Tom Watson

Live Nude Celebrities!

The traffic counter on this (recently somnolent) blog began spinning this week like Clark W. Griswold's electric meter at Yuletide What gives? No Kos, no Wolcott of late. No Gandelman, no Gilliard. Hmmm. The big blogger water cannons of the left and center haven't been pointed this way for awhile. Let's check this out. Google and Yahoo searches for...ANNA+BENSON+NUDE. ANNA+BENSON+PICS. And let's just say it goes downhill from there - in terms of, er, specific tastes, portions of human anatomy, and keywords.

See, Anna Benson - now exiled from New York by the Mets Omar Minaya - promptly dumped hubby Kris (a middlin' right-hander) and is leaving the lights of Baltimore behind her, for what we can only guess is Vegas, the offices of the laddie mags here in Gotham, and certain sections of Tampa. Kris got hit hard this spring, and although the crab cakes are scrumptious, Baltimore doesn't hold the ample job opportunities for young Anna. Maybe she'll be back blogging and we can share the heartache of her break-up - I remember how moving it was when she defended American freedoms by wishing aloud for the decapitation of Michael Moore. Now that's the heartland.

Now, Anna Benson is a nude celebrity. That is, having posed unclothed and barely clad, she will live on in skin-washed digital glory for all of her days and well beyond. There are whole sites -indeed, Web 2.0 empires - devoted to te alluring combination of fame and nudity And when a nude celebrity makes news? Well, it's just one click away to a Google search for nipples. For thousands and thousands of my wonderful visitors. [Welcome fellas - both hands on the keyboard, please].

Lance Mannion knows all about this phenomenon, of course. He's the author of the now-famed Scarlett Johansson Gambit. Sure, sure it appeared Lance only put the words "naked" and "Scarlett Johansson" in the same post accidentally as he discussed movies and a relationship in the distant past. But he's still getting traffic, I'll wager. Blue Girl was, as usual, more direct in her clickstream magnet creation.

Why then are the nipples and nethers of the well-known - or modestly known, in the case of Mrs. Benson - more desirable than those of the unknowns? I asked this again reading the vicious reviews of Basic Instinct 2, the new nudie slasher flick featuring 48-year-old Sharon Stone, whose fame was well established by an act of crossing and uncrossing her legs sans culottes for Michael Douglas and the lads a generation ago. Like almost every review of a Rolling Stones show these days, the critics focus on age and appearance - and Stone appears comfortable with the body-oriented questions. "This will probably be my final nude hurrah," she told Newsweek. "Christ, to say I'm middle-aged would be hopeful. But I'm not terribly self-conscious about being nude. There's a scene in the finale that is quite brazen."

What's shocking about Basic Instinct 2 is that, these days, it's not shocking at all - the digital distribution of nudity, body parts, and sex acts has been transformed since Stone wielded her ice pick back in '92. A 48-year-old actress displaying her souped-up sexuality in an R-rated film is less than a blip in a world where even a legit acress like Chloe Sevigny can perform graphic oral sex onscreen and suffer virtually no career drag - and a wastrel like Paris Hilton can discover a career because of an explicit sex tape. We just don't care very much anymore. Celebrity sex and nudity really has been reduced to a quick clickthrough via Google and Yahoo.

Indeed, Times reviewer Manohla Dargis cleverly focused on Stone's face and the demands on the skin (facial only) of American actresses:

...Nothing compares to the fate that awaited Ms. Stone simply by growing older — older at least in Hollywood years. Now 48, the actress retains the same lucid gaze and whippet-thin body, but in this film her face looks strangely inert, and she seems deeply ill at ease. Ms. Stone has famously denied having plastic surgery, and maybe that's true, but, man, does she look weird here.

