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November 30, 2007
It's Hard Out There For a Daredevil...
Breaking news: Evel Knievel is dead at 69. As we remember the 1970s stuntman and orthopedic-surgery poster boy, let's also remember his unwitting contribution to our slang lexicon: He helped make it legal to call someone a pimp. In 2001, ESPN's website ran a photo of Knievel with a caption saying that he "proves that you're never too old to be a pimp." Knievel sued for defamation. The case made it to the Ninth Circuit Court, which ruled against Knievel, finding that ESPN had tagged him a pimp not to suggest that he managed prostitutes, but rather that he was, as the kids say, "cool." "It was most likely intended as a compliment," concluded the majority. Knievel's decision to try to jump over the majestic canyon of the First Amendment seems even more bizarre considering that, according to his AP obit, he used to brag about having been a "swindler, a card thief, a safe cracker, a holdup man." (Photo: evelknievel.com)
Sundance Still Embracing A Misnomer
The Sundance Channel exists to produce sleek, artier-than-thou programming. That is its niche, and, though I personally choose not to watch shows like One Punk Under God and Anatomy of a Scene, I can accept that. What I refuse to accept, however, is the channel's willful mauling of the English language in service of a puffed up celebrity interview vehicle called Iconoclasts. Each episode pairs together two "iconoclasts" and "explores the intersection where two great talents meet—and where creativity comes alive," says Executive Producer Robert Redford. The third season wrapped up last night with a show featuring Madeleine Albright in conversation with Ashley Judd. Past episodes have featured Sean Penn with Jon Krakauer, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder with surfer Laird Hamilton, Renee Zellweger with Christiane Amanpour, and Robert Redford himself with Paul Newman. Even aging media mogul Sumner Redstone has been on. The thing is, this is probably a really great show for people who love celebrities—like E! True Hollywood Story for the alternative crowd—but none of these celebrities are actually iconoclasts. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of the word is (1) a person who destroys religious images or opposes their veneration or (2) a person who attacks settled beliefs or institutions.
Genuine iconoclasts include H.L. Mencken, who made a career out of smashing all manner of popular beliefs and prejudices. There's a good case to be made for Salman Rushdie as a model iconoclast, with respect to both literature and religion. But Robert Redford? Look, I liked Sneakers as much as the next guy, but when was the last time Redford shattered any contemporary American idols? The point is, mere accomplishment in a given field does not an iconoclast make. I plan to e-mail Sundance about this; pedantic language-conscious Riff readers should feel free to do the same. Resist corporate verbicide!
—Justin Elliott
John Fogerty's Back
It's still amazing to me that Creedence Clearwater Revival, a late-60s, early -70s Bay Area band, was so good at playing Louisiana swamp blues; but they were. And John Fogerty, the band's controlling but visionary leader, was largely the reason why (proof below).
At 62, Fogerty, despite a legacy of post-band-breakup lawsuits with record labels and band members, is back with a new solo release, Revival.
The album might as well be called "What's Done is Done. Let's Rock." There's an air of openness and self-awareness to album; sort of a second (or third) wind for Fogerty. Songs range from simple blues/country ("Don't You Wish It Was True") to reflective nods to the old days ("Creedence Song") to straight-up political rock and roll ("I Can't Take It No More").
Check out a good Q&A with Fogerty on Pitchfork.
November 29, 2007
Winter Holidays = God Awful Pop Music
Regrettably, I spent my morning listening to songs on the Monster Ballads Xmas CD and the LeeVees' How Do You Spell Channukkahh EP. Any holiday spirit I had when I woke up this morning has now been completely ripped out of my system.
I'm not sure why holiday rock almost always = terrible rock, but the monster ballad CD and the silly Jewish rock EP are living proof that rock songs about Santa and pop songs about potato latkes are not, and will never be, cool, funny, interesting, or enjoyable in any way. I want to personally thank them for giving me a full-fledged holiday headache.
Did Lita Ford really think that recording "I'll Be Home For Christmas" with Twisted Sister was a good use of her time? And when Tom Keifer of Cinderella sings "Blue Christmas," all I can think is, who the hell is Tom Keifer? As difficult as it is for me to admit that I actually bought a Winger tape (yes, a cassette tape) once, their version of "Happy Christmas (War is Over)" is four minutes and six seconds of sheer torture. As for the LeeVees, to me they sound like They Might Be Giants performing at a Bar Mitzvah.
Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, a co-executive producer of the rock CD, had this to say about the compilation:"'The 'Monster Ballads Xmas' CD will bring the party vibe into the holiday season with enough hairspray to further enlarge the hole in the ozone layer above the North Pole." Wow.
Baby Grace: Sleeping in the Bed Her Mother Made
You have to be made of stone not to have been following the Baby Grace case. The one that had hardened cops weeping and fondling tiny pink sneakers after her little decomposed body was found floating in Galveston Bay. Even the forensic artist brought in to create her likeness so she could be identified came away moved. After 14 weeks of nature taking its toll on Baby Grace's tortured little body, one would imagine that job to be a horrible one, but the beautiful innocence of a child whose true face she'd only ever see in her mind's eye makes the artists' description of that task simply transcendent:
A man in the medical examiner's office pushed back the cheeks on Baby Grace's corpse to put a smile on her tiny, decaying face. That's how forensic artist Lois Gibson captured the open-mouthed grin with spangled risotto-sized teeth. It was one of the girl's few features that had survived six weeks in a shed during a Texas summer and nearly two months in Galveston Bay.
But it was the way the blond toddler looked outside of the black body bag that made Gibson draw large, lid-filling eyes on the picture of the girl that led to identifying Riley Ann Sawyers.
"She was so very, very small. She looked like the size of a child that you would change the diaper on, just laying there on a metal gurney like a giant stainless steel cookie sheet," Gibson says just above a sad, disbelieving whisper before her voice shifts and she's strong and scientific. "If you are very, very small, then the iris, that colored part of your eye, takes up almost the entire eye opening."
The corpse's decay helped Gibson perfect the gentle downward slope of Riley's eyes. "The decomposition was such that I could see that bone on her face," she said. "And her eyebrows were going to follow her little ridge."
Gibson said she felt her blood pressure rising during her morgue visit. It passed quickly, she said, and "I turned into the artist. I was going to make the best picture possible and get every piece of anatomy right and find her name and get justice for her." In spite of what lay on the gurney, Gibson said, "I knew that she was beautiful, and the picture would reach out to people who knew her and loved her."
Well, her grandmother knew and loved her; she recognized in an instant the child she hadn't been able to speak to since June. That would be when Riley Anne (identified tag-team by an artist and a granny who may never meet) and her mother moved from Ohio to Texas so that mom could marry a man she'd met on the internet. A month later, mom Kimberly did nothing while dad-for-a-day tortured her daughter for 4-6 hours and allegedly prevented her from summoning help; OTC pain relievers were all she claims he'd allow. Riley's crimes? Insufficient "pleases' and 'thank you's" and "yes sir". Feminist that I am, and as much as I revile male violence, I hope Kimberly is punished more severely than her psycho husband, Royce Zeigler. He had a duty not to hurt Kimberly. She had a higher duty to protect her child from strangers which is exactly what her new husband was. On a month's acquaintance, as it appears from news reports, he shouldn't have been allowed to babysit, let alone overrule his wife's parenting decisions (he'd stayed home from work the day of the killing to ensure that his new discipline regime was carried out).
Giving the seemingly never ending stream of stories about kids tortured and dying at the hands of their chicken-headed mothers' pond-scum boyfriends, I was surprised to find that they don't abuse children more than bio-dads do. I'd expected the split to be about 70-30, given the wrath of the father's rights crowd and didn't look forward to having to agree with them, but the data paint a different picture. It's a complicated subject that the number crunchers munch in all directions but the bottom line is that "Nearly one-half of all perpetrators were male, and of these, one-half were biological fathers." So, my assumption was wrong but my umbrage remains intact: a bio- dad is a bio-dad. Unless he can be shown to be a real and present danger to the kids, he should stay in the picture. But a non-bio-dad must be thoroughly vetted and not allowed access to helpless children, even as a babysitter, until proven harmless.
No one outside her family can object to a 19 year old marrying a virtual stranger but pretty much we can when she tosses her innocent baby into that maelstrom. I'm a single mom. Dating is my problem, not my kids'. Kimberly Dawn Trenor had no right to introduce a strange person into her child's life without extremely close supervision. But, of course, the real issue here is that Kimberly herself needs extremely close supervision--she's pregnant again. She should be shown no mercy.
St. Louie Woman: Sickness in the Suburbs
This is one of those stories that you just can't stop thinking about and wondering what the hell is so wrong with people. You read the news and suddenly the whole hermit/Walden Pond thing just makes so much sense. If only there was a way to legislate against stupidity and viciousness. There isn't, but that didn't stop suburban St. Louis politicians from doing it anyway. Wrong as the underlying act was, heinous as it was, making online harassment, without a clearly stated threat, a punishable offense only makes things worse. Ninety percent of the blogosphere is prima facie harassment; they better get a lot more jails built and be ready to face a whole lotta 1st Amendment cases.
