the chutry experiment

« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »

June 30, 2006

Blogging from Hay Street

I arrived safely in North Carolina this afternoon and am blogging from my new favorite coffeehouse in downtown Fayetteville (hooray free wifi!), next to the city's one art house theater, which is currently playing An Inconvenient Truth. I'm still adjusting to my new location, but the coffeehouse's website has links to a number of places I want to check out once I'm settled into my new digs. So far, though, it seems that the downtown area is a little livelier than I had been led to believe, so that's pretty cool. Hopefully I'll return to a normal blogging schedule soon, but right now I'm pretty much exhausted from moving boxes and furniture--including several mammoth bookcases--from one apartment to another.

Posted by chuck at 9:49 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 28, 2006

Pre-Moving Day Distractions

Moving day tomorrow so I don't have time for a longer post right now, but while doing some procrastination blog surfing, I learned that one of my favorire film critics, Jami Bernard, has joined the burgeoning ranks of film bloggers. Her blog, The Incredible Shrinking Critic, looks pretty cool. Thanks to Risky Biz for the tip. While I'm linking, Risky Biz also reports that Natalie Portman may be cast as Rosa in the much-anticipated film adaptation of Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay (probably my favorite novel of the last decade, so I'll admit that I'm ambivalent about seeing it adapted for the big screen). The source for the news on Portman? Michael Chabon, of course.

Update (seven hours later): Just came cross the news that Henry Jenkins now has a blog (thanks to creativity/machine for the tip). I'm just coming down from a late night of saying good bye to my CUA colleagues at Domku, one of DC's best-kept secrets, a great little restaurant/cafe in Petworth, so I'll write more about Jenkins' blog later, but I'll be interested to see how he uses his blog to talk about convergence culture in the context of blogworld.

Posted by chuck at 3:40 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

P.O.V. Preview

Because of Sujewa's discussion of the ongoing ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka a few months ago, I've been paying a little more attention to what's going on there. Now Agnes is reporting that the PBS series P.O.V. will be inaugurating its new season tonight (Tuesday) with a documentary about this ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka, No More Tears Sister (as always, the episode's website is loaded with useful information), which focuses specifically on "the courageous and vibrant life of renowned human rights activist Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. Mother, anatomy professor, author and symbol of hope, Thiranagama was assassinated at the age of 35. This documentary recounts her dramatic story." I'm a big fan of PBS and P.O.V., so I'm very much looking forward to the new series. P.O.V. typically airs in most cities at 10 PM, but local broadcast times often vary considerably. You can enter your zip code here to find out the schedule for your PBS station.

While I'm blogging, I think I'll also throw a link to this recent CNN article on this year's documentary crop, which I found thanks to Sarah Jo at Documentary Insider. Christy Lemire's article is a mid-year review of the most critically-acclaimed films of the year thus far, a list that includes several documentaries including The War Tapes, An Inconvenient Truth and The Heart of the Game.

Posted by chuck at 3:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Grey Lady Watches YouTube

Peter and Nick have both recently mentioned Virginia Heffernan's new blog, Screens, which focuses on viral videos, vlogs, video podcasts, mashups, and other web-based visual media, hosted by the New York Times. Because I've written about these topics from time to time, so I will certainly be interested in what Heffernan has to say. I'm in the midst of packing up my library for The Big Move, so a quick pointer to Screens will have to suffice for now.

Posted by chuck at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2006

Jesus Camp

My previous entry on Ava Lowery's "What Would Jesus Do?" reminded me that I haven't written a longer review of Jesus Camp (IMDB), which I caught at Silverdocs a few days ago. As I mentioned in my initial review, I found myself watching Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's documentary about an evangelical children's camp through the lens of my own childhood experiences of attending similar evangelical churches and church youth camps, something that makes writing about this film somewhat more difficult. I do think that Ewing and Grady have crafted an insightful documentary that will provide its audience with a compelling depiction of evangelical culture, especially as it lays out in terms of educating children into that culture, but I would have liked to see a little more consideration of how children process--often in vastly different ways--what they learn from their pastors, their parents, and their Sunday School teachers.

Jesus Camp opens with a car driving down an interstate highway somehwere in "flyover country," the sides of the road littered with fast food restaurants and chain stores while on the radio, we tune in to various AM radio talk shows where the hosts are conversing about national politics, notably the announcement that Sandra Day O'Connor had retired from the Supreme Court, with the radio hosts enthusiatsically hoping that an anti-choice candidate will be nominated in her place. The radio broadcasts establish the idea that these evangelical children's camps cannot be separated from the larger "culture wars" that, for better or worse, have remained a major theme ever since the 2004 elections. Eventually we are introduced to the documentary's central subjects, Pastor Becky Fischer, a children's pastor who creatively teaches children Bible lessons using toys and other props, and three children, Levi, Rachael, and Tory, who plan to attend Fischer's Kids on Fire summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Fischer has a charmismatic stage presence, and the children who attend her services are clearly spellbound as she narrates Bible stories and tells the children about her camp. During these scenes, Levi, especially emerges as a central figure. Articulate and pleasant, Levi--shown in the middle photo on the film's official website--responds to many of Fischer's questions, expressing enthusiasm for attending the camp so that he can become a more dedicated member of "God's army."

Fischer's summer camp provides the backbone of the film, but we also encounter Levi, Rachael, and Tory in a variety of learning contexts. In several scenes, we see the children being home-schooled by parents who want to shield their children from public schools, with one mother teaching the creation story and dismissing evolution as "just a theory," adding that "science doesn't prove anything." Elsewhere, we see another pastor instructing the children to reach their hands towards a life-sized cardboard cutout of George W. Bush so that they can pray for him in ways that are clearly politically inflected (though to be fair, it was not uncommon for the churches I attended to pray for political leaders regardless of party, although this was well before the emergence of the Christian Coalition as a political force). This pastor is especially interested in recruiting "warriors," metaphorically speaking, in the fight against abortion, and in fact, later in the film, we see many of these children on the steps of the Supreme Court handing out fliers calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Children also emulate their leaders by "witnessing" to others--Rachael somewhat nervously walks up to a stranger in a bowling alley to share her faith--or by learning to preach, with Levi delivering a short sermon at the camp. We also see Tory who enjoys dancing to Christian rock but worries about the sin of "dancing for the flesh." All of these scenes suggest that the children are absorbing their lessons without really questioning them, and many of the children seem very eager to please the adults in their world, but to a degree they also seemed to suggest the children were trying on a role, figuring out something about themselves while participating in the camp and its related activities.

The only opposing voice to the conservative evangelical subjects of Jesus Camp belongs to (liberal) Air America host and Christian Mike Papantonio, who is shown taking phone calls and commenting broadly on evangelical Christianity. The scenes with Papantonio are beautifully filmed, showing him in a darkened Air America studio, the camera panning across to show him in the room broadcasting alone, while an on-air exchange between Papantonio and Fischer effectively tied the two worlds of the documentary together. While Papantonio's comments about the sometimes troubling mix of religion and politics are helpful, the scenes also had the effect of implying that Papantonio was himself alone in his more progressive version of Christianity, which is, of course, hardly the case, but I'm also unsure what would have worked better here. During a Q&A at Silverdocs, one of the filmmakers addressed a similar question and explained that they conisdered showing a progressive church but felt that it would have provided a distraction from the specifics of the Kids on Fire camp, and I think they're right about that. But at the same time, I did find myself wondering exactly how the children were processing their experiences at "Jesus Camp," because in my experience what you see at the camp is probably significantly different than what you would see at soccer practice, say, or in some other context. Like Andrew LaFollette, commenting on IMDB, the most compelling scenes for me were the ones when we see the children alone. We see glimpses of that when a group of children are talking about Harry Potter (before they are reminded that Harry Potter "would have been stoned to death" if he'd lived in Old Testament times), and I wanted to see more of these moments where children were making sense of their world outside the "Jesus Camp" context because I think we'd see a much different picture of evangelical culture, one that is far more complicated and far less homogenous than what we see in the film. I would have also liked to have seen Jesus Camp depict other aspects of the Kids on Fire camp. Like most evangelical summer camps, Bible lessons only entail one (significant) part of the camps, and some of my strongest memories of the camps are playing softball and participating in other outdoor activities. On the whole, however, despite some reservations, I think that Jesus Camp raises some important questions in its depiction of these evangelical children's camps and their relationship to political activism.

Posted by chuck at 3:58 PM | Comments (28) | TrackBack

What Would Jesus Do?

Via Agnes, I just learned about 15-year old Ava Lowery's powerful video, "What Would Jesus Do?," which features heartbreaking photographs of wounded Iraqi children and quotations from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount to the children's hymn, "Jesus Loves Me." The disjunction between the hymn and the photographs is striking, so much so that this CNN interviewer's only response seems to be mild condescension, although as Movie City Indie points out, Lowery likely has a better undertsanding of montage than the CNN anchor (thanks to Green Cine for the pointer to the CNN footage). Lowery has posted over 70 animations to her website, Peace Takes Courage, despite receiving multiple death threats. Also check out her "What Will You Do?," played to Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt."

Posted by chuck at 3:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2006

The Road to Guantanamo

Most reviews of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's innovative documentary, The Road to Guantanamo (IMDB) have focused on the film's use of re-enactments and its use of news footage about Guantanamo to depict the stories of the Tipton Three, the three young men of Pakistani descent who had traveled to Pakistan for a wedding but were detained for two years in Guantanamo when they were released without charge. The film raises important questions about the role of dramatizations in getting at the truth of what is happening in Guantanamo when we have so few visual images and even relatively limited testimony as journalists have been provided with little to no access to the detainees.

