WWII USAAF pilot and trumpeter Col. Jack Teuller (ret.) tells a war story of how music preempted killing one night in Normandy. Even if it may be, as are so many stories told in uniform, bullshit, it’s beautiful bullshit.
One can only hope that a similar tale may one day be told by a veteran from our Middle East adventures. Perhaps a poppy-growing sniper in Afghanistan will be soothed and disarmed by hooking an iPod to a Humvee PA system to blast the Insane Clown Posse, leading to a tearful thug-hug.
The lovely Maureen Sullivan and I do fund raising and communications work for a few great clients, including a South Side community center serving developmentally disabled adults. Since 1962, St. Rose Center has been giving job training and education to adults with special needs. Think of them as similar to Misericordia, only much smaller and far less funded. Here’s a clip showing the place in action:
So over at Philanthropy.com, we noticed something called the VolunTV Challenge was launched “to celebrate the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s “iParticipate” week of volunteer—focused television programs from October 19-25, The Chronicle of Philanthropy invited individuals and charities to create their own ideas of how volunteerism could be incorporated into their favorite TV shows.”
That’s what we did, and we won $2,500 for the Center. Score! The treatment we wrote was for Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, NBC’s finest comedy since CPO Sharkey. Amusingly, all three of the winners used 30 Rock for their entries. Wonder what a Silver Prize 250-word show pitch looks like?
Liz Lemon enters Jack Donaghy’s office to find him agitated and distracted. Donaghy just came back from an art auction where he lost a bidding war on a painting to first lady Michelle Obama. “She can raise her hand faster to outbid me because she doesn’t wear sleeves,” complains Jack.
Jack puts Liz on the task of finding more art from the artist. Liz discovers the artist is a member of St. Rose Center in Chicago, a service organization for developmentally disabled adults. Lemon notices St. Rose’s website call for volunteers at a talent show they will run next week.
Liz tells Jack that the artist whose work Jack was bidding on is developmentally disabled and that St. Rose needs volunteers.
Pausing to consider the information, a big smile crosses Jack’s face. “Outsider art!” he exclaims. “Do you have any idea how lucrative that is today, Lemon? What a tremendous investment! What will it take to lock it all up?”
Liz suggests volunteering to help produce the talent show. Jack orders her to collect writers, stagehands, makeup artists and actors and fly to Chicago to help put on the show.
Jack accompanies the volunteer group and meets the members and the nun who runs the program. The pros help make the show a huge success and Jack gets a meeting with the nun and her lawyer to negotiate the exclusive rights to all of St. Rose artist’s work.
Seated in the room is the nun and her lawyer, Michelle Obama.
After Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) put up the website Names Of The Dead, the names and stories of those Americans who had to choose death over bankruptcy have been rolling right in, and as I suggested in the Huffington Post back in August, simply reciting plain evidence of the “free market” death toll forms an emphatic and convincing plea for intervention on the public’s behalf.
However, House Republicans didn’t like it when Grayson later read the names of the Republican Representatives and announced the future body count in each Representative’s district. Republicans attempted and failed to cut Grayson off.
I am glad to see the shills for the insurance industry and the free-market ideologues in the House scramble to cut off a microphone that is ringing out the toll of the status quo in their own districts. It shows what I always suspected: today’s Republicans aren’t inhuman. They’re greedy, authoritarian, moral slobs — but they have feelings too.
Rethinking human-computer interaction (HCI) is a good thing, if for no other reason than to remind the computers every once in a while who’s in charge.
A video for the 10/GUI interface came to me by way of Reddit (discussion of the 10/GUI here) , and I for one am impressed with the way it rethinks clicking and window management. I’d like to wager that something like this is the future of the graphical user interface. In short, it keeps all the benefit of multi-touch screen computing (pinching, multiple click-points) and leaves behind its problems (fingers and hands aren’t transparent, neck strain).
Unless you’re nerdier than I am, you heard it here first.
James Mason dips his ’stache in the “unusual flavor” of Thunderbird in a 1950s TV commercial. Quite a discovery, given the way I learned about Thunderbird’s advertising history was from my saxophone-playing Dad, who often sang:
What’s the word? / Thunderbird!
What’s the price? / Fifty twice!
In keeping with the commercial’s Masonian tone, the soundtrack’s expected saxophone bleats have been replaced with pinkies-up vibes and vague jazz flute. Mmm, unusual!
Very little irritates me more about online life than undisclosed consideration. This is the practice of marketers passing out free products, services or money to bloggers who then favorably review the product without disclosing the freebie. It poisons conversation, distorts history and lends precious credence to the braying of marketing chumps and others who treat everything on the Internet as an exercise in “brand building”. Those of us who’d rather not adopt the habits of bullshit purveyors as we conduct our own lives and pursue our own tastes and interests don’t play around with our reputations by omitting potentially coloring circumstances from our writing. The problem is, undisclosed consideration makes it difficult to identify who is crapping in the well and who isn’t.
