It is with no small amount of shame that I admit the following:  Much  of my disgust with self-serving “C.Y.A.”  spin is a function of my having on occasion been in a position of having to think up such nonsense.  Heaven help me, but I can smell this stuff a mile away.

Today I watched an interview with Ford CEO Alan R. Mullaly, who was proudly touting the fact that, rather flying to today’s bailout hearing in a private jet, he would be driving from Detroit in a new Ford Fusion Hybrid. He said he had “learned a lesson” after he flew to the last hearing in his private jet.

Look, I’m not suggesting there is anything else he could have said. But let’s be clear: He didn’t simply “learn a lesson.” He was so embedded in the culture of perqs and excessive compensation that it never even struck him or anyone in the company – not even their highly paid flacks — that flying a private jet might rub people the wrong way.  

This may surprise you:  I actually do not see a corporate jet as inherently evil.  It would be hard to persuade me, but I would at least listen to an honest argument about how speedy, on-demand air travel might promote profits and productivity. Given Ford’s current problems, I would think that it would be mind-bogglingly ridiculous to try and make that argument now. But if  Ford was thriving, if Ford was growing and employing more people, if Ford was paying its workers well and providing good benefits,  I don’t think that many people would be having a fit about the plane.

What does give me a fit is a guy getting caught using a private plane in the midst of an economic collapse – clueless about how it would be perceived — and spinning it as a “lesson learned.”

C’mon Mr. Mullaly: It was greed and excess revealed, not simply a lesson learned.

It is hard for me to look at a photograph that fuses tragedy and beauty without some guilt.  The thought that I might feel any kind of pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction at an image of horror seems almost instinctively wrong.   

Of course, at the same time, I know that beauty is a complex concept. It is not necessarily, nor even typically, “pretty.” We all have found pleasure in gazing at images depicting moments of unbearable sadness and pain.

So what is beauty?

I will always be haunted by a renowned virologist who tried to explain to me why he found the HIV virus – in its complexity and brilliant resistance to being destroyed or even tricked — a thing of beauty. Perhaps sometimes we describe something as beautiful, not because it gives us conventional pleasure or joy, but because we are humbled or stunned at what it reveals of our profound humanness and vulnerability.  Humanness — stripped of artifice and faux gentility – can be sublimely beautiful, even when it leads us to horror.  It is who we are.

To be sure, this is a different kind of beauty, rooted not in pleasure but in awe. If we see beauty in moments of fury, angry crowds, acts of violence, and even death, perhaps we are simply in awe of such unflinching glimpses of ourselves.  Maybe we even find it titillating to see ourselves so nakedly human, so capable of evil, so overcome with grief?

Which leads to this picture from the front page of today’s New York Times by AP photographer Gurinder Osan.

This is a crowd in the midst of unbearable grief; a heaving, surging, human crowd surrounding the grieving family of terror victim Haresh Gohil. It is living the shared pain of a community brought together in a volatile mixture of anger and sadness. It is a swirling and kinetic crowd that –  from the unusual angle chosen by Osan – has formed a human tapestry of grief. The wailing and moaning even seems audible, yet it only takes a moment to recall that this is a silent photograph.   

It is human. It is deeply sad. It is horrible.

It is beautiful.

Each of us will have a day, a speech, or a moment that will be our mental marker for the presidential campaign of 2008. These will include moments of eloquence and moments of confusion, moments of high drama when both candidates revealed important personal qualities, and mundane moments that were just as revealing.

I wish that my most vivid markers were times when either candidate spoke from the better angels of their nature rather than from pettiness and cruelty.

But that apparently is not to be.

Because several sultry and rainy days in late August continue to echo with such cruelty and arrogance that they probably will shadow me as long as I live. That those responsible for those days of cruelty essentially hastened their party’s defeat should provide some small satisfaction. It doesn’t. I still feel the sting and rage of knowing I live in the same society with people who find pleasure in cruelty.

