New York's American Museum of the

Moving Image was contemplating a

website. Media-savvy and

tech-friendly - the museum did a

videogame exhibition as early as

1989 - AMMI had to have an

Internet presence. All its

buddies certainly did. So they

scraped a little here and

snipped a little there. Came up

with a budget in the low

five-figures. Shopped Silicon

Alley. Learned what $15 or

$20K buys these days -

"brochureware," according to one

curator, listings and phone

numbers which already exist

elsewhere, and which no cash-

strapped arts organization

should be blowing the endowment

on. Meanwhile, the

counterrevolutionaries at AMMI

are declining a site-

for-site's-sake: "For the

money," said Director Rochelle

Slovin, "we'd be doing the

museum a greater service by

washing the windows." May a

thousand more refuseniks follow

their glorious path.

In its usual breathless-

yet-Details-oriented

fashion, P.O.V. magazine

dreamt up a marketing event

befitting its target audience: the

"Great American Brew Crawl,"

in which "emerging, affluent"

young men sample local beers in

"influential neighborhoods" in

nine cities. P.O.V. founder Drew

Massey, 26, told Advertising

Age, "We want to reach young

leaders and influencers." It's

obvious enough that young

leaders and influencers spend

their formative years drinking

microbrews in foofy

neighborhoods, and we recognize

that, Swing magazine aside, it

takes more than Daddy's tall

dollars to keep a flaccid youth

glossy afloat. We're just hoping

that, for the sake of our

country's future, the "crawl"

part is just a harmless

euphemism.

Taking his cues from

sociopolitical trailblazers

Kate Moss, Christy Turlington,

and Cindy Crawford, ex-Beatle

and occasional Simpsons walk-on

Paul McCartney apparently gets

his panties all bunched up over

fur. (Personally, we prefer fur

panties.) So much so that in a

recent issue of The New Yorker,

a tiny ad appeared for the

imaginary "Paul's Furs." But

whether curious customers were

expecting cold-storage tips or

Beastie Boys cut-outs, they were

in for a surprise. The video,

which was produced by People for

the Ethical Treatment of Animals

and mailed to the paltry 11

readers who ordered it, solemnly

displays animals being

slaughtered for their luxurious

coats. In its aftermath, the

gloriously petty stunt left New

Yorker execs sputtering, PETA

drooling, and McCartney tripping

on the light fantastic rush of

celebrity activism. Who cares if

Christie, Kate, Cindy, and Paul

regularly hop out of leather

upholstered limos wrapped head

to toe in PETA-blacklisted silk,

wool, sheepskin, and leather? We

want to know when pathetically

banal, vapid, and irrelevant

social causes got so damn good

at manipulating the media.

If you follow the happenings on

the World Wide Web, the

graphical portion of the

Internet, you might have seen

Tuesday's parody of Flux in the

Netly News. If you did see it,

you probably didn't get it unless

you read Flux. Which you

probably don't get unless you

have a job working on the World Wide

Web. And if you do work on the

World Wide Web, you might have

read the article the editor of the Netly

News wrote about Suck in Wired

magazine. Of course, if you

didn't already have something to

do with the Internet and know

what Suck was, you wouldn't

understand much of the article,

which was as much about Suck as

it was about the Netly News. And

as we know, the Netly News

is a site which follows the

happenings on the World Wide

Web. While some wizened

cultural critics might see this as

evidence that the web is

maturing in a similar fashion to

Old Media (becoming more

self-obsessed, narcissistic,

self-referential, and self-

important), we know better.

It instead follows a model

closer to all of our personal

experiences: that of the high

school yearbook which features

its own staff in all the pictures.