It's been hard to miss the story about the 13 year old girl who committed suicide after a MySpace boyfriend wooed, then cruelly mocked and dump her. The 'boyfriend' turned out to be the mom of her former best friend and only four houses down the leafy suburban cul de sac. As horrible as was a grown woman intentionally setting out to spy on a child (how dare she de-best friend her daughter), the details are even worse. The New York Times has the goods:
Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.
Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online—Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.
The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, "The world would be a better place without you.”
Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.
Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.
Prosecutors couldn't find a way to charge her with anything (imagine how hard they tried) and the world responded with death threats, outraged letters to editors and a deluge of colorful phone calls to the Drews. I was tempted to pile on myself (St. Louis is my hometown) but the prosecutors were right; this despicable woman has simply not committed a crime. There is no way that her vile words can be construed to constitute a threat, or even the suggestion that the poor little girl commit suicide (though Mrs. Drew knew the girl had contemplated suicide before and was on antidepressants). Nonetheless, the Board of Aldermen made internet harassment punishable by a $500 fine and up to 90 days behind bars. Given the low intellectual state of the internet, it can't be long before local police are logging hundreds of complaints a week alleging what will no doubt be undeniable cases of internet harassment. Then what?
Bad cases make bad law and this is one of the worst. Not only did this awful woman stalk and mentally torture a child with whose family she pretended to remain on good terms...no, you really have to read this for youself:
Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews' driveway.
"I felt like such a fool," Mr. Meier said. "I’m supposed to protect my family, and here I allowed these people to inject themselves into our lives.”
The police learned about the hoax when Ms. Drew filed a complaint about the damage to the foosball table. In the report, she stated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel 'as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”
She went to the child's funeral? She filed a police report about the foosball table the dead girl's parents took an axe to instead of her own evil head?
If having evil in your heart was a crime, this heifer would be Public Enemy Number One. But it's not. Just like Drew, America needs to grow up and stop thinking it can legislate it's way into people's hearts. This is just one more callous bitch we'll have to tolerate polluting our planet with her amorality and hardheartedness. That sucks but we only degrade the rule of law with feel-good laws we can't, or won't, enforce.
November 28, 2007
Holiday Music Mercy Courtesy of The Killers
The holiday season offers no shortage of peril: themed turtleneck sweaters, Bűche de Noël, office party punch. And of course, the one holiday intrusion that none of us can avoid, from the dawn of Black Friday through 'til Christmas Day, is the ubiquitous playing and marketing of Christmas music. This year, if all the harking of angels on high and Beach Boys covers are getting you so down that even Neil Diamond's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" can't raise you up, The Killers have just the song for you. "Don't Shoot Me Santa" is the feel-good—in a super dark way—iTunes download of the season, with all its proceeds going to AIDS charities as part of Bono's RED campaign. For those of us who have always dreamed of tying up Brandon Flowers with tinsel and tormenting him in the desert, Christmas has come a little early this year.
For some more bloodthirsty sock puppet action that's good any time of the year, there's always Macromantics' superb "Apple Crumble."
Happy Caroling!
—Cassie McGettigan
Wonder Woman Gets Her First Female Scribe
The Times just profiled Gail Simone, the first woman to write DC Comics' Wonder Woman series. MJ was on the story back in July, when Charlie Anders introduced readers to Simone as part of a generation of feisty female comic-book geeks who are breaking into the boys-in-tights club. Simone helped get the ball rolling with her Women in Refrigerators site, which listed the horrible demise of many a female superhero. So don't expect Wonder Woman to pull a Captain America any time soon. Meanwhile, it looks like Simone is keeping Princess Diana of Themyscira plenty busy fighting off a troop of groping blue gorillas.
November 26, 2007
Lars and the Real Girl
The second the credits started rolling after a recent showing of the film Lars and the Real Girl, my friend turned to me and said, "That was the most boring film I've ever seen in my life. I fell asleep, like, five times."
Boring? I disagree. The film creeps along at a slow pace, but can you tell the story of an extremely sensitive, emotionally wrecked young man whose platonic relationship with a blow-up doll helps him get over the death of his mother and social anxieties at a fast pace? You could, but it probably would have to star Will Ferrell and be directed by Judd Apatow.
