Thursday, September 25, 2008
Literacy Debate, Part II
The belated second installment of The Literacy Debate posts:
“Why Ivy Leaguers Can’t Think”, by William Deresiewicz, can be found in the Summer 2008 edition of The American Scholar and online
here. Coming off of that same line, Rachel Toor’s “God and Jerk at Yale” from The Chronicle Review, offering another voice to the debate, as well as a response to Deresiewicz’s article above, is available here.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A: Still working on a proper site for personal ramblings and links to those of others, as well. So, if posts and traffic here are light, that’s probably the reason why. I will keep any of those who are interested in progress updated. Any questions may be directed to the following email: theparallaxreview@live.com
Friday, August 15, 2008
The Digital Elephant in the Room
“We’re in the sort of moment in history that some people will say they were glad to witness, but only twenty years hence.” – Alissa Quarts, “Lost Media, Found Media” (see article below)
New media has provided a host of new conveniences to a system that until the past two decades (and especially felt since the new millennium) has been almost solely predicated upon the old.
Quite naturally this shift has made our lives easier, however, one such as this also creates between those two forms due to the nature of civilization, their economies, and ultimately, capitalism, as well. Access to all forms of media has been made easier, but at what cost? Do those benefits offered by the new media outweigh the tension and compromises naturally arising from this kind of sociological evolution? Is it merely a case of nostalgia and personal economics for those who have vested interests in the continuity and preeminence of Old Media, or is there more long-term substance to it — a truer relevance to the finalities of this ongoing debate…
Here are a few interesting articles, the authors of which pose some of these same questions, to stimulate your own thoughts on these subjects…
“What will happen to us?” is the question Alissa and other “Lost media-ites” ask concerning the shifting grounds upon which all journalism, reading, writing, even entertainment, stands at the moment. Those of the Old journalistic establishment are uncertain of their role here, often looking down upon some members of the New, which she calls “Found Media”, where the argument can be made that their own hard work has been subjugated to simple compilation, heaped in a recycle bin of “derivative information.”
In her piece, Robert S. Boynton of New York University’s Department of Journalism notes that members of the New Media, those usually young members of the “Found”, have a “minimal” stake in the preservation of the old system. “We do our students a tremendous disservice when we promote the myth of a golden age, when everyone was a budding Joan Didion and every magazine was Esquire under Harold Hayes… The world of magazines has always been small and competitive, impoverished and uncertain,” he goes on to say. But whatever the settled score between the Old and New, the Lost and Found, Boynton recognizes that all the establishment has to offer isn’t completely lost on the young, emerging class of journalists: “…story, character, ideas, reporting — are the [parts of the old system] that will be most valued in the future.”
Quarts also is keen enough to note that print’s perception of the television was similarly pessimistic a quarter century ago. She references George W.S. Trow’s prediction “that television would unravel existing contexts and confound people’s minds, that the great figures of aesthetics of his day had been sapped of their deserved authority,” but also realizes that television “certainly did not engulf other media the way the web has.”
She’s also just as unsure of this ending as others, writing: “Indeed, we may return more to the “for love not money” journalism of writers of the earlier part of the twentieth century… For better or worse, we in Lost Media must look to the Found Media and try to learn or steal what we can from it. And perhaps some of the conventions of traditional newspaper and magazine writing that can make it rigid and bland will fade into the background. Maybe some of the best qualities of the blogs – directness and informality – will positively infect us… One hopes that the people looking so hard for the new economic models for this kind of journalism find them soon.”
Find her article in its entirety Here.
“To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” a 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, “placed the consumption of Moby Dick up there with questions of poverty and health care,” Klein begins. In a piece called “The Future of Reading”, however, Newsweek “decided to peer past the decline in reading and instead enthuse about the creation of new, expensive technologies that would help us read — namely, Amazon’s Kindle.”
Driven out of his own curiosity, Klein decides to investigate further into the future of reading: “I would simultaneously support reading and the introduction of new electronic devices by buying a Kindle and proudly toting it around town for a month.” So, what did he discover? “Though reading the Kindle felt like a courageous betrayal of every word written since the moment papyrus gave way to paper… [it's actually] far less the start of a revolution than the codification of one,” writes Klein.
