MY URBAN KVETCH

The JDate Breastplate of Truth (full version)

[A slightly shorter version of this piece appears at JDatersAnonymous.com.]

Recently, Jews observed the holiday of Purim, a day whose themes center on disguise, withheld information, and political intrigue. The theme of hiddenness is primary – in which people aren’t necessarily who they seem to be. One notable example of this is that the Book of Esther (also known as the Megillah) is the only book of the canonized Torah that does not contain the name of God. Even the Deity’s presence is hidden in the story, only evidenced within small phrases that intimate help will come from “another place.” 

On Purim, to commemorate the theme of hiddenness and celebrate the inner parts of our lives that we might not always feel comfortable expressing, Jews traditionally dress in costume. Some of these costumes are fun, or (taking a cue from secular cousin Halloween) present an excuse to sex it up a little, at least for the one day. I decided that if the theme was exposure and honesty, my costume choice became clear: I would become the clichés that people write (over and over again) in their online dating profiles. 

How would I do this? Could I wear “a little black dress and jeans and a t-shirt”? How would I visually manifest “working hard and playing hard”? Should I get a fake arm, throw it around my shoulder, and label with a sign that says “my ex – but don’t worry, he’s out of the picture”? I opted for simplicity and resonance: starting with the little black dress, and adding a whiteboard of sorts – then I’d let people add their own clichés via stickers. I wrote out a bunch of them ahead of time, and stuck them to a sign I’d created using the JDate logo. JDate’s catchphrase is “Where It Happens.” I changed that to “Where Clichés Happen.” And then the public art/commenting phase began. 

The results were fascinating. Not only was this a brilliant conversation piece, but I had become a walking blog post, a work created by a community of the fed-up, a family of collaborators all too happy to contribute their frustrations to my rapidly growing list of clichés. My yeshiva education piped up, silently noting that the “public wall” was a 2.0 version of the somewhat mysterious priestly breastplate, the urim v’tummim, which was associated with oracles, divination and truth-telling; instead of the questions coming via the High Priest, these inquiries were coming directly from the people. Some people - also correctly - noted that they thought I was dressed as "refrigerator poetry." (I guess you know what next year's costume will be. :))

Digital Hollywood: Publicists, Writers, Content Developers Talk Blogs, Celebs and More

For a woman like me, this Digital Hollywood conference is like a crash course in some things I know and some things I don't know, all at the same time. Obviously, being at a professional conference specifically geared for the entertainment industry in the town I moved to a year ago is a new experience for me: I don't know who the players are; how a TV writer hones her craft and makes connections; how a celebrity gets his or her press; or how Hollywood views the internet. 

And yet, I do.

Sure, there are some processes and politics that are specific to the industry of Hollywood and celebrity gossip. But publicity, whether it's for Spencer and Heidi (whatever) or for a name change at an umbrella organization of Jewish federations (see here), is about two things for a publicist: crafting the message and getting that message out. What the message is is situation-specific; and the modes used for distributing that message should be as well. One could point out a vital third component with two parts: relationship - both the relationship between the publicist and his/her client, and the relationship between the publicist/client entity and members of the press. 

Several ideas and experiences seemed familiar or intuitive to me, but were hailed as innovative by the audience, which consisted of an eclectic group of underemployed, self-employed, publicists, writers, editors, actors, producers, content developers, web designers, techie coder geeks, advertising representatives, lawyers, event planners and professional schmoozers. With a group that large and diverse, programming had to be similarly diverse in terms of appeal and approach, and in many cases it was. But it's hard to speak to a group with so many degrees of online literacy

For instance, if you didn't realize that making it in Hollywood was hard, well, you would after attending the conference - at one point I imagined Debbie Allen in the corner, leaning on a dance stick, giving her monologue ("You got big dreams? You want fame? Well fame costs...and right here's where you start paying -- in sweat." FAME!). Also, did you know that "Glee" was popular in part due to its premiere over the summer and then the anticipatory build until the season began in September? Or, that "The Office" didn't have that strong a following at first, but then built because of the online audience? Or that "Dr. Horrible" was financed personally by Joss Whedon? Or that the "Mad Men" characters have been Tweeting, but that they're not supported by AMC - they're a fan initiative? I've never been to a tech conference before, but I, in fact, did know all these things. But the oohs and aahs of the audience proved that not everyone reads Entertainment Weekly like I do.

