Remains of the Day

He's number one

I may be placing my order for a #1 Fukudome jersey a bit earlier than anticipated.

My life is complete

Hulu got a shout out from Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy.

Check out Hulu.com and be prepared to waste a ridiculous amount of time. That's all I'm saying. By the way, all the "Paradise Hotel 2" episodes are on there, and if you watch the first five episodes and don't consider Rahiem one of your top-five favorite reality TV characters ever by the time you've finished plowing through them, then I'm giving you a full refund for $0.00.

Last week we also got a plug in the newsletter Daily Candy, which, given how many women e-mailed us last week to point it out, seems to be as popular with the ladies as Sports Guy is with the boys.

The bizarre

Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.

Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.

***

The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:

Channing Tatum as Duke

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander

Sienna Miller as The Baroness

Ray Park as Snake Eyes

Dennis Quaid as General Hawk

Arnold Vosloo as Zartan

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty

Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President

Marlon Wayans as Ripcord

Things I Like

* Modern Love, the weekly column in the Sunday Styles section of the NYTimes. I enjoy the introspective, confessional nature of each installment. This past week's column, "Mom, It’s Me, Your Son, Finally," was a good example of its tone. It's interesting to me how my tastes for various sections of newspapers and magazines has changed over time.

* New Balance 1220 running shoe series, of which the latest incarnation is the 1223. My flat, wide feet are thankful for shoes that, unlike Nikes, aren't made for people with perfect feet, narrow, high-arched. I guess that's to be expected from a shoe company named after a Greek goddess. The 1220's don't change too much from generation to generation, so when I walked into the store looking for a replacement for my 1221's, the saleswoman simply handed me the same size for the 1223s, and I walked out and was running in them fifteen minutes later. There's something to be said for product continuity in the shoe market.

I loved the Air Jordan VIII. It was the first pair I ever owned, and the day my mom bought it for me from a sports store in a mall is still a tactile memory. But subsequent models of the shoe changed so drastically that they just didn't fit my feet anymore.

* Runner's high (proof it exists?). I'd always thought runner's high was the occasional feeling that one could run forever without getting tired, but the definition in the article implies that it's something you always experience during running. Which may be why I have not experienced it in so long.

* Taco trucks. Seemingly an LA institution, the Hulu dev team seems to find a new one every week, each better than the next. I have yet to find one comprehensive listing of all taco trucks, though partial coverage can be found at The Great Taco Hunt and this Google Map.

Anti-emo riots?

Actually a serious story, but the headline seems like it could be stripped from The Onion: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I had an image of frightened Death Cab for Cutie fans fleeing down the streets screaming.

Our Story Begins

Tobias Wolff, the writer who got me hooked on short stories when I rented a collection of his from Green Library while still a freshman in college, has come out with a new collection. It contains 10 new stories and 21 stories from his previous collections, some with edits.

The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts. To the extent that they are still alive to me I take a continuing interest in giving that life its best expression. This satisfies a certain aesthetic restlessness, but I also consider it a form of courtesy. If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can for now.

If you've never read any of his fiction, I give this collection my highest recommendation.

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

South Park online

Every episode of South Park ever, online to stream for free. The amount of time a lot of people can spend online just went up a lot.

Burst

Juicy

Bill Richardson spoke to Hillary Clinton before announcing his endorsement of Barack Obama. Said Richardson:

"Let me tell you: we’ve had better conversations."

James Carville, reacting to Richardson's decision:

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic."

EW

Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).

Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.

The speech

I've read the transcript of Obama's speech a few times now. He's been attacked for being all talk, but this speech, said to be one that he wrote himself (unique only in how few of our leaders, political or business, write their own speeches and statements and quotes these days), reveals how and what he thinks. In that, words matter a great deal.

What do his words reveal? That he has a deep understanding and empathy for the racial hurt in this country, an unwillingness to reduce the complexity of these issues to politically digestible soundbites, and an honesty that has made him the most refreshing and exciting candidate in politics in my lifetime.

