Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Pop Americana

  • Doris Day’s Secret Life

    Today, while waiting in line at the supermarket, I picked up a tabloid with the headline “Doris Day’s Secret Life.” I was mildly curious, if only because these tabloid publications rarely covered celebrities from so far back.   It’s hard to remember that merely because celebrities drop out of public life doesn’t mean that they’re dead.  (Ask Luise Rainer) . I read recently that one of the Andrew Sisters was still alive (a fact that both shocks and exhilarates me). If/When I am 90, what will I think about the world or technology or pop culture?

    Anyway, I thumbed through the pages of the tabloid for the article – skipping through various entertainment news, astrology columns, that sort of thing. I wondered  if  addictions or sexual peccadilloes or personal tragedies would be part of this secret life, but when I came to the article on the last page, I learn that Doris Day was an old person in California  who didn’t like interviews. In fact, the apparent reason for this  lazy article was that Doris Day was promoting her charity for stray animals.

    So that is Doris Day’s secret life!!!! Now I should be satisfied.

    Update: Apparently Doris Day has had a lot of romantic heartbreak in her life (also here).  In the seventies she  was  involved in a lawsuit of epic proportions against her husband’s business partner which lasted for 15 years and which she won  (although not to great result). All things considered, perhaps it is fitting that Doris Day’s secret life should remain  a secret.

  • Pondering Kellie Pickler

    I’m sure this blog post will reveal my profound ignorance about pop culture. So bear with me.

    Start by watching this hilarious video by a dumb-sounding blonde contestant on a TV game show called  “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?”  I had seen it before, but I watched it again with delight.  image

    After watching it, I asked myself, who is this blonde girl? Is she famous? Does she have a name?  And was this stupidity just an act or was she truly as ignorant about geography that the show portrayed?

    Googling a little, I see she was an American Idol contestant.

    She did a great and spunky American Idol audition here. I can’t really judge her musical talent, but she was pretty and had a strong and striking voice. It’s no surprise that she would make it to Hollywood – although it’s also no surprise that she wouldn’t win – these things are popularity contests anyway.

    I’m not really a fan of  country music – although I can listen to it in small amounts. I guess my problem is not so much country music as the packaged country music which always sounds jingoistic, overproduced and bland.  The music videos are even worse. At least with rap, you had clever lyrics and visual puns. But given her North Carolina background, it’s no surprise that Pickler would be attracted to that genre.

    Youtubing some more, I find this funny video – an interview with Ellen. It’s a  hilarious tale about fire ants on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Truly one of the most hilarious things  I’ve heard. She has this Southern &  unaffected way of talking as well as an ability to say outrageous things and pull it off as any Southern belle might. It’s fun to watch Ellen DeGeneres (a first class comedian of her own) just watch Pickler in amazement.  I checked some of her other Ellen appearances – and they are equally hilarious. I wonder, does she even prepare these talks or does she just wing it? First, there is this piece about getting a traffic ticket in California and another piece about getting stopped again by a cop for speeding and a strange Halloween appearance with crazy costumes and a  scare.  (Some other entertaining pieces on TV shows include an MTV awards  Red Carpet  stint she did for the Tonight Show and another Ellen appearance where she meets her idol Clint Eastwood.

    These are great – and these are classic TV moments, and yet I realize that I barely had listened to her sing.  One of her most famous songs, I Wonder, was sung with tears at the CMA awards – a moving performance reminiscent of one of my alltime tear-jerkers, Jennifer Lopez’s  singing of Selena’s I could fall in love with you ). Reading through the notes, I discover that Pickler has a sad family history. The song was about her estrangement from her mother; apparently her father was an abusive criminal who drove her mother to run away and leave Kellie with her grandparents. Kellie’s mother had engaged in some small criminal activity herself, and after her father was put in prison, the mother returned to take custody again. That lasted for two years, after which both Kellie and her grandparents claim the mother was physically and verbally abusive. A court released her to the grandparents once again, resulting in a permanent estrangement between mother and daughter.