This practice wasn’t invented in the blogosphere. I saw it for years, albeit with more transparency, working behind the counter at Pravda Records in the late 1980s. Every month, writer after writer for local and national music magazines came into the store to unload their promo CDs to us for a couple of dollars apiece. It was widely known that the records they reviewed weren’t something they paid for, and that the extra dollars we paid them for their Guadalcanal Diary and Slammin’ Watusis CDs were part of the perks of their job. The arrangement didn’t necessarily ensure positive reviews (who could suffer through Concrete Blonde and not cry for help in print?) but neither was the process presented as “I’m a guy who bought this and this is what I think”.
Today’s blogosphere has compelled trillions of words and indulged hundreds of millions of motivations for those words, not all of which can be trusted, but practically all of which enjoy a benefit of the doubt purely because they’re on blogs and blogs are individuals writing opinions, right?
The Federal Trade Commission seems to think so, and have moved to do something about the problem of undisclosed consideration on blogs. Starting December 1, the FTC will fine bloggers up to $11,000 for failing to reveal material connections to what they write:
“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that consumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.“
Of course this won’t catch 90% of what goes on out there, but that’s not the point. It’s a bulwark against a burgeoning shillocracy and it will turn some heads that need turning. Any move to bring greater media literacy is a move welcome in these parts, even if it comes almost twenty years too late to disclose, say, Bill Wyman at the Chicago Reader’s “material connections”.
The past presages the present. Tip of the hat to Ben Schwartz for the heads-up and new addition to the venerable RW370 NBC Letterman video post category.
I saw a video clip this morning where a stunned Jesse Jackson interviewed in the downtown location of the embarrassing non-party lamented that we had “sent our A-Team – the Mayor, the Governor, Oprah” yet it made “no difference.”
“Oh, but I was,” I think a bit smugly to myself when I see promo material for the film “You Weren’t There“, which documents the Chicago punk rock scene of the 1980s. I don’t mind a little pride in that; as the title suggests, it took a certain iconoclasm and fearlessness to reach out to the leading-edge music and culture that was so marginalized and derided at the time. And reaching out is what it was – virtually none of it appeared on TV, and with no passive social networking or digital pipe into the home, nothing sat and waited for me to download it. Punk rock was a small and moving target and I had to hit it by following my ears.
I think of this when I watch (digitally and passively) the trailer for the 2009 film Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam. In it, a group of young American Muslims with guitars, drums, amps and mikes use them in a familiar, noisy and joyous way to distance themselves from the mainstream of their own culture.
Similar perhaps to the 80s, but with notable differences. In that time, I was less explicit about cultural identity shift than I was about the pursuit of loud awesome sounds and art. But the movement the clip details is a very different beast. These punks are Muslim punks. Their art and personas are of their faith – and as such are both willingly defined by and reviled by the customs and faith of Islam.
That makes it hard to draw a comparison to Chicago ‘82, because when it came to organized religion, none of it played a role in the scene or bands, short of religion’s place upon the menu of rejected bourgeois mores that went hand in hand with subcultural spelunking. But that class distinction is lost on the Taqwacore adherents (the word Taqwa, more or less means “fear and love of the divine”) whose religious determination is real, if treated with far less reverence than it probably ever has in all of Islam.
For a band, this has special ramifications. Under many readings of the Koran, musical instruments themselves aren’t even acceptable, which leads to encounters such as this one between a Taqwacore band and a devout Muslim. The discussion builds my respect for what these guys are doing, because I know that faced with the same, I would leave such insane, retrograde nonsense behind in a heartbeat, not try to change it.
While it might seem uncharitable, I’m going to lament one more thing: the homogeneity in the music on the trailer clip. Even at its most doctrinaire and boring, Chicago’s 1980s hardcore music could count on its great stylistic distance from preceding and mainstream music to distinguish itself. Not so with Taqwacore – or at least with the band named the Kominas. While I am unexpectedly happy to not yet hear a drum machine in this genre, to my ear the music suffers from the players’ iPods being filled with thousands of hours of instructions on how to be punk. I hope this aspect evolves, and expect it will. If it doesn’t, something sinister in the disappointment will get me wondering if guitars, bass and drums specifically have simply done what they can do in this world and need to be retired as tools of distinction. If you’re going to reject orthodoxy, start at Guitar Center.
Between the Taqwacore scene’s problems taking shit from the various established institutions it chooses to associate with and its struggle to add to rather than take from the world’s repository of music and style, it’s obviously not easy to be part of. That much, I can surely identify with.
The lovely Maureen Sullivan and I do fund raising and communications work for a few great clients, including a South Side community center serving developmentally disabled adults. Since 1962, St. Rose Center has been giving job training and education to adults with special needs. Think of them as similar to Misericordia, only much smaller and far less funded. Here’s a clip showing the place in action:![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2cfddde4-ca23-41d6-b9c6-448718e1a56b)
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