Sep/098
I hate self promotion
But, I guess part of this job is letting other people know what I'm doing. I barely know who reads this (leave a comment if you like, anonymous is fine, I'm genuinely curious if anyone is reading this beside the regulars + people I know IRL) and it is kind of embarassing to have the last post up be a semi-depressing review of a sad television show.
Anyway, let's try to be "professonal" (LOL) and do that thing Real Internet Writers do when they write stuff. Besides all the gossiping I do over at BravoFan, I'm also writing a new b5media blog about celebrity kids called CelebTots. This is a strange blog for me to write, because I hate the whole "baby bump" nonsense, but I'm trying to give it a voice that is my own. I have no clue how to really do outreach for this particular blog, so I'll figure that out. BravoFan's built up a small community because I was able to really write in-depth about some stuff most of the blogs were just lightly glossing over.
What else? I've been offered a part-time job, also writing about television (kind of) but it's with a major corporation and some of the red tape is taking a little bit of time. It'll be a huge relief to have much more consistent income, and doing something that is relevant to all the other stuff I am doing. I love writing about the Internet, but writing about TV is my home. I'm sometimes conflicted about the things that I'm doing, that's it not good enough, that it's not important, especially in the face of so many other people I know who are doing so many cool, creative things. But I do need to remember that it's all a process, and that this will lead to other things.
I wrote a review of SLC Punk for the blog Filmosophy. I went to the MTV Video Music Awards Red Carpet and interviewed some people for another b5media blog, popmusicscene. That was insane and surreal. I met a former TMZ paparazzi dude who was fascinating to talk to (he went on the up and up with one of the big image sites) and my spot on the carpet was smooshed between girls from a teenybopper mag and some guys doing video. That could be a whole other entry, so I'm not going to get derailed. I went to my very first fashion show and wrote about that for bitchbuzz.
Tomorrow night (or I guess tonight) I am doing an Ignite talk. It should be...interesting. I just hope people "get it." It's about the Real Housewives and the lessons I've learned from them. So you know, it is a big fucking joke. This Saturday I am going to the vegan cooking competition, Veggie Conquest, and will be covering them for Vegansaurus. I'm also writing the weekly Top Chef recaps over there.
That's all the action I got for you today. Before I leave you again, I'll give you this gift. I first saw this video last year, and it came back into my life when the woman in it, Beth Crosby, e-mailed me on BravoFan with a link to her Rachel Zoe Project parody video. I poked around her profile and found that same video again, of these two ridiculous Hollywood fauxsalites. I'd love to do something like this with the NYC fauxsalites. Time to go read a bunch of GuestofAGuest for character inspiration!
And now, I give you...Jessica and Hunter:
Jul/092
Tumble Less, Blog More
The problem with spending most of my time blogging for a place that's so niche is I run across so many interesting things all day and I have nowhere to put them. Tumblarity is an abusive relationship and I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't bother me just a tad to post something there and then have no one like it. It's too much, ya'll. My fragile heart can't take it. So I'm going to try to post stuff here, where it is less important to receive validation. This blogging thing is such an addiction. When will I ever stop?
My headline today reads like a dieting thing. I will blog-diet my way to a more... readable Internet persona? What does Internet fame even get you these days? Besides a blog that analyzes your every move and has dozens of people calling a normal sized woman fat for not having visible ankle bones? Speaking of cankles (as someone who has a pair), I was SO HORRIFIED when I learned that term. Great, one more thing to be judged on. Trust me, I do not care about that at this point, but I do admit that I don't ever wear shoes with ankle straps.
Anyway. What did I come here to talk about again? Oh, here, a few interesting things of note:
1. Why We Keep Dying.
I'm not cool enough to know who Dash Snow was, but apparently he died and a lot of people have things to say about it. This is an interesting blog post on how drugs keep killing people off in "the scene" and how angry the writer was at Dash for leaving a daughter behind.
2. Mixtapes for Hookers celebrates Mary Magdalene, one of my favorite ladies to study.
3. Amazon bought Zappos. I'm only telling you this because apparently everyone on Twitter feels it is their duty as an Internet Citizen to tell you this. Now I'm also telling you.
