Quotulatiousness

September 14, 2009

Should publicly funded media be free?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:59

Let’s just set aside the whole question about whether the government should be even in the media-provider business* . . . if the government paid for it (that is, if you paid for it), shouldn’t it be available to you for free?

Let’s put aside my personal frustration at having my work locked away. The real question here is, since CBC content is funded by the public, shouldn’t the public own it? Or at least have access to it? Actually, the CBC archives are just the tip of the iceberg: the overwhelming majority of stuff made for Canadians with Canadians’ money is inaccessible to Canadians.

In Canada, movies are supported by Telefilm, TV by the Canadian Television Fund, books and art by The Canada Council for the Arts, and so on. But most of this stuff isn’t distributed very well or for very long, and you can only get your hands on a fraction of it.

So I want to put forth one more contrarian position: I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

Thoughts?

* No, they bloody shouldn’t be. IMO. YMMV, etc.

How to sell a film to a major studio

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:36

John Scalzi provides some helpful hints to the producers of Creation, who are complaining that they can’t get a US distributor to pick up the movie (because of all the Christian fundamentalists, y’see):

. . . leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.

The major US studios are no longer really tuned to distribute films like this in any event. Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The “oh, it’s too controversial for Americans” comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer flummoxed that such an obvious bit of Oscar-trollery such as this film has been to date widely ignored by the people he assumed would fall over themselves to have such a thing.

September 11, 2009

If you look hard enough for racist comments, you’ll eventually find . . .

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

. . . that you end up in rather ridiculous situations like this one:

In my column about Barack Obama’s health care speech yesterday, I described the president’s “we will call you out” warning to lying Republicans as “a nearly Snoop Doggesque display,” linking to a great new Snoop video whose chorus is “we will shut you down.”

DING! DING! DING! We have a racial nut! Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh is on the case:

Every time I think I’m exaggerating the nature of the racial nuttiness that Obama faces, an ostensibly tolerant, smart guy like Welch does something boneheaded like this. What in God’s name does Snoop Dogg have to do with Barack Obama (besides the obvious). Snoop’s chorus is some variation on, “I run this town, act loud, get wild, we’ll shut you down!” Oh, I get it: Obama runs Washington, and he threatened to call out people who lie about his proposals, and…that’s the same thing?

September 10, 2009

Beatlemania? I’ll sit this one out, thanks

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Stephen Robb looks at those poor, unenlightened barbarians (like me) who aren’t just wetting themselves with joy over the release of the remastered Beatles collection:

James Bond apparently hated The Beatles.

In Goldfinger, he advises Jill Masterson that “drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees” is “as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs”.

The Bond girl’s own verdict on the Fab Four, unfortunately, is not recorded before her untimely demise on the inside of a coating of gold paint.

That was 1964, when 007 may have felt threatened by that year’s global success of The Beatles’ first movie, A Hard Day’s Night.

I’m not a “hater” . . . there are a few Beatles songs I still like, but of the (quick check on the iPhone) 2254 songs currently residing in my collection, zero of ’em are by the Beatles. If I want to hear ’em, there’s plenty of “oldies” radio stations (real and virtual) offering them on regular rotation.

And I always liked that line from “London Calling“: All that phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.

September 4, 2009

How many blog checkmarks would you need?

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:38

Jacob Sullum looks at the quaint, old-fashioned notion of internal fact-checking:

When I was a “reporter-researcher” at Fortune during college, the Time Inc. policy was that one verification by book was worth two verifications by newspaper. If I’m remembering the color scheme correctly, the former was a “red check,” which was good enough on its own, whereas the latter was a “black check,” acceptable only in pairs. I may have the colors reversed, but the point is that we all assumed books were more reliable than newspapers (or other periodicals). That was a mistake, I think. While some books categorized as nonfiction, such as reference works and peer-reviewed releases from academic presses, go through some sort of fact checking, the vast majority do not. (They are generally reviewed by lawyers with an eye toward possible libel issues, but you can get lots of things wrong without risking a lawsuit.) In fact, judging from the finished products, I’d say most books are barely edited, let alone checked for accuracy. By contrast, newspaper stories typically are reviewed by two or three editors before they see print. It’s true that books take longer to produce, which gives a conscientious author more time to catch mistakes. Then again, they are a lot longer than newspaper stories, so there is more room for error.