This film, starring Ryan Gosling and directed by newcomer Craig Gillespie, is an earnest, sincere, and often sappy tale of a small Midwest town transformed by one man's real "relationship" with a fake person. It is hokey (the older, wiser women of the town sitting in a knitting circle wearing sweaters and offering casseroles and their undying support when Gosling's character is depressed), and it is, at times, a tear-jerker (lots of close-ups of a misty-eyed, red-faced Gosling as he comes to terms with his inner self), but it's also funny (Gosling getting into "arguments" with his doll).
The movie feels like an art-house film for the family: It's quirky and character-driven, but it's also, in the end, a feel-good flick about good people doing good things for each other. Boring? Maybe. Depends who you ask, or what mood you're in when you see it. Cheesy? A little. Worth watching if you're into small-budget films with mostly unknown actors forming friendships with a plastic woman purchased on the Internet? Yup.
Remixing Rudy Giuliani's Broken Record
Nice. WFMU's Beware of the Blog is collecting remixes of Rudy Giuliani mentioning his favorite (only?) topic. As DJ Joe Biden might say, all Rudy needs is a noun, a verb, September 11... and a beat. My favorite so far is Miguelito Contraband's "Gold Plated 9-11 Diapers" [MP3].
Party Ben's European Tour Update #2: Warsaw, Prague, Belgium, Munich...
"...everybody talk about, pop music." Ahem. Anyway, holy moley, Riff, it's been an eventful week around central Europe and my sincerest apologies if you've been awaiting my latest update, wondering if I'm still alive or if I'd succumbed to a plague or a hostel that turned out to be a crazy movie torture prison or something. No, and no, everything's fine, but with barely enough time to sleep a few hours each night I'm afraid Riffing has slid a little on the priority list. Here's a quick recap.
First of all: Poland. When I wrote here last Friday, we were headed to Krakow for a gig that turned out very well, attended mostly by tourists and people who didn't really know who I was but hey, an up-for-it crowd is an up-for-it crowd. Krakow itself was stunningly beautiful, covered with about a foot of snow and sparkling like a fairy tale. Sadly, I missed seeing much of it since we had to get up the next morning and head back to Warsaw for the Saturday night gig, something we were a little nervous about: Poland's national soccer team was playing Belgium in the qualifying match for the Euro 2008 championships that night (in fact, the game would be shown on big screens at the venue we would be DJing at later), and with Poland never before qualifying, a loss could have meant a big downer for the party. So we were at the edge of our seats, and thankfully, Poland dominated the game, winning 2-0. Later, I played to a packed dancefloor and for my final track put on the aforementioned mashup I'd made with Polish band Kult's "Polska," whose refrain of "Poland, we live in Poland," suddenly seemed tailor-made for the moment. So, let me just say this: if you ever have a chance to DJ in a foreign country, arrange to do it after a major soccer victory, and make a track to play that repeats the name of the country over and over, and wear that country's soccer scarf during your set so you can hold it over your head during this song, and then maybe take a big swig of the bottle of local vodka someone's stashed on stage, because the wave of cheering euphoria that you'll ride will be an experience to tell the grandkids about.
Prague was on the schedule as a rest break between fast-paced sections of the tour, and I had no gigs there, but met up with a San Francisco friend who showed me around. I was surprised to find much of the city incredibly cheap: a great meal for two (with totally drinkable local wine) at a Czech place a little outside the tourist area ran us about $27 total, and we'd even ordered an extra plate of doughy potato croquettes accidentally. The expat community was kind of interesting, and I met a bunch of Americans, some of whom seemed as pleased with their own insider-y knowledge of the place as jaded LA hipsters, and some of whom seemed fascinated and humbled by their surroundings. The Veletržní Palác museum on the city's north side is definitely worth a visit: their František Kupkas include the inspiring "Fuge in Two Colors", a painting whose intersecting spirals seem to have predicted those microscopic pictures of proton collisions, or whatever.
On Friday it was on to Liege, Belgium, a city about halfway between Brussels and Koln, Germany, and it seems slightly industrial, without much in the way of tourist attractions. So, perhaps inspired by Bilbao in Spain, they decided to throw some money at a star architect to build them a monument: a train station designed by Spaniard Santiago Calatrava. His sweeping white constructions, evoking skeletons or ships, have always seemed stunning to me in the pictures I've seen in architecture magazines and stuff. I knew about the plans for Liege, but didn't realize construction had even begun, so I was surprised to exit the train on Friday and find myself under a giant canopy made of the architect's signature thick white tubing. At first it's incredibly impressive, the huge structure almost geological in size. While the main roof over the tracks is completed, the rest of the station isn't, and the ticket window and a few stores are located in a small temporary structure off to the side, accessible by kind of sad metal ramps. So, I'm hesitant to judge the building yet, as I didn't have the full experience of entering from the front and standing under the central curve of the station's full height. However, there are some problems that seem pretty evident already. 