Ultimately, he finds that content is still king -
“It will seek out the vehicle best suited to its absorption or enjoyment. Sometimes, it will occupy multiple mediums at the same time, in order to appeal to the largest audience (think of how books live happily alongside audio books, and then are turned into movies). But the endless discussion as to whether books are dead tends to conflate “books” with “text,” and thereby obscures far more than it illuminates. Books will not dies, after all, unless we want them dead. They have survived the advent of radio, television, the Internet, and Nintendo. Rather, they will be challenged once again, and books’ content will find new ways to express itself more effectively.” The true promise of Amazon’s Kindle, and future devices like it, is rooted in that expansion and efficiency, according to Ezra. “Printed text is fundamentally limited,” and the creation of products like Kindle will attempt to go where books are inherently unable to venture in the capacities those technologies offer. As Klein sees it, electronic texts offers more opportunity for reading and writing than ever before, and such derogatory assumptions of technologies like Amazon’s are misplaced.
For example, he muses the following: “Currently, authors are hampered by the nature of the publishing process. Books are begun years before their publication date, and finished months before they will ever reach readers. A book on electoral politics may be completed in 2007 and released in early 2008, its continued relevance reliant on nothing more concrete than the author’s vision and the vicistudes of polls. With electronic text, however, the original “book” could be just the first step in an ongoing relationship between author and reader. In the more simple form, the book could be updated with new chapters and commentary. Corrections could be downloaded automatically, as could new pieces of supporting evidence,. Debates could be held with critics, and the transcripts e-mailed out to all who purchased the original title. The book could be released in 2008, and updated through the election and even beyond, the author routinely applying the insights of the original work to the daily news reports… This could profoundly alter the relationship between authors and their audiences.” Sounds good to me.
Likewise, find the full article Here.
Both of these articles are from the May/June 2008 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.
Rich writes: “As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.
What’s Best?
The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.
Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.
Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.
Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.
One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.
“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”
Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”
Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.
“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”
Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”
Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.
Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”
“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”
Click Here for a graphic titled “The New Readers” from Rich’s piece, explaining some differences in processing print and web-based texts.
Find the full article from the New York Times Here.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
From Gina at Anti Label Blog:
“I must admit, before meeting Tom, I had heard so many rumors and so much gossip that I was afraid. Frankly, his gambling debts, his animal magnetism, coupled with his disregard for the feelings of others… His elaborate gun collection, his mad shopping sprees, the face lifts, the ski trips, the drug busts and the hundreds of rooms in his home. The tax shelters, the public urination…I was nervous to meet the real man himself. Baggage and all. But I found him to be gentle, intelligent, open, bright, helpful, humorous, brave, audacious, loquacious, clean, and reverent. A Boy Scout, really (and a giant of a man). Join me now for a rare glimpse into the heart of Tom Waits. Remove your shoes and no smoking, please.”
Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.
Q: What are some unusual things that have been left behind in a cloakroom?
A: Well, Winston Churchill was born in a ladies cloakroom and was one sixteenth Iroquois.
Q: You’ve always enjoyed the connection between fashion and history…talk to us about that.
A: Ok let’s take the two-piece bathing suit, produced in 1947 by a French fashion designer. The sight of the first woman in the minimal two piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.
Q: List some artists who have shaped your creative life.
A: Okay, here are a few that just come to me for now: Kerouac, Dylan, Bukowski, Rod Serling, Don Van Vliet, Cantinflas, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, Lead Belly, Lord Buckley, Mabel Mercer, Lee Marvin, Thelonius Monk, John Ford, Fellini, Weegee, Jagger, Richards, Willie Dixion, John McCormick, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, Eurico Caruso.
Q: List some songs that were beacons for you.
