| February 28, 2005 | Today is tomorrow. It happened. |
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"In some ways, it feels like we have been doing this for as long as we can remember, but in other ways, it feels like we are still at the beginning." --Yahoo! founder David Filo on Yahoo!'s upcoming 10th birthday This Wednesday the company I work for is turning ten years old, and they are throwing a big party for everyone. You are invited too. Well, sort of. Yahoo! will be giving everyone who visits yahoo.com on Wednesday a special free treat. Hint: it's edible, creamy and deelicious. And also hopefully you are not vegan or lactose intolerant. That is the good part. The less good part is that the band they have hired to play for us is Sugar Ray. You may remember Sugar Ray from mid-1990s songs with ear-wormy choruses such as (for the love of God, now is the time to divert your eyes from this web page before these malicious songs get caught in your head!) as "I just wanna fly" and "Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed." (And to think that I thought their singer Mark McGrath had retired from the band to become the co-host of "extra". Apparently no such luck!) Before you go thinking that I'm un ungrateful bee-otch, please take note that I am very excited for my company's birthday party. For one thing, there will almost certainly be lots of free beer. For another thing, I am also celebrating my own 10 years of working on the web. While it's true that I don't have very much love stored away for Sugar Ray, perhaps it is just because Yahoo! has set the bar so high with some of their past band choices, such as hiring the flaming lips to play at our holiday party in 2003. This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1995. Even before that (as Esther posted in her blog back in 2002) you might remember visiting Yahoo! circa 1994 before the site was actually located at yahoo.com, back when you got to Yahoo! by typing in "http://www.stanford.edu/~someguysname/html/personal/webdirectory/yahoo or something like that." This is what yahoo.com looked like in 1996. The past 10 years working on the web have kept me experiencing a continuous deja vu. Anyone who has been a web writer, editor or producer since 1995 or 1996 certainly must feel somewhat akin to Bill Murray's character in the 1993 movie "Groundhog Day." For instance, when reading this Christian Science monitor article about Yahoo!'s new media plans in Santa Monica last week, I was struck by the initial thrill about these exciting plans and these exciting times, but a few moments later I had a strong sense of deja vu. Hadn't I already lived in this exciting time? Hadn't I already heard *these* exciting plans? Ah yes, I had. Reading this article brought me back to the spring of 2000, when I worked at Scour.com in Beverly Hills and we had partners like AtomFilms and iFilm and Stephen Spielberg's Dreamworks-backed pop.com was set to launch with an offering of Internet-only programming. This time (five years later) we have seen that the world (well, the U.S. at least) is finally ready for consuming entertainment content on their computers. This time, I am convinced that this stuff can actually be successful. My conviction is so strong that I am leaving San Francisco to move down to Los Angeles again to give it another try. One of my blog posts from March 2000 -- five years ago -- contains links to some of the sites that were virally hot at that time --from JesusDance to Radiskull and Devil Doll and "Superfriends, Whassup." (As an aside, I still say "whassap!" way too much, and my boyfriend has accused my diction of being overly influenced of the internet circa 2000.) Yes, all of your favorites are probably listed, but, be warned, that many of them have *gasp* disappeared from the internet and haven't left a forwarding address. I'm reminded of a sign I saw at Burning Man in 1999. It said "Warning: You are temporary." And you know, if you are an internet website, you are even extra temporary. Before being sued out of existence by the RIAA in late 2000, Scour had planned to morph into a legal for-pay music download service very similar to what Apple is doing quite successfully today with iTunes. JibJab -- whose animated shorts we used to feature on Scour -- now has a promotion deal with Yahoo! and has gotten mentioned on national TV for their "This Land" political short. Speaking of TV, it used to be only short weekly special-interest TV shows (such as CBS-Eyemark's "Wild Wild Web" which Allyson and I worked for in 1998) focused on web-stuff. Now on CNN, and MSNBC, every other word out of many reporters mouths seem to be "blogs" and "the blogsphere." Yeah, the time is right for branded media content on the web. We just really need to get things right this time. I, for one, know that I have learned so much about what works and what doesn't on the web over the past 10 years. And there is a lot that doesn't work. "Convergence" (between the web and TV) was the hot buzz word in 1998 and it's still the hot buzz word. "Blog" was the hot buzz word in 2000 and it's still the hot buzz word. I'm just thankful that no one uses the phrase "Internet Superhighway" anymore. That one was annoying. In February 2002, just before I started working at Yahoo, I wrote to Allyson on our She, Said, She Said blog:
Monthly 'zines? Yeah, done it. In 1996 I was publishing a monthly e-zine, ROAR, for Monster.com in addition to building corporate recruiting sites and hand-coding them in HTML. Community websites? Done that too. In 1997 I was hiring and managing a staff of writers and building CollegeBeat a daily community website for college students (of course, the site's URL is now a porn directory). Luckily, thanks to the Internet Way-Back machine, you can still see the site in all of its former glory and unique web design by moi. For instance, check this out. The design was quite wacky. But alas, that was where I learned all about .ASPs and how to manage writers. Broadband convergence sites? Check. In 1998, as you recall, we were at WildWeb err Getwild.com which looked like this and later like this and they were sending you on tour with John Mellencamp and me to Burning Man 1999 to write articles. Bleeding-edge technology? I was swimming in it. In 1999, I was at Scour (which looked like this minus the broken graphics and then like this) working on peer-to-peer music sharing technology and launching a "technology freedom center" after we got sued by the RIAA and the MPAA. It's like in the past five years, everything's gone so far, so fast that now nothing in the online world even looks remotely interesting to me. What has Poprocks.com looked like over the past 10 years: posted by Jess Barron @ 2:02 PM 
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| December 3, 2004 | Lyrics to "Cool as Jessica Barron" |
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As evidence that my life is like living inside a cartoon -- I submit to you the lyrics to an mp3 that was emailed to me somewhat mysteriously by a stranger in November. The song is actually not too bad, and the lyrics are smart, semi-disdainful but not as scathing as they probably could be. I'm not mad about it. Should I be? You know that I'm totally gonna play this on my radio show... How could I resist? According to the info attached to the mp3 it was written/performed by Jeremy Abbate who may be the same guy who wrote this piece for McSweeney's. I love how Googling can make anyone an amateur detective. Kinda like how the internet and computers and digital tools enable all of us to be publishers, editors, writers, DJs, photographers, videographers, and musicians distributing our songs around the world. Seriously, check this song out. It amuses me greatly. Cool as Jessica Barron written and performed by Jeremy Abbate I wanna be as cool as Jessica Barron Please let me be as cool as Jessica Barron She's a media philosopher She's an irony diva in a post-post world She's an artist and a critic and a poet too And you can bet her friends are cooler than you And she's travelled everywhere from here to East Jebip and she keeps a photo diary of everything hip Oh she's witty and she's clever and she's very sublime She's on the inside and the outside at the very same time. She muses on the simple things and finds so much depth She lives life and she mocks life -- all in the same breath. I wanna be as cool as Jessica Barron Please let be as cool as Jessica Barron She's Mary McCarthy meets Betty Paige The Zelda Fitzgerald of the techno age Virgina Woolf as Billie Holiday A love child of Marilyn and Hemingway And there isn't any subject that is too taboo Deconstructing cheap pornography or Winnie-The-Poo Her inner self is sprawled across the bathroom walls Her private sanctuary is a shopping mall If just for a minute I could stand inside her shoes -- Would the cocktail party carousel chase away my blues? I wanna live my life in public and share every thought with a generation starving for what they've been taught. Warhol said we'd get a quarter hour But Jessica's embraced her media power Nothing is sacred and everything is deep The soap commercial theme song makes the poet in her weep I wanna be as cool as Jessica Barron Please let me be as cool as Jessica Barron I wanna be as cool as Jessica Batton Please let me be so cool like Jessica Barron posted by Jess Barron @ 8:49 PM
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| April 23, 2001 | The Music of Magnetoencephalography |
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I'll leave them to do what they want, I'll leave them to do what they need to, I'll go and play with words and pictures, I'll admit I'm feeling strange. Belle&Sebastian's "This is Just a Modern Rock Song" is infinitely looping through my head today. I'm not sure I even want it to stop. This study is fascinating. Then again, anything involving magnetoencephalography will catch my attention. It's interesting that they propose that language and musical ability may have appeared at the same time in human evolution. Maybe it all happened around the time ancient man tasted the hallucinogenic fruit of Terence McKenna's tree of knowledge... Labels: music posted by Jess Barron @ 11:17 AM
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| June 11, 2000 | Dying to Disco |