He speaks of Reverend Wright, denounces his pastor's' words, and yet does not forsake him. Who among us doesn't have one racist relation whose views have made us roll our eyes in exasperation or disgust, and yet in every other respect is a person we care for?

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Huh?

Maybe I'm in the wrong business. I guess I should be making Facebook widgets.

$400M? Really?

Slaughter rule

March Madness is a great sporting event, but as I've said many times before, a good percentage of the excitement lies in the format of the event, 65 teams, single elimination, tournament style (its suitability as a large-scale gambling event doesn't hurt, either).

If I were to improve the tourney, I might try to improve the quality of the 16 seeds. No top seed has ever lost in the first round to the 16 seed (Number 1 seeds are now 94-0 versus 16 seeds). A little dose of competitiveness from time to time in that game wouldn't hurt. UCLA won its first round game today 70-29. 70-29!

In an understatement, coach Ben Howland said of his decision to not play Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who sprained his left ankle last week versus USC, "I thought about it and I felt comfortable we would be able to get this one without him."

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Happy day! Hulu added all of Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe my favorite of all the seasons of the show. If you've never watched the show, you can catch up on the short 12 episode season 1 on Hulu and flow right into the full 22 episode second season.

The show's sophomore season is a television classic built on so many of the series' best romances: Buffy and Angel's tragic love affair, the beauty and the geek pairing of Cordelia and Xander, the odd couple of Willow and Oz, and even one between Watcher Giles and Jenny Calendar. As so many shows are working hard to crank out new episodes in the wake of the strike settlement, I can't think of too many better ways to fill your TV void.

BedUp

A bed like this would've been really useful in NYC, with its cramped apartments.

How about an election every other year?

SNL isn't the only satire outlet energized by the election; The Onion has gotten a lot of mileage out of it, too:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

***

Army Holds Annual "Bring Your Daughter to War" Day

"There were lots of explosions, and...and I saw a leg."

***

Mitt Romney defends himself against allegations of tolerance.

Shout out from Gruber

Hulu got a nice little review from John Gruber at Daring Fireball today. It's always a bit more exciting to read about your work at a site you frequent in your own day-to-day life, and Daring Fireball is a daily read for me.

Hulu, the NBC-and-Fox-spearheaded free online video service, is out of beta, and it’s pretty sweet. The video quality is good, the selection is good, and the advertising is remarkably minimal — two mid-show ads of 15 or 30 seconds for a 22-minute show, for example. Individual skits from Saturday Night Live, like this one from Saturday’s show, are commercial-free. Real movies, like The Big Lebowski and The Usual Suspects have just two or three minutes of commercials — and are uncensored. They even have good URLs.

No download option, alas, so there’s no supported way to watch these things on your TV, but it’s pretty damn cool overall.

Some Like It Hot

Probably the movie I'm most excited about having at Hulu is Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. AFI rated it the number 1 comedy in movie history.

That Billy Wilder, he was a genius.

A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama promised a speech on race today, and he delivered.

The story behind that Obama supporter interview clip

Here's the story behind that Obama clip which I linked to back on February 11. It's now approaching 1 million views, and Derrick Ashong, the person interviewed in that clip, has posted a follow-up clip.

Why I wasn't wearing green

Because I forgot. My life contains no visible markers of upcoming holidays other than the commercial ones from retail stores. The only reason I know Easter is approaching is because the grocery store carries a lot of egg dye kits and those yellow gooey rabbits made of some unknown substance.

If I had remembered it was St. Patrick's Day, and if I were a woman, I would have tried to find an opportunity to send this e-card from someecards.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

The art of the outlet

I've seen freshman power forward/center Kevin Love of UCLA play three times in the span of a week and a half. For a big man, he's a phenomenal passer. It's pretty watching him pull the rebound and whip the outlet pass down court to start the break.

