Category Archives: media

Monsanto Shill Patrick Moore Fails “Glyphosate Challenge”

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France is not without it’s share of free speech issues, but much credit should be given to the Canal+ network and a recent documentary they aired, “Bientôt dans vos assiettes” (Soon on your plate), produced by investigative journalist Paul Moreira. During an interview for the show, corporate green-washer Patrick Moore claims that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is safe enough to drink (an oft-repeated claim for Monsanto chemicals). Moreira’s response is brilliant: offering Moore an opportunity to drink glyphosate in front of the cameras. This is a transcript of the PR nightmare moment:

Moore: Do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing increases in cancer. You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.

Moreira: You want to drink some? We have some here.

Moore: I’d be happy to actually… Not, not really, but…

Moreira: Not really?

Moore: I know it wouldn’t hurt me.

Moreira: If you say so, I have some glyphosate.

Moore: No, I’m not stupid.

Moreira: OK. So you… So it’s dangerous, right?

Moore: No. People try to commit suicide with it and fail, fairly regularly.

Moreira: Tell the truth. It’s dangerous.

Moore: It’s not dangerous to humans. No, it’s not.

Moreira: So you are ready to drink one glass of glyphosate?

Moore: No, I’m not an idiot.

Moore then abruptly ends the interview losing what little dignity he had left by calling the interviewer “a complete jerk.” This is the man Monsanto and the Biotech industry would have us believe is a suitable science Ambassador for EXPO 2015 whose theme will be “Feeding the planet, energy for life”. Moore has also been vocal on social media in response to the decision of the World Health Organization’s panel of scientists to list glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.

Enjoy the schadenfreude with James Corbett through the following Corbett Report video:

It could only be better had Moore actually drank it.

 

Saturday Matinee: Night Flight

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Though I don’t have cable and rarely watch network television online, there’s definitely programs and artists of enduring value I’ve discovered through television. One prime example is “Night Flight”, a carefully curated block of late night programming reminiscent of a YouTube channel for a counterculture blog (long before blogs and YouTube existed). It aired every Friday and Saturday at 11 pm on the USA Network and was probably the best source of fringe culture on air at the time (outside of local public access programs).

A typical Night Flight episode would consist of clips of varying length played nearly back to back separated only by short voice-over introductions. Though the content of each episode was often unpredictable and featured clips from varying sources, they sometimes had recurring themes which would appeal especially to college-age crowds (ie. drugs, punk rock, experimental films, etc). On a single episode one might see a short avant-garde student film followed by a stand-up comedy clip, a drug documentary and music videos (first aired on June 1981, Night Flight preceded MTV by two months). Shows also featured hilariously re-dubbed serials, profiles of comedians, musicians and video artists, archive footage, and cult movies such as Fantastic Planet, Reefer Madness, and Music of the Spheres.

Night Flight was created by Stuart Shapiro who, judging from his wiki page, has long had an eye for comedy and music/cult cinema. The show’s programing director was Stuart Samuels, author of the classic cult film book Midnight Movies (and director of the documentary based on it). Night Flight has an informative fan page (that’s unfortunately plagued by spammy ads) which provides the following info:

In July of 2001, DirecTV started airing Midnight Rider. Created by Night Flight originator Stuart Shapiro, Midnight Rider was similar to Night Flight but only shown on Pay-per-view partially because of its adult content. Midnight Rider was a 2 hour show featuring standup comics, animation and of course music videos and was narrated by Night Flight veteran, Pat Prescott. Apparently the show didn’t do too well because less than a year later, in June of 2002, their web site (www.midnightrider.tv) was gone and a Best Of Midnight Rider was being released to video stores.

Dailymotion members jeffdevil1 and philodrummond have kindly uploaded large chunks of Night Flight for our enjoyment (complete with cheesy commercials).

