But Frank Deford has always been an asshole
Wherein seriously this hate goes back more than 20 years. What really cemented the hate was a story I heard when The National closed. A friend of a friend worked for the paper and found out the paper had closed, while covering a game, from other reporters in the press box. For severance, he recieved a copy of DeFord's book.
From the fine folk at Fire Joe Morgan:
From the fine folk at Fire Joe Morgan:
I measured the decibel level at which I called bullshit on the called ID thing, and I am now buying a second amp and a kick-ass tweeter, and I am paying some very pricey A/V guys to install this equipment with like 6"-diameter cable connecting everything, and I am inventing a new kind of megaphone that has its own internal volumizing booster, and I am doing all of this in order to call bullshit louder than I just called bullshit on that other thing, because: are you fucking kidding me?
Listen, man -- I like nostalgia. I think there are certain aspects of our pre-internet days that were preferable to their modern counterparts. (For example, baseball cards were much better in the 1980's than they are now. Upper Deck ruined everything.) But taking pictures of important events in your life and then driving somewhere and dropping them off and then waiting a few days and then driving back and picking them up and finding out that half of them were out of focus and the other half sucked? This is not one of them.
Digital cameras are way better -- for the average non-professional, at least, which is all I can speak to -- than film cameras. Easier to use, cheaper to use, faster to use. If you are being driven crazy because you can't remember who played Hunt Stevenson in the TV version of "Gung Ho," IMDb is better than the old method: just going fucking crazy and never coming up with the right answer. (Which is: Scott Bakula.) That's the deal, man. Not everything newer is better. But a lot of stuff is.
posted by bill at 6:32 AM
5 Comments:
Yes and yes.
Frank Deford is a tiresome and hackneyed crank, and life overall is much better now.
"The real joy of taking photos was not knowing how they turned out until you got them back from Photo Zip"? Really? Hey, Frank -- K-Mart still develops film. Knock yourself out.
I miss "The National", though. Loved that paper.
The internets killed it, or rather, the stupidity of its owners killed it before the internets got a chance to kill it, but had it been run better it still would have been killed by the internet.
Still remember lots of pretty good articles from interesting writers over the time it was in print.
And regarding nostalgia, I'm fond of this Zappa quote, "...I've also talked about the End of the World being a question of whether it's going to be by fire, ice, paperwork, or nostalgia. And there's a good chance that it's going to be nostalgia because the distance between the event and the nostalgia for the even has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter with each nostalgia cycle. So, projecting into the future, you could get to a point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that step you just took that you would literally freeze in your tracks to experience the nostalgize of the last step, or the last word, or your last whatever. The world just comes to a halt - remembering."
(quote buried in this lengthy interview)
Also, Frank Deford, he is no Pablo Picasso.
XWL, demonstrating vintage XWL!
(**lovin' it**)
I haven't liked Deford from my first exposure to him - he's so full of himself and his own importance that I can't understand how anyone likes him. (He's just a slightly more subtle version of Keith Olberman.)
And I'm convinced that IMdB has by itself justified the existence of the internet. It has saved more time (and hence generated more productivity) than has been wasted on internet porn.
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