The second installment of the '5 friends' videos (first is here), where mega stars tell you not to vote, and then subtly flip it around until they're telling you TO vote, is making a big splash on YouTube today. This is easily the largest concentration of movie, TV and music stars ever assembled online. Listing the names of all the leading men and women, from Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise to Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts, to Snoop Dog, Justin Timberlake and others -- is a litany of the culture's most famous people.
The two versions of the first video scored about 2 million views since Oct. 1, but the celeb wattage in this one has taken it to a whole other level, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel breaks a million by the end of the day today. See for yourself:
We already know this is the year of the first “YouTube election,” where the most reliable place to find the latest footage everyone was talking about was no longer CNN, Fox News or the broadcast networks but rather from one of 10 dozen websites that undoubtedly already had the clip parsed, posted and ready for inhalation. The Web has become a political junkie’s cornucopia, overflowing with excerpts of every kind. If you’re like me, you yearn for the good old days, when October meant being bombarded with a small number of expensive political advertisements — the ones that just told us what to believe already, so we didn’t have to waste time figuring it out.
But all is not lost. Paid political ads, it turns out, have joined the swelling ranks of their unpaid video brethren and found a new home online. Only, just like everything else on YouTube, the word “paid” no longer really applies. None of the hundreds of Web-only ads for California’s 12 ballot propositions cost a cent to upload, enabling proponents and opponents across the state a low-cost way to spread their message to a potentially vast audience.
“Potentially” being the key word. Unlike paying for a slice of prime TV airtime, when millions of captive viewers will see your message, every video uploaded to the Web starts off with zero viewers — and a whole lot of them end there too. Weighing against the freeness of online distribution, then, is the serious problem of getting anyone to notice your new video among the 10 thousand that were uploaded the very same second.
Still, the haystack problem hasn’t dissuaded California activists from generating a wave of political ads, many of which are home brewed — a kind of creative alternative to the standard campaign contribution.
Jerod Gunsberg, 36, of the South Bay, decided to use his home computer to make an ad against Proposition 6 — the “Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which allocates about 1% of the state’s budget to anti-crime programs.
“It seemed like a lot more fun to make a campaign video about ballot propositions than to write blog posts about them,” said Gunsberg, who blogs frequently about state issues but is not associated with the No on 6 campaign.
Gunsberg’s snappy, tongue-in-cheek spot warns voters not to fall for the measure’s claim that it will decrease crime. “Prop. 6 will make your neighborhood more dangerous and lead California to financial ruin!” the voice-over warns. A moment later, an image of Disneyland’s main marquee pops up: “Closed forever,” it reads. “Everyone is broke.”
The video ad has netted only 275 views since it was posted on Monday, but Gunsberg is OK with that.
“It’s not like one video on these things breaks through,” he said. “There’s a bunch of campaign videos out there, especially on the ballot props. If they all generate a few hundred views each, maybe it aggregates into this building awareness.”
Modest awareness building is probably the best-case scenario this time around, given that the state has more than 16 million registered voters, and even the most successful Web video ads are still hovering around 100,000 views — a little more than one-half of 1% of the electorate, assuming (wrongly) that the ads have had no repeat viewers.
Even Proposition 8, the highly visible measure that seeks to outlaw same-sex marriage, has had trouble attracting the kind of viewing stats that go along with so-called viral success. The No on 8 campaign’s video of Ellen DeGeneres asking viewers to reject the measure has become one of the most-watched online ads of any ballot prop campaign, scoring 103,000 views in two weeks.
But Chris Maliwat, the head of the No on Prop 8 Web effort, noted that the campaign’s 40 online videos, including a number from sources independent of the campaign, have millions of views in aggregate. And that the true power of a YouTube campaign is that the issue can be approached from many angles, rather than just the lowest common denominator that expensive mass media ads require.
“With a normal campaign, within a month or two, you might have six or 12 total spots that run about 30 seconds and play the same kind of dreary music,” Maliwat said. “But when you’ve got a wide variety of voices showing their points of view, the authenticity of it resonates with people in different ways.”
No on 8 covers the rhetorical bases by variously featuring celebrities, politicians, lawyers, religious leaders, comedians and even real people. (Notably absent, as Jonathan Rauch noted in a Times editorial this week, are gays themselves.)
Several of the Yes on 8 campaign’s videos have scored well too, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declined a request to discuss its Web approach.
More than one of the proposition campaigns have sought to engage users by encouraging them to create ads. Both sides of Proposition 4 have held contests to find the best user-generated ads. (Proposition 4 would require physicians to notify a minor’s parents before performing an abortion.)
