Category: Culture

Fresh Air

Who’s the best interviewer on TV or radio? Charlie Rose? Larry King? Please. To some extent it’s a subjective question, your answer possibly skewed by your preferences in guests. For me, the answer lately has been Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. Her bio talks about her empathy with her guests, and that’s certainly a big thing, but the thing that is key to her success is a palpable curiosity that is rarely matched by television and radio personalities. Nothing is more disturbing then listening to an interviewee say something super-interesting, and the interviewer goes down to the next question on their little piece of paper, as if they had cotton in the ears. I’ve seen Charlie Rose actually cut people off sometimes (and here I’m not talking about political interviews, when cutting people off is not done nearly enough, at least in this country). Gross is right there with a spot-on followup question, inevitably better then the one I was hoping she’d ask. Too, her interviews have a satisfying quality, such that when she does 18 minutes with someone, she almost always seems to have gotten the best 18 minutes out of that person there was to get.

Her choice in guests in my opinion over-relies on the film industry (and I just flat don’t understand why she doesn’t regularly feature contemporary visual artists), but otherwise it is pretty excellent. She doesn’t do political figures, but frequently features experts who have vital information that ought to be factoring into our political decisions.

A few recent Fresh Air segments I do not recommend to be missing:

Some older things I’ve recommended previously:

Great moments in post-modernism, pt. 1 (More Money, More Problems)

I came across this old nugget while doing research for my forthcoming comprehensive appreciation of Missy Elliot’s work. This track, credited to Notorious B.I.G. (his second posthumous #1 hit single, an all-time record), is really a Puffy vehicle, and one of the strangest bits of art to make it onto MTV in the 90s. We open with a parody of a climactic moment of a golf tournament, Puffy playing a Tiger Woods character, cut to a “conventional” rap video, back to a bit of golf footage, back to rap video, then to some home-video of Biggy rambling, then cut to more rap video footage, now with a primo verse of posthumous Biggy spliced in from some abandoned track* (this is far and away the highlight of the whole thing), and then back to the previously scheduled song. The hook is lifted from a Diana Ross track (re-recorded), but what holds the track together is the line “more money, more problems,” repeated in the golf skit and in Biggy’s candid monologue.

When I saw this video in 1997 I loved it immediately, and for two reasons. One was the (* not so conventional, really) completely new vision of a bright shiny approach to hip-hop. Credit for this of course goes to Hype Williams, who directed the video, and who’d certainly directed equally eye-popping videos before. This one, though, sunk into my consciousness as much as (and just before) Missy’s I can’t Stand the Rain. The 90’s were a desolate time for rap, where the gangsta (sp?) ruled, and it was all about pictures of yourself and your crew in baggy denim and Timberlands in a bleak urban landscape, and all about your flow. It seems quaint now, but the idea that rap could be Glam again (like it had been in in the mid 80s) struck like a hammer. So did Mase’s lackadaisical flow, which seemed like a challenge to the silver-tongued MC’s of the day (e.g. DMX, who you may not remember being that fierce, but really, he kind of was) that ruled in those days, and of course Puff Daddy’s rapping was that much closer to a joke from a conventional perspective — dude got over purely on personality, and plus being the dude who’s business acumen built the building in which the party was taking place.

But much more then that, what hit home was the song’s frank discourse with reality. The toss-off line “more money more problems,” which the posthumous Biggie attributes to Puffy (who’s really creating the song, follow?), seems to accuse the whole post-barter system of human trade of being a way of keeping the little guy (ie the black man) down. Success = problems, or so it sounded to me at the time. I don’t think anyone cared at the time whether this very real critique held any merit — what was so powerful was that it sounded true, and that it helped break the mold of a pop-song, propelled it into something that looked like a particularly biting form of social commentary.

This really strikes home in the middle of Biggy’s verse, when we’re treated to a brief shot of a party with several dozen women dancing, while the song tries to to sell the idea that its grandiose concept is based on a seed in B.I.G.‘s words. Of course, this leads us to an inevitable conclusion: that Biggie’s death was somehow the result of his success. More money leads to more problems, most money leads to getting gunned down by a never-to-be-identified assailant. That is some strong medicine, and in terms of the alleged exploitation of the Notorious B.I.G.‘s death for commercial gain, challenges even the sappy ballad I’ll be Missing You.

