David Harvey at Meridian Collective details his month making a living (sort-of) as an online content mill writer:

In early November, I signed up for Demand Studios, the factory of parent Demand Media, which pays between $7.50 and $20 per article and provides a ready-made list of titles. In the month of November, I made $407.50 writing articles like “African Restaurants in San Diego,” “How to Identify Inedible Plants in Oregon,” and “How to Find a Wife in Bulgaria.” In December, I wrote about drug tests, checking accounts, flight regulations and kilts. In January, I narrowed my focus to hotels and restaurants, scouring obscure Web pages, reading hundreds of reviews and wandering the streets of distant cities using Google maps.

I’m embarrassed to admit, but I’ve been suckered in by sites like these a time or two. I’ve even written a few articles for Demand Studios (what weeks of a menstrual cycle a woman can become pregnant, and something about fennel, I think). As a freelance writer, one of the most tempting things is to try and avoid cold pitching.

Yesterday, I came across this post seeking SXSW coverage for AOL’s music site, Spinner. As writer Steve Safran points out, it’s kind of brilliant:

There are 2,000 bands playing at this year’s SXSW in March. You couldn’t possibly assign your entertainment reporter to cover them all. So AOL (sponsor of SXSW) is hiring a stringer to cover each band. AOL is paying $50 per writer to report on a given band, according to paidContent. This is part of AOL’s Seed project, which acquires and distributes content for AOL properties.

[...] This is a fascinating move. For $100,000, you get complete coverage of 2,000 bands and the start of a database of those bands.

I signed up. For Seed, and to profile a SXSW band (received my assignment today: the new-to-me but delightful Warren Hood). Seed seems like a pretty interesting idea, and a pretty novel way for AOL to secure content for it’s myriad web properties. But is it really any different than Demand Media, Associated Content, etc.? It seems like the barrier to entry is a little higher, the editorial and quality control a little better, the blatant SEO-pandering a little less. Is there a good and a bad way to be a content mill? Is there an important function for both?

Across the country, we are cracking down on teeth brushing, raw eggs and MORE!

New York: Things Get Messy When Bartenders Crack an Egg – Pegu Club busted for failing to inform customer that Earl Grey MarTEAni contains raw egg white. [But caveat: No, it is not proper to compare a ban on egg white drinks to the destruction of an entire city by Hurricane Katrina, douchebag bartender].

Boston: Call Off the Toothbrush Police – State mandates day care programs brush children’s teeth.

DC: Electronic Cigarette Imports on Hold – Appeals court puts hold on lower court ruling allowing e-cigarettes to be imported.

But, hey, at least our porn stars don’t have to wear condoms:

Los Angeles County Declines to Force Condom Use in Porn Films – County Public Health Department says no to demands from AIDS activist group that require condom use in porn films.

The best customer service email I have ever received:

Hello Elizabeth,

I once again thank you for your time and effort. We appreciate your business with HP.

We are glad to know that the information provided by us helpfull to you and we hope that you are happy with our service. We thank you for taking the time to appreciate the technical support you received. Our passion for customer excellence is driven by your response.

We must admit that the issue would not have been resolved without your efforts. We can only provide technical resolutions; it is you who implemented the resolution to perfection. Our goal is to make your email support experience a wonderful one.

Actually, I haven’t even attempted the resolution yet. But thanks for the vote of confidence, HP!

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty. — A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Oh, Salinger. I love you for sentences like that one. Determined all the more now to serve bananafish at our upcoming “Literary Feast.” But I’ve always avoided reading details about your life. Why? When I have always gotten so entangled in the personal myths surrounding my other favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t know. I’m glad I did, though. Reading all your newsprint eulogies, I’m not really liking what I learn. Correspondences with teenage girls? Locking your wives in the house? Oh my. It all makes me want to rethink naming my first-born son, should I have a first-born son, Seymour (the cat is already Holden; there’s nothing I can do about that). But I think I shall just choose to ignore it, your urine-drinking, your love affairs, your Scientology (your macrobiotic diet! A sign of true insanity, surely). I will ignore it, and remember you for the perfect stories you have told me, and the impact you have had on my life (it is true: my boyfriend and I first bonded over Seymour: An Introduction). I look forward to reading Hapworth 16, 1924 – another story about the Glass family I didn’t know existed? How?, indeed! And to the potentiality that, upon your death, oodles and treasures of unpublished stories, just waiting for our eyes and ears, will be found. You could be 2010’s Tupac, or Elliott Smith. Wouldn’t that just be grand?

Yours,

Elizabeth

Wow. New morning-after pill works up to 5 days after sex ..