I refer to those days at the August Republican convention when the Republican party’s message of the day – delivered by former New York Governor George Pataki in the morning at a breakfast of the New York Republican delegation and later by former Mayor Rudolf Giuliani to the entire convention — was a vicious, full-frontal attack on the idea of community organizing.

Pataki began the day with this reference to Obama: “He was a community organizer. What in God’s name is a community organizer? I don’t even know if that’s a job,” he said. He received laughter and applause.

They laughed.

Later, Giuliani, according to the NY Daily News, said: “He worked as a community organizer. What?” After laughing derisively, Giuliani added, “Okay, Okay, maybe this is the first problem on the resume.”

This was nothing short of a vicious attack on community volunteers and organizers who help poor people weather the kind of social policies promoted by politicians like Pataki and Giuliani. These are people who register voters of all parties, who help poor people find money to pay heating bills and buy food, who teach tenants their rights under the law, who provide their children alternatives to the street, who tutor kids after school.

By all rights, this moment of ugliness would be long forgotten and buried under the joy and hope engendered by the defeat of their politics of cruelty.

But forgetting would itself be negligent. We must never forget that on one day in August, 2008, this kind of hate and disdain came out of the hole in which it usually hides and was on exhibit for the whole world to see, in all its astounding selfishness. Community organizing, they said, is not a job. And their audience laughed.

They laughed.

They laughed at those who dedicate their loves to bringing warmth, nutrition, clothing, and housing to those who have never even seen or heard of a safety net, much less landed on one.

They laughed. Pataki laughed. Giuliani laughed. And their audience laughed.

I wonder if for even one fleeting moment these two men considered that, as Catholics, they were members of a church with such a proud and distinguished history of heroic priests and nuns working at street level to feed and clothe and organize and house and nurse the poor. I wonder if either of them read the ground-breaking 1986 statement issued by the U.S. Catholic Bishops – “Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.”

But this also hit me in a personal way. Very early in 20^th century, one particular unknown community organizer without a real job, a Chicago social worker named Jane Addams trying to found a settlement house, convinced a shy, destitute immigrant kid to train in medicine and promised that she would support him if he worked hard. Throughout his life, that kid (my grandfather) told his grandchildren stories about Jane. Only in later years did I fully appreciate that his “Jane” was Jane Addams, one of the founders of modern social work, the founder of Hull House, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But facts never adequately refute cruelty. Its purveyors must seek forgiveness for the hurt rather than simply present arguments to the contrary. To re-enter the public sphere of civility and decency, they must apologize. These two for whom cruelty rolled so easily off the tongue must atone.

And we who were rendered speechless must never forget what they said.

Remember: Politics is a system fueled by forgetfulness. Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani are banking on a system that they know will likely forget their words of cruelty. Someday they will again present themselves to voters and launch campaigns assuming that these words will be ancient history. Depending on how the winds blow, the same people who spoke these words might even try to wrap themselves in the mantle of compassion. Kindness — in their cynical world — is a strategy and a talking point, not a moral tenet. The day will come when some comparably insincere consultant will hand one of them a beautifully written, yet scandalously phony speech on how we have to do more and help more.

We can’t let that happen.

They laughed.

Watch them laugh at the people who dedicate their lives to insuring that others might have housing, be nourished, and enjoy some  measure of basic human dignity. And tell me just what Giuliani and Palin find so funny.

Quick question:

I loved Michael Clayton.

But does anyone agree with me that the otherwise extraordinary screenplay might have slipped into implausibility with the murder and car bombing sub-plot?

Maybe I am the naive one. It just seemed to cross the line into ever-so-slight nuttiness.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Catch a tiger by the toe

If he hollers let him go,

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

I have spent over a week trying to find the words to tell this story. It is 3:00 a.m.  I am in a strange hotel bed with lousy pillows. I can’t sleep. Maybe a nightmare is best told at 3:00 am.