 

Podcast Roundup

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3/11: Srini Rao has an interesting conversation with animal rights activist Peter Young covering community activism, communication, survival tips, and his former life as a fugitive on the “Unmistakable Creative” podcast.

https://sitebuilderio.s3.amazonaws.com/unmistakablecreative/audios/012b5fac-3695-42b3-9a2d-ffd7d4d7f213/lessons-in-communication-from-a-fugitive-peter-young.mp3

3/11: On the latest “Guns and Butter”, Bonnie Faulkner interviews John Whitehead of  the Rutherford Institute. They discuss aspects of  “Police State America” including the Corporate State, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Offices of Inspector General (OIG), SWAT Teams, No-Knock Raids, the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track, the New York Prototype, MRAPs, Operation Vigilant Eagle, Atlas Four Androids, TSA and VIPR Teams, the Google/NSA connection and Fusion Centers.

http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20150311-Wed1300.mp3

3/11: Host Dave Lindorff discusses the recent coup plan disrupted by police in Venezuela with veteran journalist Alfredo Lopez — a story largely blacked out or mocked as bogus by the US corporate media despite solid evidence of a plot, and of US involvement in that plot on “This Can’t Be Happening”. Lindorff and Lopez, who are colleagues on the news site thiscantbehappening.net, also talk about why President Obama on Tuesday declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary national security threat” to the US, and what that declaration means to Venezuela and Latin America.

http://s36.podbean.com/pb/0c1337348a3a2a92b0bdb73308121756/5503328c/data1/blogs18/661545/uploads/ThisCantBeHappening_031115.mp3

3/12: On the first of their recent “Media Roots” podcasts, Robbie and Abby Martin discuss the ending of the RT program “Breaking the Set”, the establishment’s Cold War resurrection, and the splintering of the left over Obama’s military policies. The second program features an interview with Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, on current U.S. government actions against Venezuela.

Useful Idiots: The Clueless Gooberism of First Look’s Fallen Heroes

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By Chris Floyd

Source: Empire Burlesque

I don’t really want to go too far down the road on this when there are far more important things happening in the world, but really, take just a moment to look at the language in the Ken Silverstein piece on the world-historical tragedy of him finding out that it was less than ideal to work for a rapacious, dodgy billionaire:

“[Matt Taibbi] hired some incredible writers, including Alex Pareene, Edith Zimmerman and other insanely talented people [for the oligarch-funded vehicle called Racket] …. During my short time at Racket, we talked about how we should have the courage to write whatever we wanted—and not to worry about whether First Look management liked what we did or whether we offended potential future employers. At bottom, that is the true formula to produce fearless, independent journalism. You will never produce fearless, independent journalism if you live in fear of angering your media boss or to please your sources or even your friends.”

I mean, just look at that phrasing. All of Silverstein’s pals at racket were not just good journalists, they weren’t just talented people; no, they had to be INSANELY talented. They were all (him included) people endowed with talent beyond all normal measuring.

And then, in those deep, soulful conversations he reports having with Taibbi and the other god-like creatures assembled at Racket, Silverstein talks of the “fearless, independent journalism” (a phrase repeated in two successive sentences) they were all courageously pledged to create, no matter what the oligarch who was giving them tens of millions of dollars might think.

But really: who on god’s green earth talks about themselves in this way? Who beats their chests and shouts about how FEARLESS and INDEPENDENT they are, how INSANELY TALENTED all their colleagues are? Who, who actually was fearless and independent, would sign up with a bloated billionaire techno-oligarch in the first place? And what genuinely talented person needs to proclaim anxiously to all the world how talented — sorry, not just talented but INSANELY talented — they and their friends are?

And again, really: Alex Parene, INSANELY talented? You might, at a stretch, say that Tolstoy or Shakespeare were INSANELY talented; that is, that their talents seem to exceed those of most other writers. But some guy who used to write pieces for Salon? He’s incomprehensibly talented, is he? Couldn’t he be, like, just talented, or even less hyperbolically, just a good writer? Is that not good enough?

And again, as with Glenn Greenwald, who famously declared that he took no interest at all in Omidyar’s background or politics before he took his multimillion dollar checks, Silverstein too declares that he “knew little” about Omidyar when he took the oligarch’s money, and that the oligarch — whatever he did or stood for — “wasn’t a big part of my decision-making.”

Not to belabor the point, but again we are talking about self-proclaimed FEARLESS INDEPENDENT journalists — Greenwald and Silverstein — who freely admit that they did virtually no due diligence, no FEARLESS investigation, of the oligarch who was waving fat wads of money at them. They just took the money. And now we are supposed to feel sorry for Silverstein and Taibbi and the other INSANELY TALENTED FEARLESS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS who discovered that working on Petey’s Farm was not the utopia they thought it would be. I suppose being INSANELY TALENTED and FEARLESSLY INDEPENDENT doesn’t preclude you from being MONUMENTALLY STUPID and WILFULLY IGNORANT. But such glaring evidence of the latter does tend to tarnish somewhat one’s savvy, dissident cred, does it not?