It's part of an actor's job to change appearances, of course, to put on whiskers and wigs and funny noses, to turn back the clock with hair dye and face tape. And it has long been part of the star's job to undergo a little surgical correction, a nip here, a tuck there. That said, and Ms. Stone notwithstanding, the mania for increasingly youthful-looking faces — these bizarrely unfurrowed landscapes that are absent the normal filigree, absent even a laugh line — seems fundamentally different from the old-fashioned ruse in which the Broadway actress temporarily pulls her loose skin back with some tape. For one thing, the tape comes off. For another, unlike the film actor, the stage performer doesn't have to navigate the close-ups that inevitably betray every secret, no matter how artfully hidden.

The thing is, the power of celebrity is waning - at least in my view. There are simply too many of them. And these days, they are us; everyone has an RSS feed of their innermost thoughts. Everyone has a portfolio of personal photos on Flickr, the results of their daily red carpet walk through life. They're not the celebrities. We are the celebrities. This is about us. Such is the cultural zeitgeist in this first decade of the millenium. Amateur sex is where it's at, a vast reality show that's on 24/7 - your Pam Andersons and Paris Hiltons understand the need to go downscale in production value to seem "real" these days.

Above it all, the power of instant search bequeaths a lack of shock value to this wired generation - including millions of male officer workers looking for a few seconds' distraction from the spreadsheeets. In this digital age - which will never end - Sharon Stone's nudity will continue to be catalogued and linked in perpetuity. Anna Benson moves from B-level actress to D-level nude celeb, one of many thousands not many dozen.

It's strange that the power of search technology, which drills ever closer to a finite set of results from billions of possibilities, can allow for such specificity in image and video prurience. "Gay" and "straight" as sexual search terms don't cut it these days. Unfurrowed landscapes indeed. Along with undifferentiated traffic - lots of it.

Wall of Death

They stood around an old van in a gravel lot behind a restaurant, sipping from coffee containers, and waiting. I saw them from across the street as we came out of Sunday brunch at the Sawpit, and knew immediately why a dozen young men were milling around, hands shoved in their pockets against the raw March breeze. They wanted work. And there in Port Chester, New York - as in hundreds of suburban towns and villages across the United States - they were waiting for the contractors to pull up and take them off to the lawns and yards of Greenwich and Rye for some landscaping job and its resultant cash.

Here in Westchester County, where wealth is more concentrated than few other places on God's green Earth, illegal immigrants form the backbone of the service industry, mainstays in the renovation and landscape racket, where million-dollar projects get built with cheap labor sans green card and no questions asked, amigo. In Port Chester, in Mamaroneck, in Dobbs Ferry, in Yonkers, in Mount Vernon, and up in Mount Kisco, scores of Spanish-speaking men wait by the hour for day work. The story is much the same in Fairfield County, in northern Jersey, and in Nassau County. There is work here: work that American citizens pass on, work without benefits and rights, but paying work nonetheless.

This is the market, and it has always been the market - so long as the United States has been a desirable place to make a fortune, or just to find a way out of poverty. You cannot find a reputable economist with an understanding of the American economy who does not find some value in the bargain of immigrant labor, legal or otherwise. Immigration is a resource for the U.S. a fuel for both production and for consumption, a safety net for falling birth rates, a near-guarantor of growth.

And yet the very men who laud free markets, who push privatization, who fight to make the poor work, who cut welfare benefits, who talk freely about the free and the brave are running scared. Small men, nearly racist in the meanness of their sweating, fearful, damp-palmed terror.

Republicans who want to build a fence. Or make illegal status a felony and fill the jails with hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Congressmen like Tom Tancredo and James Sensenbrenner.

Only a fool or a nativist proposes a 700-mile fence along a peaceful border, or institutes long jail sentences for 11 million men and women and children whose only crime is coming here looking for a better life. Neither is feasible. Neither is American.

"We are a nation bonded by a common language, culture, manners and customs,'' says Tancredo, who leads the xenophobes in Congress and pressures the President (a moderate by nature on immigration reform) to appease the right wing.

Bush is caught between his own more moderate views and the fire-breathing wing of his party, which has substituted the fear-based race-baiting of the original famed Southern Strategy for another version along the southern borders.As Steve Gilliard writes, "As long as immigration policy is based on thinly veiled race hatred and punative measures, we're not going to have an effective immigration policy. Local law enforcement doesn't like helping [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] now. Add felonies on it, they will like it even less."

