aww...but we like YOU

Did Radiohead totally dis North America back there? This went out this weekend to their subscriber list:

"all good record stores ... and the USA&Canada" -- what is this, 1770?

 (I know we deserve it, but what did Canada ever do to you?)

"you're not losing sales by having your stuff out there"

Neil Gaiman on why the understanding of the digital distribution of creative output needs to change -- and that change is clearly going to come through the creators themselves, not their publishers. Above is his quote. Also brilliant:

how many of you found your favorite authors by being lent a book?

[via Boing Boing]

"my problem is, it's become tribal"

Jon Stewart's full conversation with Rachel Maddow about his Rally to Restore etc etc etc... and its implications for pundits on both the left and right is n outstanding conversation. It's hard to believe that a conversation of this caliber and duration is allowed to exist on television (oh, wait, of course it isn't. The unedited version is only online).

The whole point is that you have to watch all 49 minutes of it. If we can't sustain our attentions for that long, well -- we get what we deserve in the 24-hour cable news cycle, then:

really, guys ... they're fascists. you can't see it?

For those who suspected that our collective ridicule of Governor Palin and Sideshow Glenn was us whistling past the graveyard, those gut instincts are proving correct. Clearly, if he's a clown, Beck is a Stephen King-type clown.

His attacks on George Soros have revealed something darker in Beck's paranoiac psyche. Clearly Soros, guilty of the twin sins of being richer than beck and disagreeing with Beck, is part of a larger conspiracy:

Throughout three programs this week, Mr. Beck has portrayed Mr. Soros, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, as a “puppet master” who is “notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world” and whose “next target” is the United States. Citing Mr. Soros’s statements about the decline of the dollar, Mr. Beck said, “Not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, took issue with Mr. Beck’s depiction of Mr. Soros as a “Jewish boy helping sending the Jews to the death camps,” calling it “offensive” and “horrific.”

Doesn't this all sound familiar? Deriding a sub-section of society as being the puppet master financiers constituting a fifth column that wants to destroy the country from within. Really? Not setting off alarm bells at all?

[NYT; image via Osborne Ink]

I'm with you up to a point

Look, I like a curmudgeonly counter-cultural position as much as the next curmudgeon, but there is such a thing as taking a good argument too far:

Television drama should say more about the world we live in today and not rely on costumes, irony and pastiche, according to the award-winning screenwriter Jimmy McGovern. The television veteran behind the uncompromising hit shows Cracker and The Street is calling for dramas that reflect reality and have a strong point to make.

"Why write drama that doesn't matter?" he asked this weekend. Commenting on the high viewing figures for costume dramas such as ITV's Downton Abbey and the popularity of arch adventure shows such as Dr Who, McGovern said he believed the best writing took itself seriously, as well as taking its audience seriously.

Hey hey hey -- I like Dr. Who.

However:

"Why have a BBC complaints unit in the first place? They tell me, 'Jimmy, it is in case you offend anybody,' and I say, 'I am a writer. That is my job.' Just imagine if it said on my headstone that I had never offended anybody – I would turn in my grave."

That? That is just awesome.

Everything they tell you is a lie

A rocket was launched in Southern California. The video is here. Clearly that happened. The Pentagon is mum -- bizarrely so:

[John] Pike[, director of the U.S.-based security analyst group globalsecurity.org] said he didn't understand why the military had not recognized the contrail of an aircraft. "The Air Force must ... understand how contrails are formed," he said. "Why they can't get some major out to belabor the obvious, I don't know."

I'll tell you why: because they know exactly what it is, and they're not telling.

When I was a kid, two Air Force bombers flew in concentric circles at a low altitude over Brooklyn over and over again. People on the street stopped and stared. Having read my fair share of crazy-but-plausible military coup porn, I thought I knew what was going on. But now that alien infiltration of our planet has been proven, I'm not so sure.

(Seriously, y'all, the Pentagon knows something.)

when are 1's and 0's more than 1's and 0's?