According to their accounts, the three men, Asif, Rhuhel, and Shafiq (a fourth friend, Monir, went missing in Afghanistan and is believed to be dead), were basically apolitical before their experiences in Guantanamo. They were, as Nick Pinkerton of IndieWIRE puts it, an "innocuously laddish bunch of young dudes," who were essentially tourists in Pakistan when they visited there in September 2001 for Asif's wedding. In fact, several days after the group had journeyed into Afghanistan, one of the men still wears a sweatshirt from the Gap. While their reasons for traveling into Afghanistan are never made completely clear by the film (to provide humanitrian aid in Afghanistan? to see the country for themselves? to find some "really big naan?"), it is clear that they are not the hardened criminals, the "bad people," described by Donald Rumsfled, George W. Bush, and others. Instead, when the bombing starts, they are rightfully frightened and attempt to find their way back across the border, instead finding themselves in Kunduz, a Taliban stronghold, where they are picked up by the Northern Alliance.

While housed in Guantanamo, the three men are kept without legal process, repeatedly interrogated, and frequently tortured under the assumption that they are members of Al Qaeda. The interrogators deploy a variety of techniques, often falsely claiming that one member of the group had turned against the others or feigning offense that a British citizen could turn against his country (several of the interrogators seem almost offended by the fact that the Tipton Three speak English). The detainees in Guantanamo are initially locked in outdoor cages at Camp X-Ray, where they are physically assaulted and prohibited from speaking to each other, and later in Camp Delta, they are forced to endure screeching heavy metal music and brightly flashing strobe lights among other forms of abuse. Of course, the Tipton Three have been released, without any charges, after being held for two years, in part because at least one member of the Tipton Three had been visiting his probation officer in Tipton when he was supposedly in an Al Qaueda training camp. The film culminates in Asif's long-delayed wedding, but even with this ending, it's impossible not to feel a little unsettled about the allegations raised by the film (via Altercation, you can read their version (lPDF) of these events).

It would have been easy for someone to create a talking-heads documentary about the experiences of the Tipton Three, but I think Winterbottom and Whitecross have accomplished something far more innovative with their approach to this material. Interviews with Asif, Rhuhel, and Shafiq are mixed with re-enactments of the events they describe, as well as news reports showing George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair describing the detainees at Guantanamo as hardered criminals. It's tempting to compare these sequences to Paul Greengrass's obsessively authentic re-creation of the 9/11 hijacking in United 93, as Nick Pinkerton does, but I found these scenes to be a little too stylized, and as Kristi Mitsuda notes in the same indieWIRE article, the actors who play the members of the Tipton Three don't precisely resmble the persons they represent, producing a "distancing effect" that I think is important to the film. To some extent, these re-enactments stand in contrast to the lack of reporting on the conditions in Guantanamo, which Donald Rumsfeld, provoking uncomfortable laughter, described as being "consistent with the Geneva Convention...for the most part." In this sense, I think the hybrid of documentary and dramatization raises some important questions about representation, and while suspicious viewers may be able to "nibble at the factual edges of this film," as Andrew O'Hehir of Salon puts it, I believe it's almost impossible to shake the larger argument of the film that--in Guantanamo at the very least--the United States is not living up to the values of human rights and justice that it claims to be promoting in the Middle East.

The film's depiction of Guantanamo was made all the more poignant as news became public that three detainees had committed suicide in what the camp commander cynically described as an act of "asymmetric warfare," and what others have described as a "good PR move" by the detainees. As my review also implies, it's impossible to write about Winterbottom and Whitecross's film without also writing about Guantanamo, about the conditions of the prison, and about the fact that many of the detainees still haven't been charged with a crime.

Posted by chuck at 11:28 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 23, 2006

Entertainment Empire

The Nation recently devoted a special issue to the topic of entertainment and politics. The special issue featured a chart that lists (PDF) all of the media properties of the major media empires (Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS). It's an eye-opening chart in terms of illustrating where and how most Americans get their news. As the authors point out, the lnadscape has changed considerably since they produced their original chart ten years ago in part due to the rise of new media, but because television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, this chart remains an important resource.

I've only had time to skim a few of the articles in the entertainment issue, but Rebecca MacKinnon's " The Self-Expression Sector" is a useful analysis of the popularization of self-expression tools such as blogs and podcasts, and Robert McChesney continues to raise important points about media deregulation, while Mark Crispin Miller and Amy Goodman describe the continued threats to real reporting presented by corporations primarily interested in the bottom line. While Markos (Daily Kos) Moulitsas Zuniga and Robert Greenwald are slightly more optimistic, the overall picture is rather dire (with good reason).

For this reason, I find Richard Morin's Washington Post column to be deeply misguided. Morin argues that "Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy," pointing to a study that viewers who watched The Daily Show were more likely to view both 2004 Presdiential candidates negatively than people who watched the CBS Evening News. He goes on to cite the argument that the negative perceptions of the candidates "could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls." While I think it's important to note that watching TDS or CBS does not take place in isolation (which I believe deeply complicates the result of this study), isn't it also important to speculate about why these negative perceptions persist and what it says about the political process itself. It's not Stewart that's poisoning democracy. Instead, his appeal--not to mention Stephen Colbert's--grows out of the fact that so many of us feel alienated from a democratic process that is already deeply flawed.

Posted by chuck at 12:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress

Mark Binbaum and Jim Scherbeck's The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stoen Congress (IMDB) plays like an agitprop border-state film noir, with witnesses often shrouded in heavy shadow describing in detail how a once unknown Congressman in Texas conspired to transform the Republican Party into what DeLay himself described as a "permanent majority." Many viewers of the documentary will be familiar with the basics of DeLay's tactics having seen them played out in the nightly news, but Birnbaum and Scherbenk's documentary places this information ina coherent narrative that gave me a much more precise understanding of how the former House Majority Leader sought to undermine democratic process in his efforts to reshape government. As DeLay himself put it in a remarkably candid 1994 speech, "By the time we finish this poker game, there may not be a federal government left! Which would suit me just fine."

Birnbaum and Scherbenk make their case carefully, avoiding many of the easy laugh lines that might make The Big Buy seem too partisan. In fact, the film opens with a conversation between two Texas Republican activists in their car, discussing the contempt that DeLay showed Repbicans who didn't completely adhere to the party line. Intercut with this conversation, we see snippets of a 1994 interview with DeLay in which he stated his goal to eliminate the Department of Education, the NEH and NEA and to dramatically reduce the scope of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, OSHA, and HUD.

The documentary only stops briefly here, however, focusing instead on how DeLay sought to achieve this very limited vision of government, and this is where the crime drama elements really pick up steam, as local Texas politicians and political observers describe DeLay's tactics, including his use of the Texas state house to redraw the state's Congessional districts in order to create a larger Republican majority, in part by using illegal corporate money to fund Republican candidates for the Texas state house of representatives. In particular, Travis County DA Ronnie Earle offers a clear explanation of how DeLay's scheme violated the law, bringing indictments not just against the former Congressman but also dozens of corporations (including Cracker Barrell, Bacardi, and others) who stood to benefit from DeLay's scheme. We also hear from Jim Hightower who vividly illustrates how the redrawn districts have little to do with democracy. Standing at one busy intersection where three Congressional districts meet, Hightower explains that these districts stretch for hundreds of miles out from this point, illustrating the ways in which the redrawn districts had little to do with the values of represnting a specific community of voters.

It would be impossible to detail all of the relevant information Mark Binbaum and Jim Scherbeck have complied in this 90-minute documentary, but the film is rather sobering in its depiction of how DeLay used a variety of illegal tactics to reshape Congress and government in the image he wanted. With his redrawn districts, DeLay managed to add five reliably Republican seats and as we learn from the film, those five votes have made the difference in a number of close decisions (see teh discussion at the Big Buy website). The Big Buy is a sobering account of how easily democracy can be hijacked by a small, but powerful, group, raising important questions about our political process. As I watched it, I couldn't help but think about Frank Popper's Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, in part because both films raise so many important questions about the process by whcih our representatives are elected.

Update: I forgot to mention that The Big Buy is being distributed by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. I saw the film last night at the Wednesday night DC Drinking Liberally event at Mark & Orlando's (sadly, my last Drinking Liberally in DC before The Big Move), but you can order the film from its official website.

Update 2: About a week after the "premiere" of The Big Buy, the Supreme Court ruled that some of the new boundaries drawn by DeLay's redistricting efforts violated the Voting Rights Act but upheld the state's right to reshape Congressional distrcits, not just once a decade as the Texas Democrats claimed. Full story via the Washington Post.

Posted by chuck at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 21, 2006

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

I originally wrote a short review of Frank Popper's exciting new documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? (official site), a few days ago immediately after seeing it at Silverdocs, but the review has been generating so much traffic--thank you, Arch City Chronicle--that I thought I'd expand my original review into something longer. Mr. Smith also won the Audience Award at Silverdocs, and after thinking about it the last few days, I think the film can offer a significant contribution to our ongoing conversations about politics and civic participation.