Yet liberals are also stuck. A wonderfully thoughtful report by the Drum Major Institute, authored by Amy Traub, takes the view of the American middle class and asks whether the proposed immigration reform on the table helps or hurts the vast consumer heartland. While properly eviscerating the lock-'em-up crowd, it also criticizes the seemingly more moderate guest worker movement led by Senators Kennedy and McCain and favored by President Bush, noting that such measures create a legal underclass of workers. And a column in the Times by Paul Krugman discounts the economic benefits of immigration from Mexico in particular, and holds that the number of illegals in this country do indeed - in some locales, in some sectors - take jobs away from lower-income American-born workers.

So what to do? Clearly, the massive rally of half a million people in Los Angeles in response to the hated criminalization bill was a wake-up call to politicians on all sides and it shows us that immigration issues in the U.S. do not clearly have Republican and Democratic positions. Just as clearly this is an issue that is chrystalizing just in time for the vital mid-terms, ad the early stages of the Presidential race. Every man and women in national politics will need to take a stand.

And that stand, just as clearly, will reward those who run from the haters. While we may not wait for the Bill Frists and the George Bushes to publicly repudiate anti-immigration forces - the wall-builders, the posse-organizers, the jailers - I'm hoping their more moderate, thoughtful political cousins will. In many ways, we are a much more liberal country than we were 65 years ago when the these lyrics were recorded by Woody Guthrie - this debate will determine whether we remain that way:

Oh, why does a vigilante man,
Why does a vigilante man
Carry that sawed-off shot-gun in his hand?
Would he shoot his brother and sister down?

I rambled 'round from town to town,
I rambled 'round from town to town,
And they herded us around like a wild herd of cattle.
Was that the vigilante men?

Have you seen that vigilante man?
Have you seen that vigilante man?
I've heard his name all over this land.

Mister, I Ain't a Boy

Five days before the Paris Peace Accords were signed to end America's involvement in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson was found dead in the bedroom of his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, his lifeless hand reaching  in vain for the telephone on the nightstand. Little more than two weeks later, the first U.S. prisoners were released from North Vietnamese prisons - but it took two full years for South Vietnam to fall, and for the iconographic photograph of the American helicopter lifting off from a roof in Saigon to hit the news wires.

Like LBJ, I don't think George W. Bush will survive this war.

Oh, he may survive politically. Impeachment remains unlikely, even if Congress changes over, and we don't have a parliamentary system. But I think he'll be dead before it's over, possibly before the last American troops come home, and almost certainly - given the actuarial tables even in his long-lived bloodline - before the country he invaded is stable and at peace as Vietnam is today.

The tinderbox region into which Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons have thrown their sparking match of invasion from the hated west may make Southeast Asia look easy.  The long tragedy of Vietnam, two decades from first advisors to lift-off, may well look easy when most of us are in our dotage - it may be the least sticky ot the two great American quagmires of my lifetime. And George Bush may be dead on a Texas ranch long before it's over.

Two civil wars. Vietnam was the end of colonialism and the spread of communist governance. This is religion and oil - and both burn a hell of a lot hotter, and much longer.

Three years in, the generals (retired and not) are talking about progress and gradual troop reductions. The politicians (retired and not) talk about exit strategies and homefront politics. But as Tim Russert said on Imus this morning, the one thing everybody agrees on is that we can't leave now - and if we do it's a failure. America, says Russert, is trapped in a box - and he's right.

On this anniversary, some would have us waive the grand Bush error rather than look back to mistakes and failure and wasted blood. Look forward, they urge. It's our only course. [This is the favored line of the growing number of Republicans who have abandoned the President they worked so feverishly to elect]. Some want us to fight our way out - but which way, and with whom? John McCain says he's moderate Presidential material, but he ought to channel LBJ if he thinks Americans can stand many more thousands of lives and many more billions of dollars in a clearly lost cause. We don't have three, five, ten or twenty years of bleeding left in our all-volunteer military - or another trillion in our indebted, outsourced economy, either.