“Video storytelling at its heart is about drama,” said Miriam Gerace, a spokeswoman for the No on 4 campaign. “And one of the more difficult and truly life-altering decisions that a woman of any age can make has to do with what she’s going to do with an unplanned pregnancy.”
The campaign received 24 submissions to its contest.
Spokesman Albin Rohmberg of Yes on 4 said his campaign actually ended up taking several of the videos it had received “over the transom” and paying to broadcast them in television markets around California. Those videos also focus on narrative strains that the campaign has formulated, like one 10,000-view video’s premise that without the notification law, child predators are more likely to impregnate young girls without consequence.
That a user-generated clip with an audience that small could hurtle its way up the media pyramid in and onto the airwaves is a nice encapsulation of this inchoate area of online activism. It shows that it’s possible for a very small number of passionate citizens to affect the political process more than we would have dreamed of, even in 2004. But it’s also a reminder that the Web is far from the panacea for democracy that many of its boosters have predicted. Democracy is a numbers game, and when it comes to a giant state like California, a few thousand people is not representative.
Kaufman also draws a parallel between his creative process and that of his main character, Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who spends an eternity trying to finish a play that keeps getting longer and more complicated. "If you're trying to be truthful, you start out with one idea, and as you become more familiar with it and explore different aspects of the idea, different things become revealed to you. And you have to incorporate that. So whereas Caden's city kept getting bigger and bigger and more populated as time went on, there was really no ending to it. So that becomes a bit of a hindrance when you're writing, but I do feel like it's the way I like to write."
Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream.
Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)
That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games — in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.
The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.
Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.
Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.
And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.
“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”
Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”
Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.
But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.
“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”
Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)
“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.”
Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.
“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.”
The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.
And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.
“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”
So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.
Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.
“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”
See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.
When we heard that the RNC racked up a $150,000 department store tab for Gov. Sarah Palin, it was hard to immediately put that in perspective. The most either of us has ever spent at one time on clothes or other personal items is under $1,000. But thanks to the beauty of online shopping, we're now very clear on what you can get for that kind of cash. We just got done going on his and hers online shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus' website, where we each managed, after an undisclosed number of hours, to spend $75,062*, the precise amount that Palin et al. spent there.
We decided to see what that kind of cash could buy for Sarah Palin herself, sticking to the Republican vice presidential nominee's own sassy-conservative style. And, of couse, we stuck to American designers. Also, we steered away from prints, which seem to have become Michelle Obama's signature. Palin favors sober (but occasionally texture-y) solids.
In the pricey "Fine Apparel" category, it turns out Neiman Marcus is big on Euro designers like Armani and Escada, and they're full up on drapey, filmy and asymmetric dresses, so it was tough finding sober campaign-ready suits. (Thank heavens for their deep St. John inventory.) After scrolling through many screens of enticing but un-vice-presidential options, we found 13 appropriate jackets and 10 skirt-and-shirt combos or dresses to go under them, enough for two weeks of campaigning between trips to the cleaners.
Footwear-wise, we jettisoned the America-first principle, since she probably won't get asked whose shoes she's wearing. We got her four pairs of Manolos, a pair of Prada boots, winter white Marc Jacobs boots, and a big fuzzy Australian apres-ski-style pair.
At this point fatigue set in. We began to suspect that spending $75,000 at Neiman Marcus would mean shopping for more people than just one suit-wearing woman. Still, if we were going to jack up our total by buying things Palin could wear during the campaign, we decided to go with accessories -- a shortcut, essentially, with a few $8,000 necklaces and 10 pairs of $3,100 earrings. (Also, couldn't resist a $995 diamond Hello Kitty watch for Piper.)
His
Boy oh boy. Oh boy. You really have to WORK to spend that kind of cash -- especially if you're a guy. David walked away with the 11 most expensive Armani and Dolce & Gabana suits in the store, 7 pairs of Prada shoes, 4 primo leather jackets, 7 pairs of Seven jeans, 35 pairs of designer sunglasses, 100 gorgeous ties, plus a bunch of shirts, underwear, watches, rings, bracelets, two iPod speaker docks and something called a Hercules Fleur-de-Lis Dog Tag ($920). In an attempt to get the editors to actually pay for this motherlode, David insisted this would be about 10 years worth of clothes for him, and that he would work for free until St. Patrick's day. No one was swayed.
(David wasn't trying for much verisimilitude. Mostly he just wanted to go Brewster's Millions on this whole thing.)