So there it is: a weird/powerful truism about social politics delivered in a catchy, post-modern package that uses parody, found video, and cutting-edge video techniques (and let’s not sell Hype Williams short for a second — check out the shots of Puffy and Mase in the yellow suits — I mean, what the hell is that?!), all montaged together with an off-handed mastery (check out how some of the transitions are deliberately not on-beat) to create something that felt so like the future that it could never really be the future. Just like all videos for pop singles, it was dug, and it was forgotten. And so it goes. Somewhere out there there is a list of videos that really truly did something new, and this one belongs on that list.

Correction: While the single and the album it appears on were released after Biggie’s death, the song was almost certainly created while he was still alive, with everything as it appears except the 2-part golf skit.

A little light reading, 1

Um, so the underlined things in all the stuff I’ve been writing are hyperlinks, and they usually point to things that I thought were worth reading or whatever. Most of y’all never click them, and that’s fine, but it bears mentioning. Here are some things that are also probably worth reading:

What’s up wiht the Daily Show?

daily show news team circa 1990s

Honestly, dealing with the Bush presidency has been a lot easier then it’d otherwise be by the Daily Show. It’s been especially great for the last few months, when the shows are uploaded nightly to their Hulu page, available for convenient and legal watching the next morning, no cable required. The show has been on the air with Jon Stewart since 1998, picking up Emmys, accolades, and scads of viewers — it’s indispensable.

So why the 4-days-a-week, when-we-feel-like-it schedule? Wouldn’t the show benefit from borrowing a slightly less anchor-centric approach from the real news shows, and go on a 7-days a week rotation? It’d give some of the other folks on the show a chance to host once in awhile, which would be interesting in any case. (“John Oliver, sitting in for Jon Stewart.”) A recent New York Times profile reveals that Stewart, “functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought,” which is a clue. But come on, after 10 years, there have got to be other folks on staff that can do this stuff. The Daily Show is Comedy Central’s cash cow, so they sure could afford to bring on more writers, put them on 7-day rotations, and get this going. The result would be maybe a little less consistency, but I actually think that would be a cool thing.

It’s interesting that Stewart has been making occasional comments about their scheduling on the air lately. During the crash, he said something about how the show was scheduled to be off the next week, but they decided (graciously) to come in and do it anyway. When Congress was off for Rosh Hashanah, he again pointed out “We’re here — I guarantee you the Daily Show has more Jews then Congress!” Well, I say that the Daily Show has gotten big enough for them to figure out how to do it every day. They need to abandon their fears of being less then perfect without every member of some imagined indispensable core team, and give some other folks a crack.