    Now of course, Pickler is famous and probably rich, and so her biography probably becomes more of an issue than it would be for most people. Her mother (Cynthia Malone)  came forward and gave some interviews. In this news interview, she describes  the turbulent marriage:

    She said her mother gave her an ultimatum.

    “To have an abortion or leave,” Malone said.

    So she left and married Clyde Pickler. She said it didn’t take long before she was being beaten again.

    “It started with the alcohol, and then it went into other drugs, and the further along I got the worse it got,” she said. “In my pregnancy I was being hit. I about miscarried several times.”

    “I went to my baby shower with a busted lip and a black eye,” she said.

    Malone claims many people were aware of the abuse but did nothing to stop it. She said when she realized her life was at risk, she had to go.

    “When I thought I was going to be killed, I knew it was coming down to it was going to be me or him,” she said.

    What was the worst thing that happened – the worst that you’ve felt?” Bryant asked.

    “Leaving my baby, leaving my baby — that was the hardest decision I had to make,” Malone said.

    (Here are two video clips here and here). On camera the mother seems like a level-headed woman. She seems like a genuine victim with remorse. At the same time, in an uncharacteristically angry TV interview, Kellie Pickler accuses her mother of lying, of doing a good acting job for the camera and warns her mother never to return to her again.  In fact, when Pickler gave a concert in Raleigh, NC, she equipped police officers at the concert hall  with photos of the mother to prevent her from making contact. (By the way, great job to the local TV journalists for such a balanced and sensitive portrayal of this human drama). The TV report makes clear that Kellie Pickler’s version of events is a lot more complicated than it first appears. The mother may have made bad decisions and had problems, but for now it seems drowned out by the Pickler publicity machine. Maybe at some point they can have a  (private) reconciliation, and that Kellie can see her mother with different eyes later.

    It is a great drama with many tragic dimensions. For the daughter, the pain is too real, and yet her fame brought her the power and independence to detach herself from it. She is using her music to work through the pain of growing up while at the same time exploiting it for her show business career.   All artists have a shtick, and I guess there’s dignity in trying to make your music or art about something real. (Country performers have that knack, it seems.)

    Celebrities have to create a personality brand, and I guess it’s better to turn yourself into a ditzy country belle than a victim of a Southern family trauma. Maybe some individuals prefer hiding their personality and focusing just  on performance or art; actually, that’s pretty easy to do if you’re not a megastar. But a megastar like  Sheryl Crow doesn’t seem to have any colorful persona during her TV concerts or talk show appearances; she is there just to sing.  Maybe Crow  makes a few asides in between songs, but she’s not really  trying to weave a biographical narrative.  She doesn’t try to be funny; she just doesn’t need to. Sheryl Crow belongs to my personal pantheon of great singers, and her music videos have always been bold and expressive (though I suspect this is more a result of Crow’s publicity team than artistic muse).

    But Pickler seems to have an insane need to be liked. She is  needy but funny. Her upbringing might account for it;  the need to be funny can mask all kinds of insecurities. Talk to any comedian on tour, and you’ll find someone with a drinking problem, a history of failed relationships and a caustic attitude towards life. Ok, I am generalizing, but this is true more often that we’d care to admit; what kind of person would try to make a living out of being funny – no matter how hard?  I once had a teacher who was the funniest and most clever person I’d ever met.  Her wit was on a par with Oscar Wilde. I got  to know her rather well; she had a very prominent and visible role in her community, but later I began to feel that her public eloquence was  a ruse to misdirect her audience from her actual personality. I actually had no idea what this woman was like inside. I had no idea if she was insecure or distraught or happy. Her wit was not only intimidating and distracting, it drowned out any kind of semi-ordinary conversation.

    Actors are  like that, as are many writers. I find – if I want to — I can offer scintillating wit in conversation .. and at the same time say nothing of importance!   Even when I seem to be talking about myself or confessing something sincerely, most of it is  for entertainment purposes only. As much as I like to gab, I’ve also  learned to turn it off, or else it would drive people crazy…not to mention myself.  

