This morning, I received the following news bulletin from Fox News. I subscribe to the breaking news alerts of every major network. Fox was the only network that sent this alert:
Now, take a look at this story from today’s Chicago Sun-Times. It’s not that the Fox bulletin was blatantly inaccurate, but it certainly was very misleading. Shouldn’t the term “breaking news” be reserved for urgent events that are in the process of taking place?
"sent from down below"
If you remember the great Ernie K-Doe, check out Josh Levin’s excellent story in Slate magazine about the death of his wife, Antoinette.
I am curious.
Several months ago, I posted a piece about an extraordinary man who I have always felt was one of the least known and least celebrated heroes of the civil rights movement.
Mose Wright was Emmett Till’s uncle. At great personal danger, Mr. Wright testified twice against those who we now know murdered Emmett Till.
What is baffling to me is why so many people have continued to read that post on my site every day. It’s great that there is interest in Mr. Wright. But I thought maybe someone could help me figure out why so many people want to read this story.
I really am thrilled that so many people are interested.
Over the years, many of my classes have heard the recording of the famous Orson Welles broadcast “War of the Worlds.” The broadcast, and especially the subsequent social research done by Hadley Cantril and his colleagues at Princeton, is a really interesting way to introduce topics in collective behavior, mass media, and social psychology.
If the broadcast interests you, you will get a major kick out of this broadcast from RadioLab, the program produced at WNYC radio in New York City by Jad Abumrad, supported by his colleague Robert Krulwich.
This incredibly entertaining and informative broadcast puts the “War of the Worlds” in the larger context of a series of hoaxes over the 20th century that showed just how persuadable many of us are.
Superbly done.
Last night in a graduate seminar, our topic was the key role that language plays as both a process and product which we use to make sense of the world.
Our readings came from cultural theorist Raymond Williams, but something incredible was published today on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com website that brilliantly illustrates how language — including the words we choose, the ideas implicit in our rhetoric, and the deep structure of our arguments — is so important in understanding how politicians craft public messages.
Check out this piece by George Lakoff, one of the greatest living scholars of linguistics and someone who frequently analyzes the explicit and implicit meanings in political rhetoric.
In anticipation of tonight’s address by Pres. Obama to the Congress, Lakoff looks closely at what he calls the “Obama Code.”
The passing of Estelle Bennett reminded me of the 2007 induction ceremony of the Ronettes into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Estelle attended but was not well enough to perform. Ronnie Bennett Spector and Nedra Talley performed three of their greatest hits — “Baby I Love You,” “(Walking) In the Rain” and “Be My Baby.”
This is really an incredible performance, completely unlike the typical reunion/nostalgia concert. Paul Shaffer leads a massive band/orchestra that pulls off the best recreation of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” I have ever heard. (Other than the studio productions themselves. )
And Ronnie Spector is dazzling. Just dazzling.
There is a bizarre coda to the performance. At the end, Shaffer reads a congratulatory message from Phil Spector. This message came after Spector, in his role as a member of the Hall of Fame Board of Governors, prevented their induction. And that is only one piece of the behind the scenes abuse and theft that marked Spector’s treatment of the Ronettes and his former wife Ronnie Spector.
Why did Spector finally allow their induction? Let’s just say that being charged with murder and being out on $1 million bail in 2007 didn’t leave him in the strongest position.
Spector’s trial is still ongoing.
But forget all this, and take a look at the kind of performance that you almost never get so many years after the cheering stops.
Nice to see that our long-standing policy of constructive engagement with China is leading to a flowering of freedom.
“I have no idea where they are,” the sister said Saturday. “The police won’t let me see them.”
It never fails.
If I am laying down, happy and serene, my mind often goes here and here and here and here and here .
Please see this gem of a film if you can. And check out la reina de las malandrinas, Jenni Rivera.
Some things never leave you. Some things always give pleasure.
Treasure them. Protect them. Return to them.
Someone changed the ringer on my home phone to a song. No one will confess.
But I actually love the song, I revere the composer Scott Joplin, and I still am not tired of the ring.
This is “Perfessor” Bill Edwards playing the Maple Leaf Rag.
It really isn’t a surprise that the Chinese government censored their version of President Obama’s inaugural address.
But you have to wonder what digital world they are living in if they think that their amateur mischief is not immediately broadcast around the world. The Internet is beyond pervasive in China, and almost immediately after every lame attempt at censorship, millions of Chinese citizens and people around the world are instantly informed.
But it goes beyond the simple act of censorship. Their choice of forbidden passages reveals a complete lack of subtlety on their part, and almost immediately telegraph their authoritarian inclinations around the world.
Gee, I wonder what they might have found objectionable in the passage they cut:
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Advice to China:
Good news: Authoritarian government and oppression is still possible in the digital age.
Bad news: You have to be subtle.