Weekendly clickables II

  • How to use a French Press. “It’s important to add your coffee quickly after grinding – if you’re smelling aromas, it’s going stale.” CoffeeGeek is so cute.
  • Holy crap people Jeff Bridges’ website!!
  • “Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.”
  • Chuck Klosterman got 96 Germans to write an essay about who their most influential American was to weed out which 20 would get to take a pop culture class he was teaching. “There was a female student who selected Jared Leto. I must admit — I did not see this one coming. He is perceived as a triple threat of acting, music, and environmental awareness (apparently, his tour bus runs on vegetable oil).”
  • Better then the van lets you sign up to let broke ass bands on tour crash at your house. Joy.
  • Songza lets you listen to any song anytime you want. Doesn’t work on my Firefox, but still great.
  • My favorite new twitter feed: Captions from New Yorker cartoons without the cartoons.
  • Some harsh words about Will Smith’s career. “Smith’s rules for how to be a global black superstar, then? 1. Keep it easy and breezy. Heroes must work for the good of the white folks (especially families and romantic pairings) in the movie, often to their own detriment.”
  • Go play in graphic design traffic.
  • “Never tell the hired gun that someone else has a bulletin, letter, memorandum, or document of any kind. You cannot possibly know this to be true, because the other person may have thrown it out since you last saw it. If you never saw it, then you did not know of its existence and cannot testify about your own knowledge. Don’t ever talk about a document unless you have the document in front of your eyes.” Actually, I have no idea what this is.
  • Nobody wants to help me out.
  • !!! (Via Keith Gessen’s blog, which is stuff about literary culture and photos of puppies and pretty great itself. Oh and who this person has a problem with. Too much internet, too little time.)
  • On the internet you can buy yourself something to make you happy, like a picture of a flying car.
  • So, Liz linked to FreeRice.com earlier this week, and the site seems like win-win for everybody, but I always get suspicious about stuff like this, so I poked around and found this. But still, right? Not only is it not completely credible, but even if true… well, I dunno.
  • Six tips for designing your happiness commandments. I can’t believe I’m not grossed out by this.
  • “. . . although it does not have law enforcement powers, TSA has begun issuing navy-blue uniforms and silver, cop-style badges. Not by accident, the badges look exactly like the kind worn by actual police officers. They say “U.S. Officer” at the top, with an eagle emblem in the center and “Transportation Security Administration” across the bottom. Not all law enforcement officials are happy.”
  • Hey you people riding around the beach on squeaky bicycles: Lube that shit.
  • Ted just posted a talk filmed in 2005: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration. This is interesting because a lot of the threads that Shirky ties together are pretty old hat at this point (e.g. flickr tags), but whether or not his grand conclusion works out is still a bit up in the air.
  • Still Bored? Want something to unravel? Try this, but don’t expect to be enlightened at the end of it all.

OK, I’m going back to read what Gessen thinks of the word ‘twat.’

Weekendly clickables

Soon to come are little byte-link posts like at the other place. In the meantime, some things of which you ought not to be without:

Don’t let’s be proud to be Americans

Happy 4th, folks. Don’t fear, I’m going to spare you the list of America’s evils (which in any case have been better documented elsewhere), except maybe to direct you to the Fresh Air interview with Philippe Sands, who makes a persuasive case that the Bush administration committed war crimes, and explains why they have an excellent chance of being indicted at some point in the future.

What I want to talk about instead is patriotism and nationalism. You’re proud to be an American? Why? Isn’t it an accident of birth that you’re here? It’s not really something you get credit for. Why not be proud of being a good person instead? The thing to realize, and really my central point, is that when we celebrate our peoplehood as a nation, we diminish our peoplehood as a global society. This leads to support for dubious wars, unethical immigration policy, and inane arguments against foreign aid on the basis of “there’s hungry people right here in America.” Sorry, but the people starving to death in Africa have no less a right to food then the people starving in America (and possibly more of a right, since their opportunities to feed themselves are likely vastly inferior).

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” said Samuel Johnson in 1775. In Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs, Chuck Klosterman describes reaction to an e-mail he sent to a number of his friends:

Just about everyone . . . viewed patriotism as a downside. I wasn’t too surprised; in fact, I was mostly just amused by how everyone seemed to think extremely patriotic people weren’t just updateable, but totally fucking insane. One of hte mwrote that the quality of “patriotism” was on par with “regularly listening to Cat Stevens” and “loves Robin Williams movies.” Comparisons were made to Ted Nugent and Patrick Henry. And one especially snide fellow sent back a mass message to the entire e-mail group, essentially claiming that any woman who loved America didn’t deserve to date him, not because he hated his country but because patriotic people weren’t smart.

So, that’s just silly, right? Plenty of patriotic people are smart. But when you ease back on thinking of yourself as “American” and see yourself as a citizen of the world foremost, a funny thing happens. You become more interested in the events of the world. You start to care about all humans everywhere, and in so doing come in touch with a more profound aspect of your own humanity. And you become more able to see the flaws in your country and criticize them, which in turn makes you more engaged and in the long term leads to making your country better.

I hope its clear that I don’t have any problem with America. It’s a great country; better then most. What I’m saying here goes just as well for any country in the world. Let’s all be members of the human race, and see national borders as a maybe necessary but increasingly less significant political construct, and let’s all get along. I’ll drink to that.