When Barack Obama was elected President, the social and cultural earthquake I wanted so badly became real. Certainly not an earthquake that would magically provide a final resolution to hundreds of years of shame, but one that would rip open the fault line with a vengeance. 

And then came the rhyme. The damn rhyme. .

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

Catch a tiger by the toe

If he hollers let him go,

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

My ten year-old daughter, trying to make some choice about lunch or a friend, was employing the old “eeny meeny miny moe” test.  I think she and the tiger ended up picking the tuna sandwich. Yet I almost immediately recalled the countless times in 1950s schoolyards when kids used the same rhyme with a word other than tiger. It was the version that Rudyard Kipling published in 1923 as “A Counting-Out Song” in “Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides:”

Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!

Catch a nigger by the toe!

If he hollers let him go!

Eenee, Meenee. Mainee, Mo!

You-are-It!

This would now be the time for me to confess that I also said that word out on the playground.  But I didn’t. I do remember how it was often used to settle marble-trading disputes. I also remember kids feeling a perverse thrill that they could vicariously participate in the larger, social ugliness.  

But this was a word that could not have been more forbidden in our house, a word I never uttered after the day — at the age of six – that my wonderful Dad heard me say it and placed a bar of Ivory Soap in my mouth and twisted it around a few times.

But I am stuck. The rhyme echoes and echoes.  My nightmare.  My daymare. A rhyme. I want to fully celebrate that Barack Obama will be my President. I will. But the intruder is a rhyme, an echo of an ugliness that was part of what delayed this day for so long.  

Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!

And that is where I am right now at 3 a.m.  

1955.

Knowing that at virtually the very moment that Emmett Till faced his final horror, at the very moment that his mother Mamie first heard the news, kids in my neighborhood were probably out in a park – shooting marbles or playing tag – and reciting:

Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!

Catch a nigger by the toe!

If he hollers let him go!

Eenee, Meenee. Mainee, Mo!

You-are-It!

 A rhyme. A nightmare.  My nightmare.

Our nightmare.

 The fact that it is election day has all but hidden the fact that today the US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Docket No. 07-582.   Fox is unambiguously on the side of free speech,  and is fighting the tendency  of the FCC in recent years to punish broadcasters for ”isolated and fleeting utterances” that it deems indecent. The vagueness of the FCC’s indecency standard is very much at issue. 

An isolted utterance would, for example, occur if — in a post-game locker room interview – a player  remarked on live television that he didn’t give a f____ing  s_____t  what the coach thought of his five missed pass receptions.  

If you care about censorship, read the accounts of today’s arguments and watch for a final decision.  And if you are really interested, check out the slew of amicus briefs filed by all manner  of organizations opposing censorship.  And some favoring it.

What makes the case interesting is that the indecency at issue is spontaneous, and not planned in advance or written in a script.  Some of us support the right of a broadcasters to do even that, but the FCC in this case is essentially arguing for — and FOX is opposing — the idea that stations  should be held responsible for accidents! 

Ridiculous.  While these cases almost always involve defending someone’s right to say something stupid and even offensive, this is precisely how we establish and protect the principle of free expression.

When you’ve done retail politics in Brooklyn, not much surprizes you. But I just heard something that has me stunned.

Senator Charles Schumer voted this morning in a Brooklyn election district I know well. And he just said on MSNBC that he waited an hour. This is really a very big deal.

I cannot recall one election in that election district in which voters  had to wait for a hour.  Given that New York state is safe for Obama, and that there are no hotly contested races going on in Schumer’s neighborhood, it seems that the sheer excitement and history of the national election is driving turnout.

Without starting to tell hilarious stories about Brooklyn politics, let’s just say that general elections  are virtually never contested there.  All the action is in the Democratic primaries. But did we have fun! Brooklyn politics was my basic training in retail persuasion. 

As my students know, I go out of my way to create an atmopshere in my classes that is safe for students of all political persuasions –  Democrat, Republican, and all other parties. But neither have I hidden my preference for Senator Obama.