Mr. Smith focuses on Jeff Smith's campaign in the 2004 Democratic primary for the House of Representatives seat being vacated by the retiring Dick Gephardt. When Smith, a 29-year old adjunct professor at a local university with no political experience and few (if any) political connections, decides to run, even his parents discourage him, in part to shield him from the disappointment of losing. Running in a crowded field of eight candidates, including Russ Carnahan, the son of Mel and Jean Carnahan (a former governor and Senator respectively), Jeff would seem to have little chance of winning. Others dismissed Smith's chances because he looked too young or didn't look the part of a political candidate, but Smith, whose progressive politics and youthful enthusiasm are utterly infectious, leaps into this improbable campaign, and Frank Popper's film takes us on the journey of Smith's campaign, capturing the energy of a political campaign that seems to be capturing lightning in a bottle.

When thinking about this film, it's the energy of Smith and his campaign staffers that I'll remember most. Riding the revitalized grassroots energy born out of the Howard Dean campaign, Jeff and his staff emphasize connecting personally with the voters of his district, going door-to-door to actually talk with the voters, and throughout the film we see Jeff with a cell phone on each ear, somehow managing to hold two conversations at once as he works to solicit campaign contributions or even a few more votes. In addition to going door-to-door, Smith's capaign emphasized yard signs (giving his name further visibility) and informal coffees hosted by suporters to give him a chance to talk about his politics in a more conversational situation. Jeff's strategies clearly work as polls show him going from being "an asterick," getting around 2-3% of the vote, to being a major contender for the nomination.

Of course, these strategies wouldn't work if Smith didn't have the support of a tireless campaign staff of volunteers subsisting for weeks on cold pizza and little sleep, and while Mr. Smith bears a strong resemblance to the behind-the-scenes campaign film, The War Room, it also offers a glimpse of a much more accessible campaign on a much smaller level, unlike the highly polished Clinton campaign led Carville and other Beltway professionals. These strategies also wouldn't work if Jeff didn't know how to connect with the voters, but Jeff proves to be an eloquent and thoughtful candidate, shining in the debates between the Democratic candidates, but also connecting on a personal level with individual voters, particularly in the African-American community which constitutes a major part of the district. And this is where Mr. Smith raises some important questions about our political process. Several voters seem to acknowledge to Jeff that they prefer his positions on the issues but worry that he won't be able to beat the more powerful candidates. The major newspapers, including the most prominent African-American newspaper in the community, choose to line up behind Carnahan, laregly because they have an eye only on fielding what they believe will be the most likely candidate to win. As Skinner's Democratic Underground review points out, "it was extremely frustrating to watch as almost all the jaded establishment types in our party and in the media threw their support behind the safe choice, rather than take a chance on the talented newcomer."

Possible spolier: As many readers will know, Carnahan won the primary by the narrowest of margins (Jeff Smith has now set his sights on getting elected to the Missouri state senate), and yet, as Skinner notes, it's hard not to walk away from Mr. Smith without feeling at least a little hopeful. While candidates like Smith face major obstacles, his campaign clearly electrified members of his district, and even though he received few endorsements from local newspapers, his grassroots techniques captured the imagination of many members of the local media. At the same time, the film depicts many of the problems with a system that strongly favors powerful insider candidates. As I mentioned in my original review, I don't think Mr. Smith offers any easy answers to the question implied in its title, and I think that's what makes Popper's film such a vital, important document for conversations about our political process.

Posted by chuck at 11:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

Wordplay

I have to admit that I'm not a fan of crossword puzzles, which probably makes me less than an ideal audience member for Wordplay (IMDB), the new documentary about Will Shortz, editor of The New York Times crossword, and the crossword enthusiasts who tackle the puzzle on a daily basis. I'm not patient enough to learn the lingo of crossword clues, and while at least one crossword enthusiast makes reference to an innate human need to solve problems, to "fill in all the empty boxes," I can rarely remain interested long enough to solve a puzzle, even on a Monday when they're supposed to be easier. But Wordplay manages to convey to some extent why so many people are addicted to the Times crossword and regard puzzle editor Will Shortz as a mini-celebrity, as well as the sense of community that has developed among puzzle enthusiasts. In fact, the larger community of crossword fans appealed to such an extent that I found myself wishing that I could become interested in crossword puzzles.

No doubt, much of the appeal comes from the charming folks who talk about doing and making crossword puzzles. Celebrities such as Jon Stewart and the Indigo Girls illustrate how engaging with a crossword puzzle can spark the creative process, with Emily Saliers in partciular noting how a crossword puzzle can even help her to overcome writer's block. Daniel Okrent, the former NYT public editor, admits that he has kept track of how quickly he solves the Times puzzle for years, competing against himself and in many ways, against time itself. Other celebrities, such as New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns also offer intriguing explanations for their crossword addictions. Meanwhile Bill Clinton and Bob Dole recall a particulalry noteworthy Times puzzle that punned on both candidates' names during the 1996 election (Clinton, in particular attests to the therapeutic aspects of a good crossword).

Clinton and Dole's discussion of this puzzle sets up a compelling discussion of how crossword puzzles are produced, with Merl Reagle letting us in on his creative process for a puzzle based on the film's title. Watching Reagle shape the puzzle gave some insight into the appeal of crosswords and the fact that crossword puzzles are, in fact, authored (something I didn't really think about as an outsider). But I was somewhat surprised to learn that in most cases the letters are arranged first and the clues are often written afterwards (Reagle even looks in the dictionary to ensure that "redtop" is a word and to come up with the clue for that word).

Along with this narrative, Wordplay builds towards the national crossword championships, held annually in the same Marriott hotel in Stamford, Connecticut. We are introduced to the major contestants, Al Sanders, who manages to finish third every year, Trip Payne, who is the younget past champion (at age 24), and Tyler Hinman, a 20-year old college student. Unlike most competitive documentaries, Wordplay depicts all of the finalists generously, and while the film managed to keep the viewer in suspense about who would win, it does so without creating villains. Instead, the crossword players seem to have a genuine sense of community, as many of the players have returned annually since the tournament began in the 1970s. I'm still not likely to pick up the Times crossword anytime soon, but the subjects of Wordplay consistently charm and entertain, and based on the reactions of the DC audience, I'm guessing that crossword fans will likely enjoy this film.

Posted by chuck at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Documentary and Fair Use

Via an email tip, a pointer to this Wired article reporting on a comic book by three Duke University law professors on the difficulties that documentary filmmakers face in dealing with copyright law. The entire comic book is available for free online at Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and provides a good overview of the ways in which copyright law can both promote and inhibit good documentary work. As the book illustrates, fair use protections do give filmmakers a lot of freedom, but uncertainty about what constitutes fair use still leads to a lot of confusion. The book also points to useful resources such as the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse that may be useful to filmmakers and other artists who are engaging with (or even passively capturing) copyrighted material or even trademarks that hapen to be visible in the background.

Update: While you're in the neighborhood, Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain looks like an incredibly useful resource for the topic of documentary and copyright, including this collection of films and videos that explore "the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film."

Posted by chuck at 12:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Debating Guantanamo

With the Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross documentary Road to Guantanamo, which focuses on the story of the Tipton Three, hitting DC theaters this weekend, I've been tracking down a few reviews and commentaries to prepare for the film. While I agree with Eugene Robinson that Guantanamo should be closed, I know a little less about the specifics of the story of the Tipton Three. I've been planning to link to David Lowery's review of the film for several days, in particular because of David's discussion of Winterbottom's decision to mix interviews with the Tipton Three and re-enactments of their treatment in Guantanamo. David argues that the mixture renders the re-enactments less effective as rhetorical devices. Also worth noting: a dialogue between two IndieWIRE reviewers about Guantanamo. I'm planning to see teh film Friday when it opens, and if I'm not too busy with the move, I'll write a review then.

Posted by chuck at 11:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 19, 2006

Other Silverdocs Coverage

I'm still processing all of the films and talks that I attended at Silverdocs and while digging around in the blogosphere found some other blog reports on the festival, incluicng Lauren Feeney's report on Al Gore's keynote address, which I now deeply regret skipping. Feeney notes that Gore cited critical theorists Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno in his talk, and that his talk was not only intellectual but also witty and inspiring. His concluding remarks convey much of what I find valuable about documentary cinema: "we have an opportunity to fix the democracy crisis and restart the conversation in America, to recreate a marketplace of ideas through documentary film." Lauren's review of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's compelling documentary Jesus Camp, which I plan to revisit over the next few days, is also worth checking out, as is her discussion of JL Aronson's Danielsons documentary.

Also check out Cynthia's read of Walking to Werner and the documentary I most regret missing, The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief.

Posted by chuck at 5:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2006

Sunday at Silverdocs, or Screened Out

After four long days of film screenings, I was only able to attend two films today on the last day of Silverdocs. I managed an early afternoon screening of Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, a documentary about the notorious 1970s soccer team led by colorful stars Pele and Giorgio Chinaglia. The film describes the team's brief flash of popularity in the 1970s, their appearances at Studio 54, their famous fans, including Mick Jagger and Henry Kissinger (the film implies that one of the motivations behind Pele's career with the Cosmos is that it would improve relations between the US and Brazil), and the packed stadiums where the Cosmos played, complete with cheerleaders and Bugs Bunny mascots (the Cosmos were owned by Warner chief Steven Ross).

