Posts Tagged Under ‘Culture’
Dudes, Why So Much Debt?
The Wife and I had a good discussion today sparked by Sunday’s first piece in the New York Times series on debt in America. (And thanks to J Frog for sending me that way today.)
I did learn a nice history of the lending industry from the article, in particular the industry’s shift in focus from demanding repayment to collecting fee-based income off of ever-rolling debt. While the credit-card industry, and certainly the mortgage industry of the past few years, often embodies the term “predatory capitalism”, it does seem that the article shifted too much of the onus for America’s debt problem away from the public. This is similar to media outlets who generally avoid putting any blame on the voting public for America’s political messes, for obvious business reasons. (What audience wants to be told that it’s the proverbial box of dull tacks? I prefer my mental tack sharp, thanks.)
Maybe I’m too harsh, though, because the writers and editors might have been making a point on the sly about the general public by choosing the subject that they did. Ms. McLeod — no relation to Connor, who has a far better repayment cycle with which to work — really makes one unfortunate (read: not well-thought-out) decision after another. From spending her already debt-addled medical recovery cruising QVC, to adding her 20-year-old son onto her second home-refinancing and ruining his credit too, I really don’t understand what made her do what she did.
So that raises the question: What really has made debt-laden ‘Mercans turn away from the admirable saving habits of back in the not-that-far-off day? Why is “I gotta have it” such a seemingly more powerful motivator across society now than it was then? This was the topic of conversation between The Wife and me. We came to one important conclusion that’s both seemingly unrelated but not that surprising: television.
The modern debt cycle really started to germinate at about the time the TV-raised Boomer generation was earning enough money to buy homes, sign up for credit cards and pop out Millennials like your gracious host. Boomers had grown up with TV, which based on its sheer volume of audio and visual stimulation was inevitably packed full of product pitches and brand names. Sure, their parents — the Greatests — were watching TV too, but the Depression experience burned the saving ethic into their parents’ heads for life. Greatests learned back then to do things like wearing the same six velour jumpsuits for 30 years. (Which is smart — over time this actually becomes cool, what with the roundabout cycle of retro hipness.)
Boomers weren’t about to wear velour jumpsuits; velour is too hot in summer, and after a childhood of American prosperity and the enveloping nature of TV advertising, they had to get that fine narrow-lapel suit to go with the Commodore 64 for the kids. Advertisers, too, were well-aware of just how good a job TV had done to implant the “buy stuff” message into America’s collective mind. Over time they shifted from making their products attractive to making access to their products a moral right — “You deserve a break today” and “Live richly”, not just “Our McNuggets taste totally rad” and “Hey, peep out this low interest rate.” This newly created sense of entitlement grew strong until too many people didn’t bother to use their better instincts, and the things they felt they needed encompassed even luxury goods that were previously — and still probably should be — considered impractical on the average income. Cue up many of my generational peeps growing up in this environment, who should nonetheless know better than to spend that percentage allotted for savings on Manhattan rent and cosmopolitans, and the cycle continues. (Also, thank you, Mom and Dad, for teaching me how to save cash and how to avoid becoming a spoiled jagoff.)
In conclusion, if we didn’t have TV, we might not have a subprime mortgage crisis and government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The end.
Tim Russert
I was sad to hear that Tim Russert died today at 58. He represented one of the last of the genial TV-news hosts in a field of openly biased shouters, and for that he was appreciated. There are times he should have been a lot more confrontational — the Iraq war buildup never did have a highly prominent critic in the media, and neither did much of anything involving the government in the years between 2001 and 2005 or so — but I did appreciate Russert’s sense of reasoned discourse and his strong Rust Belt roots. (It’s too bad that the Bills never did get that championship.) Sorry to the family for their loss.
John McLaughlin! OMG WTF
What on Earth is this about? (Watch to the end)
Who even says “Negro” anymore? What does Clarence Page make of this? Are “Orientals” the next Issue One? So many questions as you make me look bad for loving your show here, J McL.
Bye bye!
MSNBC: Just Filling the Niche, So Relax
Today I was reading this WP article about MSNBC’s left-leaning slant and found myself wondering why dudes were fussing.
MSNBC has exactly two prominent liberal commentators, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. We can pare that down to one because Matthews is usually unwatchable and isn’t really that liberal anyway. (He did vote for Bush in 2000.) So you have a network’s reputation being made off of one smart-assed commentator–full disclosure, I do like Olbermann most of the time–who makes most of his publicity off of YouTube replays. Nor do I see how David Gregory, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell count as partisan in any way when compared with the likes of Brit Hume and Shephard Smith.
But, let’s assume MSNBC is slanting to the left. McCain and Clinton spokespeople have to rail against any loud voice that ostensibly opposes them, but I wish those kind of complaints–and the ones against Fox News–were recognized more often for what they are: empty gestures ignoring the underlying reality that these networks exist because there’s a market for the slant they’re selling. Protest the viewing public that keeps your favorite target network going, and then you’re on the right track.
The media is a special business because of the effect it has on society, but it is still a business where resources flow to any open opportunity. In NBC / GE’s case, that was for a mildly liberal network that’s happy to scrap with conservative rivals. There’s thus little point in being mad at them for slanting. I think it’s digusting and hilarious that KFC has found a market for the Famous Bowl, but getting mad at KFC for following the dollars is the wrong way to go. They aren’t a 1950s cigarette company keeping a lid on the fact that fatty food is bad for you–we as a nation are clearly aware of it, but plenty of us still clamor for gravy with cheese.
TV is no different. It’s a market, and getting your news from TV is a bad decision in the first place. (Nearly every time “the media” catches flak for being too dumb, it’s really the televised media, but that’s for another post.) So get pissed all you want at MSNBC, McCain and Clinton staffers, but it’s not going to stop the gravy-and-cheese train.
“The Happening”: Eh.
For some reason tonight, I ended up reading the entire leaked screenplay to The Happening, the new summer release from Hollywood’s greatest plot-twist-gimmick guy, M. Night Shyamalan. (And starring former 1835 Hinman resident Zooey Deschanel!)
My verdict: it seems worth skipping. There isn’t really any big plot twist, because the nature of the beast becomes evident pretty early on. Maybe it would be cooler if it’s shot well, but that’s a stretch. Once the bad guy is revealed, the screenplay is little more than horror-movie imagery and a pretty ridiculous resolution.
So take it from your blogging friend who’s prejudging the entire film based on an unverifiable script: it’s probably not a great movie.
(And as an intellectual-property business guy, I recognize that I’m undermining my own business model by reading a leaked script. But is it really so different than a critic’s sneak preview? Rationalizations are great fun.)
300: The Incredibly Late-to-the-Party Review
Writing that last post about political messages in movies reminded me to note the really odd political points that 300 made last year. Before someone chimes in with, “But you’re supposed to abandon that and enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations,” I will note that I acknowledge the movie as a groundbreaking action / cinematography movie, and I truly did enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations and giant killer rhinos. Still, I think it’s notable that the movie conveys the following viewpoints:
- Those who aren’t white, physically attractive and within sexual norms are the enemy and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
- Those with physical disabilities must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as they grow up to become traitors.
- Nine-foot-tall gay men with robotically deep voices are nothing but trouble. They are dangerous and tend to lead armies of non-whites (see above). Terminate with extreme prejudice, assuming you aren’t first terminated by arrows.
- City-states that appreciate culture and science, even if they still terminate fools with extreme prejudice, are pedophiles. And that’s true even when their navy does more to win the war.
- “This! Is! Spahta!”
Still, those CGI battle scenes were pretty sweet. Four phats for those. The moral of the movie only gets half a phat, which I will award for its doctrine of standing up as a nation.
CGI battles: 
Moral message: 
There Will Be Blood: The Late-to-the-Party Review
This Saturday my amigo Andre and I decided to see Be Kind Rewind at the Landmark E Street Theater in fabulous Washington, D.C. We got there and they were down to one ticket. Thus ends my tale.
In a quick backup idea, we opted for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century capitalist epic loosely based on muckraker icon Upton Sinclair’s Oil! In a word: hmm.
My Slate D.C. coworker Tim Noah hit the nail on the head when he noted that the film divides into two halves: a first half that sets up the nerve-jangling expectation that this film will have some sort of awesome, morally complex message about business and religion in America, and a “WTF” second half that abandons that conceit and decides to concentrate on making Daniel Plainview into an unredeemable psycho. Andre and I both left the final scene — it’s really thrown in there out of left field — wondering what the hell just happened, and I think this was a common reaction among the other theatergoers present.
There was so much about this movie that was great: the Oscar committee should cancel the Best Actor award each year that Daniel Day-Lewis does a movie and just hand him the statue. (He has done a great deal to associate mustaches with bad-assedness in his past two roles.) The musical score annoyed the hell out of me with its loudness and horror-movie tone, but after I left I thought back on it and realized that the music really worked. PTA also did a phat job of making this a period piece, and the sweeping shots of the empty California landscape — though the movie was actually filmed in Texas — really established the sense of isolation and hardscrabble individualism reflected in Plainview’s life. Lots of reviewers have praised the dialogue-free first 20 minutes, and that’s warranted because it was amazing.
The supporting cast was decent — guy who played Plainview’s brother, good; kid who played H.W. Plainview, quite good; vow-of-silence dude from Little Miss Sunshine who played the crazy preacher, not convincing at all in conveying religious fervor. But I just can’t get past the letdown that was the movie’s lack of message. Boogie Nights and Magnolia both had a lot to say about the importance of being genuinely connected to others, and while TWBB touched on that a little bit, it just didn’t deliver enough.
Sorry, PTA: I love your stuff, but not as much this time. Three phats out of five:
Eschatological
The History Channel tonight aired their Life After People show, which I did not catch thanks to the Penguins-Capitals game. (It was good, then came the part where the Pens lost.) H to the C hyped it big time, including buying advertising on Slate, and I was intrigued despite this prime example of my shifting-focus theory of the History Channel. I’ll have to Tivo that mug when it rolls around again.
I don’t think this show would have the same audience if it weren’t for I Am Legend coming out last month, what with both being all deer-in-Times-Square and whatnot. Those two are in turn a hell of a lot like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. Add in the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — now shooting near Pittsburgh, though that isn’t quite so flattering when they’re evoking a post-apocalyptic landscape — and we have an end-of-it-all trend. Sounds like a certain nation is rocking some sort of end-of-empire vibe.
I can’t predict the possibility that any of this stuff will come true, but then if I could, waiting around for it wouldn’t be fun either. I certainly hope we don’t end up with The Road, because that book single-handedly messed up my Road Warrior-based distant concept of civilizational collapse — featuring crazy football-padded dudes fighting in the desert — and turned it into existential nightmare No. 1. (It was really not a fun book. Tremendously well-written, but relentlessly disturbing.)
So I’d like to make two points about this whole cultural trend:
1. Everybody dying, while probably good for the Earth, would not be cool at all.
2. If we’re watching decline-and-fall shows here in the “declining” U.S. — as much as a nation of 300 million entrepreneurially oriented people can decline without suffering some society-immolating event — do you suppose rising powers India and China are rocking Hindi / Mandarin shows about Romulus and Remus getting Rome off the ground?
Quick Hits
Yo.
- Romney winning Michigan is a little surprising, but then I say that as someone who picked him to win the state a few weeks back, only to later doubt my own pick. The reports said a lot of his votes came from the affluent Michigan suburbs, which would make sense because I really don’t see him ever connecting with middle-middle-, lower-middle- and impoverished-class voters. The dude is just way too inauthentic and screams “privileged guy” too loudly. I think the rest of the Michigan GOP must have been split evenly between McCain and Huckabee and allowed Romney to hook it up.
- Opinion: Chuck Brown and Fugazi are the best musical acts to come from D.C. Your thoughts? Not that it matters, being that I’m right. I’ll make a possible exception for Minor Threat, but that was Ian MacKaye too, so in that case you’re just debating MacKaye-led bands.
- The water heater died yesterday in our apartment building, so I had to heat up a pot of water and bathe with that, a washcloth and a bar of soap. I felt and smelled just as clean as I would have been following a regular shower, and the whole thing was strangely invigorating, which is probably because I was freezing my ass off as the water cooled between rinses. Still, if we someday have to go back to nineteenth-century life, I think I could handle it in the bathing department. Although if I did have to go back to the 1800s, I’d miss cryingwhileeating.com.
- Jeremiah pointed to this a while back, but talking about D.C. made me remember that it won for coolest city flag. I happen to think Phoenix and Wichita should be ranked higher and Denver lower, and would like to ask what exactly Provo was thinking.
Out.
Guitar Hero III
I don’t know how many of you have played the newest PS2 installment of Guitar Hero, but it has this horrible feature called Guitar Battle where you play against a boss and win by sabotaging the other dude’s guitar. (editor’s note: ?) Take the concept of fun, turn it upside down, and that’s pretty much how this part of the game works.
Guitar Hero III does have a phat song selection, including the baddest-ass leftist protest song ever, “Bulls on Parade”. But as for the battle, I call it the worst offense toward an awesome video game franchise since Contra: Legacy of War.
Diamond Dave
If you had to set Pittsburgh to music, I always imagine the soundtrack to be early-era Van Halen. (Think Van Halen and 1984.) Particularly “Cradle Will Rock” and “Runnin’ With the Devil”.
This is almost solely attributable to WDVE.
Wiz Khalifa
This guy came out last year, but I had to give blog props to Pittsburgh’s newest and best rapper:
412!
Slow Death of the History Channel
I’m sitting here watching episode No. 2 in a row of “Human Weapon”, the History Channel’s show where two guys go around the globe and do martial arts training native to various locations. I’d say they do maybe five minutes of actual history in these shows (all of which seems to center around the Pacific Theater of World War II, but I guess the Japanese really did cause a lot of martial upheaval in East Asia.) Meanwhile we’ve just been to a commercial break, where the three promos were for another episode of “Human Weapon” (although set in France - what are they going to do without all that Eastern mysticism filler material used by all martial-arts media in America?), an episode of “The Universe” detailing gaseous nebulas, and an episode of “Ice Truckers”, which is a show where guys drive trucks across ice. Great history lessons, all.
What happened here? The History Channel is going through the same thing that happened to the Discovery Channel, where they get really popular by exploiting a niche, find that they’ve filled the niche, spin off new networks into even smaller niches (think The Military History Channel or Discovery Times), cast a wider net with the flagship channel to keep growing the audience, then sit back and notice that the parent channel has become nothing like its original self.
It’s a process towards the same middle, in which the channel’s programming becomes a matter of throwing lots of stuff on the air and hoping some of it sticks, topical niche be damned. That’s probably good from a business standpoint, because it means your channel can compete with lots of other channels (including the old-school networks) for the same larger audience. But for someone like me who just wants to tune in now and then for some black and white D-Day footage with fact-laden narration—the name is “The History Channel”, after all—well hey, not as cool.
P.S. - They do lots of computer animations on this show of particular fighting moves, and each time they overlay the move with lots of chalk-drawn equations. What’s the percentage of the audience that actually knows whether those equations are accurate? If you transported a TV audience from the 1950s, would they still fall for the “Wow math, this is smart stuff!” trick? It could be appropriate physics, or the show could be writing out a simple derivative; I know I can’t tell.
The lesson is this: if you want to be an intellectual authority on TV, either a. have your info narrated by an upper-class British guy or b. show lots of formulas. Easy!
The Humans Are Dead
I planned to cancel my HBO subscription this summer, but then I caught Flight of the Conchords and now I’m stuck to the show like a junkie with monkey disease. So I’m going with a copout post of three of the best:
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