From Bitch:

Admittedly, I don’t see much disconnect between environmental issues, feminism, and animal rights issues (not to be confused with animal welfare, which I’ll discuss in another post).

… In the next weeks, I’ll be looking at a variety of intersecting issues including the human cost of chocolate, the use of fur in northern climates and indigenous cultures, soy and soybean farming, nuclear power’s environmental effects, ideas for carbon-free transit, the links between racism and animal oppression, and how you can be a pro-choice vegan.

Aside from the pro-choice veganism issue, I don’t understand how any of these topics could be considered feminist issues. There are enough feminist issues. There are enough ecological issues. Outside of perhaps academic research, I don’t understand the imperative to conflate them …

We shot a lovely two-song session with Wakey! Wakey! this past weekend, in what will hopefully be the first of many for the Goddamn Cobras‘ “Cobra Den Invitational” series. I’m trying to teach myself to use Final Cut Pro, so I shot some footage on my little digital camera while we were setting up, and edited it into a ‘behind the scenes’ clip. Enjoy!

P.S. Lead singer Michael Grubbs and the rest of the band were super nice. When I listen to their music on Wakey! Wakey!’s MySpace page, it doesn’t really grab me, but in person it was just delightful. Goddamn Cobras will be putting out our recording of the shoot sometime in mid-February – just in time to correspond to Grubbs’ next big moment on One Tree Hill, OMG.

[x-posted to brooklyn home companion ...]

Interesting post on HTML Giant right now about “the death” of literary magazines. Says writer Roxane Gay:

It is a real shame to see some of the most well-established literary magazines folding but I also think that perhaps the shelter of academia has allowed the editors of these publications to believe a great deal of money is needed to produce a great magazine. Many of the independent magazines I know, most of which are excellent publications, are able to put out 1-4 issues a year for less than $5,000 and many have the same print runs as some of the more established literary magazines. The same writers who submit to VQR and Prairie Schooner and The [insert whatever] Review also submit to smaller, lesser known magazines. In terms of quality, it can no longer be said that the best writing is exclusively being published in academic literary magazines.

So who wants to start a literary magazine, then?

Maybe I am just posting this because I enjoy anything casting an even slightly negative light on Dave Eggers’ brand of innocence and whimsy (which I detest):

The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision”: “We were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex.”

… Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.

Or maybe Kate Roiphe has a point. I haven’t read enough Mailer and Roth and all the rest to know. Perhaps today’s youngish male novelists just feel more comfortable expressing anxiousness about sexual conquest and masculinity, a comfort not allowed in the 1950s and 60s from our Hemingway-descendant men?

But what about F. Scott? He’s surely more an ancestor of the Eggers/Kunkel/Chabon line than the others. I can’t think of any particular passages – perhaps if I were a better blogger, I would look – but Fitzgerald was surely never a paragon of sexual conquest and bravado. Maybe there were always two templates. Yes/no?

My first impulse is to also disagree with this:

The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward.

There must be some younger male writers not writing about sex in this whimsical, anxious, navel-gazing way? But I can’t think of any (straight male writers, that is; gay male writers, or women writers are a different story). Help me out? I asked my boyfriend, just now. “South American writers,” he said (there are some lovely sex scenes in our beloved Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai). “But not here. Writing about sex will always be macho, and macho’s just not in style right now.”

I agree with (and lament?) the latter part of that sentence, not necessarily the middle.

If you’re not reading Katie & I’s “home and lifestyle” blog, you should be. You will never find such sweet pictures of people in overalls anywhere else in the blogosphere, promise. Plus, we will soon teach you how to make raw chocolate.

Why are New York Observer trend articles – especially the ones about love/sex/dating – so much fun to hate? Evil, evil geniuses they are …

Sound Cloud Link: http://soundcloud.com/enbrown/sets/homeward-bound-everywhere

Tracklist below the cut.

1. Home – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
2. Happy Eyez – CocoRosie
3. The Debtor – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
4. Whimper and Wail – Wheel
5. A Man in Love – Charlie Feathers
6. My Daddy Rocks Me – Trixie Smith
7. Living in Sin in the USA – Oakley Hall
8. Genesis 3:23 – The Mountain Goats
9. Where You Stop for a Minute – Cotton Jones
10. Avalon or Someone Very Similar – Yo La Tengo
11. Rock Stars – Awkward I
12. Final Horrors – Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard
13. Fangela – Here We Go Magic
14. Silver Moons – Sunset Rubdown
15. Fun Stuff – Frightened Rabbit
16. Flowers Grow Out of My Grave – Dead Man’s Bones
17. The Horizon is a Beltway – The Low Anthem
18. The Road – Frank Turner
19. Pride and Joy – Brandi Carlile
20. Draw Me a River – Lucky Fonz III
21. My Home Is Nowhere Without You – Herman Dune
22. 2080 – Yeasayer

Would you share a farm with this girl?