In general, Lifetime was a fun film about the meteroic rise and fall of US soccer enthusiasm in the 1970s, one that could have been even more playful and fun had the directors played up the team's nightlife activities even further. That being said, it's impossible to deny the impressive amount of work that went into compiling the interviews and archival materials, not to mention all of the music clearances, that went into making the film. Lifetime also seems to show virtually every goal Pele scored on US soil, which I think will make the film especially enjoyable for longtime soccer (football) fans. It also shows the long-term impact of the New York Cosmos and the North American Soccer League on today's US soccer fans, noting that many of the fans who attended Cosmos games are now among the biggest stars on the U.S. World Cup teams (Mia Hamm in particular), while the Cosmos and other soccer ambassadors also helped promote the idea of youth soccer in the late 1970s. Lifetime wasn't spectacular, but US soccer fans and people curious about the 1970s will likely find it relatively interesting.

I followed Lifetime with Linas Phillips' Walking to Werner (IMDB; official site), a film very much in the spirit of the director who inspired it, Werner Herzog. Learning that Herzog once walked from Munich to Pris to visit a dying friend, Linas decides to journey on foot from his home in Seattle to the director's residence in Los Angeles, a distance of over 2,100 miles. Phillips exchanges emails and plays phone tag with Herzog, eventually learning that Herzog will be in Thailand to shoot a film, but Linas decides to continue his journey, confronting all manner of obstacles (speeding cars, narrow bridges, physical exhaustion) and friendly eccentrics along the way. While I enjoyed Walking and found Linas charming, his story was perhaps a little too earnest and sentimental in places. In fact, Herzog's attempts to direct the film from afar come across as far more intereting, with Herzog at first refusing to meet Linas at the end of his journey because the film should be about Linas and not Herzog and later (as Phillips mentioned during the Q&A) giving Linas his blessing to use audio from an interview Herzog recorded for the DVD version of Fitzcarraldo, telling Phillips that good filmmakers "have to steal."

Because Walking ran longer than I anticipated, I decided to skip Road to Guantanamo for now (it's playing at the E Street starting this weekend), but by that point I was pretty much exhausted, screened out, after something like ten movies and three shorts in four days. But before I wrap coverage on Silverdocs 2006, I just wanted to congratulate the Sterling Feature Award Winner, Jesus Camp, which I liked quite a bit (and hope to discuss further in the next few days) and the Audience Award Winner, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, which I also liked quite a bit. Now, with Silverdocs coming to a close, I'm going to have to return to my normal life, or at least some version of a normal life before I leave for Fayetteville at the end of the month.

Posted by chuck at 11:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Saturday at Silverdocs

I was able to see only two movies at Silverdocs on Saturday, and both films, by coincidence, put faces on subcultures that have typically been forgotten or ignored. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, in particular, provides a valuable window into a history that most people have forgotten, recalling the tragic end of the story when over 900 people were killed rather than the culture that led up to it. B.I.K.E. offers a glimpse of the Black Label Bicycle Club, a group of artists and activists who form a community around the pro-bicycle movement. It's an interesting mix of politics and playfulness as the Black Label group competes in "bicycle jousts" atop six-foot tall bicycles.

The first film, Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The LIfe and Death of Peoples Temple (IMDB) relates the history of Peoples Temple and its charismatic leader, Jim Jones, starting with his humble youth in Lynn, Indiana, and running through the 1960s and '70s, when Jones developed an enthusiatsic following with his message of social justice, to the very end in Jonestown, Guyana, when Jones directed over 900 followers to commit mass suicide. Nelson, who also directed The Murder of Emmett Till, presents an amazing wealth of archival material, including footage and audio of the meeting that culminated in the mass suicides, as well as interviews with several of the survivors and former members of Jones' church (including Jones' adopted son, Jim, Jr). While Nelson quickly establishes that Jones' psychological problems likely stem form childhood, he also demonstrates, through interviews and archival materials, how appealing Jones' message of social equality and community might have been for people shaken by the Vietnam War and racial inequality. Jones' churches are a picture of diversity, with young white college students standing next to older black families, suggesting a sense of community that might otherwise have been unavailable (see Christina Talcott's Washington Post article for more information on Nelson's research).

To some extent, Jones himself remains unknowable, and I'm not sure that any amount of reporting could ever determine how the church leader saw himself or his congregation, but Nelson manages to unearth footage of a healing service in which a woman confined to a wheelchair miraculously begins to walk again. The woman was later recognized to be one of Jones' secretaries wearing heavy makeup. The film features unforgettable footage from Jones' church in San Francisco and eventually from Guyana itself where Jones fled with members of his congregation after an article in a San Francisco newspaper began to unravel problems within Peoples Temple. Jonestown is an important story, one that needed to be told, and Nelson's film provides valuable insight into Jones' charismatic appeal and the church's eventual demise in what Jones described as "revolutionary suicide." It's clear, of course, as one of the survivors put it that "there was nothing revolutionary about it."

Jacob Septimus and Anthony Howard's B.I.K.E. focuses on the tight-knit subculture of pro-bicycle activists known as the Black Label Bicycle Club. The film focuses on the New York branch of the club, which consists priamrily of artists and punks, many of whom had known each other in the graffiti culture in the city (in fact other branches in the midwest tend to be much more blue-collar). The film focuses primarily on co-director Anthony (Tony) Howard's attempts to join Black Label and the group's repeated decisions to reject him, in part because of Tony's "rock star" or individualistic style (which often came across as a bizarre art-school hybrid of Tony Manero and Insane Clown Posse. In this sense, B.I.K.E. pits indvidulism against the collective ethos of the bike club, in a storyline that probably should have been a little more explicit.

While Tony is trying to get into Black Label, a long-time girlfriend enetr rehab and eventually leaves him for another guy, he develops an admiring friendship with the leader of Black Label, an artist and champion bike jouster, and ultimately he starts a rival bike group to compete with Black Label. I'll admit to being somewhat disappointed by B.I.K.E., but that's probably due to the fact that I was more interested in the politics of Black Label and the pro-bicicyle culture in general, and the film underplayed that element. To be fair, B.I.K.E. does explore these questions to some extent, particularly the scene in which the New York chapter of Black Label travels to the national Black Label convention in the midwest, which depictis the limits of the group's politics, as they load their bikes into their parents' (?) Range Rovers and Mercedes in order to travel to the competition. This scene does not suggest that their politics are insincere, I think, but that the group isn't completely removed from the bourgeois world that they seem to reject. I'm planning to see Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, Walking to Werner, and Road to Guantanamo today.

Posted by chuck at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sunday Morning Reading

I'll write about Silverdocs Saturday tomorrow morning (I only managed to attend two films, B.I.K.E. and Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple), but wanted to mention Shooting War, Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman's online graphic novel about a reporter covering the war in Iraq in the year 2011, after it has been raging for eight years. I've only looked at the first few panels, but it looks like compelling reading. More on the docs tomorrow, and I've managed to obtain tickets for three films tomorrow, including Walking to Werner and Road to Guantanamo, so I'll have plenty to write about the next few days. Not that I have anything else to do (I only move in eleven days). Thanks to Steve's POV for the tip.

Posted by chuck at 1:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2006

Friday at Silverdocs

It looks like I'm going to take most of Saturday off from Silverdocs. A colleague is hosting a cookout this afternoon, so while I'm planning to catch a couple of films tonight, the extra time will give me a few minutes to catch my breath and blog about the films and panels I caught yesterday. I never would have guessed that going to three films in one day could be so exhausting. After a late start on Friday, I met up with Sarah Jo Marks of Documentary Insider and we were able to catch the end of John Pierson's "Doc Talk" panel, during which Pierson discussed his experiences in helping Michael Moore and Errol Morris find wider audiences for Roger and Me and The Thin Blue Line. But Pierson was even more compelling when he discussed the experience of being the subject of a documentary, in his case Reel Paradise, which focuses on Pierson's family going to Fiji to screen films in an old theater on the island. He also described the responses of the Fijians themselves to the films that Pierson programmed, but I'll save that discussion for later when I've had a chance to see the documentary (which I'm now curious to see). Side note: while attending th Pierson panel, I met another press person who tipped me off to the University of South Carolina's "Orphan Film Symposium," which focuses on lost, unseen, or otherwise obscure films. Columbia is a short drive from my future home in Fayetteville, so it might be worth checking out in the future.

From there, I found my way to Air Guitar Nation (Silverdocs), easily the most entertaining and crowd-pleasing documentary of the festival and a fascinating addition to the "competitive doc" sub-genre, recalling films such as Hoop Dreams and Spellbound but with a heavy metal twist. Directed by Alexandra Lipsitz, Air Guitar Nation follows the story of two New York City air guitar competitors, C. Diddy and Bjorn Turoque, as they pursue their dream of competing in the International Air Guitar Champiuonship in Oulu, Finland (learn more about the US Championships here). Both C. Diddy and Bjorn are compelling characters who candidly discuss the air guitar phenomenon and their motivations for participating. In many cases, the competitors discuss the ways in which identity is a perforamnce and explain that by assuming their air guitar persona, they can escape their normal lives (as software engineers or whatever). At the same time, for C. Diddy, air guitar provides an opportunity to convey to his parents, who immigrated from Korea with the hopes that he'd become a doctor or lawyer, that his chosen career as an actor-comedian is the best choice. Air Guitar Nation manages to provide some goofy fun while also offering insight into its subject.