If you know about the mechanics of blogging, you know I receive a list of all the various combinations of web search terms that people use to reach my site. Some are heart-breaking and some are hilarious. Some are scary. Here are some recent examples. In each case, my blog did in fact include each search term. Let’s just say that I was probably not what they were looking for.
famous boring speech
michael savage opinion on colonoscopy
why do prisoners have cable
i feel fear when i walk by someone
One poignant reality of the Internet is that these people will forever remain a mystery; that I will never know who wanted to know Michael Savage’s opinion on colonoscopy.
I think I can live with that.
If you love great music, this will hurt.
If you lived and breathed 60’s girls groups, you worshipped the Ronettes. Who knew that Estelle Bennett, Ronette extraordinaire, had such a relentlessly painful life? Estelle died this week at age 67.
Rest well, Estelle.
I do not point out episodes like this to ridicule the individual involved.
Unless I believe someone to be clearly and purposefully cruel and evil, in which case I confess to occasionally reveling in their misfortune, human frailty goes and comes around enough for me to usually avoid Schadenfreude. All of us have inner-jerks capable of being revealed, and — perhaps out of superstition — I generally avoid ridiculing other people’s screw-ups in the hope that my inner-jerk won’t be the next one exposed!
But what do you say about a performance like the one by Shoichi Nakagawa?
The world economy is in shambles. Every word out of the mouth of a head of state or finance minister from Lagos to Reyjakvik can send economic shockwaves around the globe. And Monday at the Rome G-7 conference of finance ministers, the Japanese finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, acted erratically, slurred words and even momentarily went to sleep at a press conference. Drunkenness is not an unreasonable conclusion.
Set aside his monumental irresponsibility. What was his staff thinking? In the instantaneous world of early 21st century media, you can’t do something like this in private and not have it broadcast around the world, much less go bonkers at a press conference in front of hundreds of millions of people.
As I write this at 12:40 AM EST on February 17th, the Nikkei index is down 109 points and Minister Nakagawa has announced his intention to resign.
A final point because I have students from Japan and many other countries: This minister and his inexcusable behavior could have come from anywhere. Someday I’ll tell you the stories of Wilbur Mills and John Tower.
I will give him some benefit of the doubt: While I don’t understand Japanese, he did fall asleep during a question of such length that perhaps sleep was the appropriate response.
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When David Barstow’s remarkable New York Times investigative pieces on corrupt propagandizing by the Pentagon first appeared, they became required reading for my students.
And it wasn’t even the propaganda that was the mortal sin. Our system is one in which politicians and agencies are allowed to vigorously promote their point of view while we are obligated to vigorously monitor their output for spin and fluff and other self-serving nonsense. I have occasionally helped government agencies shape messages about safety and health emergencies.
But the “sins” uncovered in Bartow’s brilliant series “Message Machine” went way beyond the pale. The paid military analysts were misrepresented by the networks as neutral experts. In fact, a number of them were shown to directly financially benefit from defense contractors when they promoted a certain point of view. Sure, we are all drowning in phoniness. But this was phoniness for bucks that had life and death implications.
If you have any interest in the role of the press in society, the Barstow series is a must read.
A confession: I am not naive about news management and spinning and lying and payoffs and all the rest. May God forgive me any spinning I have ever done that, well, spun more than it should have.
But this story shocked me.
Tonight David won a coveted 2008 Polk Award.
Yup. Wanda Sykes. The night of May 9th. My favorite comedian up on stage roasting the president and first lady.
Every muckety-muck in DC in the audience.
History will be made. Pacemakers will stop.
Wanda.
I only have one question: Do you think those who invited her have seen, I mean really seen and heard, her routine? Are they really ready for the comedy equivalent of a nuclear weapon?
Now this is going to be one history-making, sidesplitting , controversy-creating night. There are statues in that city who will probably start laughing.
Wanda. They invited Wanda.
Now I just have to figure out a way to get there.
My default position on narration in documentary film is almost always negative, especially when it is used as an amateurish substitute for skilled cinematic storytelling. But I don’t have a hard and fast rule, and sometimes a few strategically placed, eloquent words fit seamlessly into a narrative. For the most part, though, I am a fan of wordless ”narration” that tells a story with meticulous and rhythmic editing.
Of course, all bets are off in first-person documentaries. When these films are done well, (far too seldom) the narration is precisely the point. I think of the films of Alan Berliner, Doug Blank, Ross McElwee, and Elizabeth Barret.
In Elizabeth Barret’s Stranger with a Camera, narration rises to the level of sublimely beautiful poetry. Barret — one of my favorite filmmakers — uses her own voice and creates a truly haunting meditation on life, loss, memory, and the ethics of the visual image. I confess that I deeply admired her film for almost two years before I noticed that much of the narration had been written by Fenton Johnson, an accomplished Kentucky novelist. I hope you can see this great film and hear Elizabeth speaking Johnson’s remarkable prose and what I am sure were many of her own words.