And sometime later today, Ill try to share the incredible emotion I feel as I cast my vote for him.  Some of you in your 20s and 30s will probably end the day sick of hearing older people talk about how they never expected to see a day when an African American would have a serious chance of being elected President. I’m sick of hearing myself say it!

But I might never stop. Today is a day that is haunted by the ghosts of people — from famous to anonymous — who died to make this possible.

Have we erased the  national shame that is the American experience with race?  Of course not. Anger and privilege and bias don’t simply disappear. They don’t simply fade away without a fight.

But the distance we have travelled is nothing short of incredible.

I know that one person’s nostlagia  can be another person’s mind-numbing boredom. Sometimes the  things from the past that most touch us, that most bring us to life, are things which no audience — not even an audience of one — is eager to hear about.

So some of us keep a lot of our memories to ourself.  Or we try.

Last week, I had the still shocking experience of learning that one of my graduate students here in NYC grew up in the same southern California suburb I did, and that her family owned the Five Lanterns Chinese Retaurant, in Covina, California, the place I had my first job.

I was a bus boy in that wonderful Chinese Restaurant, one of only two Chinese Restaurants for miles around in a suburb that — to this day — I recall as one of the least diverse places I have ever seen or visited.

The result is that, in the last week,  I have been overwhelmed with memories  of a town, West Covina, California, from which I had supposedly escaped close to 40 years ago.  And the West Covina never comes without a mention of Covina, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn.

I may have more to say later: For now, all I am feeling is the flimsiness of concepts  like escaping,  “getting away from it all,” or starting over. They may be occasionally useful in the course of a lifetime, but it seems that I have rarely  been able to truly escape or get away from anything. 

Memories, joys, and hurts travel. And travel well.

I dropped an enormous tray of dishes at that restaurant. On a busy weekend night.  And until last week, that tray was gone forever.

It’s back.

Gene Jones: A Brilliant Performance

Early in the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men, Javier Bardem – playing a sadistic killer — faces down a meek, old gas station owner, played brilliantly by Gene Jones.

The result?

One of the best written, acted, and directed scenes of relentless menace that I have ever seen.

Two men in an old gas station.

See this piece in the LA Times about the actor Gene Jones, who in several minutes delivers a brilliant, electrifying performance.

A lot of my political side – especially the passion and anger that I feel about issues and candidates — never makes it on to this blog. And I thought I would explain.

I am not without strongly held political beliefs.  Neither am I at all covert about them.  I will often share my basic opinions so students can have some sense of who I am as a political and social being. Feigned neutrality, I have always thought, would be its own form of dishonesty.

But anyone who has taken my classes (or who ever will in the future) knows of my special concern for the feelings and attitudes of students who I either suspect or know might disagree with me. As much as anything, I want my classes to be safe places for the expression of political views from anyplace on the political spectrum, and even for views so marginalized that they might not have even made it on to the mainstream spectrum!  The joy of clashing ideas, especially when marked by both passion and civility – is a special thrill of teaching at a university. If we can’t do it in a university, where can we do it?

Having said that, I did start this blog especially for my students at Hunter College.  Media Studies is a rapidly evolving field and is being defined and redefined in public discourse every single day. The main purpose of my blog — Media and Mayhem — is to share this ongoing change with students as it unfolds. Last week, for example, a historic moment occurred in the evolution of the Internet: More people saw Tina Fey’s impressions of Governor Palin on-line than saw them when they were originally broadcast on NBC.

I suppose I mention all this because we now face the last ten days of a long, hard-fought campaign for the presidency. And because I support one of the candidates, Senator Obama, I wanted to make absolutely sure that all of you who are Hunter students feel absolutely free to either publicly or privately express views that might be to the contrary. You are welcome to raise them in class, to come see me, or to be in touch via email.  Some of you already have, and this touches me very deeply.

Keep it coming. And if in the next week I blurt out something in my excitement or enthusiasm – or in my anger and frustration – know that your contrary expression of  excitement or anger will be even more welcome, and will be met with civility and respect.