In an interesting way, the Economist lays bare the difference between the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks (sub req'd). Interestingly, both have intimately involved newspapers in their release (for a great breakdown of the Papers, by the way, see this book), the leakers at the center of each have similar biographies, and both laid bare data which showed the military was being less-than-truthful about its campaigns. But there's one huge difference: Daniel Ellsberg understood that his principled stand meant persecution, the near-destruction of his life, and the possibility of imprisonment. Julian Assange is doing everything he can to avoid punishment -- indeed, avoiding any culpability for actual or collateral damage:

Mr Ellsberg turned himself in, willing to be held accountable for what he has done. He faced charges—eventually dismissed—under America’s Espionage Act. In contrast, WikiLeaks distributes its servers to take advantage of whistle-blower laws in Sweden, Belgium, Iceland and America. Mr Assange enjoys the protection of several liberal democracies, but is not really accountable to any of them.

What is more, Mr Assange seems unwilling to reflect on the risks of what he is doing. Amnesty International has complained that documents in WikiLeaks’ release on Afghanistan were not sufficiently edited, and thus likely to endanger Afghans who had worked for the coalition. Even such supporters as Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic member of parliament, has expressed disappointment over how the documents were released. Mr Assange disagrees, saying that nobody needed protection as a result of the release—citing, of all sources, NATO in Kabul. In contrast, Mr Ellsberg is more self-critical and concedes, for instance, that the publication of the Pentagon Papers actually had no effect on the war in Vietnam.

In essence, Assange is doing to the Pentagon's data what Mark Zuckerberg is doing to yours: grabbing it, doing what he likes with it, and then claiming it's no big deal because it's a new digital age.

vote, motherf*ckers

In 1994, Mario Cuomo ran for his fourth consecutive term as Governor of New York. While the state had suffered along with everyone else as a result of the latest recession, Cuomo was the relatively well-respected incumbent Democratic governor of a solidly blue state.

Because so many voters had grown accustomed to having Cuomo as governor, not many bothered to show up to vote. With roughly 30% of eligible voters turning out, George Pataki was sent to the Governor's Mansion as part of the 1994 Republican Revolution.

Pataki took an emergency stop-gap decision taken by Governor Cuomo in the face of financial crisis to reduce MTA overhead -- using credit to maintain the subways and buses of New York City -- and turned it into longstanding fiscal policy, something it was never intended to do.

As a result, all service cuts and fare hikes taken in 2009-2010 are because budget funding was never restored to its early 1990s levels, because an indifferent electorate allowed a public-service-slashing conservative win an election he would have no right winning had people been paying more attention in the first place.

The Moral: Midterm elections matter, despite your disillusionment/boredom/cynicism.

Bonus Moral: You can't bitch about fare hikes unless you are a registered and active voter in New York City.

if you need help finding a mirror I'll get one

It's fitting that the NY Times will help write its own epitaph, as Jeremy Peters scratches his head in the Sunday edition as to this explosion of enmity towards the news media from both the left and right, apparently out of nowhere.

News media experts say that an attack-the-press strategy can make sense as a pure political play. While polling has shown that majorities of Republicans and conservatives have long harbored suspicions about the news media, there has been a surge in negative feelings among Democrats and liberals.

The biennial Pew Research Center poll on public attitudes about the news media found last year that much of the growth in negative perceptions about the media has been driven by Democrats. For the first time last year, a majority of Democrats, 59 percent, said that reporting from news organizations is often inaccurate. That figure was just 43 percent in 2007.

Michael Dimock, an associate director at Pew, said this reflected a tendency by Democrats to shift part of the blame for their recent misfortunes on the press. But he said he also believed it was about something broader: a mistrust of large institutions.

“Whether it’s the press, whether it’s government, there has been this lowering of credibility in a lot of institutions in America,” Mr. Dimock said. “You name it. It’s hard to find a group or institution that isn’t being viewed more skeptically these days.”

No, no, no guys -- it's afar simpler explanation: it's not institutions, it's you. They explained this to you at the Rally to Restore Sanity the day before you published this:



Oh wait, that's right, you didn't send any correspondents. Not because you don't know how to do your job, but you're worried about how you, the watchers, will be watched.

[A post-script: all of the content at the links and embedded video in this blog post are covered -- sometimes literally -- with advertisements. Why that isn't that a source of concern about the perception of media companies? Nah, it's the politicians...]

scriptwriters

Heading into the midterm elections, it's a good moment to revive an article from last November's New York Times, as Robert Pear discovered eerie similarities between floor speeches and remarks entered into the Congressional Record by members of Congress, with ink drops leading all the way back to the offices of lobbyists for Big Pharma.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

No partisan slant on this post, really; just a reminder to vote next week. It's one thing if big money buys our elections in spite of our best efforts; but if they're scripting the floor show for a democracy and no one's even bothering to watch, then we get what we deserve.

