There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.TANSTAAFL.

Anybody recognize that? Where it comes from? What it refers to?

This past weekend was the 100^th birthday of Robert A. Heinlein. I was not there, though I’d wanted to be. You see, Robert A. Heinlein was one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world, and when I was a child, his books informed my apprehension of just about everything. It might be questioned whether one man deserves the kind of press Heinlein gets. Even when he was alive (he passed away in 1988) he was controversial but there were still many places you could walk into where not a soul would know who he was. I think he’s important because, in a way, he made modern America.

What? A science fiction writer? Made America?

Such a statement demands clarification.

A biography is soon to be out by a gentleman named Bill Patterson. You can read it, read about the man who once wore the title “The Dean of Space Age Fiction”, and judge for yourself. I won’t go into huge detail about his life or work here. I want to make a smaller, more pointed observation.

In 33 novels and a significant number of short stories, Robert A. Heinlein established a didactic approach to science fiction that has been copied, improved, debated, revered, and hated since he began his career in 1938. Heinlein was born in Missouri. He graduated from Annapolis. He received a medical discharge from the Navy in the early thirties for TB. He eventually moved to California and worked ardently for Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign during the Depression. This surprises most people today because after the Cold War was fully launched and engaged, he became an icon of right wing militarism, a reputation solidified by the 1959 publication of his novel Starship Troopers. In it, Heinlein lays out the notion that the vote is too important to simply be handed out. It must be earned. He has a society in which only military service grants the franchise. It is otherwise mildly socialist, an aspect which most people seem to overlook. Humanity, in the novel, is at war with the Bugs, a hive species bent on our destruction. Heinlein lays out philosophic justifications for the kind of total war that seems necessary. He stops just short of glorifying militarism, portraying as a necessary component of survival of culture.

Heinlein was an early defender of our incursion in Vietnam, which forms the springboard from which his novel Glory Road is launched. He believed nuclear war was likely and thought people who refused to come to terms with it softheaded and bound of extinction. He wrote about it in a couple of stories and one novel in particular, Farnham’s Freehold, which drew criticism for other reasons.

Paradoxically, for a man so identified with the Right, he was also an advocate of sexual laissez faire and in his later novels portrayed all manner of novel association between men and women. He did in fact “invent” the waterbed, though he did not patent the idea. He was also anti formalized religion. There are facets to the man the Right, as we see it today, would be hard pressed to accommodate. He virtually launched the counter culture with Stranger In A Strange Land, published in 1961. (more…)

Is it just me, or are the interviews you see on television getting worse and worse?  There are exceptionally good interviewers, of course (such as Bill Moyers).  Bad interviews are the norm, however.  This is a shame, because most bad interviews could be cured if only the interviewers would follow a few basic rules

Before I go further, I should make it clear that my frustration is with interviews that are serious attempts to discuss a topic with a guest in order to inform or entertain the audience.  I am excluding from this critique interviews on comedy shows (such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert), where the interviewer is expected to interject his or her personality with more gusto or even to toy with the guest. 

Without further ado, here are 10 basic rules for conducting effective interviews:

1.  The interviewer needs to shut up and let the guest talk.  How often is it that an interviewer just can’t hold back and ends up dominating the interview, failing to allow the guest a fair chance to talk?  I’ve often watched interviews by Charlie Rose that remind me of this point.  Although Charlie books some terrific guests and does some excellent work, he is one of those interviewers who is often incapable of staying out of the way.  Many interviews end up being “about Charlie.”  In the legal field, the trick to effective direct examination of a witness is to ask brief questions that allow the witness to “bloom” in front of the jury.  If successful, the lawyer asking the questions almost seems invisible.  Many television interviewers have much to learn in this regard.
 
2.  Even if the interviewer knows the topic well (usually they don’t know the topic nearly as well as their guest), let the guest talk about it.  Get out of the way of the guest and let the guest actually have the necessary contiguous blocks of time in order to strut his or her stuff.  Those guests are experts at what you called them on the show to talk about.  Truly, if they were worthy of being on your show, they are capable of filling those relatively few minutes of time. 

3.  Allow the guest an opportunity to put his or her best foot forward.  How often do you see an over-eager interviewer jumping in to interrupt the guest?  Really, I don’t care if the interviewer knows a lot of things about the topic.  I generally would rather hear it from the guest.  I don’t want to hear the interviewer paraphrasing or summarizing the guest’s own book in front of the guest.  I’d much rather hear the guest do that.  Sometimes, of course, an interviewer has no intent on letting the guest actually express a view point.  Many Bill O’Reilly interviews are cases in point.

4.  Don’t put words in the mouth of the guest and then, without allowing a guest to respond, ask the guest an unrelated question.  How often have you heard this technique: “As we all know, President Bush is really doing a great job over in Iraq, now tell me, who is the odds on choice for next president of the United States?”  In a courtroom, the proper objection would be “compound question.” (more…)

Paris Hilton, reality show star, accidental internet hardcore porn celebrity, and heiress to part of the Hilton hotel fortune is spending the next three weeks in the celebrity wing of the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood for a conviction for drunk driving, driving on a suspended license, probation violation, and reckless endangerment.

My question is: Is this news? I did see it on the web version of my local paper.

Perhaps it is news because a super-rich spoiled brat acting her irresponsible part was actually convicted of something, and then somewhat punished.