First of all, on a micro scale, it already seems kind of old and dirty. The white tubing is already stained with dirt and water lines from leaks in the glass roof, and the white concrete ramps that lead up from the tracks have the dusty look of an old basement wall. Again, perhaps they're still working on things, but the leaky roof seems inexplicable. On a macro scale, the problems are even more troubling. Liege is a charming city, with mostly 3 or 4-story brick buildings surrounded by small hills, and while I'm all for the mixing of modern and classic architecture, the scale of Calatrava's creation is completely out of control. It has the eerie look of scenes in sci-fi movies where gargantuan spaceships descend over cities: the comparison of trees and houses with this overwhelming, alien thing is deeply, almost instinctively, unnerving. The station towers over the city, incomprehensible, a section of the roof extending out impossibly far over what will I assume be a plaza, and the city seems to cower in its presence. Calatrava's work is, for sure, meant to exist as sculpture as much as it exists functionally in the existing urban fabric, and his Milwaukee Art Museum is a good example of how well this works when it does: it perches in a spot where it seems almost smaller than its actual size, both impressively engineered and also kind of, well, cute. But the station in Liege seems even larger than it is, self-indulgent, bloated, and not in the spirit of the city at all.
Coming soon: tales from Munich and Paris. Will Party Ben get that cold he's been fighting off so far? What will German waitresses say when Party Ben's in their way? What's up with the new French music and dance craze, "Tectonic"? Stay tuned…
The Intellectual Street Brawler: What if They Held a Street Fight But Nobody Watched?
Way to come back from T-day festivities and get all depressed over the state of our humanity.
What the hell, misery loves company. Check out Sucker Punch: The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights over at Slate. Yup, knuckle draggers staging, then taping, disgusting street fights all for your viewing pleasure.
The author is an English professor and fight fan who's using the education his parents denied themselves to give him making street brawls high brow. That's unfair, I know, but so is glamorizing hooliganism (these folks go around 'happy slapping' unsuspecting women) which writing like this certainly does. As does my linking to it.
The more of them you watch, the more familiar you become with certain recurring formulas: mean kid or kids nailing unsuspecting victim, drunk guy flattening drunker guy outside a bar, bully getting or not getting comeuppance, go-ahead-and-hit-me scenarios, girls fighting for keeps while male onlookers anxiously strain to find them hilarious, backyard or basement pugilism, semiformal bare-knuckle bouts, pitched battles between rival mobs of hooligans....
I realize that this probably makes me a bad person, but I find the online archive of street fights to be edifying, even addictive, ripely endowed as it is with both the malign foolishness that tempts you to despise your fellow humans and occasional flashes of potent mystery that remind you not to give in to the temptation. There's an education in these videos—in how to fight and how not to fight, for starters (executive summary: Skip the preliminaries, strike first, and keep it coming), but also in how the human animal goes about the age-old business of aggression in the 21st century.
Far be it from me to deny another ink-stained wretch his day in print, especially such a thoughtful and talented one, but I find his 'loophole' ('there's an education in these videos'...) make-weight. Acknowledging the existence of something doesn't make you either an enabler or responsible for it, but writing about the existence of something pernicious (however "age old") without dogging it is...problematic.
I watched as much as I could stand of these videos and remembered again my fears over raising a son. Imagine looking on-line for something "edifying, even addictive, ripely endowed" and seeing my child happy slapping a young woman or sucker punching a classmate in the school parking lot after hours. Too bad men don't have a back 40 to plow anymore. I'll just go there--unless you're a cop searching out these kinds of videos to make arrests, you're glamorizing the kind of random street violence that makes our cities increasingly unliveable.
Maybe I'll just go back to my T-Day hide out where there was no cell reception and no internet. Ignorance truly is bliss. Or it was.
November 20, 2007
Anybody Here Seen my Old Friend Ian Smith?: Where do Evil People Go When They Die?
When I saw the name, that name, Ian Smith, in the paper's today, I shrunk back from my own computer.
