'Quasimodo predicted all this'

 

Oh, a media frenzy

Earlier this week, news media in northern California and Oregon especially were focusing on the aftermath of a mall shooting in suburban Portland, Ore. Driving through Oregon yesterday I heard some discussion about it, gathering the interesting fact (if it is a fact and not just something the reporter made up) that suburban Clackamas County is referred to locally as "Clackistan" and its denizens as "Clackistanis."

Three people including "the shooter" (and when did mainstream media begin using that term anyway, and did it come from Hollywood, from the military, from video games, or what?) died in that event, which seemed bad enough until today, when over two dozen died in a school shooting in Connecticut.

Mainstream media pushed the big red button that reads "Wall To Wall Coverage," so during my drive through eastern Oregon and over the Idaho border I heard "breaking news coverage" on NPR. And I listened to all of it, when they finally took a break and ran "Fresh Air" for an hour.

I asked myself, why listen to all that coverage which lasted, what, over three hours? I think the reason is, for once it's not drivel. Not that NPR is relatively high on the scale of broadcast drivel, which was epitomized for me this morning when I turned on the "Today" show while packing in my motel room. The hosts sat around chattering and "joking" without humor and laughing anyway, in that awful way straight people do when they have nothing to talk about but social time to fill.

So when the hours-long coverage of the school shooting came on today, it was actually a relief. Finally, something actually happened. Finally, people have stopped bullshitting for hours on end.

Of course that only lasts so long. I remember the moment on Sep. 11, 2001 when the incident had started to sink in. The moment was the point during the afternoon when, on network and cable news, the coverage acquired branding (recall the graphics reading "ATTACK ON AMERICA" and so on) and theme music which led onto and out of each news segment. And when they start the slow-mo, soft-focus montage of teddy-bear memorials, that's when you know it's really over.

At the moment I'm sitting in a McDonald's in Mountain Home, Idaho, where my order of a salad from the menu so flummoxed them that they took 10 minutes to prepare it and gave me a fried apple pie for free by way of apology. (The wi-fi works here, hooray.) They have a TV on the wall playing Fox News, where Mike Huckabee just assured gun owners that "You can't legislate prevention of events like this" because "this is not a law issue, it's a heart issue." I doubt very much he feels that way about abortion or drugs, but at least they are not showing teddy bears yet.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

Today's fake: Caught faking footage of fireworks, producer justifies it

A local TV program in Boston that broadcast images of fireworks exploding over area landmarks faked aspects of the footage -- and when the producer was confronted about the fakery, he defended and justified it.

Though the fireworks were shot from a barge in the harbor, some of the images broadcast would mean the fireworks were fired from other locations -- in other words, you couldn't see the bursts and the landmarks from the same angle. When the producer was asked how this came to be, he admitted the footage was digitally altered, but said it was really no different than the comedy "Boston Legal" showing exterior establishing shots of Boston before interior scenes that were actually shot in California. And besides, it wasn't news, it was "entertainment," so it should be all right.

By that logic, the station could show footage of a July Fourth parade in New York and claim it was Boston's parade. For that matter, why film a parade at all, why not just use last year's footage, as parades are all alike?

Today's fake: figure in Japanese TV commercial is actually computer-generated

We're not talking about crowds enhanced by CGI, we're talking about a pictured pop singer who is actually computer generated using combinations of features from 61 other young women.

Only an early entrant in what I predict will be a brief flood of movies featuring computer-generated characters in live-action films, movies which will garner a little bit of interest before everyone realizes they completely suck. Then the technology will be absorbed by the porn industry and by television commercials. Because really, why pay people who just get sick and die, or have gag reflexes?

I also predict there will be a new term for the flow of jobs to computer-generated figures: not off-shoring or in-sourcing, but something else. I can't think of a good snappy term for it right now. It's too bad "virtual" has three syllables and takes a long time to say. I wonder what the Japanese call it.

Hey, it's pride week

This TV commercial from the outdoors equipment retailer REI has a nice little crypto-lesbo moment that's impossible to miss.

Not sure how else to interpret it than "You may be out biking with your 'boyfriend,' but it's the lady bikers you really have your eye on."

