June 12th, 2008
FOX Does It Again…
How much longer are we going to let FOX News get away with their constant “slips” regarding Barack Obama? After several well-publicized incidents earlier in the campaign in which the network “inadvertently” confused Obama’s name with that of a certain terrorist leader, the past few days have seen a flurry of inappropriate jokes and jabs.
Yesterday, a FOX News “chyron” (those are the little headlines that pop up on the screen while a story is being discussed) about Michelle Obama read: “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama!” As the New York Times points out, the African-American slang term “baby mama” is defined as “the mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.” That’s a slick one, managing to smear Obama, his wife and children and “liberals” all at the same time, while also highlighting Obama’s race and carrying just the right whiff of minstrel-show buffoonery… all in eight words! It’s quite impressive, in a sick sort of way.
Six months ago, I might have chalked this up to harmless ignorance in the copy room. But it’s becoming a familiar story. The Times blog entry continues:
Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.” Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.
Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.
In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that these supposedly isolated incidents are part of a pattern, a subliminal campaign of fear-mongering and rabble-rousing meant to make Obama look too clownish, too scary, and, yes, too black to be President. I’d say that FOX should be ashamed of itself for engaging in such behavior, but they’re well beyond shame at this point.
June 10th, 2008
Space, Condensed
So I watched the first two hours of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, the hotly anticipated (and heavily promoted) documentary series airing on the Discovery Channel last night. And I was pretty darned excited about it. I’ve been a space nut since before I entered kindergarten. I can tell you where on the NASA timeline I was born (two weeks before Apollo XIII launched). I’ve heard the stories before, and I’ve seen a lot of the footage, but it didn’t matter: this is the tale of humanity’s first shaky steps off the planet, a turning point in the entire history of the species. A story like that cannot be told too many times.
Guess what? I hated it.
Okay, that’s too strong. I was entertained. I learned a few things. I saw a lot of film that was new to me. I’m sure it looks great in HD. But I was also deeply disappointed.
How can you tell the story of Project Mercury in 56 minutes (minus commercials)? Heck, The Right Stuff needed three hours. Or more to the point, how can you tell the story of the Mercury 7 without letting us see who they were? “John Glenn was the level-headed one” is not sufficient. Almost nothing was said about why these seven men were chosen from the pool of candidates, what training they went through, or how being America’s first astronauts and instant celebrities affected their psyches and their lives.
How can you tell the story of Mercury (or, for that matter, of NASA) without even explaining the space race, for crying out loud? Yuri Gagarin gets about 10 seconds, but without the context of the Cold War and the devastating psychological blow of Sputnik (which gets no mention at all), the mad rush to reach the Moon seems meaningless. JFK’s pledge to reach the Moon by the end of the sixties is mentioned, and we get a few “boy were we surprised” reactions, but again there is no context given. Why such a short window? What was the effect on NASA? On public opinion? What happened when Kennedy died (again, no mention of that event)?
Instead, we jump from mission to mission, with the bulk of the time devoted to whatever near-disaster was averted on each. That’s understandable; it is television, after all. But without context, how are people in the audience—especially young viewers—supposed to care?
The filmmakers conducted a lot of interviews, from Gene Kranz to Glenn to the big catch, Neil Armstrong. But rather than letting these people tell the story, they have hacked the interviews to ribbons, sound bites of a single sentence each, and intercut them with quick edits of original footage, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, all linked together by tense narration and action-movie music. It’s non-stop, it’s exhausting, and it doesn’t do justice to the incredible achievement of the Mercury Program.
Project Gemini, the subject of the second hour, seemed to fare better. In particular, the segment on Gemini IV and NASA’s first spacewalk showed some real depth, as did the dual Gemini VI/VII rendezvous mission. But still there was crucial context missing. What happened in the period between Mercury and Gemini? Nothing, apparently. Was NASA on schedule? Was there opposition? How much did it cost? Why were the Gemini missions conducted with two astronauts, and why were such experiments as EVA, rendezvous, and docking considered so important? In short, WHAT WAS THE PLAN FOR REACHING THE MOON? The documentary leaves all these questions unanswered, leaving little but a Cliffs Notes reading of the flights themselves.
Towards the end of the second hour, I began to suspect that this series might really be about Apollo. Perhaps these first two hours were just preliminaries to the main event, something to be dealt with quickly, and now we’ll get to the real meat of the series. I’m going to cling to that, and hope the remaining episodes are more satisfying. If not, I guess it’ll be time to dig out my DVD copy of From the Earth to the Moon.
May 28th, 2008
Another One Bites the Dust
It’s been a bad, bad year for smooth jazz fans.
The Baltimore Sun reports that local smooth-jazz radio station WSMJ suddenly dropped the format last week in favor of the more demographically friendly “rock alternative” and a morning shock jock. In recent months, smooth jazz stations have folded in New York, Washington DC, Houston and Denver. They’re dropping like flies.
I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, smooth jazz is… um… hm. “Abomination” is too strong a word. Let me consult my thesaurus… “atrocity"… “disgrace"… “horror"… “obscenity"… “outrage"… “evil"… “crime"… “monstrosity"… “anathema"… “bane"… Ooh! Good!
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, smooth jazz is the bane of many “real” jazz fans and practitioners, a form of pop music with a dollop of jazz flavoring that—thanks to clever marketing—millions of undereducated people have come to mistake with the music we love. Jazz is to smooth as black coffee is to a sugar-free decaf low-fat latte with a caramel shot. Sorry, but that ain’t coffee. Meanwhile, the players of smooth jazz sell millions of CDs and grow rich, while the best players in straightahead jazz (never mind the avant-garde) sell maybe a few thousand, and often remain obscure even to dedicated listeners. So I’m not going to shed many tears for these big-wattage, smooth-spewing radio stations, while real jazz radio languishes with inadequate funding and 500-watt transmitters at the far left of the FM dial.
