Astro Scape

Astro Scape
Originally uploaded by casbah42.

Just testing to see if all this internet is working.

Mass Culture and Unconditional Love

With cultural products being engineered to appeal to the widest audience, audiences have been trained that they should not ask anything of their purchases. Commodities are slaves to their owners. With little to no work invested directly towards a product, consumers learn to be pleased with little or no work from themselves.

Unfortunately, this behavior has influenced the way we love, or at least attempt to. The idea of unconditional love is like a virus in America: we are taught that one day our soul mate will come and fit to us like a puzzle piece. Like the products we buy, no work is necessary and complete pleasure is obtained. We only need to keep searching for that one, effortless love that will never come. Love requires work, compromise, and consideration. It is a two-way street. Mass consumption, detatchment from commodity and fairytales encourage us to approach love as we approach a mall.

Naomi Klein Interview Part II: Populism and Blogging

"You mentioned this retelling of narratives, and this folklore storytelling that has been emerging in branding and politics for a long time now. These are all broadcast methods, and they all come through in broadcast mediums.

"Voters participate in these narrative the Republicans weave, but they situate themselves under them, as supporters, not main, characters. But now as blogging, photo-sharing sites, and cheap production methods become available to voters, everyday people now help write and report these narratives. Where do you see this increase in communication channels taking American politics?"

NK:

...In some ways it’s more relevant in the Democratic Party... Groups like Move-On who marshaled uses of house-parties and “it’s your party,” small donations and a real sense of ownership. But it was a real bait and switch.

There was a feeling through the Dean campaign, up through the primaries, that we were building this campaign together. And then it was like, “Wait a minute...It’s going to be top-down. We’re deciding, Kerry’s our man.”... Even though what’s driving all this passion was the war in Iraq. This was especially true of Move-On; it’s what built the organization. And then suddenly: they’re foot soldiers for a candidate that’s talking about bringing in 40,000 more troops; a pro-war candidate. So that’s where I’m saying it was a bit of a bait and a switch.

But, right now I’m just sort of mad at blogs in general... This whole debate about the CNN executive, Eason Jordan, being forced to resign... I keep reading about this and the whole discussion is about the power of blogs. What actually happened was that this guy told the truth. He told the truth about something that is happening in Iraq, which is that journalists are getting killed at point-blank range; they are not collateral damage. They’re being bombed, Al-Jazeera is being targeted and bombed. The family of a Spanish journalist who was in the Palestine hotel on the same day it was bombed are suing the U.S. Military for war crimes because they say there was no way they didn’t know there were journalists in the hotel. When I was in Iraq there were three reporters who were shot at a checkpoint. That’s not collateral damage. It might not be planned murder, but it’s something different. [Eason Jordan] was the first person at that level who admitted what was going on. And instead of talking about what he actually said, everybody is talking about whether blogs are changing politics. Which I find very odd.

Naomi Klein Interview Part I: John Wayne, Branding, and the Right

Below is an interview I conducted with Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo" and "Fences and Windows," on February 21st...

"In a recent interview, you claimed that marketing and branding techniques really helped the Republicans win last November. Democrats, you argued, could only counter these tactics with true populism. Do you think the Democrats could successfully combine populism and branding?"

NK:

What I said in the interview that you’re referring to is that I think what the Republicans have done really successfully under Carl Rove is absorbed the lessons of lifestyle branding that became trendy in the 90’s, and is what I wrote about in No Logo. Instead of advertising a product and the attributes of that product, you sell a lifestyle. And essentially what you’re selling is the consumer back to themselves; you’re selling an aspiration identity, the way people want to see themselves.

I was at the Republican Convention... and I was really struck by how all the speakers were not talking about what they were promising to do if elected. They were talking about what it meant to be a Republican. They were defining the audience to themselves. And the audience was cheering for themselves.

And I think that that was really the triumph of this whole campaign, or that this whole campaign was the culmination of this very long strategy of co-branding. This is what cutting-edge branding does: you take sort of the different attributes that your consumers identify with, in this case it would be NASCAR driving, church-going, country music listening, proud-to-be-a-redneck...This is the package of identities. And you add to that Republican; this is who we are, and we believe in freedom and so-on. And then people identify. It becomes so deep a part of their identity that if you ask Republicans why they voted, policy is very low down the list. They voted Republican because they are “Republicans.” And when you have successfully merged with your “consumers” in that way, when you attack the policies, the Republicans feel personally attacked. If Democrats are screaming about how they’ve bungled Iraq, or the deficit, the way that registers to somebody who has so completely melded with the Republican party as part of their identity is: “Well, they’re just attacking us again.”

The other thing is just the way in which George Bush is playing John Wayne, 24 hours a day. Which is another way in which they have absorbed lifestyle branding in the way they do politics; which you can compare to John Kerry doing thirty-second spots where he dresses up as a hunter or something like that. That’s the old way of doing marketing. You just do the marketing during the commercial, and then you go back to your real self. George Bush never goes back to his real self. He is John Wayne 24 hours a day.

I think what the Democrats tried to do is beat the Republicans at this game, which they can never really win at. In part because there is no more powerful icon than John Wayne. And [the Republicans] seem to really have the John Wayne market cornered. I mean, he remains by all polling the most powerful icon anyone’s ever produced...

But I do think that some of the lessons of branding: having a good story, inhabiting your character, putting on a show
I don’t think any of that is dirty...if there’s something behind it that is not in indirect conflict with it. Where Democrats were extremely weak was that they tried to do this sort of superficial advertising to counter this very deep lifestyle branding. They tried to use the same iconography instead of creating their own iconography. More importantly, they didn’t really have anything behind that message. I think in this media landscape you do need to live in that world of characters and narratives, and show. But I don’t think you can sacrifice its standing for very clear principles and policies, because, personally, I don’t think you can do it better than them. The only way that you can make their marketing (which is that good) look like marketing is if you put the real thing next to it.

Because there’s such a profound hypocrisy at the heart of the Republican’s whole sell: you know, this George Bush is not a cowboy, he’s a Yale boy. Or that they don’t actually believe in freedom, they systematically try to take it away... if there were a political party, which is not the Democratic party, that were willing to deeply stand for these principles and talk in the language of morality because they believe it and are moral, then [the Republicans] would start to look like marketing.

Law and Order Vs. Life Part II

Law & Order Special Victims Unit
Originally uploaded by MacRonin47.

But even if I were to cut myself off from life, save for the eleven hours of Law & Order syndication goodness I could potentially watch on USA and TNT, I would not stay isolated for long. Law & Order frequently enters into trysts with real life. Hell, in 2002 Fred Dalton Thompson joined the cast full-time as District Attorney Arthur Branch while he was still a U.S. Senator.

For a few months, Thompson was an elected official and he played one on TV.

Thompson became a Senator for Tennessee in 1994. He was sworn into office while he was still in theaters, playing FBI agent Dale Grissom in John Hue’s fine flick, Baby’s Day Out.

While I find the fact that Thompson has served as elected officials for the U.S. and Law & Order amusing, what worries me are the political views Thompson espouses within the realm of the show. The views held by the character Arthur Branch and Thompson are nearly identical, and as a result Thompson (or Branch?) uses the show as a soapbox for his views. And in turn the show often validates his ideals. Fiction, then, supports the positions held by a Republican Senator.

Reality, it seems, is drawing support from Law & Order.

But sometimes Law & Order forsakes providing support and just calls reality out, making it much more entertaining while tying up lose ends and unanswered questions.

An episode of the series aired in late 2002 “reinterpreted” the events surrounding Gary Condit, his wife, and Chandra Levy, a Washington, D.C. intern who happened to be having an ongoing affair with Condit when she disappeared.

In the Law & Order episode that reprises the Condit headlines, it was Mrs. Condit who murders Levy. The real-life Mrs. Condit was less than thrilled. She demanded an apology and threatened to sue for defamation. NBC and Dick Wolf denied her requests.

But maybe Law & Order was just getting some payback for the time Attorney General Reno sparked some deep-seated paranoia within Michael Moriarty, who played prosecutor Ben Stone on pre-Sam Watterson Law & Order.

In 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno campaigned against violence on television, specifically citing such shows as, Murder, She Wrote and Law & Order. Moriarty took Reno’s comments as a personal attack, and held a press conference in which he called his fellow televised thespians to arms against Reno. But his pleas were ignored. He later told Dick Wolf that he planned to sue Reno, before she could sue him.

Moriarty then headed north, claiming political asylum in Canada and resigned from Law & Order via fax.

Richard Belzer, who plays detective John Munch on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, probably has some thoughts to share on the conspiracy Moriarty imagined to surround himself. Belzer, like Thompson, shares his personal views on his show. But unlike Thompson, his views are notably less mainstream.

In real life, Belzer is a noted conspiracy theorist. He has even published a book on the subject. And unlike Thompson, the events within Law & Order never support his views. Apparently, Law & Order has a world-view, and it’s sticking to it.

Side note concerning conspiracies and Thompson: Fred Dalton Thompson appeared in his first film in 1985. He played himself in Marie. However, in the 1970’s Thompson was a lawyer who was a member of the Watergate Committee that investigated the scandal surrounding Richard Nixon. Archival footage of the Committee, which featured Thompson, was shown by Kevin Costner’s character in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. So, technically Thompson’s first film role occurred 6 years after his second. But I digress...

Law & Order is an edited and rewritten version of real life. In order to draw support for the reality it presents it frequently casts actors in positions that echo their real lives or their past performances. Wolf does not hire people because they can act within his roles; he finds people who are his roles. Or who have spent their lives reprising his roles.

Fred Dalton Thompson was an elected official and now he plays one on Law & Order. Richard Belzer is a conspiracy theorist both in life and on Special Victims Unit.

However, both Christopher Meloni and Ice-T play detectives on Special Victims Unit alongside Belzer, and their careers both seem incongruent with playing police officers. Meloni gained notoriety as a sociopathic prisoner on the HBO series OZ and Ice-T made his name with the controversial song “Cop Killer.”

Despite the fact that Meloni and Ice-T’s public personas don’t suggest police officers, Wolf cast them into roles congruent with their past works. Their characters are structured to question the motivation of police officers and serve as foils against the rest of the cast. Wolf hired them based not on their acting ability, but because their public images fit his roles. They lend authority to the plots because the public sees little difference between the characters and the actors.

Since the actors and the plots both share many similarities between their Law & Order versions and their counterparts in reality, it becomes very easy for one to confuse reality and Law & Order. This might create some problems...

For example: psychiatric expert witness Dr. Park Dietz confused Law & Order for reality and accidently overturned a few murder convictions.

Andrea Yates, a mother of five who was accused of drowning her children in a bathtub. Dietz, a psychiatrist who has consulted on more than 200 episodes of Law & Order, was called by the prosecution as an expert witness. When asked by Yates’ defense attorney whether he had worked on an episode which concerned postpartum depression, the condition Yates was using to claim insanity, Dietz replied, “As a matter of fact there was a show concerning a woman with postpartum depression who drowned her children in the bathtub and was found insane, and it was aired shortly before the crime occurred.”

It turns out there is no such episode. Yates’ convictions were overturned due to Dietz’s false testimony, which may have poisoned the jury, who had rejected the insanity claim.

Dietz claims confusion.

According to an interview in January, Dietz says that he mistook two Law & Order episodes for Yates’ case. One featured a teenager giving birth on prom night only to kill the baby with her date. The other features a middle-aged mother who drives her car into a lake in an attempt to kill her and her children. Both episodes were culled from the headlines.

If Dietz, a so-called “expert” who has consulted for more than half of all Law & Order episodes, manages to confuse fictional stories inspired by reality for other instances of reality, what chance do we have?

So in the end, I finally have a motivation to watch the news: it previews upcoming episodes of my favorite show.

Law and Order vs. Life

I have spent more time watching Law & Order than I have spent in New York. As a result, I have more than enough trouble keeping the world of Law & Order separate from my own concepts of recent history, so I am more than happy to cede my recollections of New York City to the imaginary past of Dick Wolf’s TV crime drama.

You see, writers for the show rip stories straight from the headlines, twisting them to make them more entertaining while skirting the first amendment. Even if I manage to remember recent events, I risk confusing what actually happened with the plot of a TNT rerun.

Rene Balcer, executive producer for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, states this explicitly: “I think we rip off the headline, I don’t think we rip off the body of the story. I think it’s kind of fun: people see the headline, see what the story is supposedly about, and there’s already a built-in set of expectations from the audience that when we write the stories, we can play off of and against.” In a way, Law & Order is simply reality television. But with a twist.

It seems that Dick Wolf, the creator of Law & Order and its three current spin-offs, feels that reality is boring and unprofessional. And he should know: three years ago he created Law & Order: Crime & Punishment, which featured real criminal cases filmed in real courtrooms of San Diego County.

But the show failed in less than a season. It was painful to sit though: real life sucked. Even when great drama came along, it more often than not settled behind closed doors, away from the cameras.

Wolf and company learned the cold truth: reality is boring, unreliable, and sloppy.

This year they tried again on their fourth series: Law & Order: Trial by Jury premiered earlier this year and has earned strong ratings. The show, unlike “Crime & Punishment,” follows the lead set by the O.G. Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It borrows plot lines from the headlines, changing stories where it sees fit.

In a recent episode they took on the rape allegations the surrounded basketball star Kobe Bryant. Remember when Kobe’s wife stood strongly by his side, supporting him through the media frenzy? Yeah, in Law & Order-land she kills his accuser.

This is frequent fare in the realm of Law & Order. In the last few months the original series has retold the death of RunDMC’s Jam Master Jay, educated me about sexual harassment suit against Bill O’Reilly’s, and showed me what Ron Artest did after he sparked the Pacers/Pistons brawl (accidentally snapped the neck of a fan during an altercation in the fan’s apartment.)

So I ask myself: why watch the news? I can kill two birds with one stone just by keeping up to date with Law & Order, plus it’s much more entertaining than the current events it rewrites. Who cares if it’s inaccurate? If Kobe’s wife didn’t really murder his lover, does that affect me?

Absolutely not.

America and Beyond

Astro Scape
Originally uploaded by casbah42.

Western landscapes, astronauts, topless women, soda and/or beer... Say hello to the last century of American life.

Will convert to car-friendly magnet upon request.

Civil War Hangover

lincoln
Originally uploaded by casbah42.

Last year I attended a Civil War reenactment in Felton, CA. The battle was treated as a sporting event by the spectators: kids used to video games, adults used to television... There were the required history buffs in the crowd, but even they were referencing films in their discussions.

I met Abraham Lincoln: a Vietnam vet, former high school teacher/cop, and current Lincoln for hire/education. I asked for his thoughts regarding our current war. Lincoln told me people forgot that war always came with death and pain. He hopes Civil War reenactments lessen the distance between war and the attendees, an audiences used to the edited images of sensationalized battle.

As the first shots of the battle rang out, one of the first re-enactors to go down was a drummer boy, a kid no more than 13 years old. His friend and fellow-Union actor dragged the corpse of the drummer boy behind the lines, ultimately to the campsite. They played Magic while the battle raged.

Google Takes Over the World

Google just partnered with a few cell providers to use GoogleMaps and built-in cell GPS and GPRS to move AdSense from the web to the physical world. Theoretically, AdSense now operates within a cell-users physical world. Walk into a pizza shop and an AdSense message will be sent to your phone giving you a coupon for the shop you just walked into, OR telling you a better pizza deal is right down the street.

Here's where it gets interesting... Retail is all about holding your attention. Think of the advantage AdSense businesses will have if they can literally interupt your shopping in another store. Best Buy can now text you their prices for car stereos the moment you walk into another car audio shop.

Google Search, Maps, etc... they're all apparatuses for content. This is the killer app that will expand the internet into your lives

Bastardized Selves in Reality TV

In his introduction to The Tourist Gaze, John Urry states:

Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is an anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered. Such anticipation is constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, magazines, records and videos, which construct and reinforce that gaze. (3)

I would argue that today, "anticipation[s] of intense pleasures" are lived out not through daydreaming, but more often through media itself. Television, especially, allows us to gaze upon far-off lands while simultaneously allowing us to fantasize about the pleasure it could offer us. Programs are reducing the barriers between its audience and its subjects, but newer trends in television are constructing the tourist gaze from every imaginable angle.

I am talking, of course, about reality television, which not only provide us with a mediated gaze of a locale, but also a constructed image of how we might interact within the context. Characters are unscripted, and presented as televised subjects whom are most similar to the audience themselves. To complicate matters, these characters also know their actions are televised. This distinguishes them as the only subjects on television who know they are on television. They are self-aware.

So now, we as viewers find an alternate version of ourselves, interacting with a mediated environment, all while acting as we expect one to act while being televised. This is the postmodern feedback loop that constructs our tourist gazes, while also constructing a gaze of our friends and ourselves.

Conveniently, reality television is the perfect genre for the lives we live in themed environments. Reality television teaches us how to act when we go to dinner at a restaurant that is constructed to emulate another environment. However, we are also living in the sets reality television has forsaken.

But themed environments are the product of the tourist gaze, according to Urry. They are constructed to be congruent with our own interpretation of locales we have never visited. Inaccurate perceptions are validated.

Our bastardized selves of reality television are experiencing contexts, which have been bastardized for our own experience.

John Urry

"Visual media in daily life has made almost anything a potential spectacle." -John Urry

Dreamworks Just Made My List

Dreamwork's new film Madagascar can be summed up as such: animals native to Africa live the good life in the zoo (read: captivity,) but they are not satified and they want more. So they disobey their handlers and break out of the zoo to act like people for a night until their handlers (read: master) capture them and ship them back to Africa.

Wow. I like how it seemed somewhat subtle until they get shipped back to Africa. Nice try, Dreamworks. Way to slip that one out.