Mystery narratives partake of ritual

"The whodunits we make," says Marlowe Producer-Writer Gene Wang, "are as ritualistic as a bullfight." A veteran of Perry Mason and radio's Thin Man, Wang speaks with authority. "The bullfight parade," he explains, "is, for us, the parade of suspects. The entrance of the torero is the entrance of the detective, the point at which he takes the case. You cannot leave the audience wondering why the detective's clients have not gone to the police. The cape work is when the detective sees his various suspects. The picadors come on, and it's the time of murder. The moment of truth is when the Private Eye says, 'You killed Cock Robin.'"

-- TIME magazine article on TV detective shows, 26 October 1959

He ascribes the longevity of the show to its formulaic plot and format. "It's almost like a ritual. You know there's going to be a body found, and we're going to look for who did it, and then there's going to be some twist at the trial. People tune in. They know what's coming and they like it that way."

-- Law and Order star Jerry Orbach, quoted in the Boston Globe, 4 January 2004

"It's like a ritual," Jerry Orbach is fond of saying of Law and Order, "like the Latin high Mass." Nothing on the show ever changes; every episode of Law and Order is just like every other one. Some are a little better than others, some a little worse, but in the end they're all interchangeable, and that's precisely what makes them so valuable.

-- From a 2003 New York Times article on Law and Order's appeal

Wait, what?

Wish I'd been there:

Stephen Chao was the president of Fox Television for 10 weeks in 1992 before he was fired by Rupert Murdoch for hiring a male model to strip during a speech on Standards and Practices given to Murdoch as well as Dick Cheney.

From Fired Former Fox President Stephen Chao Randomly Pops Up On Reddit To Answer Questions on Mediaite.

All news, all evening

A piece in the New Yorker wonders why CNN's ratings in evening prime time aren't so hot. I had to stop and think: Why the hell would people watch news and commentary all evening long -- isn't the evening a time to relax and be entertained?

And then I realized -- it's because prime time network programming, the dramas, comedies and variety which people have watched for the last fifty years, is so bad that cable TV news and commentary is entertainment. And Fox and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC, are eating CNN's lunch simply because they're more entertaining. Some dipshit shooting his mouth off is more entertaining than serious reporting, and that's why we have Fox and MSNBC, not to mention talk radio's domination of the medium, at all.

The movie Network, with what seemed in 1976 like an over-the-top prediction of news as entertainment, becomes more prescient every year. Most people simply remember it for the slogan "I'm mad as hell..." but what it was really about was the degradation of network news into entertainment. This post on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting compares the film's Howard Beale, "a fictional TV host famous for undergoing an on-air emotional disintegration," with Fox's Glenn Beck.

Maybe we're reading

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

TV comedian kills them with the truth

In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth:

"Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."

If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said.

More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.

technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel

Comedy reflects dark times -- AP

The recently released comedy "Observe and Report" -- which has sparked extremes of reaction from critics -- reflects the country's dark mood, writes the AP.

You know the good thing about the Great Depression? It was so long that popular culture had time to reflect it instead of just react to it. When we think of films of the 1930s we think mainly of escapist fare -- "The Thin Man" pictures, Busby Berkley and so on, all the way to "Gone with the Wind." The hard times themselves were reflected subtly, in gangster movies and B pictures. Finally, at the end of the decade, a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" (on the dramatic side) or "Sullivan's Travels" (on the comedic side) could directly address the condition of being poor.

Nowadays television reacts more quickly than any other medium. You're already seeing recession-themed stories on prime-time shows.

technorati: films, cinema, economy

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard pushes himself back in the spotlight

Ted Haggard, the disgraced megachurch leader whose outing as a meth-snorting Big Gay embarrassed the Christian Right just prior to the 2006 midterm elections, has agreed to promote an HBO documentary about his rise and fall.

The documentary, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," was shot by Alexandra Pelosi, who earlier made an HBO documentary "Friends of God," which also featured Haggard. The film is scheduled to air on HBO next month.

Haggard startled observers earlier this fall by appearing in the pulpit of a rural Illinois megachurch as a "Christian businessman" talking of his rise an fall as a star of the conservative Christian Evangelical movement, and now he's pushing himself into the spotlight on television. It's not enough for him to appear in a documentary; he's so starved for attention that he also signs on to promote the film, which I suspect will show him as a complete lying douchebag. What a media whore!

technorati: Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, Alexandra Pelosi

Vox populi

I was in the break room at work, where a TV was playing CNN. A slip showed Sen. Ted Stevens leaving an office building as Wolf Blitzer narrated, "One day after being convicted on corruption charges, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens says he wants to get back on the campaign trail."