Perhaps it is news because Miss H. said that she didn’t opt for a cushy paid-for detention cell because she wanted to prove that she really was just like everyone else. I guess everyone else gets to stay in the private celebrity wing of the nicest state-funded jail in L.A. county.

On a deeper page in the same “paper” there is a comparably sized article that mentions that between 30,000 and 120,000 people are homeless after an earthquake in China yesterday. The number depends on how many homes can be re-occupied after the clean-up.

Why are CD sales down?  Rather than blaming piracy, this article in Business Week suggests that there are only so many hours in a day, and we are increasingly busy entertaining ourselves in ways other than listening to CDs:

There are only so many hours in a day for each of us — the consumers of entertainment — to consume entertainment. Various new forms of entertainment that catch on have to displace some of the time we spent on our former diversions.

While CD sales are down, the number of households with DVD players more than tripled over the past five years to 84 million and sales of DVDs rose to 1.1 billion from 313 million in 2001. Does anyone really think that consumers could buy 800 million more DVDs, worth $10 billion or more, without cutting back on some other entertainment spending? Similarly, the number of households with broadband Internet connections almost quadrupled to over 36 million. At $30 a month, that’s another $9 billion a year right there. The number of households with access to video on demand hit 24 million in 2005, ten times the 2001 level.

This article backs up its thesis with some interesting statistics regarding the way we’ve reallocated our entertainment hours over the past five years. 

Pleassssse, somebody.  Wake me up.  I thought we were all done with Princess Diana.  But we’re not, because this is the 10th year anniversary of her death.  In other words, it’s a terrific opportunity to dust her off and to put her back up on the pedestal so that we can envy her, admire her for her so-called accomplishments and (most of all) become entranced with her image.

While waiting at a pharmacy, I leafed through the June 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine because Princess Diana’s photo is boldly featured on the front cover.  As I picked it up, I thought “Not again . . .”  This issue of Good Housekeeping also features a hagiography (what else was ever written about Princess Diana?) The reappearance of Diana aggravated me enough that I’m now sitting down to aggravate you with this rant.

The article describes Diana as “young, luminous and full of promise.”  We are told that “she was worried about doing the right thing.”  In fact, she was “saintly and endlessly giving.” I have heard it all before, though, and I’ve never been impressed with these sorts of accolades.  After all, Diana lived a plush life of glitz.  She mingled with her favorite musicians (such as Elton John) and she made unending appearances at fancy dinner parties where she wore her fancy gowns and smiled her fancy smile.  She “passionately followed music theatre and ballet.”

That’s what this article tells me, anyway.  It also tells me that she was “a good friend” to some people.  Talk about a low bar.  Truly, she was born into the British aristocracy and had the good life handed to her on a silver platter.  At a minimum, she should have at least been able to enjoy the arts and not piss off everybody.  Isn’t that what we would expect of anyone who had everything handed to them, that they would at least do something for the world? 

Shouldn’t rich and famous people of leisure be lending their names and images to worthy causes? Diana’s causes were ridding the world of landmines and working against discrimination of AIDS patients.  These aren’t bad things, of course, but you have to ask yourself what would people would have thought of her had she (again, a person of great wealth and leisure) not lent her name and image to some worthy causes?   Further, doing a bit of charity is a relatively cheap Machiavellian maneuver for portraying that one has “character,” especially anyone willing to present herself as a “Princess.”

Diana’s shtick worked impressively.  In the weeks following her death, more words were written about Diana (and her so-called accomplishments) than could ever be read by any human being in a lifetime.  It was truly an unimaginable quantity of material, and almost all of it was motivated by something other than real world assessment.  As I read some of it, I couldn’t help but think that there were thousands of people of real character in every major city who have worked hard to really make something of themselves despite insurmountable odds.  There are real people who have poured their energies back into their communities, where their tortured upbringings would suggest that we had no right to expect such generosity.

Diana died on August 31, 1997.  The frenzied media ran out of superlatives to describe Diana’s great accomplishments after they reached “saint.”  It was with some schadenfreude, then, that I contemplated the September 5, 1997 death of Mother Teresa.  After all, if Princess Diana was a “saint,” what was Mother Teresa?  With Mother Teresa’s death only one week after Diana’s, the media was exposed.  It had not really been reporting the news.  It was merely manipulating its readers to sell ads.  Further, Diane, and especially dead Diana, served as an excuse for a social lek.  To a large extent, Diana was not really about Diana.  (more…)

I’ve always been fascinated by the moon. Perhaps it was my father’s work with NASA from the 1960’s through the 1990’s, or maybe just a fascination with shiny things.

I was sitting in my back yard watching the fireflies and bats at dusk, when I was inspired to grab my camera and take a snapshot of the moon and Venus over the neighbor’s roof.

Okay, I used a tripod for the 2 second exposure, and my camera is a decent super-zoom digital (35-500mm equiv). I wanted to show the Earthlight, so the light side is seriously washed out. The detail would have been better had I used a telescope, but that wasn’t really my objective (so to speak). You can make out the major “seas” in the light reflected from the Earth to the moon and back, again.

As the bats flitted and feasted and dusk drew its curtain, I noticed that I’d watched long enough to see Venus gain on the moon! When I started watching, Venus was halfway down the moon (measured against the neighbor’s roof). By the time I thought to take this picture, Venus was half a moon’s breadth closer to the sun. In the time it takes to watch a prime-time show, I saw direct proof that the moon moves to the east relative to the sun. Well, at least relative to leisurely Venus.