Democrats waffle. Although out of power, they're in thrall to K Street as much as the next guy and they're all worried about seeming moderate in the next election - or the one after that. Only the unassailable or the bereaved truly speak. The bobble-head national press repeats far much too conventional wisdom; the cue cards says "President Defends War" and they repeat it, then turn to their all-star panel, which deciphers the approval ratings and their repurcussions in November.

But we've been there before.

There is a small but relatively vocal cadre of Vietnam veterans who argue that the U.S. expenditure in Southeast Asia in blood and treasure paid long-term dividends, that in the long run, the war was worth it. Look at where Vietnam is today, they urge, in the mistaken belief that our 50,000 dead to stem the flow of communism led to the eventual abandonment of Marxist economic control and the opening of capital markets like its neighbors in China. Property values are growing, a consumer economy is developing, and tourism is taking off. But this has nothing to do with America's intervention 50 years ago, it has nothing to do with Cold War policies of containment and armament, it has nothing to do with the war.

It has everything to do with peace, with markets and trade, and with local/national aspiration. John Murtha is right. Drawn down the troops, insert an Arab peace-keeping force in what cities you can, and let the Iraqis decide their future - whether it's short-term civil war, eventual partition, or some form of unity.

The best thing we did for Vietnam over the long haul was to leave. It's time to leave Iraq. If we're very, very lucky, Iraq can be modern Vietnam in, oh, three or four decades. By that time, I'm guessing, George Bush will be dead and the mission may finally be accomplished.

NOTE: I didn't quote any blogs directly in this post, but was inspired at least partly by these posts, among others, so go read 'em:

• Lance's Peace With Honor
• Gilliard here and here
• Wolcott's Hell on the Installment Plan
• Juan Cole's Top Ten Catastrophes of the Third Year of American Iraq

Shucks and Awe

As PoliticalWire notes, a new NPR survey finds Republicans losing their stranglehold on national security and foreign policy and shows Democrats have a unique opportunity to get heard on keeping America safe. Democrats have "an historic" 15 point edge, 52% to 37%, in the generic congressional ballot. But I don't need to know the latest poll numbers to know the cultural worm has turned against President Bush and the Republicans.

All I need is that sassy red state lass Jessica Simpson, the Daisy Duke of the modern Republican Party, to show me how things stand.

And Daisy won't be seen with this President. Not now. Not when his Q rating are even lower than Nick's, for God's sake. No, the day Jessica Simpson refuses to be seen with President Bush at a GOP fundraiser is the day the skies clear and you know this crooked bunch is going down to defeat this November. When Jessica Simpson says no, you can hear that echo in dozens of Congressional districts throughout the land.

Daughter of a minister, child of Texas, avowed young Republican, singing reality show starlet and pizza-hawker: this is a bad demographic for the President to lose. Oh, she made the right noises - Jessica "really loves the President," said her Dad - and she claimed the Bush snub was out of concern for the nonprofit she's a spokesperson for (like politics and fundraising don't mix). But it's obvious: Jessica doesn't associate with losers.

Over on FreeRepublic.com, the leading conservative community Website, the freepers are peeved at the young lass. "She turned down an invitation from the President, which makes me think she's a frickin' vapid loon," reads the typical post. Another representative comment notes: "You don't think she's hot? C'mon. You'd do her in a nano-second." When replying in the negative, one poster's sexuality was publicly questioned thusly: "You are not the only straight male on the planet who doesn't find Jessica Simpson remotely attractive. Because you are not straight." Right. Then there was this one, which I'll admit, had me flummoxed and turning the screen sideways for a better view: "Fake blonde's usually snub bush anyway......." Hmmm.

This blonde, of course, is a young woman who is no stranger to the halls of power. When introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton a few years back, she famously exclaimed: "You've done a nice job decorating the White House."

So, she might say, has George W. Bush. But Jessica is no longer knocking.

