Some quick hits for ya:

The word of God on the topic of blogging, which is a mixed bag but fantastically interesting. Social networks are the devil. (credit: samuel)

Quote of the Morning:

"[I am] the only one on this stage who has a tough policy. I want to build the walls. I want to make sure there is no road to residency. I am the son of a legal immigrant. There are people today who attempted to come here as legal immigrants and died. Now we’ve got people flooding into this nation for no other reason than they want a better life for themselves...

That's 4%-polling Republican candidate for CT-Sen Alan Schlesigner, who came out swinging in last nights debate vs. upstart Democrat Ned Lamont and GOP-backed Independent Joementum (the Republicans ditched Schlesigner for Joe when Ned beat his ass the Democratic primary).

The dynamics of American Facism... I think the best bit is at the end. Classic fascism is really a kind of reactionary modernism -- industrial mass society, one-to-many communication, etc, combined with reactionary and xenophobic politics -- whereas in our particular moment we are witnessing something far more insidious and strange: reactionary post-modernism. How else can one explain the break between the organized Right-wing in the US and what they disdainfully call "the reality-based community."

And so another week begins. I've got to get back into the autobio practice (what this is trying to return to) so I'll recap my weekend. I want to be a little careful and intentional here, as I'm trying to walk a couple of lines:

• No a secret diary -- the original genesis of this whole thing was to open up my life a bit more and to lift up my conduct and being all around, not to have a place where I write things instead of saying them. It's a easy slip to have this be a substitute for more immediate expression, rather than the poetical mass-communication and aspiration I want it to be.
• Don't burn people -- I've gone over the general concept of what stories are mine to tell and what aren't, usually in the context of "kissing and blogging," but trying to get back into autobiographical writing means being careful about what I say about other people. I've already done things like remove old posts about friends who've become lawyers and have questionable google results because of something i wrote in 2002.
• Keep it interesting -- while I've got a certain confidence in the palatability of the reality-TV equivalent of blogging, I don't want to tumble down some hallway of self-obsession and inward-looking myopia. Intriguing introspection is the ideal; don't want to run off my little readership with a bunch of pathetic navel-gazing.

Anyway, enough disclaimer. This is an evolution. Let's get started. 1500+ words after the jump.

Washington, Washington... 6-foot-20, fucking kiling for fun:

Here come's George, in control
Women love his snuff and his gallant stroll
Ate opponents brains
And invented cocaine
He's coming / He's coming
He's coming / He's coming

And as an extra bonus, something my old colleague Jeremy Rosen made which strikes me as an excelent little production. Seems like something I would do with Frank if the times were different.

Conversations with Fiona Apple:

Finally, one for real politics. This is possibly the best "go vote" ad I've ever seen. It's intelligent, it's sophisticated, and it's humorous without being self-depricating. It's Women's Voices Women's Vote:

If there's any one thing that could get the progressive bandwaggon (health care! health care!) going in this country, it would be if younger/single women started voting in greater numbers.

Tresler points me to Joi Ito talking about Six Apart's new joint, Vox. It's a good name for a good product, and a nice logical next step between typepad and livejournal (which they bought).

But I like the name "Rebel Unicorn" better.

Basically my take is that the future is not in having some magic technology that lets you run a huge site that everyone uses. That's why the myspace and youtube buys don't seem like good moves to me: the functionality can and will be replicated 100 times over, so all you're buying is the community. Google may have a chance at holding that, but Fox is almost guaranteed to fuck it up over the next five years.

Not that myspace will evaporate, but it will cease to be the phenomena that it is, and just become a national "scene" site for emo kids. You might as well have bought makeoutclub.com, Rupert.

Where the future is at is in running a more modest site (or if you're not modest, a site that lets people run sites) which actually serves a real community, but which can interoperate. The future is in enabling a network of social websites, not in running some kind of monolith.

I'll write about this and how it wiil happen on my work blog soon.