I think that more people should take the time to observe simple things like this for themselves. If they did, my teenage peers might not have saddled me with the nickname “Moonbeam” when I was seen patiently watching the moon move across the sky one summer evening.

Jane Fonda succeeded, using some rather unusual techniques.   I’ve really enjoyed watching Colbert toy with his guests, but I’ve never before seen him fall so far out of character.

BTW - It appears that Colbert’s videos have been removed from sites like YouTube.   Many of them are available at Colbert on Demand.

Check out Sony’s 1975 promo for Betamax.  More specifically, this is a seven-minute vintage promotional video for the Sony Trinitron/Betamax console   You probably know at least part of the Betamax story:  Betamax, a superior video product, was beat out by VHS. 

I am sharing this video because it serves quite well as a time capsule.  It takes us back to an era when television watchers could not time-shift.  You either watched a television show when everyone else did or you missed it completely.   It was a time when people also had far fewer viewing options.  Workers were far more likely to find someone at the water cooler who saw the same show they watched the previous evening.   Now, with DVDs and Tivo (along with our aging VCR’s), we don’t generally share our reactions to things that appeared recently on TV, with the exception of sports events.  It makes me wonder whether this shift has contributed to the fact that so many people are addicted to sports spectating.  We’ve commented on that phenomenon before (see here).  In sum, we can’t bond well over most television shows, because we watch them a different times.  On the other hand, sports events are worthless to most people unless they are live.  Therefore, there is still plenty of opportunity to bond over sports events at work (and elsewhere).

As you can see from this promo, Sony advertised its Betamax as a chance to “control the past,” to play (or replay) shows anytime.  Thanks to Betamax, there was no more excuse for missing your favorite programs or squabbling over who gets to choose the channel.  Young adults might think this is all boring and obvious, but this promo really does illustrate how different things were not too long ago.

I couldn’t help but notice the smallness of the television in this promo.  It looks to be about a 20” screen.  Also notice the dated way in which the product was presented.  Remember that this was state of the art advertising back in 1975, complete with rolling fog and twinkling stars.  It all looks so hokey now.  The voice over seems so pretentious.

By the way, it’s difficult to buy a VCR anymore.   I recently needed one to convert some of my old VHS tapes, using a DVD burner I already owned.  I went to Best Buy, where I was told that they simply don’t sell VCR’s anymore (though you can buy DVD/VCR combos).  The salesperson told me to go to Target or Kmart.  I went to Target, where there was only one model available, costing $50.  It was a full-featured model that would have been unthinkably expensive had it been available in 1977.  

Time marches on . . .

Not nearly enough, I think, has been posted on DI about things which I consider just as important as politics, economics, and social issues.  That’s all well and good–DI offers a necessary forum for viewpoints which, while becoming more available in the public discourse, nevertheless need all the voices it can find.  But if we’re talking about the “human animal” then some attention ought to be paid to the things that feed into the soul, if you will, of human beings.  And they can be just as political, just as inflammatory, just as controversial as stem cell research or new taxes or who the A.G. fired this week.  We need to remember occasionally why we even have something called Civilization.  So I want to talk about something important.

Music.  Specifically some discs I’ve acquired in last year or so that I think need some attention.

I live inside music. Sometimes I have a soundtrack playing inside my skull during the day. Growing up going to movies as a weekly ritual with my parents, it always seemed sad to me that “real life” didn’t have a score–things would be so much sweeter, you would know when the momentous event was imminent by the way the string section swelled ominously, or when you were about to get kissed…

Anyway, I sometimes joke that if I had it do all over again, I’d be a jazz pianist. I stumbled on jazz rather late in life, after having first gone through rock’n’roll and classical. I don’t play well enough to actually make money as a musician, but I’ve been gigging once a month at a church open-mic for the past year (I know, I know, I’m an atheist, what am I doing at a church?  Well, there are friends involved and it’s music and…never mind), and it’s been pure joy. So who knows? I may yet find myself with a third career.

But what I wanted to talk about here is some newer music that most folks, I’ll wager, don’t even know about.

Classical.

Probably like most people, I used to think of classical (which includes Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Neoclassical, and so forth) as just “old music” written by dead guys with no amps. The three Bs–Bach, Beethoven, Brahms–and all their musical progeny. I always believed it was sacrosanct–that if, for instance, you didn’t like something, the problem was yours, that you didn’t understand it, not the music’s. It never occurred to me as a teenager that this kind of music had continued to be written and performed, continuously, even up to the present day, even with one example hitting me in the ear every time I saw a movie.

Some of the best 20th Century classical music is locked up in soundtracks. We all know about Korngold and those glorious Robin Hood-type excursions. John Williams is an heir to Korngold. As pure music, some of that material is incredible, and some very heavy composers wrote some of it. Vaughan Williams did a few soundtracks, and Leonard Bernstein did the soundtrack to “On The Waterfront.” It’s snobbery that implies “serious” composers never did movies–Stravinsky did stage plays, as did Prokofiev, so what’s the difference?

That said, however, as pure music, the form has suffered a bit of neglect on the part of audiences. I’ve been to symphony premiers of new pieces and seen empty seats in the hall. It’s a shame and we should be ashamed. This is the fountain from which musical aesthetics flow to all forms, whether we recognize it or not, and it deserves attention.

I have in front of me three CDs I’ve acquired in the last couple of years, one I just bought this weekend, and I want to recommend them.