Technorati Tags: basketball, sports

Happy birthday Sadie!

I was shooting a classmate's film recently, and there's a line in her script about how the first ten years of your life go by slowly, but every decade after seems to accelerate. There's something to that.

I remember Sadie turning 1 and trying ice cream for the first time, and now she's 5 and ready to enter kindergarten. Meanwhile, the last 4 years of my life are smeared across my memory like some broad, impressionistic paint stroke.

I think we get along because she reminds me of me as a kid, somewhat shy.

Technorati Tags: photo, birthday, sadie

Bershon

It's wonderful when you discover that there's a single word for something that, until that moment, you could only describe with many words. The word crystallizes it, makes it singular and whole, and gives the feeling or phenomenon some permanence.

Sarah Brown introduced the blogosphere to the term and defined it thus:

...the spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers’, was permanently frozen in this expression.

A beautiful description, but if you're still unclear on the concept, the Flickr group I'm so Bershon will more than clear things up for you.

Walt

Walt Mossberg reviewed Hulu for the Wall Street Journal. Always a big milestone when someone like Mossberg or David Pogue in the NYTimes reviews your product. One reason they're so successful and important in the tech review space is their ability to write evaluations that are fair and useful to the widest range of consumers. His appraisal of our site is no different.

Wall*E, trailer 3

New trailer for Pixar's Wall·E.

Much revealed. I had no idea this is what the movie would be about. Can't wait!

Some really cool free things

Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.

Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"

Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.

Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.

Hulu launches

Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.

We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.

We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:

• Every episode ever of Arrested Development, all 52 of them.
• The Big Lebowski. Dude.
• The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, and the other musical numbers you'd expect from there: Sixteen Going on Seventeen, Maria, Do Re Mi, Edelweiss, My Favorite Things, So Long, Farewell, and The Hills Are Alive. Pauline Kael may not be a fan, but it's the music of my childhood.
• Kagemusha . Yeah, the Akira Kurosawa classic!
• The top 10 moves of February from the NBA. Warning: more than a few ankles are broken in this one. And here's that crazy Chris Paul dribble move from the All-Star Game, in which he fakes a crossover and snaps the ball back to himself with backspin, goes by the defender, and dishes to the trailer for the dunk. Chris Paul is crazy good.
• "Down by the River" from SNL, featuring Chris Farley. I miss that guy, and I miss his show.
• "Ultimate Power in the Universe" from Family Guy: Blue Harvest. Watching for free is a great way to try out shows you've heard of but missed out on the first time around, and Family Guy has been that show for me, the one that Hulu got me hooked on.

People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.

A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.

We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.

It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.

We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.

Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.

Cheers!

One benefit of LA weather

Headline, "stripped" of its context:

What can I say, LA has changed me.

Coming to a movie theater someday

Based on the true story: "I fell in love with a female assassin." A common movie plot (True Lies, La Femme Nikita, e.g.) finds a riveting real-world proof.

If adapted into a big-budget Hollywood film, likely Angelina Jolie as Marylin and, hmm, Ewan McGregor or Ed Norton or James McAvoy as journalist Jason P Howe?

Fortune

We (Hulu) got a write-up in Fortune today. It's one of the more detailed profiles of the company so far.

Grizzly Bear, Walt Disney Concert Hall

I'd only really ever heard one song by Grizzly Bear, "Knife", but I really wanted to experience the acoustics of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in action, so last Saturday I attended a crossover concert composed of two halves: before intermission, the LA Philharmonic played three pieces that inspired Grizzly Bear, and after intermission, Grizzly Bear played a set on the same stage.

The 2,265 seat main auditorium is the most intimate classical music venue I've ever been in. The audience surrounds the stage, a contrast to the usual alignment in which the entire audience sits behind the conductor. All the seating is stadium style, so even seated behind Yao Ming you'd have a decent view of the stage.