There also seemed to be unrelenting criticism of bloggers as panelists and attendees seemed to alternately thank the bloggers for mobilizing fans online and condemn them for their unpredictability, and for not following traditional journalism's rules. This constant reference to all bloggers as unprofessional (which is not the same thing as calling them "not journalists") highlighted the fact that people don't get it: blogging is a tool, and all kinds of people use that tool to do all kinds of writing. (This disconnect is something those of us in Jewish journalism/commentary have seen before, if you remember "Jewish Bloggers Are Not the Enemies of Jewish Storytelling.")

Some bloggers write journalistically, others juvenilely.  And there's a continuum, of course. Many of us do employ a different tone than traditional journalism, and write in this tone because the medium's democracy and immediacy lends itself to the personal lens that most bloggers take to the subjects about which they're most passionate. But for the most part, I heard people blame bloggers more than thank them: for leaking stories, for lying, for being a source of negative press, for being uncontrollable, for being unprofessional, for ushering traditional journalism toward its deathbed...I was waiting to hear how bloggers were responsible for higher taxes, Michael Jackson's death, and 9/11, but I guess I missed that session. 

Speak Aussie to Me...

So, after my salad-dodger of a flatmate went out to indulge her tanorexia, and I had had enough password fatigue to travel to the Great Firewall of China, I decided to concentrate on expanding my floordrobe.

If you don't understand the first sentence of this post, you might not speak Australish. But luckily, here's a guide for you, so you can learn some of this year's Australish words (bolded above, in case you didn't see 'em).

And SJFs, listen up, here's a tip for you...I recently met with about a dozen young Jewish Australian leaders in their early 20s, and they all complained that their events don't attract women. "Where are the women?" they kept asking me. And I told them that Jewish women in NYC are constantly complaining that there are no men...

Food for thought, eh?

Some Notes About Technospeak

Haven't had a good grammar/semantics rant in a while. So here are two things that have been bugging me, technoverbally speaking. And maybe it's me; maybe I'm just too picky in a way that renders me unfit for human interaction. But before I buy that deserted ranch in Montana to isolate myself from humanity, I thought I'd try venting here first.

As a blogger, I write posts in my blog. I do not say things like, "today, I wrote a blog about Madonna and Kabbalah." I do say things like," today, I wrote a blog post about how Seth Rogen should go on birthright." So, as I understand it, you can "blog," you can "write a blog post," but you cannot "write a blog." Unless you're writing a whole blog. But you cannot use it to mean "individual entry." That's a "post." Isn't it?

While I'm here venting about technospeak, allow me to address the concept of a "viral video." While most appropriately used to indicate a video that started small and become so popular that it's almost an epidemic (hence the medical viral image), some people have begun to use this to refer to any video that they themselves create. "I'm doing a viral video of my son singing the alphabet; it's so cute."  It may be cute. More likely, it's kind of boring to everyone outside the kid's immediate family. But one thing it is not is "viral."

Companies trying to be hip or programs trying to appeal to a youth demographic have begun to create short videos for upload to sites like YouTube, and proclaim them "viral videos." This is akin to me assembling some petri dishes in my apartment and cultivating substances from basic ingredients in my house and then proclaiming them "communicable germs." They might become communicable, or airborne, or viral or whatever, but they aren't currently in that state.