I have little patience with those “orchestral” versions of rock band oeuvres. The first one I heard, decades ago, was an Andre Kostelanetz album of Chicago’s music. Chicago only had three studio albums out at the time. Mr. Kostelanetz, like so many of his generation, really didn’t “get” rock music, and it showed. He sensed there was meat there, something substantial, that had things to offer the musical connoisseur, but he failed to capture it, and the album was awful. I’ve never heard much improvement.

Until. Youth and Jaz Coleman got together and produced an orchestral album of Pink Floyd. The London Philharmonic plays it. The thing that makes this light years ahead of all the other orchestralizations is that these two gentlemen Got It. They did not do transcriptions of the Pink Floyd originals and then arrange them for orchestra–they took the music apart and rewrote it as if it had been intended for orchestra in the first place. They caught the soul. It is a glorious album. (An example of this reimagining is demonstrated on the album itself by the presence of two versions of Time, and while both are the same melody and theme, they are very different renderings.) All the tracks are taken from Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. The breadth of what orchestral music can do is there, to be turned up and immersed in.

The second album is by another rock artist, guitarist Steve Hackett formerly of Genesis. Hackett is an incredible guitarist. His solo work has transcended most of what he did with Genesis, and when he was with Genesis the band was at a creative peak. I would argue that Genesis in the 70s was the quintessential bridge band, between rock and classical/romantic. Live they were superb. Most of Hackett’s solo work has been in electric guitar, rock format, but I found this one offered through a Classical Music club–A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Acoustic guitar with the Royal Philharmonic. They are tone poems and program pieces set to the Shakespeare, Hackett’s impression of the play. He proves here to be a composer of the first water. It’s sort of a concerto format, the orchestra counterpointing his solo guitar work, but it’s not composed in traditional concerto style. Eighteen tracks, blending together artfully, more like a motion picture soundtrack, but without the obvious predetermined aspects–you know, the love theme, the chase, the revelation, etc.

Now we come to the reason I decided to write this. The newest one. Not quite so new, it was released in 1997, but new enough.

Conversations In Silence, conducted by Paul Gambill leading the Nashville Chamber Orchestra.

There are six pieces on this album, two of them compositions by a woman who has clearly drunk deep of Aaron Copland–Conni Ellisor. She wrote the two pieces under commission for the NCO, and the one that caused me to buy the disc is called Blackberry Winter. This is a remarkable piece. First, it’s a concerto. A dulcimer concerto. Right, I thought, a dulcimer…but the range she manages to draw out of it is stunning, and the string sections are redolent of autumn mountains, cold springs, and the possibilities of–

Well, everyone has their own response. I lie listening this music and am continually amazed at the emotions that rise to the surface, drawn by the deep confluence of motif and theme, and the complexity of sounds possible only through the vision of someone who really understands what music can do.

She has another piece on here, Conversations In Silence, which seems based on a different American composer’s template (I’ll let you guess who), and there are four other pieces by different composers.

One of these composers is Samuel Barber, who died in 1981. I was surprised he was still alive then myself. Barber was one of the best American composers of the 20th Century, but also one of the most neglected and underappreciated. His Adagio For Strings has become a movie soundtrack staple–almost a cliche–but a good deal of the rest of his body of work is considerably less well known, which is tragic. He was truly great. He had the range of the finest European composers of the day–like Benjamin Britten and William Walton–but with that uniquely American voice throughout. I have read that Barber was a bitter man in his later years. The piece included here is one of his last.

I have a reasonably good classical collection–not nearly as comprehensive as I’d like, but not bad–and one of the sections in it that has grown is the 20th Century section. I do not believe that, outside of a self-selected group, most of the American composers of that century are known. One of my favorite composers is Howard Hanson. He was a self-defined romantic composer and he can take his place beside Dvorak and Saint-Saen easily. Another American composer I admire greatly is Walter Piston–again, relatively unknown. Both these men should be in the libraries of any serious collector.

Sometime in the 50s, I think, an unfortunate event took place–the splitting of American culture into “popular” and “high”. Radio, 45 rpm records, the juke box, and, finally, television all contributed to divide the public. Now, people chose their taste all on their own, since no one forced them to stop listening to “serious” music. Many stations then played a great deal of the stuff, with educational commentary, some of it live performance by the best orchestras and conductors on the planet. But taste is something that all too often needs time and patience to acquire, and the advent of the “hit” record worked against that patience. The last truly serious music that had broad popular appeal in this country was jazz, and it very nearly died of neglect by the end of the Sixties.

You could argue that rock became serious. Much of it did. But it was not serious music when it drove jazz out of the marketplace, it was largely two-minute hit wonders with a catchy tune and a cute hook. Later, when serious musicians entered the rock idiom and tried to make substantial music with the form, another division occurred and the spectacle of people fighting about what was “good music” in rock centered on the difference between “danceable” and “listenable”. What the argument really was about had to do with whether one could assimilate all the nuance of a given tune on the first listen–popular–versus music that required–huh–patience and attention and maybe several listens.

So contemporary orchestras struggle for funding and societies are established for the express purpose of “preserving” great music. Static art–paintings and sculpture–have it a bit easier with museums. Music needs musicians to live and breathe and that requires more than a building in which to house the work.