The acoustics of the auditorium (designed by Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics) are stunning. Seated inside, with curved cedar sound panels like ribs on the ceiling, you feel as if you're in the belly of a whale carved by Gepetto himself.

The classical pieces on the program:
Boccherini (Berio) - Ritirata notturna di Madrid
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite (1919)

It's been a long time since I've been to a classical music concert, though in years past I've always tried to attend at least three or four shows a year. Hearing pieces I've played before reminds me of my childhood, and classical music in general recalls weekend nights home with the family, my dad reading a Chinese newspaper, my mom cooking, my sisters on the phone or playing, me buried in some book, a classical LP playing in the background.

At intermission my friend showed me around the hall, outside and in. Gehry's work doesn't always work for me, but this structure is gorgeous and alive. A series of pathways allow you to navigate between all the hall's shaped metal petals, with many sweeping views of surrounding downtown LA.

Grizzly Bear's music is difficult to describe, all vocal harmonies over dreamy sonic landscapes, psychedelically mesmerizing as transported by the crystal clear acoustics of the hall. Just a well-conceived concert.

Grizzly Bear - Yellow House

Technorati Tags: architecture, LA, music, grizzlybear

Ugly packaging, interesting goods

Fortune has an interview with Steve Jobs, who's always a good read.

Fortune is a reasonably well laid out magazine in print. Jobs is a design-obsessive. So there's some irony in the fact that this interview is stretched out across 15 pages so that Fortune.com can run more obnoxious ads that can cover up parts of the screen.

Technorati Tags: Apple, business, interview, stevejobs

Hey, it's Julie Taylor

I'm not sure why I didn't notice this before, but the person asking the question in the (in)famous Miss South Carolina clip from the Miss Teen USA competition is Aimee Teegarden.

Friday Night Lights was a really good book, a good movie, and it's a great TV series, too, though admittedly I've only been able to watch 7 episodes here on Hulu, 15 minutes here and there over lunch at the desk.

With shows like Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, what's the truth? Do devoted fans overestimate the mass appeal of the show, or is it really, as fans claim, misguided marketing strategies on the part of the studio. If Friday Night Lights aired on a better night, not Friday night, would it grab a wider audience? How could Arrested Development have been saved?

The economics of more niche TV series and movies still seem prohibitive for creators. Talking to many producers of indie films, even finding a niche audience on DVD doesn't help many of them to recoup production costs.

Lower production costs, remove some layers of middleman marketing and replace with more efficient marketing channels (read: the Internet), lower distribution costs (again, the Internet), bump some of the revenue streams forward in time (overlap windows like DVD and theatrical/first run TV broadcast), and I hope the ecosystem is more friendly to shows like this.

As for Friday Night Lights, if you don't already watch it, the best way for me to support it is to try and hook you. Here are the first three episodes from season one.

NIN

Along the same lines as Radiohead's In Rainbows, Nine Inch Nails are releasing their new album, Ghosts I-IV, direct to users through the web. You can download the first nine tracks as DRM-free MP3's, pay $5 for all 36 tracks, $10 for a 2-CD set, or $75 for a deluxe edition with 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with the tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with all tracks in 96kHz/24-bit high-resolution.

Their servers were down every time I checked over the past 24 hours, but they appear to be up now for downloads. This new model for selling music is so much more sensible.

Alexandre Desplat

If pressed to name my favorite film score composer working today, my reflexive answer would be Alexandre Desplat. His latest for Lust, Caution lives up to his previous work. I was more taken with the score than the story adaptation, though it is the first movie I can recall that reveals hidden depths to shoe who are well-versed in the rules and strategy of Mah Joong. There are hidden clues in the moves and tiles in the game that only a fraction of viewers will understand.

Perhaps that subtlety is the movie's chief flaw, that it keeps too much under wraps for too long until the main actors, Tony Leung and Tang Wei, are literally unwrapped on screen in some athletic love scenes. It can't help but sound prurient, but the love scenes are the most emotionally complex in the movie.