My favorite, favorite thing today is something I did post over at BravoFan. It's Padma Lashkmi in Glitter, the Mariah Carey movie! The movie so bad that even watching it in college, WITH A FORTY (yes, you were there too once) wasn't enough to salvage it. It was turned off in about 30 minutes. Anyway, here it is. I love the "80s" music at the beginning:
Jul/090
Birthmothers, Squirrels & Musicals
1. So, as most of you know, I am currently living with my family. This is going mostly okay, except that the commute normally takes about 2 hours because none of the places I actually want to go are close to either of the bus stations that NJ Transit will take me to. However, I have spent some time googling "How to deal with controlling people."
One thing I've noticed is that that my aunt and grandmother seem to think we are living in a real life musical. They will burst into song at very strange moments, like during a lull in the conversation at dinner. No choreographed dancing, Not yet.
2. My latest reality obsession is "16 & Pregnant" which follows in the great MTV tradition of True Life, Engaged & Under-age, and Made. While I hate the Juno-like graphics they use for the show (yes, we get it, Juno is the end-all, be-all teen pregnancy signifier from now until forever), the show is actually fairly realistic. The MTV reality shows always feel so genuine, with so little branding and producer involvement (from what I can tell). The best one so far has been the last one, where the couple gives the baby up for adoption. There's a lot that can be said about class about all these episodes, and this one in particular, but I'm not going to beat you over the head with it. The couple in this one were so mature, self-aware, and ultimately doing the right thing, I think.
As I always do with my obsessions, I immediately went online to read more about the 16 & Pregnant girls and stumbled upon yet another online community of people I never knew existed: the "birthmother" movement. Apparently, there's a whole bunch of adopted kids and women who've given their children up for adoption who are really against the whole thing. The most off the wall was this Exiled Mothers site. I think whenever you see a site with design that is at least 10 years old, the more insane the content.
I understand what this woman is saying, and there are aspects of adoption that are fucked up, like the underlying premise is that only rich people should have kids, or coupled people, but it is a real option for people who can't or won't have an abortion, but can't raise kids at the moment. I think the couple on 16 & Pregnant just wanted to break their particular cycles and not bring children into what was not the best situation. I also read a few blogs of adopted kids who tried desperately to find their birth parents, only to be rejected. There's a lot of real trauma there, on both sides. I'm not going to pretend to understand either side from anything but the most abstract sense.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1MiWbZaXL0&hl=en&fs=1&]
3. A squirrel found their way into my house through the chimney on Saturday. He/she was freaking out and trying to escape and pretty much trashed the living room. Eventually, the squirrel found its way out the front door. It was so strange. Do squirrels have rabies? Do they feast on human flesh or just acorns? Now I stare at the fireplace, wanting to see if any more of those sneaky bushy tailed things are going to roll back in here.
Jul/092
Taco Tuesday
Last night, after going to the opening of a high end tattoo shop (story tk on Bitchbuzz) that was sponsored by Hpnotiq, the older cousin to Alize, a drink I'd previously only had at a strip club, I spied Yelp to tell me where I could get food. I had to walk across 22nd street to go meet my cousin at Mr. West, a "lounge" (to me, it is a club, but what do I know about these things? Nothing.) and I filtered my results to be within 2 blocks and with only one dollar sign.
From there, emerged a pizza place with the name Giant Burrito. I was skeptical, but a reviewer from San Francisco gave it high marks for its tacos, so I took the plunge. I asked for the "taco de la casa," which had all three meats: al pastor, pollo asada, and carne asada. It also came with guacamole, onions, and of course, cilantro. The lady asked if I wanted "chile" and duh, of course I did.
About 5 minutes later, I was handed a pile of meat on top of two warm corn tortillas with a lime on the side. No pickled vegetables, but I could deal. I liked it so much I ordered another. I smelled like onions for the rest of the night, but I didn't care. All week, I had been yearning, in a way usually reserved for guys who don't like me back, for a piece of California. And then I tasted it.