So what is the upshot of the whole Omidyar FUBAR? The end result has been 1) to shut down for months on end some of the few ‘dissident’ writers able to publish in the mainstream media; and 2) undermine their credibility and make them all look like stupid, self-aggrandizing, money-grubbing goobers. If you had deliberately designed a scheme to cripple the already minuscule portion of mildly oppositional stances toward our militarist empire allowed to surface on the margins of the national discourse, you could not have been more effective than the long slow-motion train wreck of First Look Media.

Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Are we entering a cultural Dark Age, where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture?

Longtime correspondent G.F.B. recently sent me this 13-minute Interview with Andrew Keen. This is my first exposure to Keen, and his view that the democratization of the Web is great for politics but a disaster for what he calls the Cultural Economy— the relatively small but important slice of the economy that pays creators and artists to make culture: music, literature, art and serious journalism.

The title of Keen’s 2007 book encapsulates his dire perspective: The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values.

(His 2012 book had a similar theme: Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us)

(Author Scott Timberg makes some of the same points in his new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (via Cheryl A.)

Keen touches on a great many ideas and themes in this brief interview, but his core point is this: by enabling everyone to express themselves on an essentially equal footing, the Web has undermined legitimate journalism and buried the talented few in an avalanche of mediocrity–in his words, talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”

By eliminating the middleman who added value by sorting the wheat from the chaff–the film studio, the music labels, the publishers–the Web has created a cultural landscape where “soft, ordinary” content such as cute cat videos garner the most “likes” and clicks–the digital world’s metric for popularity and thus value in the marketplace.

Keen tossed off one of his most interesting ideas as an aside: that the break-up of community and the resulting loss of identity has generated a universal drive to establish an identity via self-expression: everybody feels they can compose a song, write a novel or make a movie.

Keen is at his most provocative (to the democratized ideal of the amateur making it big) when he declares the vast majority of people are talentless: talent is by definition scarce. We can’t all be equally talented, nor can anyone generate culturally valuable content without mastering their craft over thousands of hours of practice.

Keen unapologetically calls the previous arrangement an “industrial meritocracy.” He feels this hierarchical meritocracy is being destroyed and there is nothing to replace it.  This will result in a cultural Dark Age where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture. The only avenue left for creators of content that can be copied and distributed digitally (music, digital art, writing) is to find wealthy patrons to support their work.

One of G.F.B.’s points in our conversation was the Web’s “level playing field” is an artificial construct, much like the playing field in a stadium. But outside the stadium, the geography is anything but level.  Put other way, global corporations have great advantages in the supposedly “level playing field” of the Web.

Keen mentions that what will remain scarce in this tsunami of digital content is access to the artist, live performances and art that cannot be digitized, such as sculpture and paintings. As I have discussed in previous Musings, musicians who perform constantly can make a living in this environment, because their free music on the web builds an audience for their live performances.  But not every band performs enough to make a go of this model.

In Keen’s  view, it is now essentially impossible for bands, artists and writers to create a “brand” that will generate an income. Only those creators who entered the digital age with an established brand can leverage their recognition into an income.

As a completely marginal creator of content who never rose within the industrial meritocracy lauded by Keen, I  think Keen makes some excellent points but overstates his case for a cultural Dark Age.

As G.F.B. pointed out in our conversation on this topic, a new class of curators is arising within the Web, people who sift through the vast outpouring of content and select the best or most interesting (in their view). Those curators who succeed are adding value just as the industrial middlemen did in the pre-digital model. In some small way, I think Of Two Minds performs a bit of this curation.

It seems to me that the digital age requires every creator of content to not only be perseverant but to focus a great deal of time and energy on marketing their content–precisely what the industrial media and cultural industrial-model companies once did for their talent.

There is no longer enough money in creating content to pay an office full of people to issue press releases and arrange book tours.  In the publishing world, promotion is increasingly up to the authors; as Keen noted, only those authors with brands that were established in the pre-digital age can sell enough content to support industrial-type promotion.

We can bemoan this, or we can grasp the nettle and realize that  it is no longer enough to practice one’s craft for the fabled 10,000 hours–one must also invest another 10,000 hours in promoting and marketing one’s content/cultural creations.  That dual process (creation and marketing) is so arduous, so impoverishing, so demanding, only the driven few can sustain it long enough to claw their way through the mountains of mediocrity.

Making a living at cultural content was always brutally Darwinian; perhaps all that’s changed is the nature of the Darwinian selection process.