Tonight I had a surprise. I was watching an episode of PBS’s American Experience about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. I didn’t immediately recognize the voice of the narrator, but it was so understated and mournful that I knew I was not listening to your average voiceover artist. It was almost a new genre, something you might call historical oral theatre.
Then I realized that it was Chris Cooper, one of the finest actors working today. You may have seen him in Adaptation or Capote. Like any brilliant actor, he knows instinctively that less is almost always more. But please listen to his narration if you have a chance. This was stunningly beautiful work and showed how a great actor like Chris Cooper can turn prose into poetry.
Finally, if you want to hear another remarkable example of the use of a narrative voice in film, listen to Tommy Lee Jones speaking Cormac McCarthy’s poetic prose in Ethan and Joel Coen’s “No Country for Old Men.”
The list of Chris Cooper’s accomplishments, already long and packed with one masterful performance after another, has to include this little recognized use of his voice. Check out Barak Goodman’s The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Get a load of this:
At various places on Media and Mayhem, I mention the names of singers and actors and other celebrities. And among the thousands of other words also used, “p–n” can be found in one place on my blog.
Well within the last several months, a virulently viral rumor has circulated on the Internet that an amateur p–n film of one of these celebrities can be found.
The result is that hundreds of people put the name of the celebrity and the word “p–n” into a google search and get to my blog.
I am sure they are sorely disappointed. You see, I use the word “p–n” to refer to those trashy MSNBC pseudo-documentaries of prison life where the main attractions are nice, bloody beatings.
Yup, undeserved and unwanted hits. And the lesson is that the number of hits a blog or a site gets can be a very deceptive figure.
Meredith Whitefield, one of my students, called my attention to this wonderful quote from Virginia Woolf. It is from Three Guineas (Annotated) , probably her most polemical feminist work. What a nifty manifesto for the guts and muscularity to which culture should aspire.
“And “culture”, that amorphous bundle, swaddled up as she now is in insincerity, emitting half truths from her timid lips, sweetening and diluting her message with whatever sugar or water serves to swell the writer’s fame or his master’s purse, would regain her shape and become, as Milton, Keats and other great writers assure us that she is in reality, muscular, adventurous, free.”
Friedrich Hans Ulrich Mühe (Ulrich Mühe) will always be one of my favorite actors. His performance in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen The Lives of Others (2006) is masterful. I have rarely seen a film peformance in which a character’s small exterior gestures and ticks so subtly and perfectly hint at a turbulent, anguished interior. One tear dripping down Mühe’s cheek was almost impossibly painful to watch.
Mühe died in 2007.
He should be remembered.
Several weeks ago, I described my disgust with the Chinese government’s censorship of Pres. Obama’s inaugural address. It’s not that I was that shocked. In fact, I was almost amused at the amateurishness they revealed by censoring a passage so obviously directed at them.
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Wow, Gorelick. Big revelations. The Chinese government is authoritarian. The Chinese government engages in censorship. The Chinese government allowed shoddy construction practices that maximized fatalities of young students during last year’s earthquake. Who doesn’t know those things? End of story. Not quite.
Ever since, that particular post has been bombarded with hundreds and hundreds of spam. The spam protection I use, Akismet, is excellent. They have all been caught and deleted. But no post of mine has ever resulted in an attack of this magnitude.
And so I wonder, certain that I must sound excessively paranoid, whether anyone, anywhere is trying to communicate anything to me.
I’ll leave it at that. In fact, as I write this, it seems grandiose to even imagine that some little blog post might have caught the attention of any even mini-muckety-muck.
But I wonder. Over 700 spams directed at one post?
This is a superb resource on the urban legends that are currently floating around the weirdosphere.
Google Latitude has me thinking about Hasan.
Hasan Elahi’s remarkable ongoing project “Tracking Transience” takes surveillance to extremes you never imagined possible. Faced with government harrassment, Hasan chose to resist with an amazing public digital art project in which anyone, at any time, can learn almost anything about his comings and goings.
I’m sure some people see Hasan’s work and, using everyone’s current favorite acronym, think it is “T.M.I.”
I think it is brilliant.
By the way, in the spirit of Hasan Elahi and Google Latitude and the whole era of excruciatingly transparent transparency, here is where I am right this second. Whoopdedoo!
P.S. I really do like the concept of transparency. Unfortunately I am still uncomfortable with it as a way to actually live! So pretty soon I’ll share why I finally got too uncomfortable with Facebook and signed off.
This new Google tool raises more technical, moral, ethical, and social questions than I can even begin to answer.
For now, just check it out.
You think you have unsual tastes?
Check out Max Raabe, one of my absolute favorites. Max is a German baritone who, with his Palast Orchester, recreates German dance, film, and cabaret music of the 1920s and 1930s. If the flowering of Weimar-era film, music, theatre and art before the Nazi onslaught interests you, you must get to know Max.
Max is other-worldly, hilarious in a dry, mischeivous way, and a really great singer. The Palast Orchester musicians are incredible.
MEDIA AND MAYHEM 