But on the other hand, what about the fans? Why shouldn’t people go ahead and drink that sugar-free decaf low-fat latte if that’s what they like? And why shouldn’t they be able to listen to Michael Bublé and Kenny G if those are the sounds they dig? There’s no denying this stuff is popular. One could also argue that there’s a small but significant halo effect, where someone listening to smooth radio might hear a stray Miles Davis or Chick Corea track and be moved to explore.
It’s also hard to say whether the loss of smooth jazz is an opportunity for regular jazz radio or a harbinger of doom. After all, if smooth jazz can’t make it in these big markets without getting squirreled away onto some HD-Radio rider channel (as in Baltimore), what chance do Coltrane, Joe Lovano and Nick Payton have? My guess is that it won’t affect real jazz radio stations much one way or the other. The format names may be similar, but the audiences and expectations are completely different.
Which brings me back to the whole notion of “live and let live”. I may not care when a smooth jazz station dies, but I saw the frustration my wife went through when the only country station in San Francisco changed formats, becoming indistinguishable from half a dozen other rock outlets. It was just stupid. Why abandon a loyal audience and exclusive ownership of a whole genre to duke it out with all those other stations, which already had their own audiences? I imagine smooth fans are asking themselves the same thing now.
In the end, San Francisco got another country station. I’m sure smooth jazz will come back too (assuming terrestrial radio doesn’t curl up and die anytime soon), maybe on smaller stations, probably with a slightly different mix of artists, and perhaps—one can only hope—with a new name.
May 19th, 2008
Herding Cats vs. Holding Kittens
Today, I spent almost ten hours performing a rather silly task. I re-architected a wiki. I can already hear the geeks among you giggling. Wikis don’t have architecture, of course. They’re completely flat with no directories, no hierarchy… just a bunch of pages all mashed up in one big stew pot and crosslinked to hell. They’re organic and ever-changing—anybody can go in at any time and add a bit here, revise a bit there, make a new page… that’s the whole point. Re-architecting a wiki, therefore, is like herding the proverbial cats. It’s almost an oxymoron.
And I felt like a moron doing it. But I promised I would. Actually, I promised I would deliver it weeks ago, and by this morning my boss was almost out of patience. So I hunkered down and spent the entire day trying to impose a hierarchy on a couple hundred half-baked, frequently contradictory, often obsolete and always poorly organized pages of text. Building a castle out of Jell-O, if you will. Granted, that wiki was a mess, and if the plan I came up with is successfully implemented, it won’t be a mess anymore. So I suppose there was value… unless it becomes a mess again, and it will. Entropy, thy name is wiki. Meanwhile, I didn’t listen to a single note of music today. I didn’t write, I didn’t walk, I didn’t do anything even remotely enjoyable until I got home at about 8:00. I just wikied my iki off.
On the other hand, this is what my wife did today: she cuddled kittens. Seventeen itty bitty purring mewing cute as anything kittens. Messy, sure, but c’mon… KITTENS!!! Man, life is so unfair. I think I’m going to make a demand at work tomorrow: I want kittens in my cube! Live ones, mind you, not those drippy motivational posters. No kittens, no work! Give me purring or give me death! Dogs are fine too… Puppies for productivity! No labor without labs! Atta-boy! Atta-boy! Let’s start a revolution! Who’s with me?
May 16th, 2008
Fo’s Favorite Books(tore)
My day job is located in a nondescript quadrangle of office buildings, wedged in between Moffett Field, the mysterious Onizuka Air Force Station and Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California.
I hate working in Sunnyvale.
It’s too far from home, for one thing (about an hour each way). And there is nothing—NOTHING—within walking distance of my office except for fenced-in military facilities with big signs reading NO PHOTOGRAPHY posted every few yards, or, if you’re willing to walk for a long time, more office buildings exactly like mine. There are some good places for lunch in town, if you don’t mind driving AND dealing with a huge, noisy crowd. Or there are plenty of crappy places for lunch, but one has to drive to those too. Feh.
But there is one thing about Sunnyvale I just love: Leigh’s Favorite Books on Murphy Street, just down the block from those good but crowded restaurants and right across the street from what must be the biggest collection of porno mags on the peninsula. But I digress…
Leigh’s is the sort of cozy new-and-used book nook that used to be easy to find, and now is rare as hen’s teeth. But unlike a lot of those older shops, Leigh’s doesn’t greet you with chaos and musty odors. You won’t find foxing on the pages or random towers of books in the middle of the floor. What you will find is a clean, welcoming room with an eclectic selection of quirky new titles and used books in fine condition. It’s a bit tight in the rear stacks but never oppressive, as light streams in through the big front window.
I’ve only gone to Leigh’s around lunchtime on Fridays, so I’ve only met one staff member, who I presume to be Leigh herself. She’s very friendly, usually has a comment on the books I bring to the counter, and always brightens my day. It’s obvious that she knows her stock intimately, another rarity in these days of giant chain stores.
There’s a small but very well-chosen assortment of new titles in the front of the store, which includes the hot bestsellers everyone’s talking about, a few book-club stalwarts, and several things you’ve never heard of before [Do NOT ignore these! They’re usually gems]. The rest of the store covers a lot of ground in very little space, and reflects the same choosy, offbeat tastes as the new-book displays. Look closely and you’ll even find a section for supernatural romances. I usually make a beeline for the tiny music section, and darned if there isn’t always something there I want. Today I wandered in expecting just to browse (ha!) and came out with four lovely little books, including one long out-of-print collection of jazz essays and a nifty-looking overview of contemporary science.
Thanks, Leigh! You rock.
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