NewTeeVee calls our attention to this video dramatizing the PC-versus-Mac battle as a bloody fight-scene dance from "West Side Story":
Maybe it's all the emotion around Obama versus McCain that's making the classic Mac-PC rivalry seem as though it represents ever-higher stakes. Witness the newest Mac ad, called "Bean Counter" -- it's a quick-and-dirty riposte to the Windows "I'm a PC" campaign, with Justin Long's Apple character skewering John Hodgman's PC as he tallies up dollars, five for advertising for every one allotted to "fix Vista." As TechCrunch characterized the more-pointed-than-usual attack ad, "Apple Goes McCain on Microsoft With Mocking Attack Ads."
The more critical tone of the "Bean Counter" ad does seem like a departure from the rest of the "Get a Mac" campaign. The ads used to depict the PC as old and out of it, but in a harmless, dotty-old-uncle way -- as in this one, in which PC is trying to lure college students to use PCs by hiding in a pizza box. The ads were like sophisticated children's theater; you get the message about Hodgman's errors but you're still kind of charmed by him, because the whole thing takes place in a friendly storybook world.
But this latest ad gives PC a sinister, money-grubbing aura, and directly insults not just the product but the ad campaign trying to sell us on that product.
It's an ad that seems to have absorbed these last, urgent weeks of the presidential campaign into its bloodstream.
"Blah Girls," Ashton Kutcher's latest brainchild, is a modest project: a comical, animated celebrity gossip site. The site is built around a show featuring three celebrity-obsessed, sexually curious teenage cartoon girls who gossip about their idols — and try to meet them and date them, with disastrous results. (I did a mini-review here, and our Technology Blog interviewed Kutcher about it here).
There's South Park-style trash-talking, explosions, crashes and gross-out physical stuff. A new three-minute episode appears twice a week, and the girls — Tiffany, Krystle and Britney — also maintain a Perez-Hilton-like blog (along with their gay friend Stuart) that is updated pretty regularly. All in all, it's a nice twist on the increasingly surreal and cartoonish culture of celeb gossip.
But there's something less obvious going on too: These three cartoon characters are sexualized in a way we rarely—if ever—see teenage girls depicted. They're not sexed-up in an exploitive Bratz way, or in a judgmental cautionary-tale way. Instead the show gives us realistic teenage-girl sexuality as subject matter for lowbrow humor, the kind that can be seen as crass or as refreshingly honest, depending on your point of view.
The girls are trying to define their own fledging sexuality in the midst of our hypersexualized celebrity culture, and the embarrassment this usually leads to makes the show a gleeful satire of teenage girls' confused desires. Perhaps even more radically, the show doesn't have any impulse to protect its characters from the rest of the world's sometimes cruel or even menacing reaction to teenage girls' sexual curiosity.
On TV, slapstick sexual humor is safe only for boys, as in, obviously, "South Park." (When "South Park" does turn its lens on girls' sexuality, as in the "Raisins" episode, where the boys visit a junior Hooters, the humor is in the boys' reaction to girls' sexuality -- it has nothing to do with what's going on inside the girls themselves.)
But consider a recent Blah Girls episode focused on the Jonas Brothers. Britney declares that if she could meet Kevin Jonas, she'd get down on her knees and — gasps from her friends — tie his shoes. The visual of her doing just that is mischievously ambiguous. That gag is followed by an "OMG!" from Tiffany, as she sends an e-mail to the JoBros saying she and her friends want to be their wives -- and gets a reply saying they'd be happy to marry the girls, and asking them to send pictures, which she does. The episode ends with a shot of a skeevy old guy looking at their pictures with a horny cackle.
That's risque stuff, and Kutcher knows it will draw some disapproval given the teenagers in the audience: He told Jessica Guynn in the interview I linked to above, "I don't think content should parent children. I think parents should parent children. This doesn't go too far."
"Blah girls" may not be going "too far," (wherever that line is nowadays), but it is going to a place that we haven't yet comfortably gone as a culture. When the screen pans out to the back of the pedophile's head as he ogles the Blah Girls' pictures, it's hard not to have a moment of visceral, involuntary fear and revulsion. (I know they're cartoon characters!)
Maybe it's a good thing, that all the vulnerability inherent in female sexuality is something we can joke about now. As far as I know, for example, nothing in the mainstream has yet mined the humor in the supposed Middle School oral sex epidemic, as this little episode does.
But I wonder whether the Blah Girls' humor is bumping up against some still-tenacious cultural taboos. I still can't picture that episode (in a longer version, obviously) on any imaginable TV network, even cable -- or even in a movie theater.
Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's televised mayoral debate with the Penguin, from the "Dizzoner the Penguin" episode of Adam West's 1966 "Batman," is gaining new currency.
The clip, first uploaded in early 2007, has been picked up by several political commentators and compared to recent debates between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.
Besides being an amusing clip on its own -- the great Burgess Meredith turns in a virtuoso performance as the Bilious Bird -- viewers have noted some chuckle-worthy parallels between this fictional debate and the real thing.
In last week's face-off, moderator Bob Schieffer asked the candidates about the smears and personal attacks that have become a significant part of the discourse as the campaign winds up.
"I think the tone of this campaign could've been very different," said McCain at the time. "And the fact is it's gotten pretty tough, and I regret some of the negative aspects of both campaigns."
Likewise, the Penguin starts out humbly enough: "Friends and fellow
citizens, I want to give you my solemn word that there will be no
mudslinging in this campaign. ... I intend to stick to the issues."
But with that disclaimer out of the way, the Penguin wastes no time in getting to his point. "Now what are the
issues? There's only one issue: Batman!"
"I suggest that behind that mask, Batman is, in reality, a dangerous
criminal. Why else does he wear a mask? Why else does he conceal his
past? Would you think about that a moment, my friends? Whenever
you've seen Batman, who's he with? Criminals, that's who!"
"Senator Obama chose to associate with a guy who in 2001 said he wished he'd bombed more." McCain then draws links between Obama and the community organization ACORN, which, he says, is "maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
It's probably a comment on the predictability of this presidential campaign that it was anticipated by a 40-year-old TV show populated by wacky caricatures. Same hack script, same hack channel.
Unfortunately, Penguin's brilliant plan hits a snag. Afraid that his lead in the polls is shrinking, he kidnaps the Board of Elections so the vote cannot be certified. This scheme backfires, and Batman turns up to rescue the hostages ("Pengy, you said we associated with criminals. So ... here we are." BOOM! POW! WHAMM!).
Batman is elected but resigns to allow the current mayor to keep his position. But not before one of the major parties calls to offer him the presidential candidacy for 1968 -- exactly 40 Novembers ago.
Exclaims Robin: "Bulging ballot boxes, Batman, that was some offer!"
IBitePrettyHard is one of the best drummers around. I mean video game drummers. But check out this video of IBite playing the popular music simulation game Rock Band, which has taken Guitar Hero and added the option of playing drums and bass. Tell me the line that separates video drumming from the real thing isn't blurring out of existence:
You've just witnessed an "FC," or full combo, the Rock Band parlance for hitting every simulated note in perfect time, no errors. On the games' most difficult drum songs -- Rush's YYZ, for example -- that can mean thousands of stick movements and pedal kicks.
The FC is the true currency of Rock Band and Guitar Hero mastery. Unless you can nail a song perfectly, you are not a true expert.
But it's drums, not guitar or bass, that are bridging the gap between fantasy video game versions of playing an instrument and the genuine article. The game's guitar is essentially a colorful game controller that operates nothing like its real-life counterpart. You can be the biggest Guitar Hero in the world, and still not be able to strum a "C." The complicated plucking, strumming and fretwork of playing guitar or bass is not well emulated by the five or six buttons boasted by the Rock Band guitar device.
But the Rock Band drum set is more or less a version of the kind of electronic drum kits that have been used by real drummers for years. Drumming is, in essence, banging sticks on surfaces, which is why real drummers are good at Rock Band and Rock Band drummers are, you know, real drummers.
IBite tells us in his YouTube profile that he's been playing real drums for 20 years, been in dozens of bands and played "around 1,000 gigs." A meter on his website shows that he has racked up 191 FCs on Rock Band's "Expert" level, at which the speed and number of notes are about the same as in the original songs.
You can see how illusory the real-fake division is in videos of DrumMania -- an arcade-style drum game from Asia in which players rip through songs at blazing speeds, following a video "note chart" that scrolls downward so fast it looks as though it exercises your eyes as much as it does your hands and feet.
Twenty-something indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg is obviously interested in exploring sex, not in the porny way, but in the everyday-life, I-wonder-what-people-really-do way. (You can see trailers for his much-talked-about upcoming feature about a long-distance relationship, starring himself and Greta Gerwig, at the "Nights and Weekends" website.)