I'm 48 and was raised to be apolitical by fundamentalist Southern Baptists who thought having a news awareness, with all the ungodliness on display there, was, well, ungodly. We weren't allowed to play cards (tools of the devil) or games with dice in them (like Monopoly). Needless to say, we weren't allowed to watch the news, listen to news radio or read newspapers. Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War, which raged through my adolescence, were tumults I learned of during my 20's in the 1980's. Still, even I somehow knew how much that man hated me and how much his hatred was required to justify white privilege. His racism, and the larger reality of racism in general, was a poison I couldn't avoid inhaling. It's hard to describe what knowing how thoroughly you're despised does to you. And now, like Richard Nixon, Smith's gotten to die peacefully in his feather-bedded mansion. Where's the justice for those who brutalize the world, curse an entire race/continent, and go to their graves defiant?
Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian prime minister who broke away from Britain and fought to preserve white minority rule in what is now Zimbabwe, has died at age 88 in South Africa, the BBC says. ...
Smith ruled from 1964 to 1979, isolating the former British colony by waging an ultimately futile racial war against the black majority. And estimated 40,000 people died and tens of thousands were imprisoned. He ultimately was replaced by Robert Mugabe, the black nationalist whom Smith jailed for 10 years and who has ruled Zimbabwe since its creation in 1980.
"I don't believe in black majority rule ever for Rhodesia, not in a thousand years," Smith once said. He felt vindicated by Mugabe's dictatorial rule and the country's economic collapse and hyperinflation
Yesterday, it was the heroic pastor of the church were the "four little girls" died. Today, Ian Smith, the destroyer who helped give us Africa's present day problems.
Where's the justice? I guess Death is the great equalizer.
Race Matters. Even on the Internet.
Remember how the Internet was supposed to allow you to abandon your real-world identity in favor of a totally different virtual one?
Yeah, not so much.
According to a Northwestern study, college students' choice of social networking sites varies according to the the race or ethnicity with which they identify and the level of education their parents have attained. Some of the key findings:
*White students prefer Facebook, while Hispanic students prefer MySpace. Asian-Americans are less likely than white and Hispanic students to use MySpace.
*Asian-American students are more likely to use Xanga and Friendster than their counterparts from other ethnic groups.
*Children of parents with a college degree are more likely to prefer Facebook, while those whose parents have less than a high school education are likely to prefer MySpace.
But there was one little sentence in the press release that I think deserves further explanation—and perhaps more research: "[The study] found no statistically significant SNS choices for black students."
Now depending how you read it, that sentence could be taken to mean "Black students don't seem to prefer one social networking site to another." It could also mean "Black students don't seem to use social networking sites." Finally, it could mean "The study didn't include enough black students to make any conclusions." Whatever the meaning, like I said, this raises some questions.
Methodological matters aside, perhaps this study will disabuse us of our strange notion that people somehow step out of their personalities the moment they get on the Internet. Most of us have no interest in sprouting a new identity online (witness recent speculation that Second Life, once touted as the ultimate be-someone-you're-not experience, was actually just a flash in the pan).
One of the researchers from the study put it best:
“Everyone points to that wonderful New Yorker cartoon of the dog at the computer telling a canine friend by his side that 'on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog,'” said Hargittai. “In reality, however, it appears that online actions and interactions should not be viewed as independent of one's offline identity.”
November 19, 2007
An Inside Look At Newspaper Cuts
I blogged last week with a few updates on newspaper cutbacks, and the Washington Post this week offers an insider's take on cuts at the San Jose Mercury News. Some readers' pride in the paper has dropped pretty low ("Personality: The Merc has none"); and their criticism is often harsh ("Most of the articles seem to be written at a 6th grade level at best").
Make sure to read all the way through for thoughts on the risks of un-fact-checked blog rumors guiding the news.
"Bombingham" Pastor Dead at 82
The pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist in "Bombingham" where the "four little girls" died, has also died.
I haven't been able to find out what 'flavor' Baptist the church was, but I'm betting it wasn't Southern Baptist, given that it split with the national Baptist convention in 1845 over slavery. The Southern baptists were in favor of it, just so you know.
It wasn't until 1995 that that the SBs apologized for their racial stance, and their role in supporting slavery, Jim Crow and opposing the civil rights movement. But guess what? Now they're "planting" black churches all over the place, especially in the south. "I grew up in a very multicultural environment," [Terence Roberts, one such newly planted black minister in Mississippi] said. "I didn't go through a lot of things people in the South went through with integration. I didn't carry all that baggage."