A: Again, for now… but if you ask me tomorrow the list would change, of course. Gershwin’s second prelude, “Pathatique Sonata”, “El Paso”, “You’ve Really Got Me”, “Soldier Boy”, “Lean Back” , “Night Train”, “Come In My Kitchen”, “Sad Eyed Lady”, “Rite of Spring”, “Ode to Billy Joe”, “Louie Louie”, “Just a Fool”, “Prisoner of Love”, “Wang Dang Doodle (all night long)”, “Ringo” , “Ball and Chain”, “Deportee”, “Strange Fruit”, “Sophisticated Lady”, “Georgia On My Mind”, “Can’t Stop Loving You”, “Just Like A Woman”, “So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Who’ll Stop The Rain?”, “Moon River”, “Autumn Leaves”, “Danny Boy”, “Dirty Ol’ Town”, “Waltzing Matilda”, “Train Keeps a Rollin”, “Boris the Spider”, “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me”, “Red Right Hand”, “All Shook Up”, “Cause of It All”, “Shenandoah”, “China Pig”, “Summertime”, “Without a Song”, “Auld Ang Syne”, “This is a Man’s World”, “Crawlin’ King Snake”, “Nassun Dorma”, “Bring it on Home to Me”, “Hound Dog”, “Hello Walls”, “You Win Again”, “Sunday Morn’ Coming Down”, “Almost Blue”, “Pump It Up”, “Greensleeves”, “Just Wanna See His Face”, “Restless Farewell”, “Fairytale of NY”, “Bring Me A Little Water Sylvie”, “Raglan Road”, “96 Tears”, “In Dreams”, “Substitute”, “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues”, “Theme from Rawhide”, “Same Thing”, “Walk Away Rene”, “For What it’s Worth”, theme from “Once Upon A Time In America”, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”, “Oh Holy Night”, “Mass in E Minor”, “Harlem Shuffle”, “Trouble Man”, “Wade in The Water”, “Empty Bed Blues”, “Hava Nagila”
Q: What’s heaven for you?
A: Me and my wife on Rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.
Q: What’s hard for you?
A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.
Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.
Q: Favorite scenes in movies?
A: R. De Niro in the ring in Raging Bull. Julie Christie’s face in Heaven Can Wait when she said, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” James Dean in East of Eden telling the nurse to get out when his dad has had a stroke and he’s sitting by his bed. Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil saying “He was some kind of man.” Scout saying “Hey Mr. Cunningham” in the scene in To Kill A Mockingbird. Nic Cage falling apart in the drug store in Matchstick Men…and eating a cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss. The last scene in Chinatown.
Q: Can you describe a few other scenes from movies that have always stayed with you?
A: Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker explaining to the Puerto Rican all about gold. Brando in The Godfather dying in the tomatoes with scary orange teeth. Lee Marvin in Emperor of The North riding under the box car, Borgnine bouncing steel off his ass. Dennis Weaver at the motel saying “I am just the night man,” holding onto a small tree in, Touch of Evil. The hanging in Oxbow Incident. The speech by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner as he’s dying. Anthony Quinn dancing on the beach in Zorba. Nicholson in Witches of Eastwick covered in feathers in the church as the ladies stick needles in the voodoo doll. When Mel Gibson’s Blue Healer gets shot with an arrow in Road Warrior. When Rachel in The Exorcist says “could you help an old altar boy father?” The blind guy in the tavern in Treasure Island. Frankenstein after he strangles the young girl by the river.
Q: Can you tell me an odd thing that happened in an odd place? Any thoughts?
A: A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during WWII and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo Harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of the ocean with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping-pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface, the engineer was elated. Moral solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level; also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds.
Q: Most interesting recording you own?
A: It’s a mysteriously beautiful recording from, I am told, Robbie Robertson’s label. It’s of crickets. That’s right, crickets, the first time I heard it… I swore I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir, or the Mormon Tabernacle choir. It has a four-part harmony it is a swaying choral panorama. Then a voice comes in on the tape and says, “What you are listening to is the sound of crickets. The only thing that has been manipulated is that they slowed down the tape.” No effects have been added of any kind except that they changed the speed of the tape. The sound is so haunting. I played it for Charlie Musselwhite and he looked at me as if I pulled a Leprechaun out of my pocket.
Q: You are fascinated with irony, what is irony?
A: Chevrolet was puzzled when they discovered that their sales for the Chevy Nova were off the charts everywhere but in Latin America. They finally realized that “Nova” in Spanish translates to “no go.” Not the best name for a car… anywhere “no va”.
Q: Do you have words to live by?
A: Jim Jarmusch once told me “Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it wont be good. If it’s cheap and good it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good it wont be cheap.” Fast, cheap and good… pick (2) words to live by.
Q: What is on Hemmingway’s gravestone?
