you aren’t that way you can still buy there,” he said.

(via indefensible)

"Magazine editors are among the most unhappy people in the country."

Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Something needs to be done about SMH’s headlines, and also the sheer number of awful puns in this one article.

The stakes were high when Arnott’s took on Krispy Kreme to protect its Iced Vo-Vo trademark.

Arnott’s was defending big bikkies and Krispy was looking at a lot of dough.

The battle was set to play out in the homes and offices of Australia at morning coffee and afternoon tea time, but the war of the clones ended today without a shot being fired.

Arnott’s threatened legal action action over Krispy Kreme’s Iced Dough-Vo doughnut, which is covered in pink icing and coconut flakes, just like the famous Iced Vo-Vo biscuit.

An Arnott’s spokeswoman said Krispy Kreme Australia must have been coconuts to think it could take advantage of the 103-year old Vo-Vo trade mark.

Krispy Kreme Australia had argued that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery and Arnott’s should be tickled pink at the homage to its iconic brand.

Now the doughnut maker has backed down and agreed to rename the Iced Dough-Vo from May 11, Arnott’s and Krispy Kreme said in a joint statement issued today.

A storm in a teacup, it seems.

I think this article did the rounds on Tumblr et al back in July last year when it first ran. It just won the Pulitzer for Feature Writing last night and is so worth the ten minutes or so it’ll take you to read (and recover). (via buyhercandy: clembastow)

(via heute-und)

What the hell is this?

Charles Mudede on poverty and living on the fringes in the 90s. He writes fluid prose with great attention to detail, and his story pulls you in. I really can’t choose a part to quote because it’s not the kind of writing that lends itself to aphorisms. You’ll see what I mean when you read it.