Music, the Internet, and Pop Culture

I've been a subscriber to David Strom's Web Informant since before it was a blog; since before there was such a thing as blogs. I still get it delivered via email, and today his essay was about pop culture, and how soon we'll need a dictionary to keep up with it. To prove his point he linked to the new Weezer video, Pork & Beans.

Wal-Mart is America's largest music retailer, and as such wields a great deal of power. They refuse to carry CDs with images or lyrics their company disapproves of. They refused to carry Sheryl Crow's CD because the lyrics of one of her songs went like this: "Watch out sister/Watch out brother/Watch our children as they kill each other/with a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores." Is that right? If not, what can be done about it?

And finally, in memory of George Carlin, should his seven words you can never say on television be permitted on television?

Was that really Mary Darling commenting on our class?

Many of you wrote blog posts last week about Little Mosque on the Prairie, but only one, Wilson Ramirez's, generated a response from Mary Darling, the show's executive producer.

Wow!

The Internet skeptic in me wants to know if that was really her, or just someone claiming to be her. Ms. Darling, was that really you?

If it was really you, and you're reading this, to answer your question we are at San Jose State University, and the class is called Electronic Media and Culture. I'm Canadian, and if you saw Mike Myers on The Daily Show last week promoting his new movie, The Love Guru, then you know about our subversive movement down here in the States. I'm proud to be doing my part.

Critical Film Analysis: Writing a Movie Review

We're going to spend two classes (Wednesday and next Monday) on the topic of movies as cultural education. If you haven't already done so, have a listen to Tim Robbins and Edward R. Murrow again (clips are here). They were talking about television, but their points apply to movies as well.

Sure, movies can be pure entertainment, but the best ones are usually more than that. They make us think about our society and culture, question what is, and wonder what might be. They are, in a subversive sort of way, educational.

Your mandatory blog writing assignment for next week will be to write a movie review. You may choose either Kramer vs. Kramer, Brokeback Mountain, or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — or another movie of your choosing in the same vein. The vein is this: these movies educates us about a way of life we might not be familiar with, and in doing so attempt to make us more accepting of them. In your review, I want you to critique the film from that perspective.

In the second half of Wednesday's class we'll watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and on Monday, Kramer vs. Kramer. Here are some other links we'll be using in class:

Roger Ebert's review of Titanic
How to write a movie review
Classroom viewing of Brokeback Mountain brings lawsuit
Viewpoint: Censorship money is not worth it
Roger Ebert's review of Brokeback Mountain

For your consideration this Monday

For your consideration, from the Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2008: Broadcast networks under seige by Scott Collins. Did the writer's strike signal the death of broadcast television as we know (or knew) it? How do you consume broadcast media (radio & television), and has that changed in the last year or two? Do you watch TV online? Listen to your favorite radio station online? Do you wait until your favorite shows come out on DVD and watch them that way? Download them from iTunes or some other site? Do you watch TV on your iPod or cell phone?

For your consideration: Hulu. What do you think of it?

For your consideration: Tim Robbins's keynote speech at the National Broadcasters Association, April 14, 2008. Watch the first few minutes here. Read the full text here.

For your consideration: Does Tim Robbins's speech remind you of anything?

For your consideration: Little Mosque on the Prairie.

For your consideration: The Telecommunications Act of 1996. You can read the full text on the FCC's website, but you're not likely to want to. Instead, consider the FCC's report on the steps taken to implement the act. The most contentious of which are these: The order eliminating the national broadcast radio ownership limits; and the order eliminating numerical limits on national broadcast television ownership. Consider as an example: the Walt Disney Company owns ABC, which includes the television network and all these radio stations. What do you think will air on all those news programs if something bad happens at a Disney theme park?

For your consideration: Satellite radio is a $2 billion business that charges people for something they were used to getting for free. Are you willing to pay for it? Do you think it will succeed? What do you think the radioscape will look like ten years from now?

For your consideration: In the early days of radio its advocates promoted it as the great democratizing medium. (The same was said about the Internet 80 years later.) Do you think radio can be democratic in light of the deregulation that allows a few large media conglomerates to own most radio stations? Can a medium that charges subscribers be democratic?

For your consideration: The FCC regulates "terrestrial" radio but not satellite radio. Do you think that's right?

For your consideration: The FCC says this about its regulation of broadcast and cable television: "FCC rules generally do not govern the selection of programming that is broadcast. The main exceptions are: restrictions on indecent programming, limits on the number of commercials aired during children's programming, and rules involving candidates for public office." I can't seem to find, on the FCC website, a definition of obscene or indecent programming. Can you? How do they decide whether something is obscene or indecent? (Interesting article in the New York Times asks the same question.)