So, how many checkmarks (of a murky shade of orange) would be required for blog references? Can any blogger count that high?

August 31, 2009

Tase fast . . .

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:46

Radley Balko looks at the latest television travesty in the “reality” genre:

“There’s always a good time to use a Taser.”

So says Andrea, attractive single mom and one of the four stars of the new TLC reality show, The Police Women of Broward County. The trailer with the Taser quip then cuts to the show’s stars tackling suspects, putting knees into various backs, and pointing guns. Browse other clips on the TLC website, and it seems the network can’t make up its mind whether these women are sexpots with handcuffs or girls who want to be taken seriously for kicking just as much ass as the boys. A smug poster ad campaign for the show takes the the show’s identity problem to yet crasser heights. One ad reads, “Taser Time.” Another, “Cavity Search, Anyone?”

Of course, there isn’t “always a good time to use a Taser,” as the multitude of viral web videos depicting taserings of grandmothers, pregnant women, and children will attest. TLC’s ad campaign is offensive, though merely the latest iteration of a genre of television that trivializes the state’s use of force and makes a mockery of the criminal justice system.

I’ll take Radley’s word for it that the original Cops show was not as sensationalist and exploitative as the many successors that have aired since then. Even saying that, I had my doubts that “reality” TV was an improvement over the more traditional “cop” or “investigator” shows on regular network TV.

Fox then plumbed new depths of depravity last year with Smile . . . You’re Under Arrest!, featuring Maricopa County, Arizona’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio. In a premise that evokes the old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Running Man or Mike Judge’s dystopian parody Idiocracy, Sheriff Joe teams up with a crew of comedy writers and improv actors to create elaborate scenarios where “unaware criminal suspects with outstanding warrants are lured out of hiding in this high-energy prank show.”

Showing my cultural ignorance, I’d never heard of this show, but just on the basis of this description, I can imagine lots of ways it might go horribly wrong. If it hasn’t yet, I’m sure it’s got all the potential to do so in the future (assuming that it’s still on the air).

As for the SWAT programs, America has unfortunately grown comfortable with, or at least accustomed to, the idea of using SWAT teams to kick down doors and conduct volatile, confrontational raids for consensual, nonviolent crimes. We’ve seen a massive increase in these raids, from about 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to some 50,000 per year by the early 2000s. The popularity of SWAT shows didn’t cause the problem, but their popularity is sympomatic of it, and they can only further ingrain the troubling notion that there’s nothing wrong with sending a unit of cops dressed like soldiers into private homes to arrest nonviolent drug offenders. And of course, we’re never going to see the wrong-door raids, or police mistakes that result in fatalities.

Cop reality shows glamorize all the wrong aspects of police work. Their trailers depict lots of gun pointing, door-busting, perp-chasing, and handcuffing. Forget the baton-twirling Officer Friendly. To the extent that the shows aid in the recruiting of new police officers, they’re almost certainly pulling people attracted to the wrong parts of the job./p>

That last part is probably true. There are no other jobs open to the general public that provide so many opportunities to “go wrong” yet not face the realistic risk of punishment (the blue wall of silence will protect a fellow officer until — and sometimes well beyond — that officer being proven guilty of serious criminal activity). Any criticism of the police seems to be taken as a criticism of all police, and the “civilian” is always assumed to be wrong.

August 27, 2009

Now it’s Star Trek‘s turn

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:59

John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:

Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.

Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.

It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.

V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.

QotD: Taliban propaganda, as abetted by the mainstream media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Well, surprise, surprise: yesterday’s VBIED attack in the city of Kandahar killed at least 41, and wounded over 80 more people. All of them were civilians. Every single one.