[image via a Canadian Christian Puppets site -- really.]

the fourth estate *finally* gets it right

If the Administration's icky whiff of xenophobia when facing down its critics in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce seems a bit too desperate to latch on to, fear not -- the New York Times actually did its job and found a nasty little conspiracy on our own shores:

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help.

The entire article is worth a read -- unless the oligopoly they got over in Moscow seems appealing to you.

A fascinating look in last week's Times of shows that go straight to Broadway rather then getting regional tuneups. Most fascinating was little more than a side note in the piece as a whole:

The four multimillion-dollar musicals are all leaping to Broadway without a net because of their creators’ confidence in the material and, to varying degrees, skepticism that a tryout elsewhere is useful anymore. The Internet has made it impossible to fly under the radar at theaters in La Jolla or Seattle; bad buzz anywhere can reach New York theatergoers instantly, as was true last weekend when some bloggers picked apart the first preview of “Women on the Verge” only hours after it ended.

"Tastemakers" is a term that applies to two groups now: prominent critics / creative types, and a vengeful crowd with twitter accounts.

art and austerity

Last week the BBC asked -- a bit too cheekily for my taste -- Do hard times equal good art?

Vincent van Gogh, starving as he slaves over his masterpieces. Johnny Rotten, sneering at the wreckage of 1970s Britain. George Orwell, finding his voice amid the poverty and despair of the Great Depression.

You'd think today's artists would be happier about the prospect of imminent destitution.

Not an auspicious beginning to a serious conversation, but the article does right itself later:

The left-wing singer-songwriter Billy Bragg is certainly no supporter of the funding cuts, and he acknowledges that the music industry was already facing deep-seated problems even before the arrival of the credit crunch.

But, weaned on punk rock, and his craft forged during the battles of the 1980s, he does believe that musicians tend to find their voice during periods of crisis.

"As times get hard, it's still the most obvious way to reach out and speak to people," he says.

This is a slightly different argument, but more perceptive. It is true that artists need some kind of crisis (even a minor crisis like a deadline -- looking at you, COI podcast) to focus their minds.

I don't see how that's an argument for pushing them to the brink of starvation, though.

[image via Chris Tyrell]

would you let this man near *your* children?

Carl Paladino's delayed repudiation of his weekend gay-bashing is being rightfully dismissed as too little, too late. But that doesn't mean it still can't be picked apart for its lack of logic, cowardice, and inanity. "I am Carl Paladino," the statement (probably not written by Carl Paladino) opens, "a father, a husband, a builder and a business owner."

Why stop there? You are also a Republican, septuagenarian, Virgo, homo sapien -- actually, I can see where this would get problematic. Let's leave it at "business owner." He goes on to write that this whole incident began when "Yesterday I was handed a script."

That is leadership, people.

We could go on to outline our disdain for the my-best-friends-are-gay gambit later in the statement, the brain-melting attempt to place himself alongside President Obama on the same side of, well, anything in the Year of the Tea Party, and the fact that within hours, an aide had maintained the Paladino campaign's pace of one-gaffe-per-day by calling the Attorney General "oily".

We've noted, more than once, our disgust with Accidental Governor Patterson. But maybe the bigger problem isn't the politicians, but the office itself. Maybe it only attracts the venal and mildly insane.

Or maybe just the possibility of attaining the office turns you crazy and hateful.

performative politics

A fascinating profile of Ann Coulter in the Times Fashion section on Friday, as she stakes out new ground since the Tea Party has taken over her brand of crazy:

“I happen to think that Ann believes everything she says,” said Bill Maher, the host of “Real Time,” who is a friend. But at the same time, “it is a bunch of show business. You are working in the media. You are in makeup.” For a person like Ms. Coulter, Mr. Maher said, “once they are in the public eye, they don’t want to be irrelevant.”

Something to keep in mind the next time you get all worked up by something that was said on-air by paid pundits...

like looking in a warped mirror

Over at Deadspin, Emma Carmichael has a fascinating piece on a conversation between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell as part of the New Yorker Festival. She breaks apart the fragile mythos that allows Simmons -- a highly paid columnist and author -- to play the part of an average joe sports fan in the eyes of the New Yorker's readership. The piece has, I think, a summary of seminar attendees that transfers almost seamlessly to theatergoers:

The New Yorker Festival promotional material has a sketch of a young man and woman walking side by side, presumably headed to some venue in the city where they will listen to famous actors and writers talk about how they got to be so wonderful, and if they're lucky, one of those two will get to stand at a microphone to ask a question that shows the crowd that they, too, are quite wonderful. In the sketch, the guy has glasses and a coffee cup; the woman has high heels and a big bag. They are not walking to the Meadowlands.

