Peter Bogdanovich discusses John Simon c. 1970

At least you can afford shoes

Alejandro González Iñárritu, the marketably avante-gardish Mexican film-maker who directed Amores perros, did the commercial above. I hate to admit I liked this when I saw it at Slate, in spite of many of the things it represents-- commercialism, mindlessly hyperkinetic editing, glitzy phoniness, celebrity worship, and probably a bunch of other things which if pointed out would just belabor the obvious and make this long sentence even longer. But it's still pretty gee-whiz, even if you're not a soccer fan. (Do you ever wonder if some American bloggers pretend to be to soccer fans just to burnish their geek cred? )

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Hawaii 5.0.2

Apparently there's a new Hawaii 5-o Show. The new intro looks like something by "McG."

Parker Lewis können nicht verlieren

'the guilty men'

"The Guilty Men"

Garry A. Meyer | MySpace Video

Cinzano ads from the 80s

Pay attention to the stewardess in the last ad; fans of the 2nd Star Trek TV show ought to recognize her, without needing to read my mind or nothin'.

Killing your newspaper

Two recent articles, one in Time and one on the web in Salon.com, discuss the decline of the newspaper.

Walter Isaacson, in Time,
“How to Save Your Newspaper”, Feb. 05, 2009 and

Gary Kamiya, Salon,
"The death of the news: If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier. Subsidizing newspapers may be the only answer"

I would've liked to be able to post a response to Isaacson at Time's web site, but only Salon allows this:

Half-empty? No!

Dear Gary Kamiya,

1.With all due respect, I think you are 100 per cent wrong.
If the internet didn't exist, this article about the "death of the newspaper" would appear in some indie weekly, like the Village Voice, just as somebody else wrote about it recently in Time.
Newspapers have supposedly been dying for several decades now, and the culprit is clearly TV, not the internet.

I would argue that the internet has increased newspaper readership substantially, just not in as profitable a form as big media magnates would like. If anything, I suspect that ad revenue from the internet has probably helped stop the bleeding a bit, and (somewhat) deccelerated the rate of decline of traditonal newspapers at the hands of TV.

Another reader mentioned the UK's Guardian, approvingly. I imagine that reader wouldn't have access to the Guardian if not for the 'net. I know that I've also read scores of Guardian stories, but I've never bought a paper copy, or even seen one. Likewise, I hadn't even heard of Hong Kong's Asia Times, another supremely valuable "paper", let alone read anything in their pages, before I had internet access. I'm pretty sure my story applies to many people.

There will always be a demand, at least among some people, for serious journalism, and newspapers will continue to exist, but they need to figure out a way to make viable a business model whose bread-and-butter is the internet.

We will lose the paper that is all things to all people, with a section for everybody from most demographics, all rolled neatly into one rubber-bandable unit, and I can understand why some people will miss that, but I suspect that's inevitable.

But I'm very skeptical that subsidies are the answer. The subscriber model, like the one that

The Real News

and others have been trying to foster might hold some promise.


2. Still, there's no question, there is a huge mis-allocation of resources, and I think that somewhere down the line that needs to be addressed. Just think of how many news bureaus, of both the television and newspaper/net variety, you could open with just the salaries of Katie Couric and Brian Williams(!). Maybe we need a Big Hair Tax, with the proceeds given as grants to struggling news centers.

But that would be unfair, amusing as it is to momentarily daydream about. Better yet, reintroduce steeply progressive taxation and trust-bust the big media monopolies, and nobody would have a multi-million dollar salary, while thousands of others would have more mundane but practical opportunities to do real journalism. Sadly, I'm still dreaming.


from Walter Isaacson's insipid article
“How to Save Your Newspaper”, which I mentioned earlier:

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.

me: this reasoning is garbage-- revenue from everything declined in 4Q 2008, as the recession intensified. And the “three legs of the stool" argument is also bollocks: broadcast television was immensely profitable for decades of “giving away” their content for free, while just depending on advertiser revenue. Now they have more competition, from cable TV and other media, but the advertiser-based model is still working pretty well for them. How could they otherwise afford to pay Brian and Katie all those previously-alluded-to millions if the "one-legged" advertiser-revenue model wasn't working for them?

Isaacson wants newspapers to go to micropayments, a particularly regressive idea that enemies of a mostly unregulated internet have been touting for some time now. It's also Big Brother-style intrusive-- do you really want your web surfing/consumption habits so closely monitored? Ultimately, of course, people like Isaacson attack the internet as it is presently formulated because it represents a rejection of authority-driven media, and, therefore, a rejection of the authority of the Walter Isaacsons of the world-- and a threat to their high-paying jobs.

a Prescott Bush interview

I posted this at roughly 70% of the standard youtube size to improve the so-so image resolution, but if you want the rest or the "full-size", it's here( part one), and part 2 is here.

