Phone Quicky
In Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Larry Lipton (Woody Allen) struggles to keep the telephone cord away from his face as his wife Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) goes over the details of a recent neighbor’s death. The still does little to fully convey Larry’s frustration, but I found the best moment I could. I thought about how this humorous scene would not be possible now, as Carol would either be on her cell phone, or wireless landline — which sounds almost as ponderous as landmine. It seems so primitive to be tethered, as technology has convinced us we are free. Our cellular voices are sent to space and back, as if edited or revised by aliens. 1993 is hence immortalized, like “I will always love you,” “Creep,” and “Everybody Hurts,” which all came out the same year. I feel nostalgic towards technology quickly disgraced with time. The best moment in an early-90s movie is when someone picks up a phone the size of a toaster and puts it next to their face. HELLO? they always seem to say. In a convertible, they always seem to be driving. It isn’t his best movie, but this post is less about Woody Allen than the cultural traces we inadvertently leave behind. The way we talk. The way we sleep. Carol goes on to ask if Larry still finds her attractive, and he defensively mentions something about sex once a week, as an excuse. Some things are timeless.
Blake Butler—
@twinnegganswake uses an iPhone spell check to autocorrect the text of Finnegans Wake, i.e. “my blue ribbon Cat, Perceval, just broke the Guinness record for eating the greatest number of hot dogs,four wieners and buns in 12 minutes!” [Via Christian Bok]
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Dick in a box
With the new iPhone’s video chat, a second built-in camera faces the user, whose image is shown in the interface as a kind of tiny self-portrait. Of the many narratives instilled in their recent advertising campaign, a women tells her husband that she’s expecting (expectation being Apple’s entire marketing ethos). We the consumer become the husband, experiencing a half-life of their fantasy. In the ad, a perfect hand holds the phone — a model’s, though we accept it as the husband’s, faithful of the narrative.
lokes in damp 3 hotos
1. Neil from ESPN has been emailing me. And he says, “In short: We’re inviting folks to submit (to fictioncontest@espnthemag.com) sports-themed short stories of up to 3,000 words, and the best story (as picked by me and the editor of Stymie) will run in a future issue of ESPN. Then comes the fame and fortune, naturally.”
If you have a sports story, send it. Deadline is June 1st.
2. I just got an iPhone. Why should writers care? What can I do now besides take notes and commit “Douche baggery in a mesmerizing false flame.”
3. This invisible bookshelf is like emo-in-a-seatbelt badass.
Rotten Apple: There’s No App For That
In December 2008, Peter Cole, editor of Keyhole, thought it would be nice to develop an iPhone app for the magazine to broaden its reach. He hired a developer and they submitted the application to Apple. A few days later, the app was rejected by Apple for violating their standards. The story with which they had objections was Heather Fowler’s Catholic Girl Smile, a rather mild story under any circumstances and particularly when contrasted with many of Keyhole’s offerings. Peter shelved the idea. READ MORE >
Got Balzac Close to My Face, Ho
After an initial rejection by Apple due to its inclusion of ‘Ways Tom Jones Would Dance With Your Mother,’ the ebook reader Eucalyptus is available to all people/assholes with an iPhone or iPod touch.
The interface is nice, the size of the text is scalable, and it gives you easy access to the 20,000+ book large Project Gutenberg. It’s not like it’ll make me any less thirsty for Tao Lin on a Kindle, but it’s fun to browse through so many nice books written by so many nice dead people.
If you have iTunes, you can check it out here.