I had the good luck of watching Air Guitar Nation with Danielson: A Family Movie [Or Make a Joyful Noise Here] filmmaker JL Aronson, and while I can't attend the film, I'm incredibly curious to see it. Danielson focuses on the quirky faith-based, art-rock band, Danielson, and their struggles to make it in the music industry. I happened to catch Daniel Smith's solo act by accident in Atlanta, and his quirky, whiny, almost "unnatural" voice was unforgettable. Even more striking, he performed the entire concert wearing a 7-foot tree costume, and I gradually recognized the religious content of the lyrics. But because Danielson comes from an evangelical background similr to my own, I'm curious to learn more about this fascinating band and hope that I'll get a chance to see the film soon.

After Air Guitar Nation, I caught the world premiere of Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, which follows the experiences of the aptly named Jeff Smith as he runs for Congress in Missouri in Dick Gephardt's former district. Smith, an adjunct professor who studies African-American studies, enrolls a group of college kids and twentysomethings, none of whom have significant political experience, and runs a total (and seemingly tireless) grassroots campaign, knocking on doors, calling voters personally, encouraging supporters to host informal coffees, and posting yard signs wherever possible. Mr. Smith benefits from the screen presence of the candidate who is certainly an engaging and expressive public speaker. Smith runs against one of Missouri's big name families, represented by Russ Carnahan, the son of a former governor and Senator. Offering the most candid glimpse of a political campaign since The War Room, Frank Popper's Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? simply asks its title question: can a regular guy with no political experience but tremendous energy, charismatic appeal, and great ideas still get elected against the more powerful members of the party system? And I think it's a credit to the film that the answers it offers aren't always simple. Hoping to write more about both of these exciting new documentaries a little later.

Update: While surfing Technorati, I came across a good discussion of Mr. Smith. As Jake points out in teh comments over there, the film not only offers a critique of campaign politics but also asks some interesting questions about the relationship between white candidates and black voters. More on that topic and others in my longer review.

Update 2: I've written a longer review of Mr. Smith, which is available here.

Posted by chuck at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

Thursday at Silverdocs

For the second day in a row, I watched three documentaries, and once again, all three come highly recommended. I'll try to write longer reviews later because all three films are deserving of further discussion, but like yesterday, I feel like I've been staring at screens big, small, and tiny for a really long time. I started my afternoon with a screening of film composer Gary Tarn's Black Sun (IMDB), an experimental documentary based on the writings of painter Hugues de Montalembert, who went blind in the late 1970s when a mugger threw paint thinner in his eyes. De Montalembert narrates from his own descriptions of blindness, recalling the attack and conveying how it changes his experience of the world. After going blind, de Montalembert, rather than confining himself to his apartment, chose to travel, exploring countries ranging from Indonesia and India to Iceland, and Tarn's camera visits all of these locations, capturing images using images that can only be described as kaleidoscopic. Black Sun, with its philosophical explorations of vision and its depictions of travel recalled Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.

I followed up Black Sun with a late afternoon screening of Leila Khaled, Hijacker, a documentary by Swedish-Palestinian director Lina Makboul about Khaled, a Palestinian woman who hijacked two planes in the 1970s, with the hopes of calling attention to the Palestinian struggle. Makboul is explicit about her own ambivalence towards Khaled. While Makboul certainly regarded Khaled as a hero of sorts, she is also critical of her methods, with the documentary becoming an intriguing reflection on the line between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist." Unlike films such as One Day in September that look at the Palestinian struggles with distance, Makboul depicts her personal investment and her struggle to ask Makboul whether or not she feels she has harmed the reputation of Palestinians through her actions. Makboul also wisely underplays the emphasis on Kahled's appearance, noting in passing that Khaled's fame derived in part from her physical beauty, as members of the press repeatedly asked her questions about her romantic life. While her appearance certainly added to her initial notoreity, Makboul's film seems more interested in questions of the consequences of this violence for the Palestinian national narrative.

Next I caught the compelling "homemade" documentary, A Certain Kind of Beauty, co-directed by Liz Witham and Nancy Slonim Aronie. Beauty focuses on the struggles of Dan Aronie (Nancy's son) with multiple sclerosis, which he develops at the age of 22, just as he was beginnig to pursue a career in acting. Handsome and charming, Dan imagines that the whole world opening up before him, but after contracting MS, his motor skills quickly deteriorate despite a number of experimental medical procedures. Soon after Dan is diagnosed, his mother comes across the idea to document the family's experiences, and Dan readily agrees, in part to help others understand the disease but also--I'd imagine--as a way to help the family make sense of this difficult experience. The film is often brutally honest, depicting Dan struggling to dress himself and even to get out of bed as well as reflecting on how MS has changed him and how he experiences the world. But at the same time, Dan's story also depicts the importance of freinds and family in providing a sense of community. I'm still working through my response to this compelling film, but the honesty and openness of the Aronie family in telling their story was incredibly powerful.

Posted by chuck at 10:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

North Carolina Film Event

Sujewa tipped me off to Cucalorus, a film festival that takes place in Wilmington, NC (about 2-3 hours from F'ville) in November. The festival looks like a lot of fun. It's a non-competitive fest, which I sort of like. The festival is still accepting submissions through July 15, and the festival runs November 8-11. I'm heading out to Silverdocs in a few minutes, where I can hopefully take advantage of Silver Spring's free wi-fi this afternoon and blog (or do other work) from the festival.

Update: I'm now using Silver Spring's free wi-fi to mention that I'll be trying to catch at least two, maybe three, more documentaries today. I'm off to see Black Sun now, but hoping to catch A Certain Kind of Beauty and maybe The Railroad All-Stars, though both are currently sold-out.

Posted by chuck at 11:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wednesday at Silverdocs

Longer reviews later, but I've just returned from day one of Silverdocs (technically day two, I suppose, but I skipped opening night), where I took in a triple feature. I started with What Remains, which I saw based on Cynthia's recommendation, and I ended up finding the film, which focused on the work of photographer Sally Mann, to be utterly fascinating, a meditation on death and decay in the spirit of her recent photography series, but also on the processes of photography itself. The film was directed by Steven Cantor, who had documented Mann's work in the past in Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann, which I now very much want to see.

From there, I went to Jesus Camp (official site), Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's documentary about a camp for evangelical Christian youth, "Kids on Fire," led by children's pastor Becky Fischer, who rallies children to become more active as Christians in spreading their faith. While it would be tempting to treat this subculture with ironic distance, Ewing and Grady are careful to treat their subjects fairly, and they spend significant energy in the film depicting the links between evangelical Christianity and the Republican right (the kids pray for a life-size cardboard cut-out of President Bush and travel to DC to march against abortion). As someone who was raised as an evangelical, I'm always curious to see evangelical culture represented, and the film certainly brought back a lot of (sometimes painful) memories, and I have to admit that I'm still processing the film. But what I found most fascinating about it was the depiction of how these children "learn" evangelical culture, and within Fischer's camp, we see the children picking up the lingo and finding ways to minister to others. During the Q&A, several of the questioners depicted this as a process of brainwashing, and I think that gets what happens within evangelical culture wrong in ways that are rather significant. While we see the kids primarily within the context of the church services, their behavior elsewhere in the camp shows that the kids who attend make sense of their world in a variety of complicated ways.

Finally, I caught most of Punk's Not Dead before I had to dash out to catch the last train to Hyattsville (which I managed with less than five minutes to spare). Punk's Not Dead was a relatively solid treatment of many of the big definitional questions associated with punk. What is punk? Can commercially successful bands such as Sum 41 or Good Charlotte still be classified as punk if they've signed with a major label? Or if their lyrics lack any political content? Because I left before the film ended, I don't know what kind of conclusions the film reached, but at the very least, the filmmakers have assembled a wealth of concert footage and interviews with punk musicians that will provide useful for anyone who is interested in the history of punk.

Again, I'm hoping to write longer reviews later, especially for Jesus Camp, but after six hours staring at a giant screen, another hour staring at a smaller one seems a bit tedious. Tomorrow afternoon, I'll see Black Sun, and we'll see how things go from there.

Posted by chuck at 12:39 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 14, 2006

Rooftop Screens

Via The Back Row Manifesto, I just learned that Alex Karpovsky's remarkably funny mockumentary, The Hole Story will have its New York City premiere Thursday night through the Rooftop Films Series in the East Village. I very much enjoyed The Hole Story when I saw it at the DC Independent Film Festival a few months ago, so this sounds like a great opportunity to catch a good indie film somewhere over Manhattan (by the way, watching movies on the rooftops of buildings in Manhattan is an inspired idea).

Posted by chuck at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Clean

I'm not going to have time to write a full review of Olivier Assayas' Clean, which focuses on Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung), a heroin-addicted rock musician whose husband, Lee Hauser (James Johnston), also a rock musican, dies of a drug overdose in a Candaian industrial town (Hamilton, Ontario, if I remember correctly). Sentenced to jail for possession, Emily loses custody of their son to Lee's parents (played by Nick Nolte and Martha Henry). Cheung, who won the best actress award for this performance at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, is impressive as a recovering junkie struggling to regain control over her life, but as Filmbrain notes--in an insightful review of the film--Cheung is far too pretty to be fully convincing as an addict. But the film is well worth watching for Cheung's performance and for her interaction with Nolte. Clean manages to avoid some of the cliches of the drug recovery picture (see the recent New York Times review on this topic), but for whatever reason, I didn't find the film that memorable (although this may be attributed to my being somewhat distracted right now by The Big Move that continues to occupy much of my energy).