Both are via a channel called "BBC propaganda news", which, presumably, is not related to the BBC. As most of you already know, Prescott Bush was a US senator and the current president's grandfather.

This, n' that, etc

I was excited by the doings of "Blogroll Amnesty Day," and enjoyed poking around and finding sundry similarly small blogs that struck me as interesting.
I've added (and been added by),
Rotus,
Rob Singleton,
Jon Swift
Skippy
Art of Peace

In addition, I asked Barbara O'Brien of th' Mahablog to add me, even though she was already on my blogroll and she did, which was exceedingly nice, especially as she's kind of a bighshot, like Skippy and Jon Swift. And I've corrected my previous error in not linking to Josh Buermann of Flagrancy to Reason.

There are a few I have missed that I've been meaning to add, which I will shortly.

Incidentally, I left a comment at Rotus asking him(?) if he was aware of the defunct US kit car company by the same name that used to manufacture a Lotus 7 replica in the 1980s, designed to take Toyota or Mazda mechanicals(hence the slightly impolitic pun of "rotus", suggesting the stereotypic Japanese person's pronunciation.). I think they were based in Maryland. Caterham Cars in the UK makes a pricey but officially licensed replica, and lots of other companies in the US and UK and elsewhere still make unauthorized knockoffs.

Technically the Rotus was a knockoff of the Lotus Super Seven that replaced the original 7, but I won't burden you with too much auto pedantry, just refer you to the links below should you be curious. Also, pictured below is Patrick McGoohan in KAR 120C, the most famous Lotus 7 ever-- which was actually made by Lotus, and featured in The Prisoner.

Wikipedia's Lotus Seven article,

BBC on the 50th anniversary of the Lotus 7


photos:Rotus Cars, BBC

Marta discusses TV journalism

Here Marta Costello discusses some of her experiences working as a TV journalist-- it's very enlightening.

Meanwhile, I'm going to be gone for a few days, but I'll be back next week. Maybe I'll have a mysterious guest(no, not Marta.)in the interim...

Why I don't like "BSG"

left: c. 1956 Shelter, courtesy 3wheelers.com, right: James Callis, freaking out in an episode of Battlestar Galactica, courtesy the SciFi channel. And don't tell me to say it's James Callis's character who's freaking out. I know it's his character, for Pete's sake. But isn't is wearisome to always say, "James Callis's character, who is the only one who can see Tricia Helfer's character, blah blah blah..." Well, isn't it? Do you know how monotonous it is when people do that? I could go on, but this is only a caption... Yes, I'm fond of elipses. If you don't like elipses, frag off, as the characters on BSG might say...


1.There's something about the show, something a little hard to define-- whether it's the dialogue, or the acting, or the pacing-- that tells me the people doing it are constantly preoccupied with the darkness and supposed significance of the whole endeavor, like it's Alain Resnais in space or something. If anything, their hi-falutin' portentousness actually makes me miss Lorne Greene.

2. That guy with the British accent, lovesick over the tall outer-space chick only he can see. The actor may well a likeable person, and capable of real acting and range and all that, but I only know him on this show, and here all he ever does is mope about with that look of perpetual consternation. It's really tiresome.

2b. On the other hand, if they had an episode in which he was accidentally sucked out an airlock or something and we saw him drift out into space and explode, maybe I'd start watching. And they could even bring him back as his (non-moping) Evil Twin, so that the actor could keep up his condo payments. That would be ok with me too.

a Pew poll, more on Gravel, etc

to people(like me) who find in-depth, meaningful polling interesting, this Pew Center poll is fascinating. It mainly concerns perceptions of ideological identity of various political figures, as well as 2008 "electability." It discomfits me a bit that fairly large numbers of people regard Hillary as "an inspiring leader", but it puzzles the hell out of me that majorities on both the left and the right think she's a liberal.(!?!) She voted for the Patriot Act, supported the war in 2002 and has never conceded she was wrong to do so, has hinted that she wants to keep military bases in Iraq, and came out in favor of an anti-flag burning amendment. What would disqualify her as a liberal in voters' eyes? Favoring a return to segregation?(via kevin drum)

I've looked for a poll of democrats' response to the South Carolina debate, but I haven't seen anything.(I find myself wondering if this is reflective of a big media reluctance to suggest that Mike Gravel might have gained any traction, in much the same way that we hardly ever see polls regarding Americans' views of war with Iran-- possibly because we don't favor it strongly enough.)

However, Mike Gravel sent a bulletin to his myspace friends saying he's back in the June CNN debate in New Hampshire that he was initially bumped from. Also, he's appearing on the Colbert Report tomorrow, May 2nd(via Jack Wood).