the zeitgeist report

For some reason the Winter Olympics tv broadcastes are getting a 20 share in Portland, Oregon while in the US, at large, they are only getting a 12 share:

"My opinion has always been that Northwesterners seem to be more individualistic and less supporters of professional sport," said Jack Elder, a 1972 Olympian in luge who works at the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame. "They're not great spectators. . . . They're busy 'doing.' And they like to watch people who 'do.' "

Perhaps it is no accident that a place that embraces running and bicycling as few others do would devour an Olympic schedule made up largely of individual sports. From cross-country skiing to short-track skating, Winter Olympic sports tend to be solitary contests.

If you'll excuse me I have to go watch curling.

The New Yorker has an article about a Pentagon group that tried to put a stop to the torture at Guantanamo:

Back in Haynes’s office, on the third floor of the Pentagon, there was a stack of papers chronicling a private battle that Mora had waged against Haynes and other top Administration officials, challenging their tactics in fighting terrorism. Some of the documents are classified and, despite repeated requests from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, have not been released. One document, which is marked “secret” but is not classified, is a twenty-two-page memo written by Mora. It shows that three years ago Mora tried to halt what he saw as a disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects.

The article has a link to the Mora memo which speaks of action "unlawful and contrary to Americn values". From the New Yorker article:

Mora thinks that the media has focussed too narrowly on allegations of U.S.-sanctioned torture. As he sees it, the authorization of cruelty is equally pernicious. “To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction,” he told me. “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”

Regardless of the subject of my blogs, I will always present important Bob Dylan information. I remember watching the Hard Rain tv special when it was on tv originally. It was kind of a big deal at the time. I was 12. This is a video of Idiot Wind -- a beautiful performance of that great angry song.

As I think about this blog, I was going to try to put together lists of people that reflect the zeitgeist. The first person I thought of putting on that list was Dylan. I'm not sure he is representitive. He seems more to transcend it. When I think of someone representitive of the zeitgeist I think more along the lines of Paris Hilton or Ryan Seacrest.

When I started this I said I wouldn't use the term "zeitgeist-y", but Lisa Loeb's new show is just so darn zeitgeist-y. She is cute and smart and she is looking for a boyfriend.

Actress Illeana Douglas is turning out to be Lisa's good-luck charm. From plumbers to dog-park lovers, Illeana attracts men like shopaholics to a sample sale. She tries to share her mojo moves with Lisa by setting her up with Gidget--the pampered pooch of Queer Eye 's Jai Rodriguez--to act as a man magnet at a puppies and singles mixer. But Lisa's best encounter there is with a fellow cat lover named David.

After getting his number (Debbie does not approve), the two make a date to meet at the zoo. But David spends more time yakking on his cell phone than talking to Lisa and actually ditches her midway through. Next!

And it just goes on and on like that. There are clues that she might be a total pain in the ass. In one episode she makes her producer go to couples therapy to work out their communication issues. He also used to be her boyfriend and is involved with another woman. There is a slight Sex in the City feel to it without all the cocktails and sex. She seems post-modern.

There was a fad called the flashmob, but it wasn't really a fad. It was a social experiment in mob psychology:

Perhaps this is the explanation for Fusion Flash Concerts, an otherwise inexplicable marketing program this past summer in which Ford, attempting to sell a new sedan to the underthirty- five market, partnered with Sony to appropriate what may be the most forgettable hipster fad of the past five years. That fad is the “flash mob,” which, according to a definition hastily added in 2004 to the Oxford English Dictionary , is “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” In fact the flash mob, which dates back only to June 2003, had almost entirely died out by that same winter, despite its having spread during those few months to all the world's continents save Antarctica. Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.

If you go to an event that you thought gave you some sort of artistic and aesthetic transcendance and than someone else says,"I wasn't doing art. I was doing sociology", is the event drained of it's aesthetic value? Possibly.