You wait long enough, you can get away with anything. Where would we be without the blissful ignorance of the young?
Quarterlife: Angst 2.0
Sure, My So-Called Life was cheesy, but as a 14-year-old, I bought the sixteenth best cult show ever hook line and sinker. I swooned over dreamy Jordan Catalano. Rayanne "I Wear My Slip on the Outside" Graff was my grunge fashion inspiration. When Angela Chase observed, "My parents keep asking how school was. It's like saying, 'How was that drive-by shooting?' You don't care how it was, you're lucky to get out alive," I thought, How true.
So when I heard that the new web series Quarterlife was produced by MSCL masterminds Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, I hoped it would be just like old times. The problem was, it is.
The premise of the show is familiar enough TV territory: Twentysomethings share house, drama, shenanigans (see Three's Company, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, for starters). In each 8-minute episode, the gang does all the things that we've expected modern singles to do ever since, well, Singles: They flop onto their unmade beds. They leave empty beer bottles around their kitchens. They wonder whether to move in with their girlfriends and boyfriends.
The bummer is this:
Via snippets of her vlog (also called Quarterlife), we're given a glimpse into the annoying inner life of protagonist Dylan, who, it seems, has it rough. She wants to be "living the life of a writer," but instead is forced to work at a shallow women's magazine. Her coworker steals her ideas. And to top it all off, her roommates are prettier and more charming than she. Dylan "often cries for no reason" and is the only one who Really Gets It. "It's my curse that I can see what people are thinking," she irritatingly muses. "And what good does that do me if nobody can see me?"
Angela Chase, is that you, trapped inside the body of a 25-year-old? To be fair, I'm not sure how old Dylan is supposed to be, but ostensibly she's well beyond the throes of adolescence. On teenagers, wanna-be deep/painfully self-conscious is expected, and even charming. On adults, it's insufferable. But the narcissism doesn't stop there: When a roommate figures out that Dylan's been vlogging about her, she gets pissed ("You put my face all over the frickin' net!"). Dylan's response? "Things just come out of me. I'm a writer!"
If all this cringeworthy earnestness weren't bad enough on its own, the producers had the audacity to take it beyond the confines of the series itself. See, Quarterlife isn't just a show. It's also a web community for "artists, thinkers and doers." There's a social networking area, forums, and a regular advice column about "twenty- and thirty-something life." From a recent column:
The quarterlife can be a confusing time of contradictions, in which you’re pulled in various directions. It can be:
a time of creativity because the world is your blank canvas, with infinite possibilities. a time of paralysis because the world is your blank canvas, with an intimidating number of possibilities.
an age at which you’re expected to make important life decisions. an age at which you feel like you haven’t lived enough to make important life decisions (kind of like the experience Catch-22: employers say they want someone with “experience,” but in order to get experience you have to get hired in the first place).
Ewww! It's like the What's Happening to My Body Book for Twentysomethings. And don't even get me started on the cloying lack of capitalization.
Next time I want to indulge in My So-Called Life nostalgia, I'll stick to my friend's box set, thanks.
November 18, 2007
Agnostics for Jesus: Why My Kids Won't Be Seeing The Golden Compass. Yet.
I usually speed-delete emails from particular relatives of mine who are still steeped in urban legends (women be warned: there's a rapist under your car!) and the Southern Baptist beliefs we were raised in, with all their fire, brimstone, and intolerance for non-believers. I'm so over God that their emails bore, rather than infuriate, me by now. For some reason, though, I opened this one and learned that the previews I'd been seeing for the big budget "fantasy/quest" movie The Golden Compass were really for a movie about kids killing a senile God so "everyone can do as they please." I'd planned for months to take them when it opened next month but not now. No way this apostate wants her kids seeing that.
Unbeknownst to me, British author and atheist Phillip Pullman wrote a best-selling trilogy of books, His Dark Materials, explicitly in response to the religiosity of The Chronicles of Narnia," in which God is an imposter, angels are sexually ambiguous and the Church kidnaps, tortures and assassinates to achieve its goals, one of which is stealing children's souls." In the face of the usual backlash, the movie has been toned down and the books' anti-religiosity beclouded and muffled into mere spectacle. Reasonably fearing that uninformed parents will enjoy the bowdlerized movie, buy their unsuspecting children the books upon which it was based, and infect their own young with atheism, the believers are in an uproar. Leaving aside the entirely valid notion of why it's ok for the religious to try to convert others but not the other way around, unless you're consciously raising your kids to be atheists or agnostics, why put them through the emotional anguish of dissing, let alone killing, God? Today's kids have enough on their plates what with roofie-laced toys from China and the sky-high divorce rate. Why give them Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny but give them the straight skinny on God?