    Authentic conversation – what is it? Awkward pauses, long stretches of conversation, lots of uhhs and outright misunderstanding of the speaker’s true intentions until days or weeks later. What was the person saying? What were they really saying? Did I say the right thing? Or was it better just to respond spontaneously … no matter how awkward-sounding?  Two weeks ago a close friend told me a secret which stunned me. I just didn’t know what to say; it was a really important revelation – and even though we moved onto other subjects, the topic still loomed over the rest of our conversation.  She wasn’t a verbal person – but when she tried to articulate something, it was vital to pay attention.

    Listen carefully – I’m serious! — the person who is making you laugh might be trying to avoid a full and unvarnished conversation. 

    Verbiage can be interesting and revealing; they are nice ornaments to personality. I once read a book called “I Know You are Lying” by Mark McLish. McClish trained federal marshals in interviewing suspects.  McLish takes public statements of people in scandals (such as Herman Cain and Jerry Sandusky) and calls attention to verbal tics which suggest subterfuge. For writers and readers, this is no  great surprise, and indeed that’s what we like about literature – the roundabout clues that are baked inside narratives.

    The funny thing is,  Pickler strikes me as  an open and honest person. She doesn’t lie; she misdirects. Ok, sure she might exaggerate a few details in her stories (we all do that).   To have survived a broken household and  not to be worn  down by the relentless celebrity machine says something about her survival skills, her perseverance and her preternatural faith that things will turn out for the best. Sure, we can thank her grandparents for that, but I believe it also has to come within Pickler herself. We can say that good looks explain her success, and that may be true; on the other hand,  we could also say that good looks make you more cynical about all kinds of human relationships. Everyone wants to sleep with you or envies your popularity. 

    Pickler doesn’t strike me as cynical. Cynicism is a disease which affects mainly teenagers, the retired, and criminals. If you are 30 or 40, you are too busy to be cynical about anything.  I’m always cynical after long bouts of unemployment, but once I find a job again, voila! that cynicism is gone.  Even when in pain and desperate circumstances, most   people don’t become cynical; they still  remember how great life used to be; that’s the kind of life they still long for.  The longing to recapture a pleasant life can often be the best antidote against cynicism (even if recapturing it turns out to be impossible).

    Cynicism is what happens when you feel betrayed by someone. Betrayal doesn’t just mean “cheating” or “lying.” You feel betrayed when what has been implicitly  promised to you never materializes or  when someone  you counted upon has failed to come through.  By that definition, I guess we can say that Pickler has the perfect right to be doubly-cynical (because she has been twice-betrayed).  She may  still be at the stage where the pain is still too close; this pain can interfere with the empathy that would come naturally to someone so kind-hearted.  She has spoken publicly about forgiveness, and maybe she has reached this point; regardless she has already found  a lot of caring people to restore this trust. I’m sure she will pour this kindness into all kinds of charities.

    Talk show ditziness is fine  (for a while at least), but eventually Pickler will find that making people laugh is less important than making them care and helping them to resist  the terrible sting of cynicism.

  • Inane Logic of Teabaggers

    An odd fact: I was once mistaken for a Teabagger.  It’s true. I was a proto-teabagger. I was outraged at the bank bailouts especially because it meant shortchanging public services like education. The protest was sparsely attended but focused. I met teachers, investment bankers (!) and a token LaRouche groupie. All in all a positive experience – even if it didn’t really satisfy my desire to see the system changed.

    I was going to a Saturday tech conference on this same day and mentioned to someone there that I had been protesting the bank bailouts. “What? Are you one of these tea baggers?”  He said it with a straight face, and I was horrified. Did he really think that I was the type of person to fall for that malarky?  The Glen Beck Tea Party movement was just getting off the ground, and the voices of reasonable people were being drowned out the right-wing rabble.  (To be fair: a lot of things were going on in April; we still didn’t know what had hit us in Fall, 2008). But I couldn’t believe anyone would take the rantings of Beck etc seriously. They were irrational. Also, a lot of their anger seem misdirected. I am resigned to the fact that our political leaders make mistakes, and the fact that we approved such a gigantic TARP/GM/AIG/Citi bailout disappointed me, but it hardly surprised me.  I knew that the bailouts would affect the political dynamic somehow; I just didn’t know what form it would take or who would benefit from it.

    image

    But I didn’t seem to appreciate 1)that the media would find the movement so fascinating, 2)that it would influence Texas politics so strongly and 3)that it would outlast its promotion on Fox.

    My theory is that the driving force behind  tea parties was not Fox News but right-wing talk radio. Sure, Fox gives glitz and glamour to this political movement, but talk radio allows nonstop ranting and sarcasm while also letting people hear other angry citizens vent. The paradox of course is that the only people who listen to right-wing radio are right-wingers, so these people wouldn’t have an inkling of how out-of-the-mainstream right-wing political views are.

    Contrast that with something like CSPAN (good lord; why can’t we have CSPAN on radio? ) They have a telephone call in show in the morning which is great – exposing people to a lot of viewpoints with hosts who are polite, respectful and soft-spoken. (“Sir, can you turn your radio down please?”)  I don’t have CSPAN, but I love hearing the medley of voices on the rare occasions when I do. It is like hearing an audio version of a Studs Terkel book.  I hear a variety of political viewpoints – some cranks to be sure, but most are reasonable even if they are not particularly informed. Of course, I don’t claim to be informed about lots of things; perhaps our political problem is that everybody thinks they are 1)right and 2)smarter than everybody else.

    Now we see where the Tea Party people have come.

    John Cole adds his two cents:

    They weren’t around protesting during the Bush years BECAUSE THE TEA PARTY IS REPUBLICANS. They don’t care about the deficit. They care that a Democrat (and a black “Muslim,” to boot), is in the White House. They don’t care about fiscal restraint, they care that a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t, as some foolishly pretend, care about the Wall Street excesses. Certainly Cenk Uyger is not the only one who has noticed that the tea party bubbas could all be shipped to protest HCR, but the big money boys aren’t running the buses to protest Wall Street. They care that there is a Democrat in the White House.

    image

    Steve Benen started a great thread about the inane logic of teabaggers.  Here are some comments (mainly about the misdirected anger and Friedman’s loony idea that they could be turned into some environmental group aka Green Tea Party).  The comments are both rude and educated and truthful.

    My own father is a Tea-bagger and started screaming at me because I dared to contradict his Fox News narrative that “the vast majority of the national debt has been added by Obama in 1 only year.”

    I went to the U.S. treasury web-site and quoted the actual budget statistics that proved that the vast majority of the debt was created by Bush & the Republicans. All he could do was shout “That’s not true.”

    “I’m looking right now at the official U.S. Dept. of the Treasury web-site.”

    “That’s just not true.”

    When I told him exactly what the official numbers show he just got angry and hung up the phone.

    That’s the tea-bagger response in a nut-shell. You can’t argue or reason with them and facts are irrelevant. They have their OWN facts which cannot be contradicted.

    The media narrative gives these people power. Friedman and others like him will keep seeking for reason in their wild ranting, and argue that the rest of the country has to move more towards the tea-bag view of the world as part of our duty to be “bi-partisan.”

    It’s a tilted scale that always says we have to move endlessly to placate the right-wing no matter how determined they are never to be satisfied. Because they must be angry about SOMETHING, so it’s our duty to find out what it is and move to satisfy them.

    Why? Because they’re “the American people”. Apparently black and brown people are not “real Americans” and Democrats cannot legitimately run things because they depend on the votes of “non-real Americans.”

    ***

    Ever take public transit?

    The entire teabagging party seems to be that crowd of riders at the bus stop that wasn’t paying much attention when it should have, and now is just realizing it’s been waiting at the stop while the bus has already departed, years ago!

    The anger we’ve witnesses over the past year is the kind that foments when a person realizes he’s been ripped off, but can’t quite figure out who’s the one who ripped him off.

    Well, we are graciously blessed with the teabagging party simply because their fearful bus drivers, Bush and Cheney, have left them stranded in the dust, and now they think the new muslim kid is going to steal their fares money!

    ***

    The driving force is race. Not so much anger at a black president (though Obama provides a convenient focus that helps concentrate their rage), but at the TP’ers belief that liberal/Democratic policies tend to redistribute towards people of color.

    A great indicator of the fundamental racism of the Tea Partiers is their frequent complaint (echoed in the Remember November video, and elsewhere) that Obama and the Dems “ignore the will of the people.” They can count votes, they know they lost the election – what they’re really saying is that all those non-white people who voted for Obama and the Dems shouldn’t really count.

    ***

    Middle class whites have very little chance of getting into the tier I universities that are about the only course left for whites to succeed in the U.S. Since they have little chance of that happening, the middle class whites are left to compete with immigrants for jobs in health care, with blacks for government jobs, and with Hispanics for construction jobs.

    Since whites have smaller families and a different culture that Asian, the middle east, southern Asia, or South American immigrants, whites cannot depend on tribal, clannish, or ethnic based groups to help to support them. Look at how few whites of any class major in engineering or the science, look at how middle class whites are leaving California because there is no future for them there.

    California is about a half a generation ahead of the rest of the U.S. as far as whites are concerned the future does not look good.

    ***

    Mr. Benen is correct since the Teabaggers only want budget cuts affecting everybody else BUT their own direct interest. You never hear any of them giving up their own SS and MC, but they want it abolished for everybody else. They complain about socialism yet also complain about the condition of the roads and subways. Hey, teabagging assholes! Do you see Microsuck or CocaCola building roads and subways? (They might put ads in/next to them, but not send out their own road crews)

    They’re just angry McPalin voters who can’t stand a black guy with more brains, power, and insight than them.

    image

    (From the Priceless Tom Tomorrow).

  • Shallowness of Sunday talk shows

    I noticed that mediamatters is now  factchecking the statements made on  the Sunday talk shows. I don’t know how hard this is, but it’s extremely convenient to have this as a reference.  Up until recently, TV commentary was provided only on Sunday talk shows. Now with 24 hour cable, we have news commentary shows that appear in Prime Time.  The fact that political shows seem to be successful at prime time or late night on weeknights indicates how politicized a country we have become. 

    Steve Benen comments on the shallowness of Sunday Talk shows:

    ABC’s "This Week" held its usual roundtable discussion this morning, with Elizabeth Vargas hosting a panel of Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Paul Krugman.

    The last topic of conversation was introduced by Vargas this way:

    "[O]f course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She — she was highly criticized after the Obamas’ first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary’s office didn’t have people manning the security sites."

    This led to a surprisingly long chat about Desiree Rogers.

    Krugman sat silently while the discussion went on (and on), before eventually interjecting:

    "Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we’re worrying about the status of the White House social secretary….

    Donaldson responded, "Paul, welcome to Washington."

    Steve Benen comments:

    But this panel discussion covered exactly four subjects this morning: health care reform, Charlie Rangel’s ethics problem, David Paterson’s latest troubles, and the fate of the former White House social secretary (and where she’s from, what her clothes looked like, what her next job is likely to be, etc.), which hardly seems relevant to anyone who doesn’t actually attend social events at the White House.

    In this same discussion, there was nothing about the jobs bill that passed the Senate this week, nothing about the incredibly important Zazi guilty plea this week (and the fact that it makes Republican talking points look ridiculous), nothing about Jim Bunning single-handedly delaying unemployment insurance for those who need it.

     

    (Wow, am I the only one who missed the fact that Zazi plead guilty!?

    The people at Washington Monthly have funny observations about this exchange:

    Donaldson responded, "Paul, welcome to Washington."

    Longer Sam Donaldson: "Washington is a fundamentally unserious place, completely removed from and uncaring about the problems afflicting ordinary Americans. Deal with it."

    ***

    The Sunday morning talk show is the Washington Beltway Establishment on parade. In no other place can you expect to see a party now controlled by its radical fringes, where elected Republican lawmakers are no longer in charge of their party must instead take orders from their far right factions, cable news broadcasters and talk radio demagogues. And yet they are still treated as royalty on these shows, fully the equal with Democrats who have won the past two elections.