I went through what may be a typical cycle for someone like me. Pop tunes led to hard rock led to a rediscovery of some of the classical underpinnings of progressive rock led to jazz led to…

Led to what? Led to a place where I can perceive music as a pure abstraction and hear it on its own terms, whatever the idiom. I listen for depth and richness and intent. The three combine in most of what we think of as “classical” music, and a lot can be found in jazz. It’s a mistake not to learn how to hear it, but once you do find your way into that level of soundscape, a lot that passes for “good” music just isn’t. The trouble is, it can take a long time to learn how to hear it.

In school, we may be exposed to compressed courses of classical music, which more often than not does to our music taste what lit classes do to our reading tastes–leach the joy out of the music (the books) and leave us feeling that if it was written by dead white males, it’s stale and useless.

Do yourself a favor and check out the three discs I’ve mentioned here. Between the three, you may discover that joy you thought this music lacked, and come to find that it’s not so dead after all.
 

I found this eight-minute video on reddit.com tonight. It was “Penned, Shot, chopped, and Scored by Jamin Winans.” I enjoyed it for it’s clean execution and thoughtfulness. According to this site, Spin has been the “winner of 35 film festival awards worldwide.”

While watching this video, I couldn’t help but think of chaos theory:

chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under certain conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect).

[Wordpress seems to be acting up tonight--it's not offering comment ability on the home page for this post. If you'd like to comment, hit the title of this post (which takes you to the permalink), then comment to your heart's content].

I’ve taken something of an accidental hiatus from the blog the past few months. “Real life” responsibilities left me rather distracted, and without a word, I “disappeared” from the face of the earth, as far as everyone at Dangerous Intersection knew anyway. Or, in my view, Dangerous Intersection perhaps “disappeared” from my radar. Either way, a community of people with whom I had communicated, traded knowledge and ideas suddenly vanished from the world entirely, and I from it. Because DI does not occupy the real world in any tangible sense for me, when I neglected it, it nigh did cease to exist. And likewise, I did not exist to the people who have known me only through it.

This concept got me thinking about the expanse of telecommunications we have in our hands, and what it may mean for real human relationships. Can we define faraway, supposed acquaintances who can vanish from our knowledge at any time (as I did) as “friends”? And, as this post’s title muses, what happens to my online network of psuedobuddies when I leave, or die?

I don’t mean to downplay the potential of online communication. People made due for centuries maintaining meaningful relationships with mere pen-pals, using a far less forgiving medium and time-frame. I think of the letters exchanged between the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for years upon years, across many miles, maintaining a friendship and respect nearly across the grave, as it turned out. Thus it can clearly happen that long-distance, barely-seen friends can have an impact on one another and form a meaningful bond.

If anything, the internet has expanded that possibility and given us all more access to other people- their work, their photos, their hobbies (like blogging or photography), their fanatic rantings. The immediacy of modern communication can give us more and more intimate long-distance friends. So much so, that we may feel we actually know these people, these identities constructed by the very individual (think of flatteringly-altered photos, omitted details on profiles, and the like).

But perhaps the intimacy comes on too quickly, and without warrant. It appears that psychologically, a screen and a few hundred miles can make us all more forthcoming with out brand new “friends” online. When psychologists want to study touchy issues- like drug use or less-accepted sex practices- they favor computer-administered surveys over oral interviews or even paper questionnaires. Something about that screen makes us open up and feel comfortable enough to divulge the gory details of our lives, apparently.
(more…)

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those of us with presumptions to actually be  writers–professional, that is, receiving coin for our sentences–are afflicted, I think, with a singular mix of obsession and insecurity. 

There is, however, no Twelve-Step Program for us, and even if there were, the initial admittance–that we are powerless to control the urge to run out streams of words on the off-chance someone might actually read them (or, more, enjoy them)–means for us that we are subsequently powerless to continue with the 12-step.  But, on the other hand, explaining our affliction, paradoxically, feeds the monkey–more words.  And explaining to each other about our affliction sustains us in times when we feel ignored by those who only read what we write.  We are subject to puzzled bemusement by people who “don’t understand”; made sometimes to feel guilty by people who want us to come out and play who, when told we are busy writing, complain that we’re not doing anything.

Writing requires both solitude and congeniality–to write about people, we must know them, but we are by nature prone to misanthropy.  The more we know people, sometimes, the less we like them, yet we must be sympathetic lest we ostracize the very public we need to support our habit.

But enough about me.  I have fiction to write.  I shall leave you all with the analysis.

You guessed it.   See here for Mother Jones’ tabulations.   On MSNBC it was Anna Nicole Smith by a 7 to 1 ratio.

You can read about it here, The Daily Times of Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court was moved on Tuesday against recent legislation allowing one-dish meals at weddings, with the contention that the law had reopened the door to wasteful expenses and weddings had become a financial burden for most people of the country.

The 22-page constitutional petition, filed by lawyer Tariq Aziz, said that rich people were blatantly violating the one-dish law. It said that this started happening only after parliament approved the one-dish bill and amended the Marriage Functions (Prohibition of Ostentatious Display and Wasteful Expenses) Ordinance 2000.

Before this amendment, there was a complete ban on serving food at weddings, and hosts could only serve hot or cold drinks, but on September 18, a law was passed under which a one-dish meal of curry, rice, roti bread and dessert could be served at weddings and related functions.

When I first read this article, I shook my head, thinking it was all so silly.  But then I remembered what I had recently written about consumer excesses in America,  excesses that are so prevalent that we now need to stop and squint to see the obvious.