(In Which I Declare What I Could Have Said A Lot Less Complicatedly As An 8th-Grader Who Idolized Hippies …)

It started with reading this Sandra Tsing Loh article in The Atlantic, I think.

Loh notes that today’s “creative class” mother – with her flexible, creative job; her city life; her egalitarian marriage and child-rearing ideals – actually has it worse than her previous-generation counterparts, because of the absence of a built-in family and community structure.

Working for the AARP, I come across a lot of things about multi-generational households, and I’m convinced that they offer a lot of benefit, for all parties involved; that our nuclear-family model of housing and living (which was, in so many ways, engineered in early- to mid-20^th century America to push housing sales and create demand for railways and street cars)—our method of splintering off into smaller and smaller household units, of aging parents on their own back in Midwestern cities and suburbs, or shuttled off into nursing homes and retirement communities, of modern moms and dads raising kids in isolation—is all just a mess.

At this same time, I’ve been reading Laura Kipnis’ Against Love: A Polemic, which rails against the modern conception of marriage and monogamy on its own merits (or lack thereof). It’s a fascinating book that looks at what, exactly, is supposed to sustain marriages now that property ties and lineage concerns and gender roles aren’t all tied up with them; how marriage, as it stands, is a failing institution; how our conceptions that our spouse (or boyfriend/girlfriend/lover) is supposed to be everything —friend, lover, domestic and child-rearing partner, therapist, creative consultant, etc.—is ruining our lives.

Kipnis gets into this whole explanation of earlier revolts against marriage (or examinations of it, at least) in the U.S.—of the pamphlets and townhall meetings and intellectual discussions about the issue in 1800s America; of the transcendentalists and others who sought alternative forms of marriage or companionship and domestic life. These ideas used to be taken seriously, she writes, but the whole 1960s commune/free-love movement and the subsequent backlash and mockery that created have relegated any questioning of this sort into a hippie cliché.

Flash to last night, and I’m talking with my friend Morgan about yurts. Specifically, that her and her roommate, Sam, have been, for years now, looking into and researching and dreaming about getting a lot of friends together on a farm, out west, or in a college town, and living in yurts off a main house and practicing communal farming and living, etc.

And I laughed, because this is exactly the conversation that keeps playing out, over and over again, amongst me and my boyfriend and my friends in Brooklyn. We have a few friends who’ve actually started, who’ve left the cities (New York, Cincinnati) behind and ventured out to California, to Alaska, and started apprenticing at farms. We have other friends with family ties to maple farms in Scandinavia, avocado farms in SoCal. We’re tentatively and dreamily exploring our options. We’re starting with hallway gardens and kombucha brewing classes and volunteer sessions at the Greenpoint Rooftop Farms. We’re engaging in grand conversational fantasies with one another whenever we see things like a 15-room hotel for sale in upstate New York. We’re discussing these things with friends in other cities—like Morgan and Sam in Chicago; but also friends in Boston, friends in Cincinnati, friends out in California already. Everyone’s feeling this vibe.

From the yurt conversation, Morgan and I got on the topic of marriage, of children, of monogamy, spurred by the fact that the reason I’m visiting Chicago my best friend from college having a baby. She’s the first person Morgan or I are friends with —real friends, not high school friends, not the kind of friend who’s still in your home town and whose life bears no real connection or resemblance to your own—who has been married, and now, who’s having a child. Morgan and I were pondering the implications of this.

And then and there, I developed a philosophy on life and love and marriage and children and society (one that I didn’t even know I felt until I was espousing it to Morgan as if it was a long-held system of beliefs).

The only way, I realized, that all of this would work in my life is for it to take place within a multi-adult/couple/family communal living situation.

I’m not totally averse to monogamy, to marriage, to children even; but I also could never do it as part of a totally secluded nuclear family unit. I think a lot of people my age feel the same way. For whatever reasons, though, it’s not totally feasible or desirable to move back to our hometowns, to create multi-generational, communal households within our own extended families. But it may be feasible to do so amongst friends?