    There is an unspoken code on these shows, and one of them is not to notice that Republicans have completely lost their minds. Watching insiders like David Gregory and George Stephanopolous preside over these farces you really start to believe that Washington has become another Court of Versailles.

    ***

    "Hey Krugman! Here’s a Nobel Prize in Shut Yer Mouth!"

    ***

    This is just standard high school stuff. The popular kids let one of the brainy nerds (Krugman, Maddow) sit at their table, but the eggheads always wanna talk about boring ol’ policy instead of wailing on the unpopular girl’s clothes and hair. "Welcome to Washington" = Like, what-ever.

    ***

    "Paul, welcome to Washington."

    Google Translate:

    "Paul, most of us can’t even get our kids into Princeton, much less teach there. We rise through sycophancy and ingratiation, and we assume that, being trivial ourselves, that the rest of the world is not. We don’t consciously try to create a tableau vivant from the pages of Laclos–or unconsciously either; for people like us, "Dangerous Liaisons" is that movie where Uma Thurman takes her top off. So go back to New Jersey and worry about the little people, while we go off to Sally’s brunch."

    ***

    "I wonder, who was the target audience for the discussion of Desiree Rogers…"

    The same as the audience for the Rangel and Paterson stories–namely, people who enjoy hearing about black people screwing up.

    I no longer watch the Sunday talk shows. (Wolf Blitzer does a good job – if you can stand the commercials). Fareed Zakaria’s GPS is by far the most cerebral shows out there. I just love how occasionally CNN will give a prime spot to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

    Let me see. What is my multimedia news diet these days?

    • PBS Newshour (occasionally, but especially Friday with Shields & Brooks)
    • Washington Week in Review (smart reporters give the inside scoop on everything)
    • Bill Moyers (still the best; see also NOW on PBS).
    • Best of the Left podcast… Takes snippets from the political satire and commentary shows.
    • Fareed Zakaria’s GPS
    • McLaughlin Report. This retro program features blowhards from all political sides. What I like about it is 1)it lets me hear the loony rightwing talking point of the week (which I would otherwise miss). I sometimes learn a lot of things about political culture – for example that lots of conservatives still deny global warming as a reality. 2)Jim McLaughlin is good at identifying the next big hot issues. I always learn a few new things each time I watch, and it’s not only the extent of right-wing foolishness.
    • Paul Solman Economic Reports on PBS News hour. He’s the best, and frankly, he is good at bridging the gap between academic discussion and concerns of the common man.
    • Red, White & Blue, a Texas political talk show.
    • From Our Own Correspondent, a BBC behind-the-scenes 1st person narrative about the major and not-so-major news stories.

  • Risque Comedy & Flagging those Molecules

    Crazy TV nonnews.

    The actor who played the annoying Screech in Saved by the Bell  tells how he picked up women: walk around Disneyland until a teenage girl recognizes him and starts hanging around. (From an amusing book review written by Sam Greenspan).

    Ever wonder how to get on CNN? Write a random note about Gilligan’s island while on a plane and be arrested for endangering the lives of other passengers.  I quote the actual note he wrote in the customer card being passed around by flight attendants on the plane.

    “I thought I was going to die, we were so high up,” the card said. “I thought to myself: I hope we don’t crash and burn or worse yet landing in the ocean, living through it, only to be eaten by sharks, or worse yet, end up on some place like Gilligan’s Island, stranded, or worse yet, be eaten by a tribe of headhunters, speaking of headhunters, why do they just eat outsiders, and not the family members? Strange … and what if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited (sic) to earth, landed on Gilligan’s Island and then lived through it, and the only woman there was Mrs. Thurston Howell III? No Mary Anne (my favorite) no Ginger, just Lovey! If it were just her, I think I’d opt for the sharks, maybe the headhunters.”