In Finland, approximately 20 percent of the Lutheran church quit. Most people that left were young adults, 20 - 35, who did not find meaning in the church any longer. Another significant number left because:

Views expressed by the Lutheran Church also drove people away. For some, the church is too liberal, reformist, and spineless.

It's refreshing to see spinelessness cited as a reason to leave the church. There is apperently a system called the religious freedom law wherein one needed to go before a government committee to leave ones religion. It can now be done with a mail-in form. The article also cites about 50,000 people that joined the church through the miracle of infant baptism.

Most of the people who left were not bitter or angry as they left. They just didn't feel strongly enough to leave until the new system was enacted.

This seems to express a common attitude about religion: kind of, I don't know, whatever.

Maybe the best movie I have ever seen on the Hollywood Blacklisting of the early fifties is "The Front" starring Woody Allen. It is funny, warm, heartbreaking and the hero gets to tell the Committee to 'go fuck yourselves'. It is so well done without being heavy handed. Zero Mostel, who was blacklisted in the 1950s gives an amazing performance as an old comic who has his career ruined by the committee.

From Vincent Canby's review in 1976:

As much as an entertainment film can be, "The Front" is about what it was like when to be a member of the Communist Party, or to have been a member at some earlier time, or to have associated with people who might have been members, or to have had left-wing sympathies, or to have been sympathetic to people who might have had such sympathies, was enough to destroy one's career, to turn old friends into stool pigeons, to humiliate the codes by which men professed to live morally.

The film was a nice surprise.

We hear so many stories about bad things happening to kids through the internet. We seem to be in a patch of alarmist reporting about what kids are doing and potential for awfull things happening and documentation about what kids are being exposed to which they supposedly haven't been exposed to at any other time. This story might take things down a notch:

Despite parents' fears about how much time their teenagers spend sitting in the glow of a computer screen, social scientists say to just chill. The kids are doing just fine, thank you.

A panel of researchers told an international science conference Sunday that the online generation of teens is gaining valuable social and leadership skills, developing their sense of identity, creating their own space separate from adults and educating themselves about their world in often more effective ways than in classrooms.

It seems the internet can be another tool for communicating what they have always been communicating, but now it is leaving something that can be monitered and recorded. For many kids the internet has always been around and it is taken for granted that it is a way that they will communicate. They get it, they use it and it's not going away. Do we stop using the telephone because pople can use the phone to make obsene phone calls, or plan crimes? It is a tool.

Slate's television critic deconstructs Madonna's new video:

There has existed a line of thought in Madonna scholarship suggesting, to quote Robert Christgau, "that there was more gym than boudoir in the way she pumped her crotch." The point of this pair of videos is to deny that distinction. For Madonna, exercise is passion is pleasure. There is no sex or violence or violent sex here. No metaphysics, no religion, no politics. The singer's only statement is that she's the hardest-working woman in show business. Her only thrust is ambition.

The old instrument is not as up to the task as it once was. It is hard to imagine what sort of reinvention she will have to undertake to maintain her explosive celebrity status and not injure herself in the process.

There is an ugly little trend on Broadway to raid some of our favorite rock legends catalogues and paste together a musical with a story line and dancing. This has happened to ABBA, Billy Joel, The Beach Boys and now Bob Dylan. This seems a little crass and slightly suspiscious:

Dylan, who saw an early preview, has given the project his blessing and is said, in fact, to be eager to see it on Broadway.

Not only because he likes it — which he does, very much — but also because, according to sources, he's looking forward to those big fat royalty checks that can flow from a hit show.

The great icon of the '60s counterculture has already cashed in his catalog to Victoria's Secret and Starbucks, so why not try to ring a few more bucks out of it on the Great White Way?

People view these sorts of things as a sellout but I think most artists enjoy people listening to their music. That's why they do what they do. Dylan doing these sorts of things is viewed by a slightly different standard, in that he is viewed as more of a religious figure than a pop musician.