Could it be that rather than a narrow-minded debate about ossified rituals, the Supreme Court that is holding the line in Islamabad is wisely squelching the beginnings of a beast that grew (yes, thousands of times beyond these meagre beginnings in Pakistan) to ensnarl so much of America with so many “needs” that we don’t really need.

Question: Are opulent American weddings any more meaningful than Pakastani weddings?  Similarly, are opulent American weddings any more meaningful than the pared-down American weddings held in the woods with a dozen close friends and a total food budget of $20?

Heather Havrilesky of Salon is a gifted writer, indeed.  She opens a recent article by discussing the delighted innocence of her baby girl, “my own happy tadpole, who just arrived on this overheated blue sphere four months ago, gazes at the branches of trees and feels the cold noses of dogs and pronounces them exciting and delightful.” But then the discussion moves on to what dawns on us adults when we realize what we once were: 

This is why so many parents of young kids look simultaneously giddy and heartbroken: They share in the raw happiness of little people (an intoxicating experience that’s not foreshadowed at all by spending time with other people’s messy little monsters) but they’re also forced to recognize what blind, embittered, joyless shells they themselves have become over the years, by comparison. When my little sponge stares, rapt, at blades of grass, it makes me wish that I could scrub off 36 years of neurotic tics and self-defeating habits, that I could forget about the burgeoning population of pedophiles uncovered by Dateline’s queasy “To Catch a Predator” series, that I could just appreciate the greenness of grass, not to mention the million or so other things that healthy, dry, well-fed middle-class people like myself have to feel thankful for …

For the schadenfreude, read the rest of her provocative article, “The dreams of aspiring Broadway stars and white rappers are crushed while a nation looks on, delighted!”   Havrilesky has put her finger on something that I never quite articulated so well.  Her focus is NBC’s Grease: You’re the One That I Want,” a show that “taps into a scary subculture of wannabe Sandys and Dannys out there, an odd assortment of humans with big saucer eyes and disturbingly earnest looks pasted on their faces.”

I haven’t been posting much lately–deadlines on other things, etc.–but I’m working on a couple of fairly thorny ones.  In the meantime, since it IS Super Bowl Sunday, I thought I might suggest a review of an older post of mine on the subject.  Link is here: 

http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=402

I haven’t changed my opinions about this much, but I am happy to see that some universities are beginning to turn around their priorities, and ratcheting back on their “box office” programs.

Me?  I’m doing a little reading, a little writing, a little…self improvement today.  No footsball (sic).  No beer.  No latent adolescent…well, you get the idea.

Have a good day.

The reclusive artist behind the Doonesbury comic strip is interviewed for the Washington Post Magazine (here) in October 2006, and I only found it today.

I figure that this fits neatly in with the recent theme of media issues.

For the past week, I have been posting information I’ve learned from the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis (January 12-14). This post is yet another in that series.

One of my favorite parts of the conference was the exhibit hall. There, I met dozens of exhibitors, representatives of organizations dedicated to alternative media and other media issues.

I decided to spend some time interviewing many of these exhibitors. I hope you will be impressed, as I was, by the exhibitors’ enthusiasm and dedication to numerous critically important media issues.

I certainly learned a lot by talking to these people. For those of you who are interested in pursuing media issues further, these videos will give you many links to worthy organizations. Of course, as another a starting point, consider visiting the site of Free Press, where you will find videos of all the major speeches. You will also find numerous suggestions for A) taking action to stop big media, B) preserve equal access to the Internet and C) to promote media reform.

Due to technical limitations of YouTube (most videos may not exceed ten minutes), I have broken my interviews into three separate segments. The first segment involves the following exhibitors:

• See Jane
• First Freedom First
• Real News
• Deep Dish TV
• Project Censored
• In These Times Magazine
• Public News Service

In the video immediately below, you can see my interviews with the following exhibitors:

• Social Service Research Council
• Consumers Union
• Free Speech TV
• Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood
• Common Dreams

In this final segment, you’ll hear from the following exhibitors:

• The Well-Connected Project: the Media Tracker
• The Action Coalition for Media Education
• The Media Education Foundation (consumer site here)
• Haymarket Books

This post is one of a continuing series of summaries I am creating regarding the sessions I attended of the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee.  Much more information about the conference, including audio of all of the sessions (and video of many) can be found at Free Press.

The academics that spoke at this particular session (“Media Scholars’ Policy Research Review”) were proof that academics (the people and their topics) can be exciting. 

Mary Kaplan is the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as well as the founder and director of the Norman Lear Center.  Kaplan has focused his research on the content and regulation of local television news.

The Lear Center studies “entertainment.”  Broadly defined, this is the “attention economy” which is no longer a separate economy from anything else.  Entertainment has expanded like an empire to consume all other activities.  Media and journalism are mere branches of entertainment.

Kaplan reports on research establishing that local TV news is, by far, the most important source of news and information for Americans. Almost unbelievably, 65% of Americans say that local television news is their number one source of information.

I write “unbelievably,” based on the widespread lack of serious news content. The fluff of local newscasts drives me to distraction.  See an earlier post on local TV news at this site.  Kaplan is troubled that most of the content of local news is “soft.”  News directors of TV stations have repeatedly told Kaplan that covering politics and public affairs is “ratings poison.”  As a result, “earned media” for politicians doesn’t exist anymore.  Almost all media covering politics is now “paid media.” 