Swanberg has a three-season-old Web series on IFC.com called "Young American Bodies" (sorry, can't link because the actors are always pulling off each other's clothes). It's one of those shows, like HBO's unrenewed "Tell Me You Love Me," that focuses with relentless seriousness on how ordinary people manage their sex lives — the kind that ends up being both unsexy and sometimes painful to watch. As Swanberg's earnest, rumpled young actors stammer their way into and out of bed with little evident joy or emotional release, you're reminded of what a strange species we are, that our courtship rituals can make us so unhappy.
But relief is here: Now Swanberg is also behind a much more watchable Web documentary series on IFC.com called "The Stagg Party" (nope, can't link to this one either). The show follows a professional photographer named Ellen Stagg as she goes about her dual career: Fashion and celebrity shoots pay the bills, but her personal artistic passion is erotic art photography (which would pay the bills, she says, but only if you want to do the bidding of porn purveyors, and she doesn't).
With its rampant female nudity and nonjudgmental "adult industry" theme, the voyeuristic Web hordes will love it. But the show's soft-touch intelligence and compelling characters give it depth — maybe even more than its five-minute format can do justice to.
In a recent Huffington Post blog item, Stagg tells the story of how she and Swanberg came to collaborate. As different as their approaches might seem, she writes, "we realized we had a lot in common with our work and the fine lines we are always trying to not cross." Making sexually focused art that is entwined with and fueled by their real lives, they both need to figure out how to keep some separation between the two.
But the contrasts between Swanberg and Stagg seem even more interesting and productive. She has managed a full embrace of her own erotic interests, whereas he is reflexively indirect about his. His characters tend to be consumed by their desire for this woman or that woman or the one over there, but everything has an anxious undertow.
Also, their visual and emotional styles could not be more different. Swanberg prefers drab, my-first-apartment bedrooms and "realistic" emotions like ambivalence and confusion. Stagg is all about trying to capture the mysterious beauty and allure of sexuality. She has an unusual rapport with her models, who are all porn actresses. Their complex connections are the show's main subject: The models are un-self-conscious about their bodies and what they're doing, and Stagg is unapologetic about her fascination with them. She wants to show them as real people, but she still gives her pictures a stylized, moody glamour.
The photographer and her naked subjects chat away lightheartedly as they play around with different poses and approaches. As Stagg explains, she gravitated to these women because unlike her friends, they aren't going to change their minds about the pictures in two weeks when their boyfriends get wind of them. It's a mutually beneficial deal because, as Stagg says, "the adult girls need content" for their blogs and websites.
The first episode features Asa, a Japanese American from New York who has been working in adult films for a year and is savvy about where her assets lie. In the second one, we meet the willowy blonde Charlotte. Stagg, who is extremely blonde herself, tells her, "You're the one girl I was most excited to shoot on this trip," because "I love blondes."
Charlotte tells Stagg that she has just filmed her first sex scene, and it sounds like she had a good time. It's not clear if Stagg has chosen porn neophytes on purpose, but it does create an interestingly wholesome, untroubled mood. These first two women, at least, seem untouched by the darker currents that tend to make women in their line of work build a hard, exaggerated shell around themselves.
Some of the models who will be the subjects of upcoming episodes look a little wilder and more hard-core, so we'll have to see if Stagg's tastes run beyond girls next door.
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
When we heard that the RNC racked up a $150,000 department store tab for Gov. Sarah Palin, it was hard to immediately put that in perspective. The most either of us has ever spent at one time on clothes or other personal items is under $1,000. But thanks to the beauty of online shopping, we're now very clear on what you can get for that kind of cash. We just got done going on his and hers online shopping sprees at 
We decided to see what that kind of cash could buy for Sarah Palin herself, sticking to the Republican vice presidential nominee's own sassy-conservative style. And, of couse, we stuck to American designers. Also, we steered away from prints, which seem to have become Michelle Obama's signature. Palin favors sober (but occasionally texture-y) solids. 
In the pricey "
Footwear-wise, we jettisoned the America-first principle, since she probably won't get asked whose shoes she's wearing. We got her four pairs of Manolos, a pair of Prada boots, winter white Marc Jacobs boots, and a big fuzzy Australian apres-ski-style pair.
Boy oh boy. Oh boy. You really have to WORK to spend that kind of cash -- especially if you're a guy. David walked away with the 11 most expensive Armani and Dolce & Gabana suits in the store, 7 pairs of Prada shoes, 4 primo leather jackets, 7 pairs of Seven jeans, 35 pairs of designer sunglasses, 100 gorgeous ties, plus a bunch of shirts, underwear, watches, rings, bracelets, two iPod speaker docks and something called a 
for free until St. Patrick's day. No one was swayed.
Thanks to YouTube, the below video of Batman's 