(Okay, minus the "young" part.)

As we've argued before, theater exists in an elitist, rarefied market. Attempts to make works for "the people" ignore this salient fact (looking at you, Lombardi). When theater artists try to make their work universally appealing -- or, let's face it, appealing on any kind of mass scale, they look as absurd as Bill Simmons trying to convince us he has more in common, class-wise, with sports fans than the millionaire athletes they watch.

The whole article is definitely worth a read.

[Deadspin.com]

the old versus the new on the subcontinent

It's not just on these shores that the integrity of live performance is under siege by the pandering of mass media. Aditi Saxton's profile of the Gati Dance Forum in the Caravan explores how the group can preserve traditional forms in the face of vulgar popularization while still finding space to innovate (and stare down their own arch-conservative critics). Saxton's purple prose is also a joy to read:

Even as fusty traditionalists worry about the siege of the new—in Besseling’s End (of ) Days, Arundale’s disciple MR Krishnamurthy expresses precisely these fears—the modern, the contemporary, it’s the twin Trojan horses of Bollywood masala mash-up and TV dance competition gimmickry that are laying waste to the Indian dance-scape. With no connection to reality, the kind that inspired thinking choreographers like Chandralekha, the two are reducing dance in India to its lowest common denominator. When the aggressive jut of a pelvis wins accolades, the appreciation for subtleties dwindles proportionally, whether it’s a mudra replete with spiritual significance or a battement executed with technical virtuosity. The threat is not from change but from capitulation to mediocrity.

RTWT here.

the end of days (coming in 2011)

God. Dammit.

[Relevant to NYC subway riders only]

Ars Marginal

If you're interested in any of the following:

• minority viewpoints vis a vis mass media
• informed sci-fi fandom
• the playwright's process
• good damn writing

do yourself a favor and bookmark this site. You're welcome.

morality is a mule

The New York Times reported earlier this month that one of the most celebrated photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, Ernest C. Withers, was actually an FBI informant.

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.

[...]

Although Mr. Withers’s motivation is not known, Mr. Garrow said informers were rarely motivated by the financial compensation, which “wasn’t enough money to live on.” But Marc Perrusquia, who wrote the article for The Commercial Appeal, noted that Mr. Withers had eight children and might have struggled to support them.

The lack of any reaction among those not old enough to have participated in the movement themselves is a damning indictment of our society's sense of history.

On the one hand, many clearly see the political gains that resulted from the struggle to be pre-ordained. This bodes ill for those who hope to secure the rights of non-documented laborers, gay and lesbians who wish to serve in the military and/or adopt children, any many other marginalized groups. Why do we need to lift a hand to ensure social justice? These things just happen.

Another perversion of hindsight is that the enemy of change came in the form of chaw-chewing, pot-bellied, pasty-faced Southern sheriffs calling grown men "boy" and lecherously ogling African-American women; sure, if you live in the world of "Mississippi Burning" (or even, heck, "A Time To Kill"), but the reality is that the camps of "us" and "them" are far blurrier than we like to admit.

Through rose-tinted glasses, segregation was an unmistakable evil, its elimination an inevitable historical correction. Those who equivocated, opposed, or undermined the progress of history are the enemies of all that is good.

But in the event, things don't ever shake out that clearly.

Desegregating Southern society had the potential to undermining a large black middle class that had developed as an unintended byproduct of "separate but equal." It was a group largely destroyed by integration -- and nothing of its ilk has ever arisen to take its place. There were plenty of people who wanted to protect the status quo rather than cast in with a bunch of Communists and degenerates.

And there were plenty of people -- like, apparently, Ernest Withers -- who used the agitation of the time to make a quick buck off the strife between those who wanted change and those who wanted things to stay just the way they were. Withers had access to civil rights leaders, and the federal government was willing to pay for that access.

It doesn't make him evil, merely human. And it's a reminder that human motivations and allegiances are almost never as clear-cut as we wish they were.