Utopia: The Final Frontier

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By Sadie Doyle

Source: The Baffler

Leonard Nimoy, who passed away this past Friday, was less an actor than an icon, an ever-present figure and a seemingly universal pop-culture touchstone. What struck me, upon hearing the news of his death, was that I’d somehow assumed he couldn’t die. It seemed as if Leonard Nimoy had always been there, in one form or another—as Spock, as himself on the best episodes of The Simpsons, as the man singing that ridiculously earworm-y theme song to the animated Hobbit movie—and I’d believed he always would be.

Not bad, for a guy whose biggest claim to fame was a TV show that was cancelled after three seasons. Despite his understandable discomfort with being identified solely with Star Trek (his first memoir was entitled I Am Not Spock, after all), it’s Spock, and Star Trek, that will be Leonard Nimoy’s most lasting legacy.

The role also explains much of the emotional hold he had on fans: he was the purest and clearest symbol of Star Trek’s utopian vision. Spock was an icon of perfectible human nature existing in a perfected world.

The Star Trek universe’s political vision is fun in part because it’s so massively impractical. The reasons I adored it as a child are the same reasons I find it so charming today. To start with, Star Trek is explicitly post-capitalist. No one worries about money; the characters seem to show up to work simply because they like being there. And the one alien species that does operate on a capitalist structure, the Ferengi, are villains. Yet the Federation is entirely devoid of the problems anti-capitalists face now: no one gets stuck with a crap job on the spaceship, because all of the “bad” jobs (factory labor, secretarial work, cleaning the Holodeck) are automated. No one has to worry that sharing resources will deprive them of things they want; in the Federation, everyone is comfortably middle-class, if not rich.

Needless to say, this is impossible. As ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies have repeatedly affirmed, affluent, technologically enabled Western lifestyles simply can’t be universalized. (See, for instance, this excerpt from their book Ecofeminism (PDF). In the real world, at least, the Earth is a closed system. There’s only so much stuff we can use. Western ideas of “comfort” or affluence depend on Westerners using up vastly disproportionate amounts of that stuff, which depends on global capitalism, which depends on strategically impoverishing other countries and using them as a source of exploited labor. We can create a world where no one is poor, but never a world where everyone is rich; the Earth simply can’t produce enough to support that level of consumption.

But you know what solves the problem of the Earth as closed system? Spaceships, that’s what. In Star Trek, there is infinite Stuff, and whatever you don’t have, you just find on a new planet, or get from the replicator. Poverty and exploitation are things of the past, because their fundamental cause—competition for limited resources—simply doesn’t exist.

Star Trek’s perfect social reality is nothing next to its vision of perfect people. It’s not so much that Star Trek is dorky—although every character on those shows is deeply dorky—as that it lacks the necessary conditions for coolness to arise. There’s no counterculture; the culture is already perfect, so who’d want to counter it? There’s no youthful rebellion—even Wesley Crusher, the much-abhorred teenage pipsqueak of Star Trek: The Next Generation, hangs out mostly with his mom—because there’s nothing to rebel against.

If the Federation can seem humorless, it’s only because the keenest humor, as Freud reminds us, arises from hostility; in Star Trek, interpersonal hostility has been replaced with an all-encompassing sweetness, a sense that, although the characters on the Enterprise may chafe each other occasionally, they’re ultimately friends, making common cause in the best of all possible worlds.

Which brings us to Spock, and to Nimoy. Though Spock is half Vulcan—and, as such, treated to some of the show’s few explicit acknowledgements that racism might not just disappear, via McCoy’s frequent references to him as a “green-blooded goblin”—he was also Star Trek’s clearest statement of what a perfected human might be. His character is cleansed of hatred, fear, greed, and self-destructive impulses, just as the show’s universe is cleansed of oppression. He is a strict rationalist; the show, likewise, puts its faith in science to resolve all practical and emotional problems. If someone is getting on Spock’s nerves, he merely remarks that their actions are “highly illogical.” If something threatens his life, he’s more likely to call it “fascinating” than panic or run away.

Try to visualize Spock yelling at someone in rush-hour traffic. Visualize Spock in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, or picking a pointless fight with a friend after a rough day at work. You can’t. Those are the parts of human nature that are ugly and hard to manage, the parts that we don’t like, and that others don’t like about us. Spock has none of them.