We are living through an extraordinarily historic election, taking place amidst economic chaos and wars on several fronts. Now is not the time to be shy, silent or reticent, whether you support Senator McCain, Senator Obama, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, or any one of a number of other candidates.  As Edward R. Murrow once said in a broadcast that many of my students have seen:

 “We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, we will remember we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular…. There is no way for a citizen of the republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom where ever it still exists in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

Online Divorcee Jailed After Killing Virtual Hubby

Morgan suggesting that asking when online journalism will pay for the newspaper are asking wrong question. Newspapers in the traditional sense won’t survive.  The trick will be to disaggregate the following traditional componenents of newspapers and see which will  thrive and survive in a digital age:

Local news and editing

distribution

ad sales and marketing

printing

digital

Newspapers do have exisiting d  ansuccessful ad sales and marketing structures that may be ready to support a new newspaper model.

But printing is an enormous expense pulling whole companies down.  It is unlikely that any new model will have any serious printing component.

Check out the live feed. How do news outlets recreate themselves in a digital age?

Today I am at NewBizNews Summit at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, an incredible initiative of The McCormick Foundation and The MacArthur foundation and Professor Jeff Jarvis of the J-School.

Jeff’s blog Buzzmachine.com is an indispensable guide to the dizzying change in the digital communications world. Today’s summit, at the risk of oversimplification, is about where – in a world governed by a new model of news as process rather than product –  will the money be made? How will news be reported? What new business models for news will thrive?

More to come.

The night that John Kennedy first debated Richard Nixon in 1960 was, in some ways, the night my life began. I might have only been 9 years old, but I was a strange 9 year-old.  Even then, I knew that something with incredibly high stakes was unfolding, a real-time face-off that would have real consequences.  

I was hooked. Debates became my Olympics, my World Series, my Super Bowl.

In graduate school, when I had to complete a so-called qualifying paper, I wrote a comprehensive review of the literature on the effects of presidential debates on voting behavior. And I watched and re-watched hours of debate video.  I remember thinking how embarrassed I would be if anyone knew that I actually found video of the first Carter-Ford presidential debate to be entertaining.

I should confess that with all this work, I never really got very interested in the substance of these debates. To me, they were the highest form of theatrical, hand to hand combat, in which the weapons were impressions, body language, turns of phrases, and images. I loved the tension.

So why can’t I stand watching them anymore?

Any student of debates learns early on that many have been the occasion for inadvertent statements and other so-called “gotcha” moments. Candidates from both parties have accidentally made statements that quickly come to be seen as the “turning points” of campaigns. One candidate’s tongue slips, the other candidate pounces, and the world turns upside down.

I hate that. I hate that such an important decision can hinge on one unintentional mistake or misunderstanding.

I know that the counter-argument is that debates are precisely the high-stakes situations in which a person’s real feelings and attitudes are revealed. That might be so.  But what about the slip-up that comes out in a way that does not reflect the views of a candidate? What about a simple mistake?

Do we really want to allow these moments to change the course of history?

I have always felt that the most unfair example of these “gotcha” moments took place in the 1976 debates between President Gerald Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter. At one point, President Ford, in response to a question about the Soviet Union, stated:

“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

Carter argued that Ford didn’t understand the full extent of the domination exerted by the Soviets in Eastern Europe.  Yet it has always seemed perfectly clear to me that what Ford meant to suggest was that the United States refused to concede that the domination was a permanent reality. And that the people in those countries had not accepted this domination.

But the “Ford Doesn’t Get the Soviets” narrative caught on. My candidate – Carter — won. I guess I shouldn’t complain.

That may be ancient history. But it is also the reason I can no longer watch debates.  We are still a people who love the politics of the car crash.  We love the possibility that a collision could occur at any moment.  We watch politics as if it was the NASCAR title rather our future on the line.  