A: “Pardon me for not getting up.”
Q: How would you compare guitarists Marc Ribot and Smokey Hormel?
A: Octopus have eight and squid have ten tentacles, each with hundreds of suction cups and each have the power to burst a man’s artery. They have small birdlike beaks used to inject venom into a victim. Some gigantic squid and octopus with one hundred foot tentacles have been reported. Squids have been known to pull down entire boats to feed on the disoriented sailors in the water. Many believe unexplained, sunken deep-sea vessels, and entire boat disappearances are the handiwork of giant squid.
Q: What have you learned from parenthood?
A: “Never loan your car to anyone to whom you’ve given birth.” – Erma Bombeck
Q: Now Tom, for the grand prize… who said, “He’s the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of”?
A: Mae West
Q: Who said, “Half the people in America are just faking it”?
A: Robert Mitchum (who actually died in his sleep). I think he was being generous and kind when he said that.
Q: What remarkable things have you found in unexpected places?
A:
1. Real beauty: oil stains left by cars in a parking lot.
2. Shoe shine stands that looked like thrones in Brazil made of scrap wood.
3. False teeth in pawnshop windows- Reno, NV.
4. Great acoustics: in jail.
5. Best food: Airport in Tulsa Oklahoma.
6. Most gift shops: Fatima, Portugal.
8. Most unlikely location for a Chicano crowd: A Morrissey concert.
9. Most poverty: Washington D.C.
10. A homeless man with a beautiful operatic voice singing the word “Bacteria” in an empty dumpster in Chinatown.
11. A Chinese man with a Texan accent in Scotland.
12. Best nights sleep-in a dry riverbed in Arizona.
13. Most people who wear red pants- St. Louis.
14. Most beautiful horses, N.Y.C.
15. A judge in Baltimore MD1890 presided over a trial where a man who was accused of murder and was guilty, and convicted by a jury of his peers… and was let go- when the judge said to him at the end of the trial “You are guilty sir… but I cannot put in jail an innocent man.” You see – the murderer was a Siamese twin.
16. Largest penis (in proportion to its body) – The Barnacle.
Q: Tom, you love words and their origins. For $2,000…what is the origin of the word bedlam?
A: It’s a contraction of the word Bethlehem. It comes from the hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem outside London. The hospital began admitting mental patients in the late fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century it became a lunatic asylum. The word bedlam came to be used for any madhouse- and by extension, for any scene of noisy confusion.
Q: What is up with your ears?
A: I have an audio stigmatism where by I hear things wrong- I have audio illusions. I guess now they say ADD. I have a scrambler in my brain and it takes what is said and turns it into pig Latin and feeds it back to me.
Q: Most thrilling musical experience?
A: My most thrilling musical experience was in Time Square, over thirty years ago. There was a rehearsal hall around the Brill Building where all the rooms were divided into tiny spaces with just enough room to open the door. Inside was a spinet piano – cigarette burns, missing keys, old paint and no pedals. You go in and close the door and it’s so loud from other rehearsals you can’t really work- so you stop and listen and the goulash of music was thrilling. Scales on a clarinet, tango, light opera, sour string quartet, voice lessons, someone belting out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, garage bands, and piano lessons. The floor was pulsing, the walls were thin. As if ten radios were on at the same time, in the same room. It was a train station of music with all the sounds milling around… for me it was heavenly.
Q: What would you have liked to see but were born too late for?
A: Vaudeville. So much mashing of cultures and bizarre hybrids. Delta Blues guitarists and Hawaiian artists thrown together resulting in the adoption of the slide guitar as a language we all take for granted as African American. But it was a cross pollination, like most culture. Like all cultures. George Burns was a vaudeville performer I particularly loved. Dry and unflappable, curious, and funny – no matter what he said. He could dance too. He said, “Too bad the only people that know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.”
Q: What is a gentleman?
A: A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.
Q: Favorite Bucky Fuller quote?
A: “Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood”.
Q: What do you wonder about?