    By the way, they expect to release a Gilligan’s Island remake in 2011. I can’t wait (seriously). I also really can’t wait until the sequel to Wall Street is released in February. I admit I’m a sucker for sequels – especially when the original writers go against the grain and try  something peculiar (time travel, go to Vegas or get the band/crime-fighting duo back together), If all goes well, I’ll be receiving my Get Smart sequels in the mail tonight. (Apparently they did several TV sequels in the 1990s).

    Actual answer by Sarah Palin on the 2008 campaign trail about oil:

    When someone asked Sarah Palin this question ( “I’d like to know that all that oil we’re going to drill here is going to stay here domestically and it’s not going to be exported by the oil companies.”), Palin gives a doozy of an answer:

    Oil (of coal), of course, is a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, ya know, the molecules where, where it’s going to where it’s not but and in the, in the sense of the Congress today they know our very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So I believe that what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here, it’s gotta flow into our domestic markets first.

  • And I thought I was so cool (the incredible speed of Internet memes)

    I had been having a back-and-forth about global warming with a friend in Japan. Just on a lark, I sent a silly music video that was a remix of an infomercial . It is absurd and yet it’s hard to resist rewatching (“Stop having boring tuna!”).

    My friend in Japan is a bit crazy, but he’s generally pretty tuned into American culture (he grew up in Houston).  A few hours later, he replied by sending me another remix of the song; apparently not only had he already seen the video, but he had found  a “better” version.  I couldn’t believe it. This video was just a minor example of American pop culture, but apparently my friend saw it before I did.

    A few years ago I used to take comfort in  William Gibson’s thought that the future is already here;  but it’s unevenly distributed. I would still receive the occasional email about Nieman-Marcus cookies or the Bill Gates chain mail for charity. It comforted me that people were stumbling upon these things for the first time while for other people like me, it was old hat. It made me feel so hip and avante-garde.

    Nowadays, I am no longer so sure. An Albanian friend of mine watches Friends more religiously than I ever did. A Brazilian friend of mine had also watched every episode of Lost (I knew Lost was a worldwide phenomena; I just didn’t know that the level of obsession was to be found everywhere). A Ukrainian friend is telling me he has already seen the music video I sent him, and I tell him I had already seen the crazy stunt video he had sent me. I had been reading an obscure and erudite book on a provocative topic, and I find to my astonishment that my Albanian friend had been reading a pirated digital version of the exact same book!  I thought I had found something unique and unknown when I discovered a wedding dance video and my family members told me they enjoyed watching it. That dance video was on CNN a day later; the same thing happened for the United Breaks Guitars song and several other minor Internet phenomena. Since when has CNN been so quick to identify cultural trends? (My glib answer would be: ever since the invention of Digg, Reddit and Google Hot Trends). Media outlets like CNN amplify certain aspects of pop culture (creating enough momentum for these trends to take off).   Facebook has certainly added a new dimensi0n to everything. Now you see the memes which are infecting your friends, and you infect other friends with the same Meme. Assuming that your friends are interested in the same kinds of things, it now seems that you are sharing the same cultural signposts.

    For a while, I thought Slashdot was driving the cultural memes in geek culture (and to a lesser extent, Metafilter). Then it was Digg and then it was BoingBoing (actually BoingBoing was always big and still is). Now it seems that the video clip sites are taking over (Collegehumor, blip.tv, etc) while certain political icons are also exerting a lot of influence (Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen). For a while, I stopped blogging about anything that appeared in Slashdot or BoingBoing. I just assumed that if it had appeared on BoingBoing,  the world had already heard of it.

    Is it possible that Internet memes transcend cultural and geographic boundaries?  Obviously email and facebook allow URLs to be shared, and so it is theoretically possible. On the other hand, I would expect aspects of pop America to interest only Americans (and maybe only English-speaking countries). Yet that does not appear to be the case. On the other hand, this may simply reflect the fact that English still exerts a lot of influence over world culture; surely that is changing; pretty soon Philipinos or Brazilians  will no longer be interested in our stupid music videos (and we will no longer be interested in theirs).