I'll be back home someday.
Jun/090
The Week In Pictures
I'm at this point where I dislike most things I write, so I think I will just let my Flickr do the talking. Blogging about Internet Week for Pepsi was very positive, we had a really great editor and I really have to say that Pepsi, oddly enough totally understands this Internet thing. Go figure. Anyway, here's some highlights from the iPhone camera roll:
We made our own soda with HCFS at the Pepsi factory. This was mine -- mango, grapefruit & lime. I only drink diet soda, so I had a sugar hangover the next day like you would not believe. This soda was pretty gross.
On Tuesday, I had to go to the Westin Times Square for a summit (which I was denied entrance to anyway) and there was a fire across the street. Excitement!
I managed to catch the Cupcake truck by Union Square on Thursday. They were very reasonably priced and GOOD. They're also using Twitter a lot to announce their location and do promotions. I hope they stick around.
there was one schmoozy event i went to that didn't have any alcohol at all, probably because it was an event for under age interns. nice to have sandwiches, though.
What I was lugging around all week. Minus the iPhone of course and minus the sangria. Taken in the lobby of the W, which has free wi-fi and smells amazing.
May/092
Stuff I've Been Looking At, Volume 1
News Stories I have been paying attention to:
1. Known as Father Oprah in Miami, Father Cutie leaves the Catholic Church and goes to Episcopalian church. Latin American media are obsessed with this story, especially now that Cutie has turned his back on the Catholic church. What happened was he got caught canoodling with his girlfriend on the beach, the Church told him to go take a spiritual retreat until he got that crazy lust out of his brain and then he came back and was all "No thanks" and is now joining a different church and is engaged to his lady friend.
I've seen some talk on the spanish news shows that he was the one who leaked the photos (I guess the girlfriend met with the paparazzi who took them?) and orchestrated this entire event in order to get the hell out of the Catholic church. The priest is rather media savvy, so he may have cooked this up with a crazy publicist. Many Catholics feel betrayed and a higher up in the church says that only God can forgive him. I don't understand the complete unwillingness of the Catholic church to change the celibacy clause. Clearly, it doesn't work. And what's up with all the outrage over the priest having consensual sex with an adult woman vs all the covering up of the priests molesting young boys?
2. Sonia Sotomayor's nomination and the avalanche of racist & sexist garbage being spewed in the media by the usual suspects. Jezebel has it covered, so I won't even bother to comment except how sad it is that everyone is acting exactly as expected.
3. Elizabeth Wurtzel's piece in Elle and the commentary on Broadsheet. The piece itself is kind of long and whiny but it makes me sad that a woman of such insane privelege and obvious smarts and opportunity is obsessing over her looks and over the attention of gross dudes. We all do it, we're all taught as women that our social value is in how fuckable we are, but perhaps I was naive and optimistic to think that this kind of obsessing diminishes as you get older and stop caring. Apparently, not so much. I feel kind of lucky that I'm extremely average looking and won't have to be dealing with "losing" my looks when I get older because you know, there were never any to begin with.
4. I keep trying to get excited about new television shows but when you write about television for a living, it sucks all of the fun out of it. I'm extremely excited to cover Top Chef Masters however, only because the Real Housewives while fun, are draining. The reunion of the NYC housewives (both epic parts) made me want to get a lobotomy. I think everyone's fame has gotten to their heads (especially my previous favorite, Jill Zarin) and I am completely over the NYC housewives. My previous second favorite, Bethenny, is also on thin ice with me, especially with her drunkorexia diet book.
Finally, we have books! Stuff I'm hoping to read this summer:
1. Camgirls
2. Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg about the history of blogging
3. Finally finish the anthology of graphic novels I got for my birthday last year
What have you been looking at?
May/095
Red Tape
Today I found out that my name is actually Maria Diaz-CRUZ. I did not know this because everything I have ever done has been without the hyphen. When I was naturalized as a citizen (I wasn't born here), my mom signed my name as Diaz-Cruz.