I have GOT to watch South Park more often!

Thank you Wilson for the link:

Something's in the air, all right

It puts me in mind of country roads back in my homeland, the farms of Southern Ontario, where the fragrance makes you want to roll your windows up.

Last Friday at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, the most prestigious, most coveted prize, the Grand Prix for film, was awarded. This is Fallon London's synopsis of their entry, "Gorilla," which took the prize:

"We hear 'In the air tonight' by Phil Collins as we realize we're in front of a calm looking gorilla. 'I've been waiting for this moment for all of my life…' The ape stretches its neck like a heavyweight boxer would do before a fight. He's sitting in front of a massive drum kit as the best drum fill of the history of rock is coming. The Gorilla knows this. He smashes the drums phenomenally - feeling every beat. The camera leaves the ape and his drum. United, the way they are meant to be."

Huh?

This ad isn't postmodern, it's just ridiculous.



The problem, for me, is that it's not a gorilla, it's a guy in a gorilla suit — I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? Does anyone really believe for one second that it's a real gorilla?

And don't say of course not. Go ask your English teacher what suspension of disbelief means. In order for us, the audience, to believe the story (and a good advertisement is simply a very concisely told story) we must believe that what we are seeing is possible.

I believed the apes in Planet of the Apes. I believed the Borg, and Q. I didn't believe Julia Roberts in Mary Reilly (or in Michael Collins, for that matter).

The gorilla in this ad might as well be wearing a Julia Roberts suit.

For John McCain, it's not Easy Being Green

(With apologies to Kermit the Frog.)

I just read an interesting article in AdAge called "McCain Me-Tooism on Global Warming Is Not Convincing." It's a critique of McCain's latest advertisement. The author, Ken Wheaton, writes:

John McCain has a new ad out emphasizing the environment. I won't dwell on the fact that Team McCain once again is using B-roll and music that should give even the most conservative art director a heart attack... But I will dwell on the content of the ad, such as it is. John McCain, the viewer is informed, "sounded the alarm on global warming five years ago." It's one thing to claim McCain broke with George W. Bush -- which he did -- it's another to claim that McCain was sounding an alarm about global warming in 2003. If I remember correctly, the alarms had long been sounded by then. So bragging about sounding the alarm sort of puts me in mind of Al Gore inventing the internet.

Watch:

Media kits

Media kits are packages of information about the consumers of a particular media property, such as Rolling Stone magazine. Media kits are used by media buyers at advertising agencies to make their decisions about where to spend their advertising dollars. They are also the tool of the advertising sales representatives at the magazines, who use media kits to sell their magazine's audience to those media buyers.

There are approximately 13,000 magazines in print at any time in the U.S. How does a media buyer choose which ones to buy ads in? By studying the audience demographics as described in the media kit, then choosing those publications whose audiences most closely match the target market for whatever it is they are advertising.

Most magazines have a website. To find the media kit, first go to their website, then scroll down to the bottom and look for the link that says something like "Advertise with us" or "Advertising information." It might even say "media kit." Here are a few direct links to magazines' media kit page:

Rolling Stone
Us Weekly
Vanity Fair
Chill magazine

This week's blog assignment

For this week's first blog topic, choose one of the following:

Do you think the government should ban books under any circumstances?

Under what circumstances, if any, do you think schools should give in to challenges from the public and remove books from their libraries?

Write a defense of one of the books on the ALA’s banned books list -— but only if you’ve read it.

What do you think about the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces?

Lou Dobbs, yellow journalist

What else can you call the man when he fans the flames of a conspiracy theory?

Thank you to Eric, for writing recently on his blog about the Amero, the supposedly proposed (by whom, no one has said) North American-wide currency, along the lines of the Euro.

Here's the link to Lou Dobbs's report on CNN (I don't know when this aired) in which he goes on about the supposedly secret government initiative to create a North American Union. He mentions, with horror, the name of this initiative: The Security and Prosperity Partnership.

And here's the link to a recent joint statement by North America's leaders, published on The White House's website, about what, exactly, The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is.

I can't see any similarity between what CNN reported, and what the SPP actually is. Can you?

By the way, according to the Wikipedia, the Amero is just an idea, nothing more. There has never been a government proposal from any of North America's three national governments to actually implement such a thing. Which means the journalists who are ranting about it are nothing more than conspiracy theorists.

Who the hell is Steve Previs, anyway? Nothing gives credibility to journalism like a Yahoo! email address.