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Barry's Boot camp is killing me. My entire body was in pain all weekend from Barry's "Disco Friday." Eighty push-ups, hundreds of squats, and almost a thousand crunches -- and let's not even talk about the running. Barry can tell if you're doing less than the required speed during the sprints. I know what it is like to die to disco music. There are muscles in my hands and wrists that are crying out as I type this. On Saturday Jeff and I got to Santa Monica by 9:30 a.m. and then we rollerbladed north of the pier to the end of the bike path. Then we went back south through Venice. Afterwards Jeff incited me to jump in the ocean, so we changed into our bathing suits on the middle of the beach (by holding up towels around each other while we were changing). We went up to our chests in the water and played in the waves, which were huge and kept knocking me down. We were giggling the whole time. Jeff got a bit of a sunburn. He's been away in New York for the past three months, and in comparison to me and Paul he looks very pale. (Jeff and I have both always been extremely pale with our freckle-y Irish skin, but now when I look at myself I am shocked to see that I am tan. I am no longer officially a goth girl. Sorry folks.)  Last Wednesday night, Jeff and Hillary and I went to the El Rey to see Sleater-Kinney and Bratmobile. Selena and Steve were there too. The show kicked ass. Bratmobile opened, and they started with "Love Thing" off of their 1993 album 'Pottymouth.' It begins with the singer Allison Wolfe screaming in a Valley girl accent, "Admit it, innocent little girls turn you on, don't they?" JP put that song on a mix tape he made me back in our Vassar days. That song rocks.Sleater-Kinney were incredible. The crowd was bouncing around completely ecstatic. They played "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone," and "You're No Rock'n'Roll Fun" and they did an inspired cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's song "Fortunate Son" (you know, the song that goes:  "It ain't me. It ain't me. I ain't no Senator's son./ It ain't me. It ain't me. I ain't no fortunate one.") The one song I really wanted them to play was "Good Things" off of 'Call the Doctor.' I didn't think they would play it, and they didn't give it to us in the first encore, but I was thrilled when they came back for a second encore and started it with "Good Things." I was pretty close to the stage, so I took some photos of Corin and Carrie. Labels: jeff, la, losangeles, music, selena posted by Jess Barron @ 6:47 PM
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| June 4, 2000 | The Busier the Better |
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If you were wondering and waiting in antipication of why my car went "Boom!" last weekend, here is the official answer: It turned out that my pretty blue Beetle's battery exploded. Alas, it wasn't covered under the warranty, because as the mechanic guy eloquently and existentially put it: "sometimes you get a bad battery." But, it's all fixed now -- and I suppose my experience with the explosion could've been a lot worse. Like if I had driven to Tijuana for Memorial Day weekend. I will just file the whole car incident under "How to lose $400 without really trying." Grrr! I really need to remember to sign up for AAA. Selena tells me that membership includes a bail bond. Apparently, in the event that you are ever thrown into the clinker, those Triple A peeps will front your bail. That's pretty sweet.) The last few days have been some of my favorite since I've moved to Los Angeles. I've been feeling so good, and doing things that I'm enjoying so deeply. I guess it began with Tai Chi on Thursday morning. I knew I needed to try lots of new activities to help myself to not focus on Lee and to also get me to start trying all the things I wished I could learn. And that very morning Selena came in to work with a book of all kinds of courses. We started looking through it together and decided we wanted to take: belly dancing, bartending, tai chi, yoga, self-hypnosis, drum lessons, conversational Japanese, and DHTML. We had to narrow it down a bit, so that we could focus properly and so that we'd have *some* free-time left. We decided to save belly dancing and conversational Japanese for later. But then we decided that we're going to join Barry's Bootcamp too. We're starting that tomorrow, and we're going to be doing it every day at 6:45 AM. Yes, that's AM. Wish me luck. It may just be too hardcore for the likes of me. We'll see. So, Selena and I started going to a Tai Chi class last Thursday night, and it really helped me to get over the negative funk I was in. It takes so much concentration to learn the movements, that I was able to get completely out of my head for the three hours while we were in class. It's one of the only activities I've found that is completely relaxing for me. It eradicates all of my anxious feelings. Now every morning and night I keep practicing the postures we were taught, and I can't wait to learn more this week. I wonder if yoga will be this good. I can only hope. On Saturday, I had breakfast with Adam (who is the singer for Timonium, a darkly ethereal band I might go see play this Tuesday night at the Silver Lake Lounge, but I'm not sure because that's the night that Jeff comes back from NYC). And then we went to Rhino Records (which, as it turns out, is only about two blocks from my house). We spent a few hours there, hearing new music on the listening stations and also listening to older CDs in the used section. Adam told me that he thought I would like a British band called Broadcast, and when I listened to their CD "The Noise Made By People," I fell in love. I bought that CD and also Dimitri from Paris' mix CD "A Night at the Playboy Mansion." I also bought a few used CDs (Laika's "Sounds of the Satellites" and Shudder