And yet still, in the AP piece above, you read the phrase “Taliban spokesmen were not immediately available for comment…” What if these lying sacks of shit had been available for comment, folks? Would we have been reading their misinformation in black and white, juxtaposed credibly against BGen Tremblay’s words in a pathetic bow to “balanced reporting” — like somehow both should be weighed equally? You bet we would.

I’m tired of it. I’m sick and tired of our media giving them a soapbox from which to proclaim what is clearly, plainly, and obviously pure propaganda designed to attack our will as part of a well planned and executed information operations campaign. I’m tired of our journalists willfully ignoring the fact that they’re not just observing the war, they’re affecting it with their reporting. I’m bone-tired of them refusing to take steps to ensure their powerful voice isn’t used against the very system of government that allows them such unfettered speech in the first place.

Damian “Babbling” Brooks, “Real propaganda”, The Torch, 2009-08-26

Kids will be kids

Filed under: Britain, Media, Railways, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Even when they’re adults . . . James May tried to set a record, but the kids just got in the way:

An attempt by Top Gear‘s James May to break the world’s longest model railway record has failed amid claims that vandals and thieves tampered with the track.

The long-haired presenter joined 400 enthusiasts to build the miniature railway stretching 10 miles from Barnstaple to Bideford, in North Devon.

He was recording the attempt yesterday for his new show James May’s Toy Stories.

The team hoped that a train would run successfully along the length of the track, built on the picturesque Tarka Trail.

But their hard work was hampered as parts of the track were taken and coins dropped on the line, blowing the battery. Even the battery was stolen.

H/T to Jeff Shultz.

August 26, 2009

Print media’s problems

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:04

Colby Cosh has concerns about the direction in which the newspapers have been moving:

Some days I think print media should die even if I would too

Our business would have a lot more credibility if we spent less time giving each other awards and concentrated on handing out boobie prizes for uncritical, gormless stuff like the St. Albert Gazette‘s breathlessly excited coverage of a new local math curriculum for primary schools that “covers far fewer concepts.” As I get older I grow more cowardly about making enemies in a rapidly contracting business, plus I’m taking the piss from a somewhat higher summit than I used to; but seriously, how do some people sleep at night?

August 25, 2009

QotD: The Race War that Isn’t

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:15

These are indeed “profoundly troubling” charges, which makes one wonder why they’re being bandied about with such flippant regard for historical plausibility.

The “jackboot” analogy, for starters, breaks down at the ankle: The footwear was favored by enforcers for totalitarian governments, not random Ron Paul supporters flashing Thomas Jefferson quotes outside political events. Weimar-era brownshirts were an organized Nazi paramilitary group perpetrating calculated violence against political opponents in a hyperinflationary, recently humiliated country that had never enjoyed liberal democracy; not a dozen-plus scattered gun nuts in one of the world’s oldest democracies peacably (if jarringly) exercising their Second Amendment rights by keeping their guns holstered (not “brandishing” them, as Rich and countless others have claimed). The last actual lynching in America, depending on who you ask, took place in 1981; the atrocious practice had been all but dead since the 1960s.

To fear the Weimarization of America, or the return of lynching, is to fundamentally lack confidence in the very real progress the United States has made over the past several decades. Conditions have improved exponentially even since the post-lynching 1980s, when I was coming of voting age. Back then there was still a politics to be had in bashing Martin Luther King, supporting apartheid South Africa, whipping up fears of black ultra-violence, and otherwise appealing openly to white resentment against blacks. It was gross, it was reckless, it led to terrible policies, and it was the reason I permanently swore off joining the Republican Party. It’s also largely an artifact of the past.

Matt Welch, “The Race War That Isn’t: Media anxieties over ‘lynch mobs’ and ‘brownshirts’ demonstrate a telling lack of faith in contemporary America”, Reason Online, 2009-08-25

Update, 27 August: Matt Welch posted a follow up to the article from which this QotD was abstracted. He writes: “The assertion that the Esquire piece was promoting the “racial-resentment” narrative was inaccurate, and I have corrected the article accordingly.”

