Tag: media

I hardly can believe I’m real

The New Yorker favorably notes the revival of West Side Story, pointing out that certain parts of the libretto have been vastly improved:

Fifty years on, in a multicultural America, this decision makes the production feel fresh; it also allows the show to dispense with some of Sondheim’s rookie mistakes. In “I Feel Pretty,” for instance, he had Maria, an uneducated Puerto Rican teen-ager, only a month in New York, singing with such showy internal rhymes as “It’s alarming how charming I feel.” (“When rhyme goes against character, out it should go,” Sondheim said in 1974, with the wisdom of years.)

Indeed, nothing jerks me out of the gritty cinéma vérité of your typical Broadway Musical than does a bit of overly florid prose or the far too convenient (or clever) rhyme. Why can’t those eggheads just let me be gripped by the you-are-there horror of exquisitely choreographed gang wars-of-the-dance and the ever present (and shockingly hardcore) street lingo…any small children may need to leave the web:

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
They won’t give me a puff.
They didn’t wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!

So thank the maker we are prevented from hearing so much as one internal rhyme that defeats the inherent and inexhaustable believability of Maria. And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.

The Graduate Too

It’s remarkable how rarely treasured insights from “The Analysts” are called into question. It happened in the NYT with reference to “Up,” a forthcoming Pixar film:

With “Ratatouille,” analysts fretted about whether moviegoers would go to see a movie about a rat in the kitchen. They did. With “Wall-E,” people feared the lack of dialogue would bore children. It did not.

As noted in the article, those films banked box-office business of a quarter-billion dollars. Each. Yet it seems the asshats still control the dialogue and, by extension, the purse-strings:

“We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character,” he wrote, adding a complaint about the lack of a female lead.

Indeed. We are also Quite Concerned that there is a 17% defect in the sass-back quotient and absolutely no fart jokes. How can you possibly even market a film like that?

Astonishingly, Disney (absolute and unchallenged kings of scarcely animated, direct to DVD cash-ins) even puts some pushback on the side of the creative out there:

“We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.”

That’s the best statement I’ve seen come out of Disney since this comment:

We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
Walt Disney

That sentiment, however, is clearly too much to hope for.

We were doing it before we had a name for it

One Kimber VanRy was ticketed to the tune of $25 for sipping a beer on his stoop (not a party, not a nuisance, just sitting out there quietly enjoying a beer in the great urban out-of-doors).

Clyde Haberman reports on the long-term outcome of that event while simultaneously showing us how serious journalism is done:

[VanRy was sitting on] the short stoop of the four-story co-op building on Sterling Place in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in which he owns an apartment. The stoop is set well back from the curb, but does not lie behind a gate, as some other stoops on that block do.

There Mr. VanRy sat, on what was private property — minding his own business, working his BlackBerry and nursing a beer. For the curious, it was a 12-ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada.

Twist top or crown cap?

Anywho:

Last week, a judge tossed out the case on a technicality. The matter had dragged on too long, he said.

For Mr. VanRy, the victory was less than satisfying. Larger questions about stoop sitting and sipping were not addressed.

Agreed.

I can only assume editors cut out the explanation of Mr. VanRy’s fucked up last name capitalization schema. Perhaps he’s big into R (or perl, perhaps) and wanted his name to reflect a delightful air of utterly random and insanity-making camel-casing conventions. Haberman does mention:

Neighbors drinking beer on their front steps get these “quality of life” summonses, but not people sipping wine at New York Philharmonic concerts in Central Park or knocking back frozen daiquiris at summer movie screenings in Bryant Park.

Rest assured, these people will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Decline and Fall

We can see a lot of the decline and fall of the MSM at the hands of those damnable innertube world wide web log, or “blog” startups what with their cursing and pajamas and whatnot in last night’s press conference.

First, we have the Huffington Post’s Stein:

“Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?”

Of interest for being the first non-plant blogger called on at one of these thing. Let’s compare and contrast to the performance of the MSM, in this case the Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher asked:

“What’s your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?”

I think we can all agree that that’s pretty much exactly what anyone given one question would ask the sitting President. At least it failed to include the traditional four-paragraph lead-in. Been nice knowing you, MSM.

The Year We Make Contact


Interesting results from the folks over to Gallup. Turns out that, despite major (and continuing) assistance from the MSM, ‘Merica is seeing right through this shit.

Seemingly forgetting the downright ruly 2-million person mob at their doorstep on Inauguration Day, seemingly forgetting that, in many cases, Obama carried their own districts by large, double-digit figures, seemingly forgetting that, you know, the economy is in freefall and that most everyone in America places blame squarely at the doorstep of the GOP; most of all, seemingly forgetting 2010.

Joy Behar, meet Campbell Brown

Credit where due department: CNN’s Campbell Brown has been dramatically more engaged and more insightful recently than at any time in my memory. True, she’s getting more to do recently than report on plucky cats that could, but she’s also doing something with that occsional opportunity for real journalism (sorry, no link to the full transcript):

Tonight the scape-goating of Sarah Palin. Whatever you may have thought about John McCain’s running mate… about whether she was qualified, prepared or experienced enough for the job… try if you can to put all of that aside for just a moment. Because Sarah Palin is who she is. She did not become measurably more intelligent or measurably less intelligent during this campaign. Remember, she was only part of the campaign for a matter of nine weeks. Sarah Palin is who she is.

Which is why I find it so stunning that the very people who introduced us to Sarah Palin… who told us she would make a great Vice President… have now turned on her with a vengeance. They are the top advisors to John McCain’s failed campaign and they are desperate right now to find someone to blame for their long long list of mistakes. They have been launching grenades at Palin and her supporters… some of their allegations we at CNN have found to be patently false. You will hear people say “this is what always happens with a losing campaign”… and hopefully, this is the last time we will be talking about these people. But what they have done just in the last few days to save their own skins is worth a final comment.

To those top McCain advisors who leaked the little story about seeing Sarah Palin in a towel. To those who called her and her family “Wasilla Hillbillies” while using her to stoke class warfare with redmeat speeches and an anti-elitist message. To those who claim she didn’t know Africa was a continent. To those McCain aides who say she is the reason they lost this election… can I please remind you of one thing: you picked her.

You are the ones who supposedly vetted her, and then told the American people she was qualified for the job. You are the ones who after meeting her a couple of times, told us she was ready to be just one heartbeat away from the Presidency. If even half of what you say NOW is true, then boy, did you try to sell the American people a bill of goods. If Sarah Palin is the reason some voters chose Barack Obama, that is no one’s fault but your own. John McCain, as he so graciously said himself the other night, lost this election. He lost it with your help, your advice, your guidance, and yes, your running mate recommendations. And that is crystal clear to everyone, no matter how hard you try to blame Sarah Palin or anyone else.

As Atrios notes, it’s no Special Comment from Keith Olberman; I’d say it’s better. Olberman serves up the red meat, to be sure, but a force such as Brown on CNN gives you something else entirely: a thoughtful, questioning agent that isn’t immediately identifiable as in the bag for any given ideology. Much, much more effective, if somewhat less enjoyable for the partisan. Good on you, Campbell.

Joy Behar, meet David Letterman

More from the Questions the “Serious” Media Will Not Ask file:

Letterman questioned him about Palin’s claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama “palled around with terrorists,” and McCain backed her up, saying his opponent need to better explain his relationship with former Weather Underground activist William Ayers.

“Did you not have a relationship with Gordon Liddy?” Letterman asked about Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy.

McCain said he knew him. Then, after a commercial break, McCain said, “I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison … I’m not in any was embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy.”

“You understand the same case could be made of your relationship with him as is being made with William Ayers?” Letterman said.

McCain said he has been completely open about his relationship with Liddy.

Letterman appeared to ridicule McCain about the implication that Obama and Ayers had a relationship.

“Are they double-dating, are they going to dinner, what are they doing?” Letterman asked. “Are they driving across country?”

“Maybe going to Denny’s,” McCain said.

I doubt it, John. Denny’s doesn’t usually cotton to the African Americans. But, in other news, does anyone give a shit that we’re so reliant on our “entertainers” to ask serious questions?

DOW 0


Reliably predicting events even a few days in the future is never easy. But this time, I think it’s pretty obviously straightforward. Lead-pipe domain. Assuming a continued steady and daily 500 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Index (which is looking pretty optimistic at this point) when will we finally reach Dow=0?

Why, on November 4th, of course. When else could it possibly happen?

I expect CNN and others to have some “Countdown to 0!!!” graphics up by the afternoon.

But Joy Behar knew better

Sometime, in the far future, when they are writing the definitive history of that mysterious entity known as the United States of America, you know, the one that went through this odd, transformative period that no one can really explain, still, even here in the far future; when they are writing that history, they’ll come to the point where they write “But Joy Behar knew better.” Joy Behar, defender of (whatever’s left of) The Republic. She’ll be right there by Cicero.

Richard Cohen, of all people, lays it out for us in the WaPo. Check this out:

Last week, one of the co-hosts [of The View], Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig – an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

“We know that those two ads are untrue,” Behar said. “They are lies.”

[…]

“Actually, they are not lies,” he said.

Actually, they are.

Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Read that last line again. And then read it again. And then rub your eyes (but not too hard). And then double check the link above isn’t some sort of Russian redirect intended to cleverly sap your accounts and steal the time-share you’ve got way out in Bermooda. “Actually, they are.” See, that wasn’t too hard. But our man Cohen ins’t going to leave it there and start in with the hacktackular James Carville™ excuses. No sir:

[Continuing directly] McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most.

[…]

[McCain’s] opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir – the person in whose hands he would leave the country – is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

[…]

McCain was […] going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can – as he did in South Carolina – renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work.

God save Joy Behar. She was The One who could get through to Our Media Elite, the Serious People who run things around here. Too late for the Republic, and all that, but at least we may be spared the final indignity of going down in a blaze of “glory” under a McCain/Palin administration.