Somehow all of this fell through the cracks when getting my CA ID card and my US passport. Today, at the New Jersey DMV, while attempting to get state ID and a permit so I can drive and have something resembling a life while I get my shit together, I was not allowed to get either because my INS certificate has this Diaz-Cruz name. The employees there said I didn't have enough proof of ID and looked at me like I had two heads when I said I freelanced and did not have insurance (no insurance card).
So my mom calls and asks how the DMV trip went. I explain this whole Diaz-Cruz thing and she says "Oh yeah. That is your legal name." I had no idea how to respond to this; I have NEVER gone by this hyphenated name. I should have noticed when I got this INS certificate in 2003 (which was another enormous ordeal that I will talk about another time) but you know, I didn't. So, it's just as much my fault. Do not consumerist-comment me about it, please.
The moral of the story is: read your government documents carefully. And don't lose your social security card. And don't expect a trip to the DMV to ever occur without a tear or two.
May/091
My Sex 2.0 Session
So Sex 2.0 is this coming weekend. I'm excited to get some time in hotel rooms (I love hotels) and to go to DC as an adult and not an AP history obsessed teenager. I'm super excited to be around a bunch of smart sex people and unlike most conferences I go to, this one won't be about monetizing the Internet. Sex and tech is uh, kind of my thing.
Because I always want to be in the front of the room, I am leading a class on the "revenge porn" trend. My updated description never made it onto the schedule, but here's what I wrote:
I just saw your ass on Myspace: A discussion on revenge porn
With smart phones and your mom on Facebook, what used to be private polaroids and video tapes can now get sent to everyone you've ever met within seconds -- whether or not you want it there. This class will discuss ways to express ourselves sexually using new technology and dealing with the ever present risk having the evidence disseminated online the minute things turn south. This class will cover ways to cope with a Revenge Porn & "Sexting" world.
Basically, it's my usual private vs public discussion. What inspired this was the Gretchen Rossi drama in late February. For those of you who don't know, I am a paid TV blogger and my beat is the Bravo network. Gretchen is a Real Housewife of Orange County. She was the latest addition, younger than the other cast members and she had some conflict with the other cast members. Anyway, there were a ton of rumors floating around that Gretchen was cheating on her dying, twice her age, fiance Jeff during filming. When the show was over, this dude, who she dated after Jeff died when the show wrapped, started to post photos about her on any website that would have him. This continues to this day.
So, I was fascinated by this story because Gretchen thought she had her tiny story line wrapped in a bow. We've already seen that society loves to hate "gold diggers" and Gretchen played the reality show game perfectly. And then this tool came around and blew her reputation up. Around the same time, I found a Details story about "revenge porn" and how many amateur porn videos on the tube sites (fantasti.cc, xtube, etc) get labeled as being from ex-es. And that's where this idea came from. I also thought bringing it up at Sex 2.0, where a bunch of the attendees have been naked on the Internet for either money or because they're sex bloggers and put their own naked photos online for things like "Half Naked Thursday", would make for an interesting session.
But my point for clarifying here is, the class is meant to be more a discussion on how technology makes it possible for us to express ourselves, but can also create things like this, because it's so easy to distribute and copy. Photos don't really belong to their owners anymore. It's much more about privacy than about porn or sex itself. I also want to discuss the idea that maybe at one point society will change and putting this stuff up won't be used as retaliation. Not that I realistically think this, but its one question to explore.
Anyway, I'm irritated that my session is at the same time as Melissa and Joanne (from Tomorrow Museum) but I'll deal. I'm a little concerned by the things Amber brought up in this post (namely by how some of the feminist stuff has fallen by the wayside and the more kink-centric feeling of the event which is fine but not what I'm going to the conference for and just not my thing) but I'm going into it with an open mind.
Apr/091
I Totally Care What You Had For Lunch
The world that I inhabit is not the type that worships the Internet "A-list." or the self appointed group of Twitter addicts that never misses a conference, "Tweetup" or never fails to make posts like "Why Everything You're Doing Is Wrong" or "Using Friendfeed Will Convince Your Girlfriend To Have Anal Sex With You."