A:
1. Do bullets know whom they are intended for?
2. Is there a plug in the bottom of the ocean?
3. What do jockeys say to their horses?
4. How does a newspaper feel about winding up papier-mâché?
5. How does it feel to be a tree by a freeway?
6. Sometimes a violin sounds like a Siamese cat; the first violin strings were made from cat gut- any connection?
7. When is the world going to rear up and scrape us off its back.
8. Will we humans eventually intermarry with robots?
9. Is a diamond just a piece of coal with patience?
10. Did Ella Fitzgerald really break that wine glass with her voice?
Q: What are some sounds you like?
A:
1. An asymmetrical airline carousel created a high pitched haunted voice brought on by the friction of rubbing and it sounded like a big wet finger circling the rim of a gigantic wine glass.
2. Street corner evangelists
3. Pile drivers in Manhattan
4. My wife’s singing voice
5. Horses coming/trains coming
6. Children when school’s out
7. Hungry crows
8. Orchestra tuning up
9. Saloon pianos in old westerns
10. Rollercoaster
11. Headlights hit by a shotgun
12. Ice melting
13. Printing presses
14. Ball game on a transistor radio
15. Piano lessons coming from an apartment window
16. Old cash registers/Ca Ching
17. Muscle cars
18. Tap dancers
19. Soccer crowds in Argentina
20. Beatboxing
21. Fog horns
22. A busy restaurant kitchen
23. Newsrooms in old movies
24. Elephants stampeding
25. Bacon frying
26. Marching bands
27. Clarinet lessons
28. Victrola
29. A fight bell
30. Chinese arguments
31. Pinball machines
32. Children’s orchestras
33. Trolley bell
34. Firecrackers
35. A Zippo lighter
36. Calliopes
37. Bass steel drums
38. Tractors
39. Stroh Violin
40. Muted trumpet
41. Tobacco Auctioneers
42. Musical Saw
43. Theremin
44. Pigeons
45. Seagulls
46. Owls
47. Mockingbirds
48. Doves
The world’s making music all the time.
Q: What’s scary to you?
A:
1. A dead man in the backseat of a car with a fly crawling on his eyeball.
2. Turbulence on any airline.
3. Sirens and search lights combined.
4. Gunfire at night in bad neighborhoods.
5. Car motor turning over but not starting, its getting dark and starting to rain.
6. Jail door closing.
7. Going around a sharp curve on the Pacific Coast Highway and the driver of your car has had a heart attack and died, and you’re in the back seat.
8. You are delivering mail and you are confronted with a Doberman with rabies growling low and showing teeth…you have no dog bones and he wants to bite your ass off.
9. In a movie…which wire do you cut to stop the time bomb, the green or the blue.
10. McCain will win.
11. Germans with submachine guns.
12. Officers, in offices, being official.
13. You fell through the ice in the creek and it carried you down stream, and now as you surface you realize there’s a roof of ice.
Q: Tell me about working with Terry Gilliam.
A: I am the Devil in the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus– not a devil… The Devil. I don’t know why he thought of me. I was raised in the church. Gilliam and I met on Fisher King. He is a giant among men and I am in awe of his films. Munchausen I’ve seen a hundred times. Brazil is a crowning achievement. Brothers Grimm was my favorite film last year. I had most of my scenes with Christopher Plummer (He’s Dr. Parnassus). Plummer is one of the greatest actors on earth! Mostly I watch and learn. He’s a real movie star and a gentleman. Gilliam is an impresario, captain, magician, a dictator (a nice one), a genius, and a man you’d want in the boat with you at the end of the world.
Q: Give me some fresh song titles you two are working on.
A: “Ghetto Buddha”, “Waiting For My Good Luck To Come”, “I’ll Be an Oak Tree Some Day”, “In the Cage”, “Hell Broke Loose”, “Spin The Bottle”, “High and Lonesome.”
Q: You’re going on the road soon, right?
A: We’re going to PEHDTSCKJMBA (Phoenix, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Tulsa, St. Louis, Columbus, Knoxville, Jacksonville, Mobile, Birmingham, Atlanta). I have a stellar band: Larry Taylor (upright bass), Patrick Warren (keyboards), Omar Torrez (guitars), Vincent Henry (woodwinds) and Casey Waits (drums and percussion). They play with racecar precision and they are all true conjurers. I’m doing songs with them I’ve never attempted outside the studio. They are all multi-instrumentalists and they polka like real men. We are the Borman Six and as Putney says, “The Borman Six have got to have soul.”
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
What has happened to The History Channel’s programming lately?