    I really don’t think there is anything magical about the Internet memes I have described. The wedding dance video just isn’t that funny or clever.  But it took off because people found it cute enough to share with friends. (One characteristic of an Internet meme is its harmlessness and inoffensiveness; if an Internet meme were offensive, it wouldn’t be shared as often). This criteria of inoffensiveness meshes perfectly with the criteria of  mainstream media (which cannot risk offending its audience or advertisers). Even though Big Media amplifies certain aspects of pop culture, I doubt that they are wholly responsible for it.

    Perhaps these cultural memes serve as social exchanges, and the ability to recognize these memes as potential social exchanges is hard-wired in our brains. Certain messages and jokes are shareable; certain ones are not, and the unconscious human brain is equipped to tell the difference. Perhaps cave man would have some synapse in their brain that fired at the sight of the Slap Chop video which would have prompted him to want to share it.

    Semi-Related: This post was the inspiration for another one.

    Post-script: “Lewis Black’s Law” (mentioned here) states even if you don’t seek out Internet sensations, they will come finding you, hounding you nonstop until the winds of the fad die down. I guess the opportunity to miss the Gangnam Style sensations is  a rare privilege to be savored.

    Post-script 2: There will soon come a time when people who stumble upon this blog entry (if it exists) will not recognize any of the references or names. At this point they will need to consult some archive of historical Internet memes (if they are motivated enough).  A meme is bad enough when it is first born. Later though, it will be viewed as tiresome historical curiosities which perhaps can be co-opted by another meme which is newer and more ludicrous.

  • The List is back: Old Gossip Page on wayback machine

    A few years ago I came across this hilarious  gossip site and even blogged about it. But the site name “The List” was horribly generic, so much that I couldn’t even search my own site to find out the original URL. (I tried several times).

    Quite by accident I stumbled upon my mention of it on my blog yesterday, and so I immediately  checked the URL.  The Geocities link is dead, but through the magic of the Wayback Machine, we see the original List here (Version 6.1, last updated March 31 2004). I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information here, but in general many  of the casual remarks have been turned out to be true, and the descriptions were witty and fun.  (Apparently there is copious information on gossip sites about people’s tipping habits).

    Gosh, it must be hard being a celebrity. They will treat you like trash when you are alive and like an angel after you dead.

    It goes without saying, but a lot of really cool sites just die because of the content creator’s neglect or because a free webhost went offline. My friend Michael Barrett still bears an unceasing grudge against me for recommending that he publish items on the now defunct  themestream (more on themestream here). Themestream was a Ponzi scheme back in the days of early Internet giddiness.

  • Breaking News: Celebrities are Dying all around us!

    Joanne McNeil on the phenomenon of media outlets reporting a constant barrage of celebrity deaths.

    Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.

    Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.

    Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to sign on Twitter, precisely for that reason. What if David Cronenberg died? Or Bill Callahan? Sophia Coppola, Rachel Maddow, Tilda Swinton, anyone I like.

    Hmmm, I wonder, if media companies like Universal or Time-Warner ever stand to gain financially from reporting about the death of Heath Ledger/Michael Jackson/Brittany Murply. Would that even be possible?

    All I will say is: thank god there are no other major international crises for news programs to report on! 

    By the way, I have become smitten with the Tomorrow Museum blog for which Joanne writes. See her post about managing RSS feeds, why teenagers still read, and  geek literary culture:

    So there is no geek literary movement. There are geeks that write, some even embrace their geekiness, but no work is about to oust “Eat, Pray, Love” or “The Corrections” as the dominant publishing ideal. Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.

    If there is a “l33terati,” they aren’t writing novels or even short stories. They are writing flash-super-super-flash fiction or flash-super-super-flash creative nonfiction. That quick evocative half-poetry, half-advertising that is “A diamond is forever” or “if you lived here, you’d be home now,” well you can find it on Twitter every day.

    (See my thoughts about microfiction here).  By the way, I am in the process of writing more on this topic.

    Here’s a remarkable picture from her post about cell phone cameras.

    image

    From her blog, a quote about publishing from Virginia Woolf.

    Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.