What if, as we age—as we reach that inevitable stage where people really do start wanting to pair off, to maybe make relationships legally and economically sanctioned, to start forming families—my friends and I all did it together? And combined it with our collective desire to be a part of the land, to create food and art together? How wonderful would it be to have those things—a life partner, children if you lean that way—without the confines of having to rely on the totally illogical goal of having one person meet all your needs in life? You could serve as each other’s companions, creative partners, domestic helpers, chefs, housemates, and friends. You would, of course, still get some of all of this from your primary partner. But you wouldn’t have to rely on them exclusively for all these things, and thereby diminish the primary love/sex bond you have with them.

I’ve pretty much decided in the past 12 hours that it’s the only possible way for me to live, create and grow old.

One of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long time:

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

And while we’re on genetics, check out Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal article, “Femina Sapiens in the Nursery,” too.

Evolutionary psychologists are sometimes accused of not giving proper due to the flexibility of the human brain. In her recent book Mothers and Others, for instance, Hrdy argues that just as animal males don’t tend to their infants, so human fathers can’t be expected to hang around for the long run. But at their best, scientists are apt to describe the brain as chemically and neurologically predisposed to certain behaviors—nurturing babies in the case of women, for instance—while capable of adapting these behaviors to enormously varied environments. Sometimes those environments even change the brain’s chemistry, a process that the writer Matt Ridley calls “nature via nurture.” When Hrdy presumes the fecklessness of men, she underestimates the environmental pressure of social norms. The human record suggests that social norms, especially the universal one of marriage, can reinforce fathers’ ties to their children, which in turn might even become part of the male neural architecture. Recently, neuroscientists have even discovered evidence that married men’s testosterone levels fall at the birth of their baby.

I concede no opinions about ev-pscyh yet, but Dr. Science approves:

That is quite possibly the best account of the topic I have ever read! She pretty much gets everything right. The science doesn’t prescribe social policy, but rather informs it. How do we come to grips with all of the evolutionary inertia/path dependency that has built up over millions of years, reconcile it with our visions of what “the good life” ought to be, and set ourselves on a course to a better society?

That is the debate we ought to be having, but step one is accepting where we are at the moment with regard to our understanding of the world (science). And yes yes yes, our decisions about the kind of society we choose to create and live in will, over eons, create new selection pressures and reshape our evolutionary trajectory. And as Kay so eloquently points out, technology has already done a lot to change the selection pressures. Maybe a million years from now, our descendants will bemoan how much nature predisposes us to an asymmetrical paternal investment into offspring and they will create new technologies and social policies to swing nature back in the other direction once again.

One of my particular cultural irritants, as of late, has been what can be scapegoatedly pinned on Ayelet Waldman or more broadly described as the “bad mother” genre. What a strange symbol of our times, these women hemming and hawing over their perceived psychological transgressions against the pathos of motherhood, their defiant reclamation attempts in Oprah-friendly memoir form . How ridiculous; how tedious.

So I got a kick out of Sandra Tsing Loh’s December Atlantic article, “On Being a Bad Mother,” in which she reviews both Waldman’s Bad Mother and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch:

What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)

After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.

But every time I read these sorts of things—this, or Tsing Loh’s last Atlantic article, about her affair and divorce; Elizabeth Weil’s New York Times Magazine article about working on her marriage, and all the bloggy disccusions around it; books like Against Love and A Vindication of Love, both railing against modern “companionate” marriages in their own way; all these late-boomer and Gen X women at once enchanted and neurotic and furious with our current exemplars of marriage or motherhood or monogamy—I am left wondering (and depressed) about what fights we Gen Y (and beyond) women will face in this realm. So much of the current angst seems to be a reaction to the 1970s woman’s reaction to the 1950s woman’s lifestyle/dilemna/ideal … it frustrates me. I’m tired of those battles; they seem silly and cliched and obvious.

But our battles are going to have to be a reaction to these. Or a backlash. And what will that look like? All I know, when I read these things, is that I don’t want to be any of the women in these essays. I don’t want their problems, don’t want their lives. I wonder how they possibly got there, and then can see myself getting there. I think the avoidance of all that will all be so simple, but then they, as women in the 70s and 80s, probably thought the same thing about that 1950s woman.

I could say a lot about Helen Rittlemeyer ’s Doublethink piece on women’s Web sites and blogs, but I’m going to focus on her relatively minor criticism of gender skeptics and their lady-blogging:

… liberal feminists like Kerry Howley, Amanda Marcotte, and Tracy Clark-Flory are gender skeptics who don’t believe that a “feminine perspective” exists. (Which raises the question: If their brand of feminism is right and gender differences are really as superficial as eye color, why have a gendered blog?)

This seems like a cheap shot, a deliberate conflating of ideas for the purpose of a ‘gotcha, silly liberal feminists’ that falls apart with any examination.