And I simply can no longer stand the tension of watching an event that might turn on a “gotcha” moment, on a slip of the tongue, rather than a well-crafted argument.

I am glad we have debates. They are about more than “gotcha” moments.  Everybody should watch them. The enormous audiences  may be as close as we come to a collective, national, civic gathering.

I just won’t be there with you. Too nerve-wracking.

Trust me.

I am as baffled as most of you are about the financial upheaval of the last few weeks. I don’t understand derivatives, cascading effects, and the intricacies of mortgage-backed securities.

But I have spent many years studying what sociologists call moral panic, sudden shocks to a social system in which it seems that the most basic assumptions about right and wrong, about the norms and values we take for granted, suddenly come undone.  The concept was developed by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, whose work I admire greatly. I have been mostly interested in sudden violence, but any sudden, disorienting shock to a social system can rip away at the social fabric.

For all their seemingly unique horror, so much of what usually follows these events is predictable. Society rushes to the moral barricades. Portraits of evil are drawn so we all can share a collective image of who we are supposed to hate. Heroes are constructed who will save us. And scapegoats – those who brought this evil to our doorsteps — are sought and stigmatized and made to pay.

It’s the scapegoating that’s on my mind.

Social shocks are almost immediately followed by a hunt for the guilty. We need to know who to blame. We find it almost unbearable to live in a state of uncertainty in which a sudden, disturbing event cannot be blamed on a specific person or group. We need to see the face of evil. We need to hear its voice. We need to construct a narrative with a villain who knew what he or she was doing, yet still chose to act in a purposefully venal manner.

And then we need to join together and focus our collective loathing on the group or individual who tried to hurt us. Congressional hearings are wonderful settings in which the guilty are brought to the public scaffold and publicly humiliated. Right and wrong becomes clear during these rituals and we symbolically purge ourselves of those who would do us harm.

Yet this is precisely the point at which we often really screw things up.

Months after the panic has calmed, we almost always look back and see that, in our rush to the scaffold, we settled on the wrong culprit. Or we see how, without even realizing it, we lost the ability to see how an event might have resulted from the complex interaction of multiple culprits, or that even we ourselves might not have been blameless.

I was thinking of this as I watched former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld testify Monday on Capitol Hill. Trust me. You could waterboard me and I still wouldn’t be able to explain the dynamics of this financial collapse or what role Richard Fuld did or did not play. My forever secret math SAT score stands as silent testimony to why no one in their right mind should ever look to me for any economic wisdom.  And I certainly don’t know what Richard Fuld knew and when he knew it.

What I do know, though, is that my panic alarm starts to ring anytime I see someone publicly demonized in the midst of traumatic events. It’s not that they might not turn out to be demons. Or worse. I just wish we were all more aware of just how bad we are at assigning blame at these moments when we are afraid, when we are angry.

To suggest that events and their causes are complex is not what we want to hear right now, especially when we feel like somebody – anybody — has to pay. The question is whether, with all this anger, we can hold fire and struggle to see events in all their complexity before we decide who we should blame.

Fairness is never more important than in those moments when we are most tempted to ignore it.

There will never be another IZ. Listen to the sublime guitar riff in the middle. 

Henehene Kou ‘Aka

Kalalau Valley, Kauai, Hawaii

I repeat, there will never be another IZ.

While some partisans might fairly consider me overly cautious, my tendency is to not immediately jump into all sorts of controversies. I prefer to wait and watch as they play out. I have enough experience with news coverage and the public arena to know that — even in several days — what looked certain might not end up being certain at all.

This is especially the case with public figures. I like to see what they say and how they handle themselves before I jump in with an expert opinion that turns out to be anything but expert, or even correct.

I try to be fair. I like to be judicious. Maybe I remember times when I felt I was judged prematurely and unfairly. I simply am not comfortable being part of any initial attack-pack.

So I have waited on Governor Palin.

Until today.

I just saw the video below. Watch it and decide for yourself.  Watch it closely. Think about it. Replay it.