to Think's soundtrack to the film "First Love, Last Rites.") After Adam left, I went up onto the roof of my apartment building and listened to music on my discman for a few hours. I mostly focused on the Travis CD "The Man Who." It's a great album. My favorite song is the first track "Writing to Reach You" (yeah, it's probably not surprising that a web writing person would relate to that one, huh?) I just love the opening lyrics: Everyday I wake up and it's Sunday This morning I went bowling in the Valley with Ray and Selena. I learned how to bowl the real way, (as opposed to my old method of just rolling the ball with both hands in the between-the-legs stance). After bowling we had coffee at Buzz in West Hollywood. And then I went to visit JP, and we had a great time. After that I went to see Robert Mapplethorphe's controversial exhibit "The Perfect Moment" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Labels: beetle, jp, la, losangeles, music, selena posted by Jess Barron @ 10:16 PM
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| May 19, 2000 | My Sudden Gwen Stefani Obsession |
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Let's get this straight, I have never been a huge fan of No Doubt's music. But the other night when I was out with Selena and JP to see Tsar play at a Hollywood club called Vinyl, those two pop junkies (Selena and JP) started talking about Gwen Stefani. "Why won't anyone marry poor Gwen Stefani?!" one of them said. I listened as they discussed things I knew nothing about, things I had maybe heard about but had allowed to fall under my radar as pop tidbits about things that I just wasn't interested in. They excitedly discussed No Doubt's video for "A Simple Kind of Life," and how everything in the video is about how Gwen wants to get married and have a baby, but that none of her boyfriends were at all down with that. The men in the video all run away from her and look at her like she has three heads. It's also weird because Gwen used to date Tony (the Indian guy in No Doubt), but they broke up and are still friends, but as JP pointed out -- you need to notice that the baby Gwen picks up at the end of the video looks like he is Indian.
Labels: camille, jp, music, selena, video, women posted by Jess Barron @ 5:44 PM
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| March 1, 2000 | Allyson's Email Following the Secret Cult Show |
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An email Allyson wrote to her friends after her weekend in LA, where I took her out to the Viper Room for The Cult's secret show (thanks to Ray): _______________________________ From: "Allyson" To: everyone CC: jessb@poprocks.com Subject: LA Story Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 01:16:12 To all my celebrity stalking friends -- I was so fortunate to arrange a visit to LA this past weekend and to have plans with one JESS BARRON, the very same day she did secure two spots on the VIP GUEST LIST to a suprise Cult show at none other than LA's infamous Viper Room where the not-so-fortunate RIVER PHOENIX did pass his last moments on this here earth. Needless to say we experienced multiple celebrity sightings covering the worlds of music, film and television... With the highlight of our evening being my exchange with Mushmouth-style hat-donning FIONA APPLE: Me: Watch out, it's wet there. (As Fiona Apple sits next to me on a couch where someone had spilled a drink.) Fiona Apple: Oh! You're right. Me: I think someone spilled a drink. Do you want me to move over? Fiona Apple: No, I'm fine. I'm just happy to sit down for a while! (smiling, sweet) ME: Okay. Furthermore, below is the complete list of stars witnessed by Jess and myself, in no particular order: 1. DAVID BOREANAZ 2. MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY 3. FIONA APPLE 4. MARILYN MANSON 5. ROSE McGOWAN 6. ERIC ERLANDSON (from Hole) 7. TOM PETTY (possible) Not a bad take for one night out. Many thanks go to Jess for showing me the best possible of times in the world's capital for GLITZ, GLAMOUR and, as she aptly pointed out, DETACHED and UNAFFECTED Hollywood WANNABES. Long live the Viper Room, free Guinness, and waify little singers. THE END Labels: allyson, famous, la, losangeles, music posted by Jess Barron @ 9:08 PM
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| October 15, 1999 | What I'm Listening To |
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I work at MP3 search engine Scour, so I listen to a lot of music. Here are some MP3s in heavy rotation right now on my Mac: Supreme Beings of Leisure's "Last Girl on Earth." Supreme Beings of Leisure are a trip-hop act from L.A. Their singer (who's absolutely gorgeous and has a beautiful, haunting voice) is Lawrence's friend Miles' wife. If you like Portishead and Lamb, you will probably also like SBL. I need to buy their CD. Eminem's "Stan" (featuring Dido). I heard this song on the radio yesterday while JP and I were driving in his car on the way home from In-n-Out Burger. "You have to listen to this," he said, turning the radio up. It begins with this beautiful part where Dido sings, and then Eminem comes in rapping but he's reading these letters from an obsessed, troubled fan. You need to listen to it. This song gives me goosebumps. Billy Bragg's "Help Save the Youth of America" and "California Stars" (with Wilco). Jeff got me into Billy Bragg when we were in high school. I used to be obsessed with "Help Save the Youth of America," but I lost my 'Talking With the Taxman' CD before I even got to college. I just downloaded it on Macster, and I'm loving it. Billy Bragg really *gets* it. Check it out: "Help save the youth of America/Help save the youth of the world/Help save the suntanned surfer boys and the California girls/ When the lights go out in the rest of the world/What do our cousins say?