Plus, an insider's note to all of you who are proud of yourselves for using such an advanced term as "Web 2.0" or "social networking"...I know you must think you sound very 21st Century for using these terms that the rest of the world is just now beginning to adopt. You might think that you're so ahead of the game  that you are now tempted to move out to Silicon Valley to see if your familiarity with Facebook can translate into big bucks. But the sad truth is that by the time you and I are using those terms, they're frigates of technoverbiage that have already sailed; people in Silicon Valley don't use the term "Web 2.0" anymore, and "social networking" has become "social media." I know this, but only because I have "people."

So, in closing, please continue to "post to your blog," or "write blog posts," but not to "write blogs." Don't declare a video "viral" until you see it's been passed along to hundreds or thousands of others like the flu-bearing sneeze it aspires to be. And if you're going to use terms like "Web 2.0" and "social networking" to impress your less-tech-savvy friends, say it quietly: because any louder, and Silicon Valley is likely laughing at you and too much laughter on a faultline leads to earthquakes. Just saying.

"Celebrity Apprentice"? Or "Celebrity" "Apprentice"?

I'm torn. When there's a TV show title, you should put the whole title in quotation marks. But when you're trying to make a sarcastic comment using quotation marks -- as in describing people as "celebrities" when they're not really celebrities but are so designated by someone else -- where do you put the quotation marks?

Grammar is hard.

Potato, Po-tahto, Osama, Obama...

Let's call the whole "not proofreading our headers before we publish them" thing off...

Okay, CNN?

THE

Something about the sign bothered her. Nothing wrong per se, no misspellings, no misplaced apostrophes indicating a possessive where there should have been none; but still, it stuck in a crevice of her brain, if such a thing as a brain crevice did even exist, of which she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t taken a science course in years, and which she would be sure to look up later in the dictionary, or at least on dictionary.com, which was her constant companion on such meandering, run-on forays into the things that irked her like this smallish sign on the inside of the bathroom stall door in Old Navy.

PLEASE DO NOT FLUSH
SANITARY NAPKINS,
PAPER TOWELS,
DIAPERS, OR TAMPONS
DOWN TOILET.

Sure, the sign Powers-That-Be had opted for the series comma, which wouldn’t have been her choice had she been at the editor’s desk. But the use of a period indicated that this was intended to be a complete sentence, uttered by an authority somewhere overhead, making requests of squatters in this most intimate of spaces. And as such, it was missing a definite article.

The missing ‘the’ piqued her curiosity as much as it irritated her. Logically, there was certainly room for it in that last line. Aesthetically, it would have improved the sign, lending a near-symmetry by adding letters to that last line, and creating a better, if still imperfect, balance to the text in the five-line poem of the sign. But someone decided not to banish all attempts at symmetry, and didn’t include it. She wondered who that person was, the editor at the sign factory, if such a thing existed, and whether he or she took his job seriously. Who had a grudge with a “the”? What kind of editor—nay, what kind of person—allowed a sentence to be printed, in white letters on a bright red sign, without a vital definite article?

She was there again, in the bad place. The one where she looped into a cycle of grammatical insanity. (Shame on you for using a sentence fragment for dramatic effect, she self-scolded.) She had to get a hold of herself, and with some difficulty, shook off the thought, flushing it away.

Unfortunate Typo of the Day--Winner: JTA

In today's JTA Daily Briefing email of top stories, witness this headline:

An operation planned to repair surgical damage to Ariel Sharon's skill was postponed.

Links to this story. And clearly, that word's supposed to be "skull." I'd make a joke if Sharon's condition weren't so unjokable.

Typo of the Day

(And please, let this be the only one I find...)

Cynopsis, you know I love ya. And I see where you went wrong on this one. But a little fact-checking, please...I'll even highlight the phrase for you and link to IMDB for you...

E! has picked up a movie package from Sony Pictures Television.  This marks the first acquisition of this type for the cable net.  The short list of films includes Mystic Pizza, Fargo and Suddenly Seeking Susan, according to Broadcasting & Cable. 

Or to put it another way:

Madonna is to "Desperately Seeking" what Brooke Shields is to "Suddenly."

Please make a note of it. Thank you.