In 1974 study showed that only 2.5% of election cycle local news concerned the California governor’s race.  In 1998, this amount of coverage fell to 0.45%.  When the news directors were asked why they didn’t cover these important issues, they told Kaplan “it’s too hard.”

In 2000, the Gore commission regarding the Digital Age (this commission included the chair of CBS) convinced stations to pledge to spend five minutes each day covering candidates for the 30 days prior to each election.  This pledge was voluntary and generally not monitored.  Kaplan’s group did monitor 58 markets to see what they were doing in the month prior to the election, however, and found that the stations averaged only 74 seconds of coverage per night.

Kaplan describes this as the “stick.”  The “carrot” is the Walter Cronkite Award, given by the Lear Center to stations that are doing an especially good job of reporting real news.

The statistics cited in this post are available at the Lear Center.

In 2002, the University of Wisconsin “Newslab” undertook an ambitious study.  The group studied 10,000 broadcasts in the top 50 markets of the United States.  The results showed that 6 out of 10 local television news programs in the top rated markets provided virtually no political coverage prior to the elections.  For those that did provide coverage, horse race politics (reporting the polls) dominated substantive coverage four to one.  Equally amazing for local “news” shows, 92% of broadcasts provided absolutely no coverage to the elections of state and local officials.

Susan Douglas teaches communications studies at the University of Michigan.  She is also the author of The Mommy Myth (2004) among other books.  Douglas argued that it is critical to know the history about how we got where we are in media.  Corporations have excelled in obliterating history.  Those that obliterate history have empowered themselves to create their own history (she jokingly referred to the history Channel as the “Hitler Channel”).

When it comes to media issues, Douglas argues that we need to combat the word “inevitable.” The problems with our media do not have to be the way they are. Corporations constantly drone that the market is a giant all-knowing Buddha that knows best, as if the market is the only way to run things.

Here’s the history: an alternative model had been in place prior to the 1980s.  Corporations were seen as custodians of public airwaves.  They could retain custody if they gave equal time to opposing viewpoints and if they provided public service programming.  These obligations were enforced by the threat of license revocation (though licenses were not often revoked).

How did we get where we now are?  Prior to 1980, Radio stations needed to reapply for their licenses every three years.  Now they need we re-apply only every seven years.  Public service requirements have now been suspended, even though this requirement enabled and inspired local filmmakers to report on stories involving local communities. The deletion of this requirement was the brainchild of former FCC Commissioner Fowler.  The FCC also allows stations to increase the amount of commercials they ran per hour.

In 1985, cross-ownership started growing.  In 1985, a station could own 7 AM stations and seven FM stations.  TV station owners could not own newspapers in the same market. Those were the days. In 1992, a single owner could own 18 AM stations in 18 FM stations.  In 1996, thanks to the Communications Act, “all hell broke loose.” (more…)

This age.  Bizarre.  Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it.  We swim in a deepening sea of information.  How to cope? 

We compartmentalize.  So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration.

Recently at a holiday gathering with my family we exercised what has become a ritual—complaing about the state of the world.  A comment that has been made often in the last couple of decades suddenly struck me with its self-evident, contradictory absurdity.

My father was going on about something he had learned regarding Israel, and ended with the oft-repeated question “How come our media doesn’t tell us that part?”  His meaning is clear enough—details of certain events are not presented to us on the nightly news.  Instead, something with a particular “spin” gets put on.  The nature of the spin depends as much on the program’s owners as it does the politics of the viewer.

But a larger question occurred to me.  So I asked it.  “If the media doesn’t tell us, how did you find out?”

“I saw it on Charlie Rose!”

And therein lies a wealth of assumptions which need examining.  Why isn’t—at least to people like my father—things like the Charlie Rose Show  The Media?

What is The Media?  This is an important question when we’re in hot debate with each other, because our sources of information dictate what we consider relevant.  They also dictate our attitude toward our culture, our civilization, our country, and our leaders.

To me, The Media is a fairly useless label.  We have television, print newspapers, radio, the internet, magazines, blogs, direct mail, town hall meetings, government newsletters, NGO newsletters, canvasers, missionaries, PACs…on television alone we have nightly news, morning news, news magazines (like 60 Minutes), talk shows, Special Reports, documentary programs (like NOVA).

My father seems to take as a given that if something doesn’t come over on the nightly news programs between five and seven (again at ten) then “our Media” isn’t telling us.  It is a prejudice many of his generation have, from the day when that was about it as far as news sources.  There was radio, of course, but that was tv without pictures, and newspapers, which went into greater depth.  The advent of the News Magazine Shows happened in the late 60s and for some people still may not be part of legitimate news sources.

My father is not connected to the internet.  He grew angry with me once for knowing more about something than he did, information I got off the Web.  Not personally angry, just–”Why should I have to pay $20 a month to get the information I need?  Why doesn’t my (free) television news give it to me?”

The answer—part of it, anyway—is simply that there is too damn much.

The other part of that is that television news programs are now part and parcel of the same ratings game as everything else on tv, and it is now entertainment more than education.

But that leads to the rest of the problem.  How many people assume there should be One information source and that it should provide everything?   And, consequently, all other sources are considered somehow illegitimate?

During the last two decades we have all heard certain people complain about the Liberal Media—yet it is a documented fact that over 70% of radio and print news sources are self-defined as conservative to right wing.  We can assume of the remaining 25-30% half can be considered neutral, which leaves 10 to 15 % as “left”.  Yet the overwhelming perception by a vocal segment of the population which assumes it is “the majority” is that most media is liberal-biased.