/They're playing in the sun and havin' fun, fun, fun until daddy takes the gun away. I hadn't heard "California Stars" before, but I found it when doing an artist search for Billy Bragg on Macster. It's another gorgeous. simple romanticization of the promise rapped up in California: "I'd like to dream my troubles all away on a bed of California stars...They hang like grace...I'd give my life just to dream with you on a bed of California stars." Labels: california, music, scour posted by Jess Barron @ 10:40 AM
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| October 13, 1997 | The Scatman in Greece's Modern Ruins |
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The first time I heard "Skee-Bop-Bop-Ba-Da-Ba" by the Scatman, I was lying practically naked in a shabby hotel room in Athens. It was 3:30 AM local time. Our bodies weren't acclimated yet. Mindy and I had been sleeping with our clothes off because Greece was sweltering. It was late July and the temperature had topped 100 degrees. Our tenth-floor room featured a small window that wouldn't open (whether it was forced shut from accumulated grime or well-positioned glue, we didn't know), a large dead cockroach (we named him Hephestus and he became our mascot), and a small TV which received five channels (two in English). The ancient fan (there wasn't an air conditioner) was positioned on a short table in a corner of the room. Its blades blew stagnant air across our low pallets. We had arrived in Athens at 5 PM, and after lugging our overstuffed packs through the airport and surviving the treacherous cab ride to our hotel, decided sleep was more important than dinner. Just a nap, we told ourselves, and then we'll venture out to explore the nightlife. It was still too hot to move. We peeled off the clothes we had been wearing since Boston, and collapsed in our bras and underwear on the beds. "I wish I could take my skin off and just lie around in my bones," Mindy had grumbled. I didn't answer. I thought of the cracked buildings and crumbling facades I had seen out the grimy glass of the cab window. Everything looked dirty; it was as if the entire city had been thoroughly coated with a dull beige layer of paint. Or maybe it was sprinkled with the dust of disintegrating skeletons. You may notice that I have morbid tendencies. When we had explained to the cab driver that we had come to Athens for a vacation, he advised in broken English that if we were visiting Greece for a summer holiday we would not want to stay in the city. As per our premeditated plan, we neglected to add that we only intended to stay in Athens two nights before moving on to Turkey. The additional information would have taken too much energy to communicate and would have angered him unnecessarily. I sprawled uncomfortably across my lumpy bed and worried. Would I be able to manage carrying my backpack? Would we be able to get information from anyone (neither of us spoke a word of Greek)? And how would we ever get to Turkey? I wondered whether the trip would be successful. Somehow, my anxieties subsided as I shifted on the lumpy the mattress beneath the gaudy gilded mirror (a price tag in Greek drachma was still stuck on the frame). And then we slept for hours. Mindy woke up first and turned on the TV. The meager options for late-night viewing kept the dial positioned on channel 18, MTV Europe. While most of the videos played by the trendy British VJs were well-known American artists such as Nine Inch Nails or Nirvana, an occasional wild-card was thrown into the mix, reminding us that we were far away from home. When The Scatman came on with his cheesy video, we knew we needed to get out of our stifling tomb. We dressed and headed downstairs. The hotel bar was closing down, from what we could tell. No one could (or would) speak English, so we ventured onto the street without any direction. After walking for a few blocks we found out that the large divided street housed nothing but Italian car dealerships with well-lit glass showrooms that only emphasized the nighttime desolation. One of us wondered aloud how it was that the ancient Greeks had managed to build and maintain aquaducts while the modern Greeks hadn't managed to build and staff 24-hour convenience stores. There were very few cars on the road and sometimes the drivers slowed down to look at us. We attracted attention as "foreigners" without doing anything silly or wearing anything tacky in that way American tourists inevitably do. We realized slowly that we were the only women out walking the street. After receiving catcalls from two men on a motorcycle, we gave up and returned to our hotelroom. Back in the room we broke into our supply of "emergency food" and nibbled Nutri Grain breakfast bars followed by swallows of warm bottled water. Then, in an attempt to entertain ourselves we made togas out of our dingy bed sheets and paraded around the room. posted by Jess Barron @ 8:20 PM
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