Ridding ourselves of hostility and irrationality is just as impossible as everything else in Star Trek. Nimoy’s great gift as an actor was to make it seem plausible: With his seriousness, with his stillness, with the reserves of humor we could always sense glinting just under the surface (that eyebrow!), he made Spock a real person, and so gave our ideal selves form. That gift made him the most beloved character in one of our most beloved stories. And Star Trek granted him his own measure of immortality. Leonard Nimoy couldn’t stay with us forever. But Spock can.

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Celluloid and Simulation

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By Cary Hill

Source: Moviepilot

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. — Marshall McLuhan

A friend recently remarked to me that it felt increasingly more like his childhood was being repackaged and sold back to him. We were discussing the recent rash of movies, toys, and TV shows based on things from our childhood: GI Joe, Transformers, etc. New Hollywood franchises (including merchandise) are being launched from shows we watched 30 years ago, targeting our generation and our children. Nostalgia is now big business.

So I wondered: If the majority of Hollywood’s efforts are being put to resurrecting original content from decades ago in an attempt to exploit nostalgia, what happens when all new films and toys are based on prior existing material? We’ve seen Hollywood not even balk at rebooting an existing franchise (Spiderman, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Hulk), but with the lack of original content (OC) it could reach a theoretical point — or singularity — where there is no original content to recycle.

A reboot or remake is, at the bottom level, a copy. It may have different characters or actors, but the story remains the same. Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man was essentially the same story as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (yes, the villain was different but it was still his origin story). And Raimi’s film was based on Stan Lee’s comic. So Webb’s film is a copy of a copy. The upcoming sequel to Webb’s film creates an extension of the copy’s copy. Even if you claim Webb’s film adapts Lee’s comic directly, it still becomes a copy of Raimi’s film which adapted the same source.

Teenage Mutant Turtles is perhaps a better example. Originally a 1980s comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, it was adapted into a cartoon series (and toys) and then a feature film. It spawned two sequels then an animated remake in 2007, and finally a live (with heavy CGI) remake last year. This order of simulacra, is chronologically correct in my generation’s minds because we lived through it. Our memory can align which came first and trace the comic book origin back to 1984. But for our children’s generation, there is merely a group of copies to choose from with no memory attached.

So if our nostalgia is packaged and sold as a reimagining, reboot, reset, or remake, there has to be something from our childhood to appeal to us. There is that OC that remember being so new, so awesome, and so…unique. If there is a lack of original content and new franchises, studios are further pushed to recycle existing properties. Recycling begets recycling as all resources are consumed to merely recreate a film or property that already exists. And as there are less and less original films, the risks becomes even greater to take a chance on something novel.

This is, of course, theoretical. I’m sure readers are quick to point out “new” franchises like The Hunger Games that are doing well at the box office. After all, these Young Adult books have become a hot-ticket item, perfect fodder for Hollywood’s most cherished demographic: the teenager. These books (and films) aren’t that revolutionary in plot or story, and seem to share a lot of common themes among them. Regardless, they can play out as something “different” for the purposes of this article. However, given their box office take, one wouldn’t be too shocked to see them remade anyway.

In our theoretical, Simulacra and Simulation-esque (The Matrix, anyone?), Baudrillard vision of Hollywood, at some point the entire palate of films would consist of pre-existing material. The 80s and 90s childhoods repackaged and consumed by the same people (now adults) and their children of the 2000s and 2010s. So in the 2020s and 2030s, can nostalgia be repackaged if there’s no OC from the 2000s/2010s to resurrect? Or do you repackage the repackage?

Baudrillard’s 3rd stage of Simulacra:

The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to.

What makes this even more head-spinning is the fact that film is, by definition, simulacrum. Cinema is a representation of something else (a story, or screenplay), played out by actors pretending to be characters. In a decade or two or repackaging, you would have a copy of a copy of a copy of a simulacra. The result, according to Baudrillard’s book, is a decay of meaning through each additional simulacrum.

And maybe that’s just it. Baudrillard’s decay of meaning makes the reboot less effective — people don’t bother to see a fourth or fifth reboot of Teenage Mutant Turtles. At some point it just couldn’t be that different, right? So if the reboot carries no value, it makes it unmarketable by Hollywood to sell. Perhaps at this point all reboots are done away with and there is only original content. A child born in 2030 could have three or four versions of the same franchise to watch, and with so much selection why go to the theater to see that fifth version?

Then again, the “Greatest Story Ever Told,” the birth and death of Jesus Christ, remains a popular adaptation to make over and over since Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) . If Spider-Man and other superheroes are a post-modern, cinematic parallel to Christ, then perhaps their stories too will always be remade over and over.