During that same period we have seen survey after survey showing a trend toward self-editing—we have so many news and information sources now that people can tailor their intake according to taste.  Which means that we do not, as a general rule, get a wide spectrum of information and opinion—rather we get self-reinforcing polemic.

The assumption is my father’s compaint is that there should be a single source of reliably neutral (by his standards) information.  If information shows up anywhere else, it must be suspect.  Yet trust in the veracity of those suspect sources is, paradoxically, rising.  They simply aren’t The Media.

While this may seem like a confusing set of compartmentalizations, it is also indicative of the susicious regard Americans have had toward anything purporting to be somehow cross culturally and nationally relevent—as if by the time a source actually becomes large and broad enough to cater to a majority it has lost its ability to be useful.

I am worried what this means for the public debate.  For instance, this past election saw the Republican Party lose its majority status in congress.  We are told that this was a referendum on the war.  Yet of the nearly thirty congressional seats that changed hands to become Democrat, two-thirds of the new representatives are vocally ProChoice.  To be told (by ommision) that this issue had nothing to do with the election is a curious consequence of the homogenization of The Media, if such a process is actually underway.  It is not, however, information that was censored.  I found out quite passively.  There were other left-right issues informing many of the contested seats and I am sure that the War, while significant, was insufficient to turn over that many seats.  But to find the other reasons, one needs look elsewhere than traditional network media sources.  One of the downsides of this is that those other reasons have not become part of the national quorum over electoral politics.

So it was an interesting holiday discussion.  Anything that prompts a question like this is worth the overeating, the unfortunate presents, the cold weather, and the crazy traffic. 

So tell me:  What do you consider The Media?

Oh, and have a good New Year.

Okay, ladies too. But I was going for a “Sunday, Sun-nday Sunda-ay” feel with the headline.

I’ve always liked this Watterson throwaway reply to Karl Marx from 1987-ish.

But, after reading some of the firestorm of responses to Erich’s post about Misquoting Jesus, maybe religion hasn’t really lost any ground.

Why is the economy showing signs of both recession and inflation? Which 3 young Americans will be today’s (averaged) fatalities in Iraq? Whatever became of Osama Bin Laden? Why can’t we carry drinking water or letter openers when we fly? Which form of proposed required national ID card will become our travelling papers, and who besides hackers will then have access to all our personal information? Will conservative religious groups continue to succeed in repressing medical research as well as medical procedures?

Let’s just fret about the latest reality show contestants, or whose opinion about ancient religious texts is more believable. Bread and circuses.

What kinds of voters are we?  It’s hard to tell by looking what kind of candidates we elect.  After all, we usually only have two viable choices; we often hold our noses and vote for the “lesser of two evils.”   Many potential candidates never appear on the ballot, thanks to our horrifically corrupt political system, a system that requires a candidate to have corporate money in order to seen as viable by the corporate-owned media. It is a ludicrous and vicious circle. 

Even acknowledging the severely limited choices we have at the polls, how well do we vote? Do we prepare ourselves carefully before entering the voting booth?  Do we work hard to expose ourselves to a wide range of perspectives before voting or do we fall prey to the availability heuristic, voting on the basis of highly suspect political ads and intellectually vapid local “news”? Do most voters take time to carefully deliberate on the long-term risks and benefits of the political positions touted by the candidates?  Apparently not, based upon the ubiquity misleading attack ads that invite unreflective scorn rather than a deliberate consideration of the issues.

Another bit of evidence suggesting that many of us vote without enough preparation occurs whenever citizens vote for lesser known candidates and issues.  On numerous occasions, people have admitted to me that they voted for or against a particular candidate (or issue) about whom (which) they knew nothing at all.  In Missouri, this happens all the time when circuit judges seeking retention appear on the ballot.  People tell me that they voted for or against judges based simply on their names (which, admittedly, suggest gender and, very tenuously, ancestry). 

How else suggests the sorts of voters we are? 

I suspect that people make voting decision in about the same way they make the other important decisions in their lives.  People who are generally nonchalant or reckless in their ignorance probably tend to vote that way.  People who are well-informed in other aspects of their lives tend to be well-informed when voting.  I suspect, then, that we might get a reading about how we take care of our country as voters with about the same amount of care we exercise when we make decisions—often life and death decisions—in other important areas of our lives. 

I realize that I am treading in dangerous psychological territory. Perhaps I am violating the fundamental attribution error—the “inflated belief people have in the importance of personality traits and dispositions” (see The Person and the Situation, by Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett (1991).   I am also a firm believer in the multiple intelligences, as eloquently expressed by Howard Gardner. Perhaps people showing little care in one area of their lives are nonetheless careful voters.  Despite these concerns, based on my many years of observing and listening to people, I suspect that I’m on to something. At the very least, it seems that people who are generally conscientious prepare conscientiously to vote.   People who are generally dysfunctional (I would include many well-to-do people in this category) continue to be dysfunctional when they vote. 

Let’s consider some examples.  (more…)

You can learn the following things and much more in this article by New York Magazine:

• He’s the eleventh of eleven children.
• Every night, he would listen to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” before going to bed and it would make him cry.
• He studied philosophy in college.
• His favorite comic was Bill Cosby.
• He’s married to a woman from his hometown, and they have three kids, the oldest of whom is 11.
• He’s a church-going Catholic and he still teaches Sunday school.
• He loves Richard Nixon.