Even recently, I remember an great lineup of shows that were informative, thorough, and thoroughly interesting, generous in dispensing facts useful to most everyone. And while there’s still miles more solid programming available there than say E!, more and more is diluting what I thought was the station’s real substance before. Now suspicion takes its place before science and fact, speculation over affirmation and so forth in many of The History Channel’s current programs.
Let’s take a look at some of the programs in the lineup…
Maybe I’m being ridiculous, but I’ve enjoyed, and mostly still enjoy The History Channel, and have noticed this surging preference for less history and more pandering to sensationalism lately.
Let’s leave that to those who only want to be E!ntertained
It’s not that I expected more, It’s just I expected the norm. Not a comprise of quality for ratings.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Morgan Meis at The Smart Set:
Immanuel Kant: Father of Critical Distance
“Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.
The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.
So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.
Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn’t about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness. I’ll tell you what makes sense about closeness right away. In today’s cultural world, a bird’s eye view of the situation doesn’t get you very much. There is nothing to sort out from up there because there is simply too much culture in too much variety. The distance, the desire to categorize and judge, is overwhelmed by the very pluralism it seeks to understand. The only solution is to get down into the mix and participate. You need to grab works of art and hold onto them tightly. Stepping away from them even a little bit is to risk losing touch altogether.
Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here’s the crucial paragraph:
If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules — or, at least, none save those that are obvious.”
Read the full article Here.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The controversial current issue of The New Yorker
As I’m sure most already know, The New Yorker’s
current issue is stirring up quite a firestorm in both Washington and other public circles.
It’s front cover depicts Presidential hopeful Barack Obama in traditional Muslim garb standing in what appears to be the Oval Office, alongside his wife Michelle Obama donning an afro (giving each other “daps” no less), along with guerilla-style clothing and an M-16, not to mention the American flag burning in the fireplace behind, and atop that above the mantle, what I think is a rather large framed portrait of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
The Obama Campaign quickly and sharply criticized the publication’s use of the image, and even his Republican adversary John McCain condemned the depiction, calling it “totally inappropriate” in expressing his understanding with the media attention and public outcry it has received. The cover image nevertheless points out some of the public rumor and speculation that has surrounded Sen. Obama throughout his campaign.
Several questions arise within the mixed reviews creating this mini-debacle, the central of which being: Is The New Yorker’s depiction of the Obamas as terrorists satire or no? More pointedly, Does the American public perceive the image as pure satire? Or for an ignorant few out there, might it at a glance seemingly reaffirm their unfounded suspicions?
In an email between New Yorkereditor David Remnick and The Washington Post, Remnick described the depiction as “clearly meant to be a joke.” “And if you can’t tell it’s a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don’t know what more to say,” he went on. Though it’s true that as the viewer’s eye drags itself across the cover the images themselves combine to form a level of absurdity (therefore achieving the foremost goal of satire) many will agree that the depiction is unfair, tasteless, and as Mr. McCain stated, “totally inappropriate.”
But even Remnick will concede that point. “The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are,” he continues. Hence there at least seems to be a gap between what can and cannot be considered satire by all, what is and is not fair to suggest, imply and/or depict publicly. Further, this particular incident seems especially pointed due to its situated context within what has increasingly become one of the most important US elections in history, both for its obvious historical significance and other merits.
Now obviously the controversy isn’t quite as contentious as, say, the illustrated depiction of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist in recent years. As of yet, thousands of Obama supporters have not stormed The New Yorker’s offices in protest, the life of illustrator Billy Blitt, who drew the depiction, has not been threatened numerous times (that I know of), and I think that it’s relatively safe to say that the uproar from this isn’t going to conflagrate toward either of those reactions. But it still begs the question: Is it successful satire or not? – And if it is, does the public that exists beyond the mostly educated readership of the publication and the Washington crowds get it? Does the Idaho housewife understand the attempted humor beyond the literal translation of the images themselves? Does she even care? Or does the one glance over it on Fox News or CNN only reaffirm her own suspicions and the other bulk email rumors she receives from her friends?
The answer is unfortunately probably reflected in the mixed perceptions of the satire itself. It’s probably some of both. While The New Yorker succeeded in taking on high-brow, substantive political issues in a low-brow way, they also might have done both Mr. Obama and the American public beyond their readership a disservice by agitating not only anti-Obama sentiment, but specifically the anti-Obama sentiment rooted in misinformation, bigotry, ignorance and apathy, as well. Yes, I got the joke. Yes, it got at least one “chuckle.” But that’s not to say a lot of people out there didn’t, and the implications it perceivably could have throughout a broader public are potentially more troublesome than some might think.
To illustrate, I offer a personal account of a rendezvous with that population lying beyond the reaches of The New Yorker. I recently made the drive from Florida to Arkansas on a short vacation. Eight hours into the drive, I stopped at a gas-station outside Ruston, Louisiana, which is just South of Shreveport. Upon the wall inside the bathroom there I found the words “OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT” scribbled above the toilet in black sharpie. The success of that highly-grassroots form of campaigning did not last long. In true bathroom dialogue form, others had offered their own opinions on that phrase, in what could only be coined as the most respectful debate on substantive issues I could ever hope for on a rural southern bathroom wall. The civility of the dialogue was truly inspiring. (That’s sarcasm I’m using, not satire.)
First the dialogue began with the thickness of the words “OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT” being scratched through with ball point pen. This was innocent enough, right? I thought so, too as I read on. The second party had obviously not agreed with the political views of the former occupant, or instead, simply didn’t wish to be solicited in the particular venue. Just beyond their scribbles, though, lay a larger barrage of ink, their sharp arrow-points all giving voice to handfuls of other gas-station patron opinions who had also passed this over.
Circling around these lay such other phrases as,
And, oh of course, let’s not forget the boldest, most frightening one of all:
Comments like these are inexcusable in a society based on freedom, equality, and equal opportunity. Yet they exist today in twenty-first century America, and they are indicative of the views held by some citizens here. These people don’t read The New Yorker, but they see the images of its cover on the local news at 9. If I had to guess, they don’t really “get the picture.” That kind of satire only seems to reaffirm their suspicions, and whether those are based on ignorance and hate or not is of little to no consequence.
Washington Post Culture Critic Philipp Kennicott stated, “To be effective – if by effective one means a teachable moment, a transformative bump forward in self-awareness – the humor must be widely appreciated.” It’s hard to imagine that this satire had resonance one could deem as “appreciative” anywhere beyond The New Yorker’s readership and the like.
So what’s the verdict?
Editor David Remnick said today in the New York Times, “The cover takes a lot of distortions, lies, and misconceptions about the Obamas and puts a mirror up to them to show them for what they are. It’s a lot like the spirit of what Stephen Colbert does — by exaggerating and mocking something, he shows its absurdity, and that is what satire is all about.” And that’s true, the satire was mostly effective with its readership comprised of (mostly) elites and intellectuals. But was it effective beyond that base? Even if it was or wasn’t “successful” was it at least understood by some like those who wrote on the bathroom wall? My guess is no. Not even close.
One response to Philip Kennicott’s online forum on the issue at The Washington Post however read, “successful satire should [not] at its zenith have a moment where everyone is let in on the joke. The whole point of satire is that only a certain kind of perceptive individual with some kind of exposure to the satirized object will see it for what it’s worth. And I agree with Remnick – if everyone “gets” the satire, then it hasn’t been successful. I personally found the cover hilarious and really smart and daring. And yes, it may be elitist, but we’re talking New Yorker here!” Kennicott himself was also in agreement, noting that the image also “tried to distinguish between “effective” or “socially safe” satire, and the more dangerous, anarchic, free-wheeling kind… The cartoon failed as “safe satire,” but not necessarily as good satire.”
Alternatively, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly thought the whole ordeal would have been better served to equally distribute the image’s satirical context on to both sides of the political aisle:
“If artist Barry Blitt had some real cojones, he would have drawn the same cover but shown it as a gigantic word bubble coming out of John McCain’s mouth — implying, you see, that this is how McCain wants the world to view Obama. But he didn’t. Because that would have been unfair. And McCain would have complained about it. And for some reason, the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame McCain is somehow seen as worse than the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame Obama… And whatever else you can say about it, good satire is never gutless.”
The answer seems to be just as mixed as the public’s perception of the piece itself, and apparently for some, of Obama.
