Showing posts with label popular culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label popular culture. Show all posts

Thursday, July 1, 2010

The Culture of Celebrity: A Second Look


New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 26 -- July 3, 2010

This week in New World Notes, radio program #122, July 6:

The Culture of Celebrity:
A Second Look

In brief

The corporate media enthusiastically promote "the culture of celebrity." This culture does worse than yield trivial entertainment. It make people more passive and powerless, more inclined to blame only themselves for their misfortunes, less able to organize and fight back against The System. Celebrity Culture is a tool used to pacify the masses. Or so argues journalist-prophet Chris Hedges.

We'll hear more of Hedges' October 14 talk in Winnipeg. This week Hedges focuses on Michael Jackson's career and especially on his funeral-- "a variety show with a coffin." (Other parts of this talk are in New World Notes #115.) I'll add additional specific examples--a few dozen headlines from a popular news-and-entertainment Web site--and some commentary.

Top: American Idol, 2010, Lee DeWyze.
Bottom: Miley Cyrus.
Most photos: Click to enlarge.

Notes, Credits, & Links

This week's music: I read a few dozen celebrity-culture headlines over a "bed" of hit instrumentals by The Ventures. They are, in order: Wipe Out; Pipeline; Walk, Don't Run; and Out of Limits.

Hedges' speech was recorded on October 14, 2009, by Ethan Osland, of Black Mask Winnipeg. Thanks to Ethan and Black Mask for permission to rebroadcast.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "first floor") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

New World Notes is archived at both radio4all.net and The Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chrono listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page, and each page has links to the recorded audio.

Coming Soon -- Tuesday debut date shown:

  • July 13 -- Interview with health-care activist Susan Rosenthal, M.D., on her new book, Sick and Sicker: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care

Top: Michael Jackson. Bottom: Chris Hedges.

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):



A-Infos Radio Project http://www.radio4all.net




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Saturday, April 4, 2009

Can Technology Save Us?




New World Notes News
Volume 2, Number 14 -- April 7, 2009


This week in New World Notes, #58 -- April 7 &10:

Did you hate Day of the Jackal because you knew that the plot to kill DeGaul would fail? How about The Greatest Story Ever Told? Did you ever think there was even a chance that Jesus would plea-bargain the charge down to Practicing Medicine Without a License and get off with "time served"?

This week's installment of NWN is about the near-future Critical Petroleum Shortage. Its title is, Can Technology Save Us? And you already know the answer--better than the U.S. Department of Energy does (or pretends to).

On one of its Web pages the DOE has a breathless account of how hydrogen will keep our SUVs running throughout the forseeable future. No lifestyle changes required! 50 years from now, the grapes sold in New York State will still be grown in Chile and shipped northwards economically. And if the U.S. has any jobs available other than currency arbitrage, you can still drive 50 miles to work!

Right. And thanks to nuclear energy, electricity will be so cheap to produce, they'll just give it away. Industry flacks were actually saying this in the early 1960s. I remember. So it must be true.

Two nuclear-industry P.R. flacks explain the benefits of Clean
Energy For Tomorrow ... Today! Oops, wrong picture. This is
actually Jello Biafra (left), playing a Zombie mayor, in a scene
from the major motion picture, RetarDEAD. The lady on the
right looks a bit un-dead, too.

Don't worry about the fact that it requires so much fossil fuel to produce enough hydrogen to drive 100 miles that you'd save energy by burning gasoline instead. Scientists will surely solve this problem Real Soon Now. Look how well they solved nuclear waste disposal!

This week's show presents two funny and intelligent views on why high-tech won't forestall the disruption that Peak Oil will cause.

Jello Biafra addresses the matter indirectly by discussing--with a good deal of wit--the down-side of two "new technologies" that many expected to enhance personal freedom and transform the world: cell phones and especially the Internet. Thanks in part to these technologies, we now have less freedom and more social alienation.


Then urban-design theorist James Howard Kunstler tells of his unhappy but funny failure to get Silicon Valley "genius dudes" (at Google) to comprehend that technology cannot replace energy. You can turn petroleum into jet fuel or into Ipods. But you can't turn Ipods into jet fuel. Like, sorry, Dude!