I am quite serious: For the first time in a long time, I have really been stunned into silence. 

Now you might get a hint of why the  life of a professor of media studies can be so downright joyous.

A sociologist of media and culture is like a free-range chicken. We are dead serious about the impact of media and culture on society, but we are relatively free to find that impact in all sorts of nooks and crannies, past and present.

Which leads me to the great Ronnie Dyson.

This morning I accidentally popped the original Broadway  soundtrack of “Hair” into my computer. I saw the show performed by the original company, and I have always loved the music, despite the saccharine covers of the songs that have been recorded over the years.  It does, though, leave me  with complicated, mixed feelings. So much of the enthusiasm and lunacy I felt when I saw the original cast in 1969 seems so distant.

And all those dreams. Some lead to dead ends. Others became life-long journeys. So much seemed possible. 

And then I thought of Ronnie Dyson. Joyous, hilarious, gifted Ronnie Dyson. You might remember this song:

Ronnie Dyson was an ebullient, infectiously enthusiastic performer who brought the original cast of Hair to life. He had a  sweet and powerful tenor voice and a wicked sense of humor. He was mischievous. If Hair was a celebration of life, Ronnie was the fuel, the raw material. He seemed to live more fully than everyone else.

Except that he didn’t. This morning I woke up, vowing to send him an email and tell him of the impression he made,  only to learn that — after making several memorable recordings — he died in 1990 of heart failure. He was 40 years old.

Thank you. Ronnie Dyson. Bringer of joy. Thank you.

Guilty as charged.  Somehow I missed an incredible resource for anyone interested in news and digital media.

Online Narratives is a treasure trove of outstanding examples of interactive narratives and multi-media journalism. It is a project of The Online News Association.

One really moving and vivid piece of work is  a feature about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica  created by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Check it out.

I have a debt to repay.

In 1969, my senior year at South Hills High School in West Covina, California, I was introduced to a filmmaker named Kent Mackenzie. He was interviewing kids at my high school for a feature documentary about the struggles of being an adolescent. He asked me to be in it, but I was going off to college and couldn’t do it.

But Kent saw I was fascinated by film and he invited me to see his studio. If my memory serves me right, he worked out of Churchill Films in LA.  He  gave me a master class, and then showed me a film that he had made while a student at USC. It was called The Exiles. After that, he had me down a few more times and introduced me to the world of documentary film.  I have never made films, but I have lived and breathed and studied them for years.

It was one of the most unselfish things anyone has ever done for me. He shared his wisdom, but what remains unforgettable was the love he had for his craft and how freely he shared that with me.

I never saw him again. Story over.

No, story not over. Not by a long shot.

Kent died, much too young, several years later.  But I was haunted by the film’s characters for years — poor Native Americans living in the small Los Angeles enclave of Bunker Hill who had come from impoverished reservations in the late 1950s. These were people neither here nor there, people at the margins of a society that didn’t even want to know what to do with exiles.  And LA was a city happily ridding itself of any unsightly enclaves it could find.   Kent’s exiles would be gone in several years.  But not before he told their story.

The Exiles is a brilliant combination of spontaneous verité and staged scenes.  It is rendered in a black and white film that had more colors and hues and shadows than Technicolor. What I didn’t know then was that this guy who had been so warm and helpful was a master cinematographer. And that he filmed it with a slew of other master cinematographers.

Almost 40 years pass.

And then, in 2003, Thom Andersen’s wonderful documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” was released. It included scenes from The Exiles.  Milestone Films, supported by producers Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett (filmmaker of another quiet classic, Killer of Sheep), and in cooperation with USC’s film archivist Valarie Schwan, brought the film to preservationist Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

The result was that the restored version of The Exiles was released this past July to worldwide acclaim. Milestone Films is itself a gift to the film community, and its founders Dennis Doros and Amy Heller were also responsible for the release of Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. (Definitely check out their catalogue.)