August 23, 2009

Happy 5th anniversary to Gods of the Copybook Headings

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:12

Publius notes the fifth anniversary of the blog:

The critic, of which this blog has many, may say that The Gods of the Copybook Headings is Publius’ Star Trek V. Publius being Publius. Rambling historical asides. Rants against the government. Circuitous pieces of logic that somehow link obscure references to The Fountainhead, Reflections on the Revolution in France and a rather too detailed understanding of Trek arcana — though I am piker compared to people I have met. Trust me. It all makes sense. Just another few paragraphs, it will all come together. As we note this blog’s fifth anniversary — or blogversary as I called it after year one — one is compelled to ask how have we lasted so long. I say “we” not referring to Publius’ multiple personalities, or imperial sense of self, but you and me.

I keep writing because I’m an eccentric. It’s either this or talk to the TV. Whatever person is sitting next me, they tuned out awhile back. I sometimes have no idea why any of you keep showing up. Some of you, I know, are fellow eccentrics. Objectivists, monarchists, atheists, non-mainline Christians, Anglophiles and others caught in a kind of time warp. Pardon the pun. I say eccentric as in “deviating from the recognized or customary character.” Ever been told you were born at the wrong time? Yeap, I get it about once a week. Right now JS Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for 2 Harpsichords is playing on my iTunes. Exactly. The word you’re looking for, the WFB word anyway, is discomfiture. Sometimes you’re embarrassed, sometimes you’re embarrassed for other people.

August 21, 2009

For fans of The Clash

Filed under: Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:34

Today only, you can download the Sandinista Project for free:

Joe Strummer of the Clash would have been 57 today. So today seems like a good day to give Clash fans a present.

It’s been two years. Does anyone remember The Sandinista Project?

In May 2007, Abe Bradshaw and the crazy geniuses at 2 Minutes 59 Records let me put out a borderline-insane track-by-track tribute to the Clash’s Sandinista!, with a different artist performing each of the album’s 36 songs. (You can read Abe’s version of the origin myth here.) We received mostly positive reviews from publications ranging from The New York Times to Pasadena Weekly, although someone told me that Robert Christgau hated it. More important, it was a great experience: I got to work with many of my favorite performers and create something.

The Sandinista Project is free for a day

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

Stratford: Canada’s gayest town?

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:36

It’s definitely the slow news season: the Ottawa Sun summarizes an article in Outlooks magazine entitled “The Gayest Small Town in Canada”:

Travel editor Randall Shirley came to see a show or two and met with some of Stratford’s prominent gay and lesbian residents and business owners, some of whom were featured in the article.

The piece — “The Gayest Small Town in Canada” — appears in the July/August edition in print and online. The national magazine is geared toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) population.

Shirley wasn’t surprised to find a relatively large gay and lesbian community in the southwestern Ontario city of 30,000, but what did surprise him was the openness he found there.

“Growing up in a small town myself, I know how difficult it could be. I was just really surprised at how open they are about it,” he said from his Vancouver home.

He noted the artistic community connected to the theatre is a draw for GBLT visitors but Stratford is unique because it’s in the middle of a rural area.

Okay, perhaps Ottawa is far enough removed from Stratford that this might come as a surprise to Sun readers, but really? Stratford has two industries: pig farming and the Festival. Historically, the theatre has been one of the few areas where being gay was not an automatic career-destroyer. Stratford’s theatre industry is huge for the town … it literally put the place on the map. Put these facts together, and you’re surprised that the town is gay friendly (or, at the very least, nowhere near as gay-hostile as a typical small town in a rural area)?

August 20, 2009

It must be a slow week in movies . . .

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:14

. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom:

I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.

R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”

C-3PO
Can’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.

And the crowd goes wild.

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