Not believing that an inherent “feminine perspective” exists (which is the position of most gender skeptics I’ve read) in no way means that a) a learned gender perspective does not exist, b) there are not topics of concern to women which some may feel don’t receive enough play in mainstream or non-gendered press/blogs, and therefore require their own separate outlet, or c) it’s not beneficial for readership/branding/intellectual/whatever purposes to gather a bunch of women together to talk about women’s topics. I fail to see how any of those three things negate a belief that we aren’t born with preferences on football or the color pink.

My other serious contention with the piece is that Helen seems to take Double X and Broadsheet as representative of all women’s blogs. I know for brevity’s sake it’s necessary for a writer to focus on a few examples. But using only these two, similarly-constructed women’s blogs leaves out some important contrasting types, and makes me think Helen was being this selective only to avoid having to delve deeper than her core argument that women’s blogs are lazy, chatty and unintellectual.

One of the most popular women’s blogs, Feministe, often offers a much more intellectual approach to and long-form critiques of feminist issues. This isn’t always great; Jill is the only writer currently there that can pull it off interestingly.  I’ve stopped reading Feministe, for the most part, because there are only so many intro to queer theory essays I can handle. But it is a women’s blog with a slightly different approach.

It’s also a for-love endeavor, versus a for-profit endeavor (as Broadsheet and Double X are). Whether you’re a women’s blog, a sports site or CNN, page views do, somewhat, dictate content, something which Helen’s essay fails to address entirely. I don’t read Marie Claire and expect that that “editorial” content about the best new brand of lipstick was completely and solely the brainchild of some enterprising, lipstick loving reporter. Economic reasons for the creation, tone and content of any publication, women’s blogs included, is a major aspect to overlook.

For all those of you who are spending the holiday with those you love, even though you may not technically be “home” … Enjoy:

[cross-posted to my other blog, b/c everyone should see this lovely video]

Notice I never link to  Julian’s substantive analyses  of copyright or privacy issues, but a Neil Postman-style screed about news cycles and masturbating chimps and Sarah Palin catches my attention:

Culture war froth comes to the fore because it’s one thing we all feel competent to talk about.That makes Palin the perfect post-postmodern politician, in a way: A totally self-contained text, a signifier with no referent. You don’t really need to know anything to love her or to hate her, because she’s not about anything except… Sarah Palin. Obligingly, she places no demands on either her supporters or her detractors, because what they decide to think of her is all they need to know to decide what to think of her. At the center of her media narrative is… the media’s narrative about her, bouncing down an infinite corridor of mirrors. If Jorge Luis Borges had a talk show on a cable channel run by M.C. Escher, it would look like CNN right now. Welcome aboard the Goodship Palin, now sailing from the desert of the real.

The core of Julian’s rant is why blogs and Internet news sources “so often wind up stampeding after the same trivia as cable networks anchored to a 24-hour news cycle.”

As part of my job, I choose what news stories from a variety of sources nationwide get published on my employer’s Web site each morning. Which means I rapidly  pour through a ton of  headlines each day. The past few days, I’ve found myself thinking: when did “Black Friday” become a hardcore news event? Post-Friday-after-Thanksgiving reports of how retailers fared, okay. But since Saturday, newspapers have been devoting multiple articles each to budgeting tips, shopping strategies, where to find deals, what to pack while you’re waiting in line, how to avoid crowds, redemption stories of those who’ve foregone the holiday shopping rush, retailers’ price wars, etc. etc. etc.

And I’ve been publishing nearly every one of them to our site.  I actually have no idea at all about the secret copyright treaty Julian mentions. But did you know some families eat sauerkraut on Thanksgiving, and the the average American shopper will spend $23 less than last season?

New York Times notes:

As with home design, where curio cases, taxidermy and other stylish clutter of the Victorian era have been taken up by young hipsters, many of today’s popular men’s styles have their roots in the late 19th century. There are the three-piece suits once favored by mustachioed Gilded Age bankers; the military greatcoats and boots of Union officers; and the henley undershirts, suspenders, plaid flannel shirts and stout drill trousers worn by plain, honest farmers.

This is just to say: I approve.

A few months ago, my friends made a tribute to this Brat Pack Mashup of Phoenix’s ‘Listomania’ that was posted on YouTube. Now, a group of Phillipino kids has made a tribute to their tribute, complete with footage from my friends’ video of the New York City skyline spliced in and re-creations of the Brooklyn kids’ mistakes (a hat falling off, one of the boys falling down).

Globalization at its strangest?