A beautiful photo gallery of the significant players in the films of 2005 from the NYTimes:

Around this time of year, acting in movies starts to feel like a kind of athletic event, with prizes awarded to the winners while the losers are reduced to being glamorous extras on televised award show after televised award show. By the time of the Academy Awards, which this year will take place on March 5, the spirit of the contest seems to take precedence over artistic achievement. This year, as in the previous two, The New York Times Magazine has tried to eschew this notion of competition by saluting the performances that moved, surprised and thrilled us, regardless of whether they were nominated for awards.

Reese Witherspoon seems to embody the spirit of the times as much as anyone -- she is funny, serious when she has to be, making an apperant good faith effort at having a "normal" family and she is probably smarter than she lets on.

Several of the actors have been drawn upon by the photographers.

The NYTimes has a sort of Valentines Day afterglow story. There is a true/false pop-quiz to disabuse us of our marriage mythology. Generally speaking, it is agreed that marriage is on the upswing statistically, the good ol' days were not that great and people kind of like the traditional marriage paradigm.

Everyone agrees that marriage isn't what it used to be, and everyone is quite right. But most of what "everyone knows" about what matrimony used to be and just how it has changed is wrong.

The divorce rate is down and the number of people who will celebrate a 40th wedding anniversery is greater than ever.

Someone, please, inform the Swedish.

Is that Bergmans signature?!

It is now easier than ever to gather evidence of our own existence.

In her bedroom in Lubbock, Tex., Ms. Adams, 21, tried out a variety of poses — coy, friendly, sultry, goofy — in the kind of performance young people have engaged in privately for generations before a mirror. But Ms. Adams's mirror was a Web cam, and her journey of self-expression, documented in five digital self-portraits, was soon visible to the 56 million registered users of MySpace.

"Everyone's a little narcissistic," Ms. Adams said.

Narcissism would be the desire to look at one's own image. It would seem that assuming that 56 million other people demand fresh photographs of us takes it up a few other levels.

Egocentrism strikes again! We always think we're understood but we seldom are.

(I'm not being sarcastic.)

I have long relied on the Simpsons as my childrens main source of education in cultural literacy. The show is laced with an abundance of film, literature, art and philosophy references. I have always said that I would rather they watch a good tv show than read a bad book. I now have science to back up my idiocy.

From the 1966 Coleman Report, the landmark study of educational opportunity commissioned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Gentzkow and Shapiro got 1965 test-score data for almost 300,000 kids. They looked for evidence that greater exposure to television lowered test scores. They found none. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young.

We may be able to chalk this up to the "everything you thought was bad for you is good for you" trend, but it was pretty clear from the study that the big factor in education and advancement was socio-economic -- kids from higher income families did better in school and life despite watching more tv than their less advantaged counterparts.

The article in Slate.

The last time the Stones threw a huge free concert, things did not go so well. The stage was a war zone and several of the supporting bands were unable to get through their sets. Marty Balin was knocked out on stage during his performance. Yet, there was nothing funnier than a bunch of stoned hippies trying to gain control of an unruly crowd using "grooviness" as their only tool. Grace Slick was particularly idiotic.

"Gimme Shelter" is one of the great concert films of the time. It is a remarkable deconstruction of some of the most ruthless aspects of that day in Altamont, New
York.

I found this matter of fact recounting of the days events in 2006 Rio as somewhat surprising:

Police officers on Sunday continued to patrol the upscale Copacabana district, which was still crowded with tourists who stuck around to enjoy the beach.

Civil defense officials said nearly 500 people received minor medical treatment during and after the two-hour-long show on Saturday.

The most serious cases were three stabbing incidents that took place during robbery attempts, but none of the victims reportedly suffered life-threatening wounds.

There were three stabbings at the Rio show and it's recounted rather matter-of-factly. There was one stabbing at Altamont and the sixties came to a crashing end. Granted, the stabbing resulted in a death but the Rio stabbings have had absolutely zero cultural resonance. The tone of the whole thing is -- those scrappy old sexagenarians are still at it, ain't they something.