A janitor was sitting there watching. "A crook, and he wants to campaign!" the guy said. "'Look at me, I just got convicted, vote for me.' He's just a big crook!"

I said something about how I guessed he already had his campaign donations in hand so why not get out there and spend them.

"That's all they're there for," the janitor declared. "Crookery!"

technorati: Republicans, Ted Stevens, CNN

Hospital notes

Cris just spent a few days in a hospital getting orthopedic surgery. She came home today and she's doing well. But while she was there this week, I spent a lot of time up there over four days, and I discovered two things.

One, the day nurses were invariably awesome; the night nurses were mostly mediocre. Makes sense: the day shift is more desirable, so the best nurses choose it. The main distinction between the great nurses and the mediocre ones was that the latter are more inflexible and tend to cite rules and policies when you ask them a question, while the good ones actually answer your question and know the science behind whatever you're talking about.

Two: due to the much worse condition of the other patient in the room, I now can say with some experience just what TV programs brain-damaged people like to watch:

Jerry Springer

Nancy Grace

Glenn Beck

Und so weiter. Poor thing, it wasn't her fault some drunk ran into her car. Now she's stuck watching Nancy Grace.

Sign of the apocalypse: Dentist chair TV's programming is Disney, ads

This definitely falls into the Kill Me First category: a new device you wear like eyeglasses allows you to watch television in the dentist's chair while being worked on. Sounds good, you say? The only programming is:
ð Disney programs
ð Dental health messages
ð Advertising.

It's paid, of course, by the latter.

Personally I'd rather listen to the drill.

technorati: advertising, television, technology

'Who are you calling Cootie Queen, you lint licker?!'

I'm going to show how low-class I truly am with this post, but... You know how TV commercials sometimes stick in your mind, and you want to know more about them, and it's not like you can look them up on imdb.com or anything.

This is the commercial I was obsessed with:

http://www.splendad.com/ads/show/863-Orbit-Euphemisms

That actress who plays the gum-chewing mistress is so hilarious that I wanted to know who it was. Fortunately, thanks to Google, with a little patience you can find out just about anything. Her name is Jesse Meriwether, and she is from New Orleans.

I also found another commercial she was in, unfortunately without dialogue from her: http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1753/

The case of the productive blond

Courtesy MediaBistro, here is some of the worst, most entertaining writing I've seen. It's in a blog post by a former TV producer, who writes about his tortured relationships with Fox News fuhrer Roger Ailes, a blond assistant, his agent, his wife, and other characters. Despite the quality of the writing, it has all the ingredients for a Bonfire-of-the-Vanities style novel and/or memoir.

Some choice phrases:

My wife Gina was emailing strange men in foreign countries on the computer, a habit she seemed unwilling to break. I was fantasizing about the 23 year old blond, who that day walked into the elevator facing me, threw her shoulders back, projecting toward me her extraordinary breasts, stared at me, and backed up against the opposite wall, putting a sexual no-man's-land between us.
...
She was blond and productive. Regardless, on the last day of production, the blond knocked on my door and asked if we could talk.
...
I had lived at 1060 Park Avenue for 30 years. My adult life had played out on that stage. I loved it. I walked out along Park and wept. Everything was intolerable. But that which could not be changed had to be accepted. And I had to have the courage to change that which I could change. I moved to my mother's.

technorati: Republicans, television, New York

Tough guy

MSNBC presenter Keith Olbermann, who became better known last year after launching a series of bitterly critical commentary of Bush administration officials, suffered a ruptured appendix on Wednesday but still went on the air the next evening to anchor coverage of Bush's Iraq war speech, before undergoing appendectomy surgery. (Courtesy Publisher's Marketplace)

technorati: Keith Olbermann

In tune with the zeitgeist

Have you seen "Man Men," the television series on the cable channel AMC? It's the big new thang this summer. The entire staff of the New York Times' Arts and Culture department is creaming over it; now that "The Sopranos" is over, they have to have something to lionize, and naturally the focus of their fandom is something as close as possible to the culture of the New York Times itself: white, waspy, privileged, and set in Manhattan. Yesterday's article-of-the-week, A Return To That Drop-Dead Year, 1960, beatifies the show's attention to period detail.

None of this is lost on me, as my (unpublished) novel Make Nice is also set in 1960. As Cris as I were watching last night's "Mad Men" episode, I muttered, "If my novel had been published this year, I would have looked like a fucking genius" for anticipating the interest in that watershed year. Oh well.

technorati: 1960, Mad Men, New York Times