I made the painful decision not to raise my children in church, as I had so thoroughly been, because I simply don't buy the theology nor much of black religious culture. Imagine how I've seethed to learn that someone, I'm not sure who, has been indoctrinating my six-year-old with fundamentalist Christianity. Quite purposefully, given how often short-attention-span boy brings it up. From nowhere, he started talking about God and how when people die they "go up in the sky and make cookies with Jesus." He's so smug and zealous when he says it, I want to shake him. But I don't disabuse him of the notion. That would only confuse him, make him sad, and most of all, make him intransigent in his "belief." If God makes him believe that there's justice and retribution in the world, when so often there isn't, fine. He's only six. I've got time. In the meantime, God often comes in quite handy.
My son (let's go with "Lefty") lost a tooth while away from home recently and brought it back with him, despondent that the folks he'd been with hadn't taken care of Tooth Fairy preparations. Assuring him that she just hadn't known where to find him, we settled in to write a long note explaining where'd he been and that, since he was back home, homey was waiting for his payday. The note went on and on as he officiously dictated and I played stenographer, finally ending with a list of sweetly stupid questions like if she found all the houses with her radar, how she visited so many houses in one night, etc. While I wasn't too worried that he'd recognize my handwriting, scrawled as it was across the full page he'd dictated, I didn't want to press my luck and had no idea what to answer in any event. Then, it hit me. I changed colored pencils and wrote in block letters: Dear Lefty. Then, big enough to fill 98% of the page: GOD. Love T.F. He bought it hook, line, and sinker. He even believed that God and the TF had put his tiny little tooth and a dollar in that ziploc baggie so it wouldn't get lost while he thrashed.
"Killing" God is a bit heavy on the symbology, even for a 48-year-old agnostic. Why go there? I have no use for God. I wish y'all would stop bringing it up. But, having done so, let's just let that sleeping dog lie, shall we? Until, of course, my 6- and 4-year-olds are maybe 12 and 10. That gives me six years to teach them how to think and, more importantly, how not to fear where their thoughts lead them. Then we'll be cuddling up with both the Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials. Let the contest begin.
Here's the kind of "training" my smug little boy will soon face: Why would a God who loves humanity make it rational but then make the most important thing in the world (religion) a-rational? Why give us a mere lifetime to figure everything out but an eternity to pay for getting it wrong? I'm not saying these questions are dispositive. I am saying, however, that whoever's been feeding Lefty religion had better be prepared to feed him some answers. In the end, I don't care if my kids become believers, atheists, or agnostics. As long as they can go toe-to-toe with Mom.
November 16, 2007
RZA Draws His Wu-Tang Sword in Movie Soundtracks
The RZA is a genius at putting music to fight scenes, and even better at putting the sounds of fight scenes to music. To complement this Wired interview with Bobby Digital himself, here's a Riff rundown of the Wu-Tang Clan co-founder's best cinematic work.
1. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
This Jim Jarmusch mob/samurai drama is a hybrid of Japanese, African American and Italian American cultures. Who better to compose the soundtrack than the man who first synthesized East Asian martial arts culture and New York hip-hop on the Clan's 1993 debut, Enter The Wu-Tang? RZA sets an eerie tone for the movie, with dark and heavy bass lines and samples that propel the movie's narrative forward. During fight scenes, the mellow music matches Ghost Dog's cool, thoughtful demeanor. Works as a stand-alone album as well as a soundtrack.
2. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
The four tracks that RZA contributed to this East-meets-West Tarantino masterpiece are more traditional movie fare—they're not meant to stand alone, but rather to enhance the scene. In contrast to the dark mood of Ghost Dog, the comic book feel of Kill Bill 1 inspired livelier RZA pieces. Individual instruments played one at a time match fighters' specific weapons and moves. Influences range from hip-hop poetry on "Ode to Oren Ishii" to a J-pop feel on "Crane-White Lightning" to a Spanish guitar-strumming, old West shootout sound on "Yakuza Oren 1."
3. Afro Samurai
RZA's soundtrack to this Spike TV show about a futuristic, afro-adorned samurai trying to avenge his father's death is as underrated as the show itself. It ranges from funky to soulful to militant, and it features rappers Talib Kweli, Q-Tip and Big Daddy Kane, as well as RZA's cousin, t