Was security provided by the Hell's Angels working for beer?

The city deployed 10,000 police officers for the concert -- about three times the usual contingent for the traditional New Year's festival -- as well as 600 firefighters, civil defense workers and lifeguards.

Perhaps the key to the relitively well-behaved crowd was the Stones crowd-pleasing song selection -- they stuck to the old hits in the two hour set.

UPDATE: Vincent Canby's review of Gimme Shelter.

The British film award gave many of it's top honors to "Brokeback Mountain".

"Brokeback Mountain," already a hot favorite for next month's Hollywood Oscars, was the big star of the night at the British Film Academy awards on Sunday, scooping four BAFTAs.

The gay cowboy love story won the coveted Best Film Award, Ang Lee was picked as Best Director, Jake Gyllenhaal was chosen as Best Supporting Actor and it also won the Best Adapted Screenplay statuette.

Ang Lee is an great director, who has made some amazing films. Check out "The Ice Storm". I just do not know anyone, personelly, who has seen this film. Are people throwing themselves behind it because it's a gay themed film? If one says any line from the preview, laughter is evoked. If you add "Brokeback" to anything you have another instant joke.

This is a film targeted at a very marginilized audience and has to seem "normal" to get enough viewers to be significant. Thus everyone is programed to say,"it's a great love story". It remains to be seen whether this will start a trend in gay films.

A Starbucks chantico was probably the best non-alcoholic drink on the planet. I was entirely shocked by it's discontinuation. I had gone into a few Portland area Starbucks and was being told that they were being discontinued. This tiny, overpriced, insanely rich and chocolatey beverage was one of the great pleasures of my life. It was a genuine extravagent treat. Were people not drinking them? Why were they not drinking them?

People stopped ordering them because they couldn't "customize" them:

In the end, that limitation irked customers who are used to dictating not only the size of their lattes and cappuccinos, but also whether they want regular or decaf coffee, non-fat, whole or soy milk, sugar-free or regular flavor shots, and even extras like whipped cream and caramel.

"It was something that customers did like, but they wanted to be able to do something else with it," Hilowitz said. "We wanted to go back and give customers what they are looking for."

So, what a fascinating little piece of sociology. People enjoy going into an establishment, barking out a bunch of customizing instructions and overpaying for the trouble. It was one size and one flavor. If something is just insanely rich, sweet and delicious, that is not a reason enough to go into a Starbucks.

You could, of course, make your own at home and customize away!

There is something I really enjoyed about watching the film Capote: One sits in a theater and watches a fictionilized account of the writing of a book. The book is a new type of writing -- a true fiction or non-fiction novel. So we have a movie that contains actors portraying real people in the creation of a fictionalization of a real event.

In the film Capote pays a bell boy, portrayed by an actor, on a train to tell him how great a writer he is in front of his research assistant, Harper Lee. At Lee's party celebrating the publication of her book, To Kill A Mockingbird, Capote mopes around and mutters to himself about Lee's more beloved and maybe better book,"I don't see what the big deal is".

On talk shows the actress who portrays Lee, Catherine Keener, has said that because she was unable to meet the reclusive Harper Lee to prepare for the role, she had to make up what she thought she would be like. She than goes on to say that after the release of the film Lee spoke to her to tell her how accurately she was portrayed in the film.

In another weird little tango between fact and fiction, real life killer Robert Blake plays the roll of the murderer in the original film adaptation of In Cold Blood.

My memories of Capote, the real Capote, was as a funny little man on gameshows and talkshows during the seventies. Was he on Matchgame? One of the criticisms about Hoffman's performance was that Capote was just so darn easy to imitate. I say he should win something. I completely forgot that I was watching Hoffman.

UPDATE: Hoffman was just on Letterman. He said he is tired of doing the voice. To fulfill a drunken college vow he will deliver his acceptance speech in "bark talking". Now I have to watch the Oscars.