Posted by chuck at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Indie Web TV

I've been relatively distracted by The Big Move lately, so haven't really had the time or energy to blog. Plus, I'm moving quickly on 1-2 writing projects (including an article for a book collection), but just wanted to throw a quick pointer to some other folks who've been thinking about some of the new "homemade media," the DV films and series that I've recently found so intriguing. In particular, David at GreenCine has written a short blog essay addressing the comparison between Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation) and Joe Swanberg (LOL and Kissing on the Mouth, both of which I'd love to see). But David also discusses Swanberg's NSFW series for Nerve, Young American Bodies (also check out the MySpace page), now in its sixth episode (of course you should start with the beginning).

I don't have much to add to David's analysis right now, but I think that one point he makes is important (and it's something I want to address when I have more time to write on web television), and that is that with estimates of 50,000 uploads to YouTube and 50,000,000, "YAB is a prime example not so much of the future preferred alternative to television but of the present preferred alternative." This might be a relatively obvious point, as David implies, but still a point very much worth noting. Also check out Cynthia's analysis of Young American Bodies. Hoping to revisit this later, but with Silverdocs starting soon and all the other stuff, I might be pretty distracted for the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 1:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 10, 2006

Lazy Saturday Coffee Links

Quick Saturday morning coffee links: I just came across a an academic group blog focusing on film and media studies issues, Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope. Lots of good posts on teaching film studies and related topics.

Via GreenCine: Anne Thompson has a useful primer on the use of MySpace in "personalized participatory grassroots marketing." I think she's probably right that it's difficult to measure the effect of these grassroots campaigns on theatrical attendance, although similar (non-MySpace) grassroots campaigns for the upcoming Snakes on a Plane should be quite successful, but the jury's still out on that. The article culminates in an interesting discussion of how various websites have been used to promote some Hollywood and indie films, noting that the MySpace page for the film version of Strangers with Candy struggled to accumulate 500 friends while its YouTube trailer quickly scored over 200,000 views (related: a Wired News article on fan sites devoted to the Whedonverse, the alternate reality where Joss Whedon's films and TV shows, including Buffy and Firefly, take place..

Also worth watching: Kimberly Peirce, who directed the amazing Boys Don't Cry, has plans to make an Iraq War drama, Stop-Loss. with Ryan Phillippe slated to star.

Just came across the new-to-me online film journal, 24LiesaSecond, which is edited by James Moran, who wrote There's No Place Like Home Video, one of my favorite recent books, a really great read on the topic of home video (I liked the book so much that I taught it last fall in my junior seminar).

BTW, I caught the Quotidian Theater's production of Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune last night. Looks like its playing for a few more nights, so I'd recommend checking it out if you're in the DC area. The play is almost nothing like the Pacino-Pfieffer film adaptation, which terrence McNally adapted from his play, but the play itself, which takes place entirely in Frankie's bedroom probably wouldn't have worked as a film.

Posted by chuck at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2006

Cellphone Cinema

Via Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column: the You Tube video, "Bus Uncle," which features an oddly compelling argument between two passengers on a Hong Kong bus captured by a third passenger on his cell phone.

The basic plot: a middle-aged man has been talking too loudly on his cell phone and a younger pasenger behind him taps the older man on the shoulder to ask him to lower his voice. The older man then begins lecturing the younger passenger, repeatedly alluding to the "pressures" of daily life while gradually becoming more and more profane. And as Robinson points out the episode concludes perfectly with the older man getting another cell phone call and turning to answer it. Of course, Robinson points out that the scene is fascinating in part because it illustrates just how easily a scene from everyday life in Hong Kong can very quickly be transmitted across the globe with millions of potential viewers ready to watch. The version I watched has been viewed nearly a million times in less than a month. Not sure I have much to add, but it's an intriguing little video.

Posted by chuck at 3:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Consuming Videos

Andrew's pointer to David Leonhardt's New York Times article on Netflix reminds me that I've been planning to write a blog entry on my ambivalence about Netflix for a while now. In the article, Leonhardt argues that the Netflix model, which allows viewers to rate movies on a five-star scale and to choose from a far wider catalog (60,000 DVDs) than any video store could ever offer, has expanded the movie-watching horizons of home entertainment consumers (although I find his example of The Conversation as a potentially "lost" film a bit odd). Given that most chain video stores, especially those with a blue and yellow color scheme, focus almost exclusively on promoting new releases, that's probably true, and evidence is pretty strong that consumers are digging deep into Netflix's archives, with anywhere from 35,000-40,000 of its titles going out on a daily basis. Arguably, Netflix is making it possible for films that might otherwise be forgotten to find new and wider audiences than ever before. Even better, there are no late fees if you hold on to a video for a few extra days, and because the movies are delivered in the mail, you don't have to worry about rushed late-night trips to the video store.

But for whatever reason, I've found it incredibly difficult to adjust to using Netflix. When I decided to live without a car this year, a Netflix subscription seemed like a necessary investment in my professional career, but instead of expanding my viewing horizons, I've found that I've never watched so few movies at home than I have this year. Now, there are a number of complicated factors that might explain why this is happening. Because I'm in Washington, DC, I have access to a number of good art house and repertory theaters (two Landmarks, the AFI Silver, the Smithsonian theaters), which means that I've been going out for movies relatively often, although probably not significantly more often than I did in Atlanta or even Champaign-Urbana and Lafayette. I've had to adjust to teaching new courses, which required a little more background reading than in the past, which means less time for late-night movie watching (I find watching a movie before it's dark outside almost completely unbearable, and if it's still daylight when I leave the theater, I get what feels a bit like jet lag). And to be honest, I think the lack of late fees puts less pressure on me to see whatever film I've rented immediately. As a result, I sometimes hold on to movies for days or weeks without returning them with the good intentions of watching them eventually.

Still, I think the biiggest factor in making it difficult to adjust to Netflix is that I genuinely enjoy (and miss) skimming the shelves of the independent video stores I used to frequent in Atlanta, Champaign-Urbana, and Lafayette. I enjoy the tactile experience of looking at the DVD (or VHS) cover, holding the box in my hands, and seeing the other videos stacked nearby, and obviously that's something that Netflix or video-on-demand services can't offer. I also miss the sense of community that I typically found at many of the independent video stores I've frequented, the conversations with video store clerks who were bigger movie obsessives than I am. I realize that my nostalgia for these video stores may be coloring my perceptions of them, but those places are a big part of my cinematic eductaion, and I haven't yet figured out how to incorporate Netflix into that.

At the same time, I realize that moving to Fayetteville will change my movie watching habits yet again. Fayetteville does have an art house theater, the Cameo, downtown, and I'm sure I'll get my art house fix there and in Raleigh, but I imagine that the availability of services such as Netflix will mke it easier for me to feel connected to the independent and foreign film scenes that are typically associated with major cultural centers. I realize that my experiences thus far with Netflix are probably exceptional, but I've found it somewhat surprising that I've actually watched fewer movies than I did when I actually had to make the trip to the video store.

Leonhardt's Times article is well worth a read, though. In addition to addressing how Netflix changes our movie watching habits, he explains how the service has become such a massive enterprise, becoming "a logistical operation that has few peers outside of FedEx, U.P.S. or the post office itself." In fact, the head of operations is a former postmaster general.

Posted by chuck at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2006

Media That Matters Film Fest

While I'm on the topic of cool film events, I thought I'd mention the Media That Matters Film Festival, scheduled for June 29 in Washington, DC. I'm particularly intrigued by Something Other Than Other and The News is What We Make It, but in general it looks like an interesting sereis.

Posted by chuck at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

YouTube and Me

While self-indulgently skimming my Site Meter stats this morning, I came across an interesting blog post by a student in Matt Kirschenbaum's graduate seminar, "Inscribing Media," on YouTube, textual studies, and media theory. Drawing from Henry Jenkins' discussion of fan cultures, Helen discusses the ways in which YouTube users are developing new ways of responding to video content, such as the SNL "Lazy Sunday" skit that went viral and was then widely imitated and parodied by other YouTube users: "Like Flickr, YouTube allows users to comment and discuss videos, but, in addition to written comments, many users choose to comment by creating original video that is at once unique and also tied to a previous video to which it is directly responding." The entry is an excerpt from a longer seminar paper, and the paper itself sounds really interesting.

On a completely unrelated note, I got an email tip on a cool event here in DC at the Provisions Library, which is a couple of blocks north of Dupont Circle. It's a "Teach In on the Poetics, Politics and Practice of Films for Change." The event is scheduled for June 24, starts at 11 AM, and will last all day. The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Social Media at American University.

Posted by chuck at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 6, 2006

Straightheads Blog

I've been planning to mention Straightblog, a blog promoting Straightheads (IMDB), a dark thriller written and directed by Dan Reed and starring Gillian Anderson and Danny Dyer, but have been distracted by punk rock bears and puffy chairs. Plus, I've been trying to get some serious writing done before the move.

The blog is a fun read, describing life on the set (including the experience of working with stars such as Anderson and Dyer). And I can't pass up the opportunity to link to Reed's video of Rascal, the film's "prosthetic stag." Looks like an interetsing film.

Posted by chuck at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Learning Documentary Work

Via Jenny, a mention of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, which features courses on documentary production and other cool events and activities. Jenny reports that she's taking courses on audio production and fieldwork, both of which sound interesting (not to mention the opportunity to work in communities in Durham). If you've read this blog for more than a few days, you probably know that I've written quite a bit about documentary films, but like her, I'd like to check out the production side of things from time to time.