Which brings us back to Jesus. Or rather, to Monty Python's Brian . . . on a hilltop in Palestine, crucified along with several other culprits, all singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!" as the camera slowly pulls back and the closing credits begin to roll.

So this installment takes these folks' advice by viewing the impending breakdown of what now passes for civilization with a certain amount of humor and good cheer.

  • When you're chewing' on life's gristle,
    don't grumble . . . give a whistle!
    And this'll
    help things turn out for the best!


By the way, WHUS broadcast this installment on April 3. As they say, consult station listings for the installment they'll broadcast on April 10. (You won't find the answer, but you might find some additional shows you want to check out!)

Song played: Chumbawamba, The Wizard of Menlo Park


Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern) . . .

Soon to Come -- Date of first scheduled broadcast [on WWUH] listed:

  • April 14 -- Independent Journalism & Alternative Media: Jeremy Scahill
  • April 21 -- Men and War

Personal Note:

On April 3, I delivered a paper at a conference--Teaching Peace Across Disciplines: Strategies of Peace, Global Sustainability, & Conflict Transformation--held at Central Connecticut State University. It was sponsored by 4 NGOs and 3 local colleges/universities including WWUH's gracious host and licensee, the University of Hartford. I met some really interesting people there and expect some of them will speak on future installments of NWN.

My talk was titled, "Composing Language, Promoting War, Creating Peace." Complete with photo ("slide") illustrations & 10 pages of handouts. OK, I overdid it a little. The whole shebang was based largely on what I learned while putting together NWN's four recent shows--and four blog entries/newsletters--on media distortions of the Israel-Palestine conflicts.

It's rare that I find cause for optimism . . . but encountering a handful of young, educated, enthusiastic graduate students and young professors committed to making positive change in the world . . . . As we used to say, 'way back when, What a blast from the past! A little good news! . . . The first since November 4. . . .


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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Story of STUFF


Volume 2, Number 3 -- January 20, 2009

This week in New World Notes, #48 -- January 20 & 23:


Apart from the speaker's voice, this is great radio! I know: we're getting pretty close to, "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" But hear me out.

Annie Leonard is a serious person; a good researcher, writer, and editor; and a talented filmmaker. On-screen she's dressed and made-up comfortably and very plainly, with only a smidgeon of conventional femininity--as though she planned to go out back and dig up the garden as soon as filming was over
.
But her voice! It's the cutesy, squeaky, faux-kindergarten-teacher style: high-pitched, with too great a range of intonation. She's the lady on the supermarket PA system, cooing about how your cat will love Acme-brand Kitty Treats . . . and you! But speaking twice as fast. Melanie Griffith on amphetamines. (Shirley Temple, for you old-timers.)

But don't touch that dial! Two minutes into her talk, the voice was bothering me much less. Three minutes in, I stopped noticing entirely. What she was saying was a brilliant, cogent synthesis of politics, science, and economics. She was explaining--clearly, persuasively, and in ways almost anyone could understand--why our globalized system of production, consumption, and disposal is bad news for almost everybody everywhere and also completely unsustainable.

Let's go back a few steps. Leonard produced a 20-some-minute video called The Story of STUFF. It's available, free, on the Internet. The visuals alternate between her (speaking to the camera/viewer) and some animated stick-figures drawn in pencil. This was the easiest video in the world to adapt for radio, since the heart and soul of the work are Leonard's spoken words. Though, I hafta admit, the stick-figures are awfully cute.


Auld acquaintance and now acclaimed Lefty folk-singer Anne Feeney turned me on to the video. Thanks, Anne! Later I discovered that the Unwelcome Guests Collective (http://www.unwelcomeguests.org/) had already broadcast the piece on their nationally-distributed radio program. Well, if you live in southern New England, you may have missed it, so here's another chance.

I still have no idea why God gave the world Melanie Griffith. I should check the Book of Job for clues. But Annie Leonard's contribution to the universe is easier to discern. Everyone--especially every American--should either see her video or else listen to a fine radio adaptation of it, such as . . . well, modesty forbids. . . .


This week's music:
  • Chumbawamba, The Good Ship Lifestyle
  • Intro: Warren Zevon with Something Happens, Werewolves of London

Catch New World Notes . . .


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