Sure, we're sort of early adopters, glued to our iphones, checking in on loopt or foursquare or whatever new system comes around until we tire of it, we use Tumblr and we make references to "thought leaders" in an insidery way. We don't worship people like Guy Kawasaki or Gary Vee or Scoble or re-tweet everything Mashable posts. Which is why I was shocked to see people actually paying attention to those people when I went to SXSW. This is a very different Internet from my Internet (which I admit is mostly sponsored by Nick Denton; the "cool side" of the Internet as once brilliantly mentioned by a friend of mine). But anyway, the following post I read today on Kawasaki's keynote at a search engine conference last week confirmed my decision to largely ignore the "experts" and leaders of thought.
Here's my favorite quote:
According to Kawasaki: either you're a money-grubbing, social-media-abusing pusher of some product, service, or yourself to the waiting Twitter masses, or you're a frivolous nobody posting about your cat, or the new hairbrush you bought, or the fact that you brushed your cat with the new hairbrush. So those are the only two options? Building a genuine professional rapport or exploring mutual interests with a small to medium-sized circle of people? That has no place in Kawasaki's dichotomous world. People who aren't on the A-List are really just nobodies who should be spammed by A-Listers; that's Kawasaki's mental atlas. Funny that's how it is, because Kawasaki wastes a lot of breath trying to say that he feels just the opposite. He protests too much, a lot.
I think there is a lot of time and energy wasted on the Internet on things like analyzing how many followers you have, your "retweetability index" and a bunch of other nonsense. Who cares? How to get people to follow your corporate Twitter account? Don't be annoying. How to get people to read your professional blog? Be a good writer and update a lot. And if not, hire someone who knows how to write and do it for you. The whole Internet industry is far more complicated than it ever has to be. This stuff is not rocket science, unless of course, you're paying me, in which case it is.
But seriously, even when I've worked with people on their web projects, I've always told them that less is more. The appeal of social networking and how it can work in business is that there are people around you. So be real, like J. Lo. Don't write for search engines (but do write your titles for them), don't be the douche with 30,000 Twitter followers he can't possibly be invested in and who aren't invested in you.
And all these fake metrics are distracting from the only metric that matters (I learned everything I know about business from hip hop): how much cash you making? I have a small group of followers on my b5media blog on Bravo programming. I engage with them regularly, in addition to feeding my blog feed to it. I've increased my blog traffic significantly thanks to this and have sucessfuly monetized that blog. Do I care about analyzing my followers? No. My method is very simple: I update a lot, I follow leads on gossip people care about, I stay out of comments and I am nice to my PR people. So I get more pageviews and get pizzaid (still a pithy sum but money is money). What I'm doing is working and I'm building a tiny reality tv empire. But I realize that will take time. I'm not going to add 50,000 people on Twitter who had the word "Bravo" in one of their posts. That'll just make me look clueless. And that's the worst of all on the Internet -- just ask Amazon, who is probably having the worst Easter ever.
What I do wish Internet blowhards would realize is that not everyone wants to monetize on the Internet and they don't care about building a "brand." One of the most amazing things about writing a blog about reality television is how my Google Alerts point me to women who keep these meticulous personal blogs about their lives and who totally don't care about SEO or networking. And that's totally okay. There's room for them, too. I love the personal blog and prefer it (it's why I read Tumblr, where the personal blog is alive and well ). There's room to write about your cat on the Internet, still. After all, I love cats.
Mar/094
We Don't Really Live In Public
The joke about "overshare" and "living in public" is that no such thing actually exists. The story actually happens between the status updates, not in them.
When I think back on my years of compulsive blogging, what's most striking to me is how much I didn't say, how much didn't get documented or only got referred to in the vaguest of terms, mostly because I didn't want to upset anyone or worse, have to explain myself. It becomes about pleasing you, the audience, the reader, whoever I happen to be writing for at the time, intentionally or not. The audience that screams at the girl in the horror movie to just run outside or not to get into the car.
And yeah, sometimes I wish I'd said more, even in those webpages that will never see the light of day ever again, that will never be accesible anywhere, ever, but the truth is, I know what happened. I can piece it together.