You may have noticed that I've added a new category for this entry, "Life in NC." The goal for this category is to track local opportunities in my soon-to-be home state. One of the claims about electronic media is that it destroys any sense of place, but I've often found the opposite to be true when it comes to blogging, which can be used very effectively to foster community on a very local level. I don't anticipate that my "Life in NC" entries will represent any kind of systematic focus, but hopefully the category will allow me to track opportunities to meet up with locals who share similar interests.

Posted by chuck at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Living in Hyattsville

Via Lance Mannion, a pointer to a brief anecdote from ReggieH about stopping for Chinese take-out here in Hyattsville. Prince George's County and Hyattsville often get a bad rap in the local and national media, but ReggieH depicts why Hyattsville is such an incredibly cool and interesting place.

Posted by chuck at 9:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 5, 2006

The Puffy Chair

The Puffy Chair (IMDB), written and directed by Mark and Jay Duplass, opens with the two leads, Josh and Emily, sitting at a kitchen table as Josh prepares for a road trip to collect the vintage La-Z-Boy of the film's title. Josh (played by co-writer Mark Duplass) and Emily (Kathryn Aselton) speak in the familiar tones that suggest they have been a couple for a long time, but a phone call that interrupts their late-night conversation suggests that some uncertainty within their relationship. Filmed naturalistically with handheld camera, the scene quietly establishes the tone of the film, both in terms of the tension in the couple's relationship and their ability to talk around that tension. The film's "homemade" style, suggested in large part by the naturalistic cinematography and dialogue, allows the Duplass brothers to achieve something quite effective: a funny and thoughtful indie film that earns the emotional impact of its final scene.

After the kitchen table argument, Josh semi-apologizes the following morning by waking up Emily by standing at her window and holding a juke box over his head while playing a song they like. Under normal circumstances, the nod to the classic scene in Say Anything might seem obvious, but it's just the sort of slacker-romantic move that someone like Josh might use to get himself back in the graces of his girl-friend. Josh invites Emily to join him on their road trip,a nd along the way, they pick up Josh's neo-hippie brother, Rhett (Rhett Wilkins), who eventually serves as a foil for Josh's interactions with Emily. And in true road-trip style, the plans to pick up the recliner don't go as planned, and Josh, Emily, and Rhett find themselves stuck in North Carolina (of all places) for several days.

As Kimberly Jones of The Austin Chronicle notes, the film works so well because the Duplass Brothers have an ear for dialogue, with Josh and Emily "mired in the universal ways of dysfunctional couples--the doublespeak and hidden agendas," making the couple at once highly specific but also very familiar. There are suggestions, for example, that Emily may have pressured Josh to quit his rock band so that he could spend more time with her. The tension in their relationship culminates in a remarkable scene in which Rhett meets Amber (Julie Fisher) in an art house theater in North Carolina. They disappear, and eventually when Josh and Emily find them, Rhett declares that he wants to marry Amber, whom he met just hours earlier. Josh "marries" them in a series of improvised, mock-romantic vows that Rhett and his new "bride" recite whle Emily watches, comparing her relationship with Josh to Rhett's eagerly romantic gesture (as Mick LaSalle notes, Aselton is very good in this scene). Still, even while the film is remarkably perceptive about these dysfunctional relationships, it is also a remarkably funny film. The soundtrack is also impressive featuring songs by indie faves Matt Pond PA, Of Montreal, and Death Cab for Cutie. I really liked The Puffy Chair and hope the film finds the wider audience that it deserves.

Posted by chuck at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Southland and Other Tales

I've been intrigued by the Cannes reviews of Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's latest film, Southland Tales. While the reviews of Kelly's 160-minute Cannes cut have been mostly negative, Kelly's comments about the film make it sound compelling. And given that Donnie Darko didn't find an audience until it was released on DVD, I'm beginning to wonder if Kelly's approach to movie making isn't better suited for the DVD medium. Of course the cinematography for Darko is impressive, and seeing the film on a smaller screen automatically entails some form of loss, but as Nick points out in his blog essay on "incompleteness," Kelly often seems to be re-directing his films during his director's commentary tracks.

At any rate, Matt Dentler's blog entry describes two scenes that may contribute little to the film's narrative but work well as "set pieces," self-contained scenes that seem to be doing something. The first features "a moody dance sequence--featuring The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, and others-- choreographed to" Moby's "Memory Gospel." The latter features "an inexplicably bloody Justin Timberlake lip-synching a Killers tune while surrounded by a chorus line of dancers." I haven't seen the film, but these moments sound pretty amazing. Meanwhile, Anne Thompson reports on Kelly's creative casting decisions and, in describing Kelly's post-Cannes press conference, speculates that Kelly is in need of a good editor, compaing his films to the often-rambling but intellectually-stimulating work of filmmakers such as Wim Wenders (Until the End of the World, by the way, is a personal fave) and Gus Van Sant. The comparison to Robert Aldrich's 1955 film noir, Kiss Me Deadly is also enticing.

Also worth noting: Mark Peranson's Village Voice article, which anticipates that Southland Tales is destined to become Kelly's "next cult film."

Update: Just testing something by republishing this entry. Talk amongst yourselves.

Posted by chuck at 2:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sex Pistols Action Figures

Via McChris, a pointer to two sets of Sex Pistols action figures by Japanese toy company, Kubrick Toys. One set features the best-known members of the band, and the second applies their aesthetic to a group of brightly-colored bears.

Update: Since Andrew and McChris have suggested bands they'd like to see immortalized as action figures, I think I'll turn this entry into a question: which bands do you think this toy company should translate into action figures next, especially if those figures are brightly-colored bears? I'm still thinking about this one, but I'll put my answer in the comments.

Posted by chuck at 11:37 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 3, 2006

Being Al Gore

By the way, Green Cine has a link to Spike Jonze's campaign video made for Gore's 2000 presidental campaign, which wasn't shown during the election but really should have been. It's really a fascinating document, about thirteen minutes long, filmed entirely on digital video with Jonze essentially spending the day with Gore and his family as the candidate gears up for the campaign trail. It features Gore's daughters teasing their dad about his movie-watching habits (he likes Jonze's Being John Malkovich, among other films and pauses films whenever anyone leaves the room) and Gore speaking lovingly about his family while showing Jonze and the viewer family photographs, a painted self-portrait by his wife Tipper, and other family heirlooms.

These family scenes depict Gore as anything but stiff, as Tipper and Al joke about the media depiction of him. The "home movie" format depicts Gore as a relaxed family man, with Gore's politics evolving organically out of his daily life. In one scene, he describes a friend whose struggles with grammar and spelling suggested to Gore that government should be about helping the "little guy." It's an amazing piece of footage and yet another reminder how important it could have been to have seen this version of Gore during the 2000 election.

Posted by chuck at 3:15 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

An Inconvenient Truth

For whatever reason, I've found it incredibly difficult to write a review of Davis Guggenheim's documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB), in part because I find myself wanting to say too much about it. As almost everybody who watches the news knows by now, the documentary features for VP and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore giving a "slide show" presentation on global warming, arguing not only that global warming is taking place and that it will have devastating consequences if we don't take immediate action, but Gore also makes clear that humans are primarily responsible for global warming and that we can take action to reverse current ternds. The film has been widely debated, and while I have few illusions that my review will do anything other than add to the noise already out there, I would encourage anyone who cares about this planet to see this film. But while An Inconvenient Truth offers a lucid, eloquent explanation for the potentially devastating effects of global warming, it's also a surpisngly human film, in large part due to the presence of Gore, and an unexpectdly hopeful film, with Gore outlining the ways in which we can combat global warming. The film also subtly argues that corporate greed is priamrily to blame for perpetuating the myth that global warming isn't happening (or that it can be attributed to "natural cycles" or whatever), but to Gore's credit--and the film's credit--An Inconvenient Truth avoids coming across as overtly partisan or political.

In writing this review, I am conscious of the fact that I will likely come across as an "advocate" of sorts, but for once, I find myself agreeing with Roger Ebert, who argues that "to be 'impartial' and 'balanced' on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's." The evidence that Gore offers has become the consensus position of the scientific community, with Gore pointing at one point that in academic journals dedicated to science, not one article disputes global warming while 57 percent of all newspaper and magazine articles dispute it. At the same time, the film outlines the ways in which Bush's current "environmental policy" is geared primarily towards benefitting oil and energy companies. As David Remnick points out, both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush have worked to discredit Gore. The older Bush referred to Gore as "ozone man" and implied that Gore cared more for owls than he did humans, employing the incredibly disingenuous argument that protecting the environment would destroy the economy. The younger Bush "has scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming (a pact that Gore helped broker as Vice-President); he has neutered the Environmental Protection Agency; he has failed to act decisively on America’s fuel-efficiency standards even as the European Union, Japan, and China have tightened theirs." In addition, the film reminds us that Philip A. Cooney, Bush's former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, left the chief oil industry lobby, American Petroleum Institute, to take the White House job. When Cooney left that job, he went to work for Exxon-Mobile.