Esther Dyson's Tax

Esther Dyson believes in taxing the Internet. That's really how simple it is: her lame, regressive argument in The Times for creating fees in the hope of spam-free mail is nothing more than a tax.

And it's a tax that hits the least affluent consumers and companies while dumping money in the coffers of the big boys. See, we already pay for Internet access - quite a bit of money, actually. Putting a fee on email is quite literally a return to the days when toll roads were privately owned and operated, and citizens could be taxed for their travel by monopolists. Sure, the bigshots in their coach-and-four rigs will roll down the private highway with a little tip for Goodmail and their type - but the startups, the consumer, the nonprofits? They'd have to pay to justify their passage. Dyson uses marketplace libertarian arguments to justify her tax (rather badly. I think):

I agree that pretty soon sending most e-mail will cost money, but I think that's only right. It costs money to guarantee quality and safety. Moreover, I think the market will work, and that it will not shut out deserving senders, if we only let it work freely.

But, of course, this is not letting the market work freely - it's really the opposite and it's where liberarian economists also brush up against anti-trust considerations: they never can decide what "free and open market" means. In this case, it's not an added fee for email - pay or ye shall not pass. That's a Soviet-style Internet, folks. I think Chervokas gets it right:

Tacking on fees (and taxes in the case of municipalities) as a means of changing business or consumer behavior rarely works, always engenders anger and inconvenience, and drives up cost of living for everybody.

Dave Winer agrees with Dyson - or rather praises her NYT piece and suggests aloud that there aren't any good arguments against the Dyson Tax. I thought he was werll-answered by one of hs commenters:

Hello? I was under the impression that for 29.95 per month I was already paying for email service.

UPDATE: Good takes from Fred Wilson and the always irascible Steve Gilliard.

Googling Joe Bruno

Suppose you were studying the voting patterns of the New York State Legislature, a body of representatives that is positively Dickensian in its sloth and malodorous reputation, and you wanted people to pay attention to the results. Well, you could issue a "scorecard," send out a press release, and hold a news conference. The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy did all that today when it released its report Fighting for New York's Middle Class: 2001-2005 NY State Legislative Scorecard. It's a great report, and gives each legislator a grade based on how they voted on a host of key economic and social issues inherently important to the state's middle class. Yeah, I know - another report card. Put in on the shelf.

But DMI went one brilliant step further: it bought the entire State Legislature.

Oh, not in the traditional way: no brown paper bags were harmed in the making of this report. No, DMI bought the names of each and every legislator in Google AdSense. So when you type in, say, Senate majority leader Joe Bruno - boom, up pops his grade in the neat little AdSense box. The link, of course, goes to the report.

I've never seen this done, but it's clearly another step in the evolution of digital politics, and it's nice to see it taken by a non-partisan policy group (on the left, of course - and as many readers know by now, I'm on the board). So go ahead, Google Joe Bruno - or your own legislator if you live in New York. Watch out Congress, you're next.

DRM is LAMF

Back in the days of the Clinton Administration, when Al Gore was running around streamlining government and many people in Washington were actually looking at progressive ways to improve American life, you could get a few industry leaders together, talk to a Secretary or two, and actually hold a summit on national policy - particularly if it had to do with technology. Back then, as the boom was growing, there was a sense that public policy was vital, that business needed to make government understand what the stakes were (so it could lay off on the taxes for a while), and that someting bigger was at stake - to me, it felt like people understood at the  time that innovation to America was like oil to the Emirates: a vital national resource in which the public had an important stake.

Nowadays, if it ain't oil or energy, there's no summit. And yet there is so much at stake, particularly in the world where media and innovation come together. While I would not expect the listless Bush Administration to rally a real public-private gathering of the minds and the interests on the issue, somebody must - and soon. The issue is digital rights management, an innocent moniker for an insidious business practice that is choking American innovation and threatening to make the U.S. a second-rate power in digital technology.

Yeah, you heard me straight: we need a DRM Summit.

But let's talk about me first. The artist and I are planning a little home renovaton project; after 15 years, it's finally time and - without talking countertops, dovetail joints, and copper flashing - let's just say the back wall of our 1929 house is coming down and I thought it would be a good time to upgrade wiring that hasn't seen the light of day since Model T's were still rolling out of Detroit. As part of that, I sensed a big opportunity for me, the music addict: a high-speed home network, part wired and part wireless, that uses a big-ass server to store all the music I own and let me play it in a bunch of places around the house. Now, my house is small so it could be that my Ramones would overpower my son's classic Elvis, but whatever, I'd really like to do it.

Can't. Or rather, cannot - without buying some music I already own, some of it for fourth or even fifth freaking time. LAMF, for example, the classic 70s punk record by the Heartbreakers - led by the frenetic and brilliant Johnny Thunders - and cleverly referenced in the title of this post. I bought LAMF on vinyl. Later, when a job demanded long hours in the car, I picked up a cassette. Then the CD. Then, quite possibly because they remastered it, the iTunes version. But guess what: none of the rather cool-looking server solutions I'm looking at will play the DRM-saddled iTunes, except one - the newish Apple home entertainment software.

And don't just single Apple out (though Jobs & Co. are particularly old school on this issue) because Microsoft, Sony and many others have their own annoying rules and requirements. Many is the so-called "new media" company that still thinks of media as a thin, plastic wafer with little ridges on it - or a mile-long strand of magnetic tape. This is patently ridiculous. And don't get me started on video and the cable companies. Let's jst do music first.

The more media moves to online distribution, and all of it is moving there rapidly now, the less the old rules about physical ownership of units make any sense at all. Sometime soon, I'd like to buy the rights to a record once, download it as many times as I'd like, and run it from whatever computers I'd like - just as I'd be able to do with a Word file.

Because I can't, American innovation in new media will gradually whither and die. Too dire a prediction? Possibly - but consider the legacy I'm creating every time I buy a DRM-locked iTunes song. I'm giving Apple my musical future. And whenever you buy a DRM product, you are too. You're locking in - and locking in is in direct opposition to the rest of what's happening with media. It's opening up, with some exciting results.

These companies will never get together on their own. And yet the problem needs to be solved. It's a matter of a vital national resource. That's why we need a Digital Rights Management Summit in the public arena - now.

Absolute Baseball

Towing the Steinbrenner line, some of my Yankee-loving friends track the World Baseball Classic only to see if - God forbid - Johnny Damon tweaks a hammy. Not me. Although skeptical at first at Uncle Bud's Great Adventure, I'm a convert now. A few minutes ago, A-Rod lined a fastball from Japanese right-handed reliever Kyuji Fujikawa into centerfield, scoring Vernon Wells in the bottom of the ninth with the winning run and sending Team USA to a controversy-scarred victory over Japan. The American bench erupted like any jubilant pennant-winning squad, while Japan legend Sadaharu Oh protested the game to the umpires - and yeah, he had a case.

This is great baseball and here's what I'm now thinking about the WBC - it's baseball's equivalent to the tension-riddled Ryder Cup, another dramatic (and much-hyped) international made-for-TV tournament.

It's not quite Yankees-Sox for the pennant, or the Mets versus the Astros in '86. But it's better for this New Yorker than, say, Braves-Diamondbacks in a game that has wild card implications. Two things I like about the WBC: it's in March, and it creates new sets of teammates with natural (yes, nationalistic) reasons for trying hard to win. I've enjoyed seeing Bernie Williams - always by far the best and classiest Yankee of this generation - excel in his baseball dotage for Puerto Rico; the sheer power of the Dominican team even without Manny or Vlad; and the open, athletic joy of the dirt-poor Cubans, who walloped Venezuela today in a game that had Luis Sojo on 24-hour suicide watch (big righty Pedro Lazo looked like Lee Smith in his prime). All of these guys want to win, and they're all playing real hard.

About that controversy: Japan, whose team of wiry but powerful players reminds me of what baseball used to look like before steroids, was robbed.

With the bases loaded, one out and Joe Nathan pitching, Akinori Iwamura skied a fly to medium left that was caught by Randy Winn, who was late in his throw to the plate to nab the tagging Tsuyoshi Nishioka. The U.S. appealed that Nishioka left early, but lost. Buck Martinez stormed out and pushed American umpire Bob Davidson all over the field; Davidson caved and overruled the call. Three outs, no run. Replays were clear - he left after the catch. A terrible, embarassing call. But you know what, despite the appearances of ugly Americanism, that's baseball - ask any Red Sox fan. Dramatic, compelling, controversial - elements the network sales boys love to take to the bank.

In any case, time to wrap this up. Bartolo Colon is warming up for the Dominicans, and Bernie's leading off. Baseball, si!

Bulletin: Silicon Alley Still Dead

Don't believe everything you read, and watch out for what section of the paper you read it in. Those are the two thoughts I have for you this morning, as I add my voice to the disapproving chorus of those reacting to the rather silly story in the Style section of the Times. Alive and Well in Silicon Alley purports to document the rise of New York's media technology sector once again - and damnit, the wonderful "style" of those go-go 90s we all miss so damned badly. So cool. But as Jason Chervokas says this morning, "if Silicon Alley's going down that road again, well, I've got a start-up to sell you, online pizza delivery, $100 million valuation. It could happen."

Great line, and it refers to an actual company that (successfully) made the funding rounds in 1996 in New York. Which should tell you something. After the Netscape IPO in 1995, the gold rush enveloped the formerly anti-entrepreneur ruling class of New York. Silicon Alley 1.0 was a gold rush town straight out of HBO's virulent Deadwood - a shoot 'em up frontier village filled with con men, hustlers, snake oil salesmen and all the hookers, hangers-on, and profiteers you could possibly fit into lofts and cube farms from the Hudson to the East River. It was all great fun, I have to admit - oh except for the heartache, the bankruptcies, and the thousands of employees left with stock options that retained as much value as Confederate paper circa 1865. Nor was it much fun for all the late investors, for would-be angels, the amateur money that flooded the town looking for the next eBay, the next Amazon.

Still and all, there was a creative spirit that was eventually welded to the greatest graduate business school of them all - the mean streets of a cruel market - and I know it was a fascinating period in my own professional life. Ideas were everywhere, even if countless ne'er-do-well trust fund babies spent other people's money on high-end vodka, cocaine, and Super Bowl ads. [When I found myself featured in a full-color spread - clothed - in Penthouse magazine next to a certain notorious party boy and his dog, and two pages away from an explicit montage of two, er, Vikings of some sort ... well, I knew the jig was up: the for-sale sign went up quickly at good old @NY].

As a board member of NYSIA, I spent a couple of hours at the our old haunt at 55 Broad Street this week and schmoozed with its chief Bruce Bernstein - who has more staying power than any dozen start-ups - and we talked a bit about the buzz in the air. It's not the money really, although there have been a few nice exits, primarily of companies that ran cheap and have been plugging along for years now, some of them before the catastrophe of 9/11. It's more the creativity - lots of ideas, lots of open discussion, some collaboration. And then there's Google and Yahoo - why did they move their big sales units to New York? Easy: it's where big media lives and they want to get the big campaign money. And they probably will: that's business.

Which the Times Styles article clearly was not. Back in the day, Jason and I were first attracted to the business story and to its place in New York's history; as he says:

...first and foremost we took seriously the ideas that New York could be an important hothouse for the invention of new media technology businesses and that the boys in Silicon Valley could learn something from New York's media-centered approach to technology. We also believed that media technology start-ups could have a major financial impact on a city that hadn't had a new home grown industry since movies left in the 1920s.

The kernel of this remained during the bad years, but the explosion of the phony bubble we had predicted accurately - but too early, of course - killed thousands and thousands of jobs. Now we're getting photos of pool tables again, and descriptions of techie wardrobes. Who cares? At 55 Broad, I bumped into John Tepper Marlin, the economist who did some terrific reports on New York's job growth and job decline during and after the bubble. Now out on his own and working on some project, he told me that the job numbers are just starting the creep up again. This is a good thing, real evidence of an important - and still young - sector coming back from the dead in town. The Times didn't bother to report this. In short, I'll agree with Fred Wilson's take:

I don't like the name Silicon Alley either and never did.

Why do we need some wannabe name to describe something that is going on in every major city in our country and increasingly every major city in the world?

Entrepreneurs are building interesting companies using technology and brains and imagination.

That's all there is to it.  And if there's a story in that, let's put it where it belongs in the business section or the technology section, not the style section.

There is a business story there, and I'll be paying more attention myself in the coming months. But I have to chuckle. This morning I noticed that Jason Calacanis, our old bete noir from the 90s, is in fighting spirit and spitting at my old partner (and me as well) after Jason's initial blog post. Here's the Calacanis take:

I love the fact that I beat them so bad that Jason still can't get over it. That is what competition is about--getting inside the other guys head to the point at which they take their mind off the game. I *tortured* these guys for five years and ten years later they are still throwing stones.

I think Jason has let L.A. get into his DNA, infecting his viewpoint - it's a very non-Brooklyn sentiment, it seems to me: unkind, inaccurate, and all-hype. You know, post 9/11 in this town and after the Iraq debacle, bragging about torture - even in jest - ain't cool. We like to keep it real around here (let's hope the Times is listening). Hey Jason, time to get out of the cabana and come back to a real city. Where, it seems, there is some interesting growth - in business, not in style.

UPDATE: Man, so much passion for the 90s. Read the comments via Chervokas, Wilson, and Calacanis as well as Steve Gilliard's acerbic memories of the boom - here's a handy list of links via Pamela Parker, an ex-@NYer who proved one thing: Jason and I knew talent, at least. Her post is here.

• Jason Chervokas - Style over Substance in Silicon Alley
  
• Tom Watson: Bulletin: Silicon Alley is still Dead
  
• Jason Calacanis: 10 years later... lessons from the SAR/@NY Battle
  
• Fred Wilson: Alley Wag and Revisionist History, Calacanis Style
  
• Brouhaha: Back Alley Fighting
  
• Steve Gilliard: Warning, bullshit alert
• i-boy: Fight Club: Silicon Alley Style
• PR Differently
• Daly Om: Silicon Alley vs. Silicon Alley

It's a good debate, and I'm glad the initial Chervokas post touched things off. Meantime, I re-read the Times story and you know, it's not such a bad business piece - a bit simple perhaps, badly labeled and positoned, but the story is well-told, in general  - there is something brewing again in town.

Frist in War, Frist in Peace

Oh dear Lord, let it be true - this incredible dream, the marching legions of Republicans for Bill Frist. Lordie, the Hardball honeys were all a twitter this evening at the (wonderful? stupendous? I simply can't choose) news that Senator Bill Frist has swept the presidential straw poll of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Tennessee. Sure, Johnny McCain basically took his baseball and went home, snidely suggesting the gathered conservatives vote the current President. But please make that a catastrophic error on his part. This country dearly needs Bill Frist - we need him as the Republican nominee for President. Oh do we need him, the man who stood near a pile of tsunami debris in Sri Lanka and told his photographer: "Get some devastation in the back." Oh my, let him run strong Lord, let him sweep the southern primaries, and let him get up on the that red, white, and blue stage and make his acceptance speech. Let him wave his hands over eight years of Republican reign, over Iraq, over New Orleans, over a party in power that advertises its Congressional votes in the pennysaver. Then let him repeat that award-winning line. "Get some devastation in the back." It's the perfect line to describe the achievements of his party, his cronies, his President, and himself. Then we can change the locks on the executive mansion, roll out the bastards, and attempt once again to hold our heads high as Americans among the nations of the world.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman agrees with this somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis (would that Frist actually had a real chance for the nomination), and has his usual great round-up of reaction.