While the film is no doubt critical of the Bush enviromnetal policy, it is far more devastating and utterly convincing in its depiction of the effects of global warming, which are powerfully illustrated by Gore's power point presentation, which he estimates he has now given over a thousand times to pretty much anyone who's interested. Much of this information has appeared in advertisements and trailers for the film: ten of the hottest years in recorded history have taken place in the last fourteen years. Hurricanes have grown more frequent and more powerful than ever before, while typhoons have also increased in frequency. The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, which will cause coastlines to dramatically recede, eventually putting Calcutta, Shanghai, Manhattan, and huge portions of Florida under water. With Katrina's devastating effects on the Gulf Coast fresh in our memories, Gore notes that we've seen the effects of 200,000 refugees and to then imagine the effects of a hundred million. Gore's numbers are powerfully supplemented by footage of melting glaciers, before-and-after photographs of Mount Kilimanjaro and Patagonia, and animations that depict the radically changed coastlines that are expected if global warming continues unabated.

While this all sounds potentially wonky, I can assure you that it is not. As MaryAnn Johanson notes, Gore's presentation of this material is utterly compelling, his rapport with his audiences undeniable. And the film's use of charts and graphs dramatize the effects of global warming in ways that surprised me. And while I am strongly convinced that Gore's argument is correct, I found it meaningful to see these arguments delivered in such a vivid, lucid manner. Reviewers including Peter Travers of Rolling Stone have aligned the film generically with "edge of your seat" thrillers (as seen in the film's trailer), and that's a rather apt comparison for the most part, though I think it might underplay the degree to which Gore generosity, reflectiveness, and his sense of humor carry his presentation. While Gore was often faulted during the election for appearing stiff, dispassionate, or dry, his passion for the topic of global warming is absolutely clear, and he also displays a sense of humor that was often overlooked during the election. These moments include Gore's self-depricating introduction of himself as the man who "used to be the next president of the United States," but as Johanson notes, his humor is also pedagogical in places, as he uses the anecdote of the frog who will comfortably rest in water that gradually warms until he "...is rescued." And with that analogy, Gore introduces ways that people can begin to combat global warming.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I've found myself struggling to write about An Inconvenient Truth. And one reason I've struggled is that I found it difficult not to think about what might have been had Gore become president rather than Bush, how much different the last six years could have been. It's also difficult to reconcile the image of Gore from the often hostile coverage he received in the 2000 election and the image of him in this film as a releaxed and humorous but passionate individual fighting for an issue that isn't just political but moral. While the film rarely comments directly on the topic of the election, it was never far from my mind, and implicitly at least, An Inconvenient Truth seems to underscore the ways in which eletions should be less about image and polish and more focused on policy and substance. Even as I say that, I realize I'm creating a false binary, but when you see this film and see the man who ostensibly lost the 2000 election, you see what we as a nation really lost.

Posted by chuck at 11:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 2, 2006

The Middle Children of History

I knew that I shouldn't have gone over to Andy's blog when I needed to do some work, but the Fight Club conversation is irresistible. I've written about Fight Club in the past (still waiting for that article to appear in print), so I'll try to keep this brief.

If my chronology is correct, Amanda from Pandagon started this thread by commenting in passing that Fight Club's critique of consumer culture still relied deeply upon an identification between cosumer culture and feminization: thus Tyler and Jack's struggle against conformity is essentially a struggle against emasculation. Matt then argues that Fight Club is essentially a radically anti-individualist work, pointing to Tyler's platitudes that "self-improvement is masturbation" (after looking at an impossibly chiseled male model in Calvin Klein ad) and during the Project Mayhem training sequences, "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." Finally, Peter disputes Matt's interpretation, arguing that Fight Club is actually radically individualsitic, with its "brutal satire of progressive groupthink" and its "call to take responsibility and not blame outside influences."

I'm tempted to argue that all three are correct, if only because Fight Club's politics are in fact remarkably incoherent, which is generally the case with most popular culture texts, but as my entry on Fight Club and masculinity points out, the film very clearly associates cosumer culture with femininity ("the Ikea nesting impulse," Jack's particpation in a testicular cancer group, the anti-Martha Stewart remarks) and implies that the former is something to be rejected. Also worth noting, Tyler sells expensive soap to women made out of human fat removed presumably from owmen during liposuction surgery. I think it's also possible to read Tyler's "self-improvement" comment in response to the Calvin Klein model in terms of male panic. Of course this is complicated somewhat by the distancing imposed by Jack's narration, and we're never quite sure how Jack perceives Tyler's actions.

This distancing is why I think the film leaves open the possibility for both radically individualistic and anti-individualistic readings. Tyler and Jack's rejection of consumer culture may very well be done in order for Jack to regain his "true" identity (note the fake names he gives at support groups, his comment about airport time: "If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"). Thus, one reading of the film seems to point towards Jack's move towards embracing his identity and, in a sens, taking responsibility for his actions. However, Tyler's anti-individualistic comments also have affective appeal. Tyler Durden, especially as he is embodied by Brad Pitt, is nothing if not seductive. His dialogue, including the lines mentioned by Matt, are immensely quotable.

I think this ambivalence also works when it comes to the representtaion of the support groups. Of course they are the object of satire, but in the novel, especially, the support groups actually provide a va;uable form of community ffor Jack and Marla, something that is downplayed in the film. And many of the film's most exciting scenes depict actions not unlike the anti-WTO (note: not anti-globalization) protests in Seattle, which took place within weeks of the film's release. I didn't intend to write such a long entry, but it's interesting to see that the film still provokes such vastly different interpretations.

Posted by chuck at 1:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Politics of Pop Music

While Al Gore's documentary has been getting major buzz, I've also been fascinated by this summer's other high-profile blend of politics and popular culture, the realease of the new Dixie Chicks album, with its unapologetic single, "Not Ready to Make Nice." As Atrios and others have noted, their latest album debuted on top of the Billboard country charts, selling over half a million copies despite getting very little airplay on most country radio stations. Their appearances on Larry King's show and 60 Minutes have given them some publicity and an opportunity to discuss their experiences since 2003.

The Dixie Chicks, of course, made major headlines in 2003 in the days immediately before the US launched a pre-emptive war in Iraq when Natalie Maines criticized President Bush during a concert in London, leading many country music stations to participate in a boycott of the band's music. Maines and her bandmates faced death threats but refused to back down from their criticism of the president. Of course the new album has been quite successful, and there have been a number of interesting editorials on the topic, including this Eugene Robinson editorial in The Washington Post that explains the band's popularity in part through the unpopularity of Bush's war.

But a far more interesting narrative is offered in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed by John Sinton, an FM radio pioneer and the creator and co-founder of the Air America radio network. Sinton argues that the Dixie Chicks have benefitted from satellite radio, which he reads as supplanting the increasingly homogenous playlists available on FM radio (what he calls "terrestrial radio" or "earthbound stations"). For me, the jury is still out on satellite radio, but in explaining the potential appeal of satellite radio, Sinton offers a brief history of how the FM revolution in the late 1960s and '70s became sidetracked into the homogenous radio formats we have today. It could be a nice companion to Susan Douglas's account of that history in Listening In, which covers some similar ground.

Update: I was still waking up when I wrote this entry (10 AM is surprisingly early in the summer), so it doesn't quite do what I want it to do. I think, more than anything, I was trying to comment on Sinton's discussion of satellite radio, which I find interesting but problematic. I think satellite radio can open up playlists, but Sinton's comments don't take into account the fact that the Dixie Chicks' new album has been promoted havily on TV and on the Internet (thanks to a number of liberal bloggers such as Atrios and the folks at Crooks and LIars). And while I agree with many of Sinton's criticisms of commercial FM radio, to characterize all of FM as a musical wasteland isn't quite fair, especially given the number of very good college and community radio stations in many cities. I have been intrigued by media representations of the Dixie Chicks and probably have a lot more to say about tht topic, but I really need to get some work done this afternoon.

Posted by chuck at 10:11 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Global Warning

Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB), Finally hits Washington, DC, today, and the Washington Post offers an interview with Gore and Guggenheim in addition to a positive review from Desson Thomson. Both the interview and the review are interesting reading, in part because they so clearly negotiate the narrative of Gore the Politician (stiff, boring, you know the drill) with Gore the Global Warming Guru (compelling, humorous).

Eric Alterman, perhaps better than anyone, has documented how unfairly Gore was treated during his run for president in 2000, citing instances in which the press openly jeered Gore during his primary run against Bill Bradley. Alterman also quotes Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank who observes that "Gore is sanctimonious, and that's sort of the worst thing you can be in the eyes of the press. And he has been disliked all along, and it was because he gives a sense that he's better than us--he's better than everybody, for that matter, but the sense that he's better than us as reporters."

This narrative presists in semi-hostile "reviews," such as Gregg Easterbrook's Slate article, in which Easterbrook can't resist reviving all the tired jokes from the 2000 election (thankfully Media Matters takes Easterbrook to task). Essentially, Easterbrook implies that the film's cinematography isn't exciting enough (read: Gore is dull) and that Gore, in a documentary about global warming, comes off as too informative (read: Gore is sanctimonious). Easterbrook also tries to suggest that Gore overstates the effects of global warming (read: Gore the liar/exaggerator), when as MM points out, it's Easterbrook who has a history of downplaying the effects of global warming.

Of course it's impossible to separate Gore's film his reputation as a politician, but I'm intrigued by these competing narratives and how they're shaping the discussion of the film and the topic of global warming. I'm seeing the film tonight, so I'll have a review up asap.

Posted by chuck at 9:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 1, 2006

Man on the Moon

REM and Bruce Springsteen performing "Man on the Moon" live in Washington, DC, in 2004. YouTube is the coolest invention, ever. Case closed. Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the link.

Posted by chuck at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack