The Pop View

From Blye, Private Eye (1976), by Nicholas Pileggi

The South Bronx, often referred to as Fort Apache by the policemen assigned to the area, is an urban war zone. To live there is to live in a nightmare. The streets are ruled by addicts, drunks, and psychotic adolescents, and for the countless poor forced to live in the area, a simple stroll to the corner store for a quart of milk can be a perilous adventure. When not motivated for profit, the area’s shootings, stabbings, and maimings are often the result of minor and imagined slights over parking spaces or jostlings on crowded streets. It was in the South Bronx that the owner of a luncheonette was shot and killed when he failed to provide the apple pie his customer had ordered. It is in the South Bronx where thwarted lovers make a habit of pouring gasoline outside the doors of former girl friends and then lighting fires of vengeance in the night. Since most of these fires are started in the rickety slum tenements built before 1900 they account for the deaths of dozens of innocent people every year. It is an area that has been abandoned by everyone lucky enough to escape.

Tags: Irwin Blye, private detective, Nicholas Pileggi, South Bronx

The lead track off Mike Doughty’s new album Golden Delicious is called “Fort Hood.” It’s not an anti-war song, but it is about the young soldiers who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and about Doughty’s feelings about them. Doughty grew up a military brat and had first-hand experience with Vietnam veterans.

I smell blood and there’s no blood around
The blanked out eyes and the blanked out sound
I see them coming back; they’re motionless in an airport lounge

Let the sunshine in
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine in

You should be getting stoned with a prom dress girl
You should still believe in an endless world
You should blast Young Jeezy with your friends in a parking lot

He wrote about the origins of the song on his blog and further explained that “Fort Hood is the base in Texas that’s lost the most people in Iraq and Afghanistan.” He also appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered back in October and spoke in more detail about his visit to Walter Reed Hospital, his father’s 40+ years in the military, his childhood on an Army post.

His mother talked his father in going together to see the movie Hair (1979). More recently, Doughty came across a recording of the 1971 Japanese cast recording of the musical and the chorus of “Let the Sunshine In” hit him rather emotionally. He ended up borrowing the chorus for “Fort Hood.” (You can find that cast album on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.)

Anyway, the song’s important enough to Doughty that he and director Bex Schwartz made a video on their own. It’s a seemingly happy, peppy video about a very unhappy subject.

Tags: Mike Doughty, Fort Hood, war, Iraq, Afghanistan

This American Life is possibly the finest show on radio. And since its debut on Showtime last year, it’s also a great television show.

Have you seen these promotions for watching rock concerts or the Metropolitan Opera at your local movie theater? I have. I think I’ve read that the first season of Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD was pretty successful. The second season increased from six broadcasts to eight and it looks like they’re doing an encore broadcast of La Bohème this month.

So, I’ve been curious, but have never really been tempted to attend. But then I heard This American Life promoting one of these live events. Here’s the AP story:

Tickets are on sale for “This American Life - Live!” which will be broadcast in high-definition to cinemas nationwide Thursday evening. Originating from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, it will include previews of the TV series, as well as [host Ira] Glass to talk about it.

So, kind of on a whim, I decided to go tonight. It was 20 bucks, but I figured the TAL guys deserved it. I frankly didn’t expect much of a crowd in Columbia, MD (a suburb of B-More), but the theater was packed.

Bottom line: I loved it. Well worth the money. There were some clips from the radio show and some upcoming segments from the TV show. There was also a kind of “blooper” clip that showed an interview that included cutaways to Glass interviewing the subject — hilariously bad. We also got a real bonus: a story cut from the series for reasons of time.

“We found some eighth- and ninth-graders who decide they’re going to be comedians, so they do stand-up for a summer,” Glass explains. “It doesn’t sound like much of a premise, but, truthfully, hearing them talk about it is amazing, and watching the stand-up routines is pretty interesting. It’s very funny and very moving.”

It was a really great story, told by TAL regular Jonathan Goldstein. One highlight is an earnest instructor explaining to the aspiring kids that it’s more important for comedians to be likeable than funny. David Rakoff also made a cameo appearance, offering a solution to that awkward situation when you have to introduce two people and you can’t remember their names (He feigns a coughing fit). I also thought I saw Sarah Vowell in the audience, but I can’t be sure.

A big chunk of time went to audience questions, both emailed and live. Ira Glass answered a question about how the show is done and pointed out they do a lot like The Onion staff does: Start with a ton of ideas, weed through them mercilessly, throw stuff out, end up with quality. This ties in a little with my comments about reality television, in that many TV producers just want to get the material done and get it on the air and quality often requires time and endless creative editing (and the strength to kill off weak material).

It’s also worth pointing out that listening to the radio is generally a solo activity. I listen to TAL through the podcast, which is an even more solitary pursuit. It was pleasant to gather with other local people, united in our appreciation of Ira Glass and his gifted colleagues. Pretty mixed crowd, too.

The new season starts on Showtime this Sunday.

Tags: This American Life, Ira Glass, Showtime

While I was out in California, I spent a fair amount of time watching what my kids wanted to watch, which means I saw a whole lot of reality television. Everything from Jon & Kate Plus 8 to Top Chef to The Hills to Rock of Love to Hell’s Kitchen.

It was a real indoctrination. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the reality genre. I’ve seen a fair amount of it and there are some shows I really like. When you watch a lot of it all at once, it becomes clear that there’s a glut in the marketplace. There’s a whole lot of reality shows that are nothing but clones of reality shows. Not only does the original version struggle to remain fresh, but it has to compete against the copies. The dating shows all blur together: The Bachelor seems only slightly classier, but you can’t tell Rock of Love (with Bret Michaels) from Flavor of Love (with Flavor Flav). And if Project Runway and Top Chef are entertaining, by the time it dribbles down to Shear Genius and Step it Up and Dance, something is lost. (That also goes for Bravo’s tired-even-before-it-started series of shows about dysfunctional people, like Blow Out and Work Out.)

The big problem is that just about every reality shows comes across as phony to me. The shows act like the star actually lives in that huge mansion (it’s rented). The casts acts like there’s not a huge production crew standing around, making things happen. The story acts like events happened by accident, as opposed to being set up, and acts like events happened in the sequence you’re seeing (highly unlikely). The first blow-up between a couple of drama queens seems dramatic, but when every episode of every show includes entertaining conflict between people, then I can’t take any of it seriously.

Take a look at this article from The Guardian last year. It was written during a period when British television was going through a series of scandals, which prompted me to write this column on the problems of reality TV. In their piece, Janine Gibson & Stephen Armstrong went through a whole series of issues from British television, including some that seemed fraudulent bordering on criminal and some that seemed like mild attempts to keep the curtain drawn over the production process. They raise a great question.

If Gordon Ramsay didn’t spear a single one of the three very big fish he waved around in triumph; if, in fact, they were caught by the professional standing next to him, then shouldn’t we ask why he didn’t say so? People in television think that question should always be asked the other way round - why should they have to spell out how they got the shot?

As they say, there’s real reality and TV reality.

In television-world, the only thing that matters is what it looks like on screen. Whether the TV truth is what actually happened off screen is irrelevant. And that applies to actual events as well as constructed reality. Programme makers know that if you pitch up anywhere with a camera, people will immediately begin to perform for you, so it doesn’t matter what was occurring before or after. Similarly, if you’re making the reality, after a while it never occurs to you to maintain its integrity if the story could be made that bit more dramatic with a little tweak.

So, there are two great temptations driving almost all television.

Keep the hand of production invisible. Act like the host is making up those words, instead of reading off a teleprompter. Pretend the people stumbled across the location, instead of being the product of location casting. Pretend like people were chosen randomly or based on talent, instead of being the end result of long casting sessions, with everyone selected carefully for dramatic potential.
Always make it better. Isn’t a same how messy life is? Let’s clean it up. This would be so much more dramatic if we had the shot of him coming up to the door, but we didn’t get that shot. That’s okay, just have him do it again. It would look better if it felt like all this stuff happened in one day, so let’s edit it that way. This shot works well leading into this shot, even those two events happened different days in different locations. That’s okay, we’ll fix it in post.

That’s partly what makes someone like Anthony Bourdain so entertaining. If something gets screwed up, he acknowledges it on camera. I love that on Throwdown with Bobby Flay, you see Flay in his kitchen working with his assistant to come up with the recipe, since it shows that these guys don’t do it alone. I think TV benefits from an occasional touch of real reality, warts and all.

Tags: reality TV, The Bachelor, Rock of Love, Flavor of Love, Anthony Bourdain, Bobby Flay, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Top Chef, The Hills, Hell’s Kitchen.

Via Soul Sides, I found out about Muxtape, a new site that allows you to upload MP3s and then create a mixtape online.

A CNET article examined the legality of the service, which apparently is relying on a “hosting on behalf of users” copyright infringement defense. Here’s an interview with Justin Ouellette, the man who created Muxtape.

True confession: I made more than my fair share of mixtapes in the Eighties, although I can’t remember the last time I did so. Maybe Muxtape is a good thing, although it only lets you load 12 songs and doesn’t have liner notes.

Anyway, I’ve created my first Muxtape based on an idea I’ve had for a while to re-create Jay-Z’s The Black Album using remixes. I fell two tracks short of the whole album, but you get the idea.

Tags: Muxtape, mixtapes

I want to follow up on the post below, where I spoke of the collision/collusion between pop culture and politics. In their most recent diavlog at bloggingheads.tv, Robert Wright discussed the “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” incident with Mickey Kaus.

Watch this exchange where Wright (who has no idea who Jay-Z is and clearly has never heard the song) says we should “leave aside the alleged connection” to the song. He then argues that the gesture only plays to those who would vote for Obama and risks alienating others.

But he misses the whole point. Remember the Republican debate when Jack Bauer was evoked? In part, referring to pop culture is a populist move. But it’s also useful shorthand. 24 is a popular show. The show’s fans love Jack Bauer and his Git-R-Done attitude. Tom Tancredo said that when we face a terrorist threat in the real world, as some believe we do today, he would “look for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.” That remark would resonate for 24 viewers.

Imagine discussing Ronald Reagan’s speech to the American Business Conference in 1985 when he threatened to veto any tax increase with the phrase, “Go ahead — make my day.” Suppose a political analyst had started by noting that Reagan was allegedly referring to a line spoken by Clint Eastwood character Harry Callahan in the 1983 film Sudden Impact, then dismissed the connection and stated that Reagan was possibly alienating voters with his aggressive attitude. You’d be missing the point.

That’s why we all use catchphrases and refer to songs and movies. Your friends have heard and seen them too and they instantly understand what you mean and you share a common bond.

Can a politician risk alienating people who don’t like 24 or Jay-Z? Sure. It’s a calculation you make. That’s why I was applauding Obama for making a connection with hip-hop.

Tags: Barack Obama, Jay-Z, Robert Wright, Mickey Kaus, pop culture, politics

My new Spot-on column is up: A Revolutionary Soundtrack. It examines the relationship between politics and pop music and looks at an example from a few weeks ago when Barack Obama channeled Jay-Z.

A lot of pop music ignores politics altogether. Some pop music is very earnest about pop music. You don’t often see artists operate in Bono’s manner, very knowledgeable and very pragmatic. In contrast, politics almost always ignores pop music, unless there’s a point to be scored.

One issue I didn’t really address is that candidates don’t just stay away from pop music because it can be hazardous, they also don’t often sound very comfortable when they do try to talk about it. It’s one thing to wax about Springsteen’s lyrics, because he captures the concerns of the working man. Let’s hear you rave about much you loved Judas Priest in high school. Watch this video interview of Obama on the topic of hip-hop. He sounds like a hip-hop head to me, loving the form and yet being aware of its faults, limitations and possibilities. That’s a fan.

To help you appreciate the material, here’s some background music: two remixes of Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” The first mixes Hov’s vocals with RJD2’s remix of El-P’s song “Lazerfaces.” The second version does so by mixing in Weezer’s “Surf Wax America.”

Dirt Off Your Shoulder [El-P “Lazerfaces Remix”] - Bazooka Joe

Surf Wax Off Your Shoulder - Jay-Zeezer

Tags: Barack Obama, 2008 Presidential election, Jay-Z, Dirt Off Your Shoulder

There’s the common phrase “unintended consequences.” That usually conveys a negative, something harmful you hadn’t anticipated.

But sometimes a new piece of technology has a benefit you hadn’t anticipated. For example, I got high-speed cable modem service when it first became available. The touted benefit was speed — so much faster than dial-up. Well, yeah, but I wasn’t doing much that really required that kind of bandwidth. Whoop-de-doo, you didn’t have to wait 5-10 seconds for the graphics to load. But what made a bigger impact was the fact that the broadband connection was on all the time. That meant I left my computer on all the time, so whenever a thought popped into my mind, I could walk in and jump online to look something up.

I got a BlackBerry for work five years ago and eventually I got used to using it to hop onto the mobile version of Google at a moment’s notice. I have irritated many of my friends and family members while interrupting a conversation to whip out my CrackBerry and say, “Hold on, I’ll look it up.” I mean, if at a moment’s notice you could know, why wouldn’t you? (Answer: Because, who cares?)

So my old iPod, which I got for Christmas ‘05, bit the dust. Failed logic board, they told me. After much struggle, I decided to replace it with an iPod Touch. Basically, it’s like an iPhone, without the phone and the camera. I suppose the two big draws were the flash drive (which means no moving parts) and that cool interface. Those things are nice. The Cover Flow View is fun. They lost some of the navigation; for example, you can’t access the show descriptions on podcasts, which is a weird oversight.

But here comes the unintended benefit. It has wireless access. You can pull up the weather, check your stocks, visit a special version of YouTube (browser doesn’t support Flash), shop from the iTunes store. Or you can just visit the Web, anytime there’s WiFi. And it’s a pretty nice experience. The screen is only 3.5" diagonally, but you can view it vertically or horizontally — just turn the Touch and the image rotates. That zoom-in feature for the photos also works in the browser; you make a pinching gesture on the screen and spread your fingertips.

You can get used to carrying it around with you, whipping it out to see if there’s a WiFi connection. You start wondering why there aren’t more free WiFi hotspots.

I have WiFi in my house and the Touch means the Internet can be in my pocket, not even requiring me to go upstairs to the computer. I hadn’t realized what a big deal this would be.

I’ll throw in one more quick example. While out in L.A. recently, I was driving my daughter’s Prius. Yeah, it’s a hybrid and it’s a small car that would probably get great mileage anyway. It comes with GPS, as many cars do today. But the important feature turned out to be that you don’t need to use the key physically. You don’t have to push a button to open the door; as long as it’s on your person, the doors unlock as you approach. You don’t need to put the key in the ignition, you just press the power button to turn the car on. I’ve seen ads for other cars with this feature.

What this means is that you can walk up to the trunk with both hands full of groceries and it unlocks by itself. You walk over to the car, which unlocks itself, slip behind the wheel and press a button on the dash to fire it up. So awesome.

It’s the little things…

UPDATE: Turns out Deborah Klosky said more or less the same thing two months ago. Only she more cleverly pointed out how different Seinfeld would have been with an iPhone.

Tags: iPod Touch, Prius, technology, consumer electronics, gadgets

From time to time, I write about Southern California, where I am from. I haven’t lived there since 1989, but I’ve never stopped feeling like “Los Angeles” (by which I mean the general area, not the specific city) is my home town. I was born in Pomona, which is located about 30 miles due east of downtown L.A. I have also lived in Valencia (30 miles NW) and Glendale (less than 10 due N).

Because I haven’t lived there in such a long time, I had developed an ambivalence about the town, part of learning to see it through an outsider’s eyes. I have two kids, in their Twenties, who live there now, and they keep it a little at arm’s distance. They see young locals who carry a real sense of entitlement and they see the shallowness and materialism that gets shoved in your face. Of course, there’s a lot more to the people. But I understand.

My kids had been living on the Westside, but they recently moved to Glendale. I’ve been out there a bit lately (see below) and spent a few weeks helping out and running around town. It’s amazing how much Glendale has changed and yet there’s a lot that’s familiar. I’d heard that Armenians were now a big part of the population and I found that to be really true (there had been some Armenians at Glendale High School when I was there). It was great to go to a lot of my old favorite eating spots. I love Zankou Chicken and was surprised to read a new article on The Zankou Chicken Murders, which I had never heard of.

L.A. Magazine is running this competition between The 64 Greatest Things About L.A. to determine the single greatest thing about L.A. Kinda dumb, but that list of things contains much that I love about L.A. I’ve done a bunch of them, but how have I gotten to my mid 40’s and not yet been to Roscoe’s House of Chicken’ n Waffles or the Bradbury Building?

Now that I probably won’t be spending so much time on the Westside, it’s probably time to pay tribute to car washes. The ones in L.A. just seem to be swanker than those in Maryland and New York. Maybe it’s not true. But recall that Car Wash is about an L.A. car wash. I fell in love with the Red Carpet Car Wash in Manhattan Beach. It’s all in the details.

The side of the business that runs along Marine Avenue is lined with Rosemary bushes, which were in bloom when I was there in October of last year. The smell is heavenly. Inside the building, you can get a chair massage from a vendor. There’s a pond with lily pads and Japanese goldfish, with roses around the water. It’s a little spot of paradise in an industrial environment. It’s a place to love your car.

Tags: Los Angeles, California, Glendale, Zankou Chicken, car wash

When the anthology Grindhouse came out last year, my friend Dan and I had a little bit of a mini-debate on the relative merits of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Dan took Rodriguez and I took Tarantino. If you take a look at this previous post, I laid out the likely merits of my case. Mind you , neither of us had seen the movie at that point.

Grindhouse is one long movie, containing two feature-length films and a handful of trailers. Each feature was issued separately on DVD. I purchased them, but hadn’t gotten around to watching them. Recently, the theatrical version of Grindhouse appeared on Starz, so I sat down to view it.

As I had suspected, the whole thing is pretty clunky. Part of this is based on intent: If you set out to mimic a set of flawed movies, you’re probably going to make a flawed movie. In addition, if you set out to parody or pay homage, it can be difficult to create something of originality. As I pointed out, Rodriguez seems content to make simple genre films, while Tarantino seems incapable of making a straight genre flick.

I also watched the first hour of the uncut DVD version of Planet Terror with Rodriguez’s commentary and a few things became apparent. The theatrical version got cut down too much. There are a few transitional bits in the longer version that made the story work better. It’s also clear that Rodriguez winged the story. For example, I really hated the early crucial stand-off at a military base. The writing felt sloppy: Bruce Willis’ first line is “Where’s the shit?” The plot points seemed confusing. In his commentary, Rodriguez admits that he’s had the scene for a while and kept trying to find ways to stick it in his movie. The plot also gets excessively silly a few times, such as when the character of Wray rides a pocket bike (a kind of miniature motorcycle).

The last few years have shown that it’s possible to make intelligent zombie movies, so I was disappointed that the creatures weren’t used well in Planet Terror. A couple times they rip out their victim’s brains, but not on a consistent basis. In contrast, it’s clearly established in Return of the Living Dead that the zombies seek to eat the brains of the living. Sometimes our heroes in Planet Terror have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it, but the “sickos” are sometimes dropped by being stabbed or shot elsewhere.

On the other hand, Planet Terror is structured like a conventional horror movie, so I can understand why that approach might be preferable to the route Tarantino took in Death Proof. He does a twist on a slasher movie when, instead of watching a victim stalked for about 5-10 minutes before she’s killed, she hangs out with her pursuer for 40 minutes and they make small talk first. This also means that instead of seeing a series of killings, you only get two attempts, only one of which is successful.

It also feels like Tarantino does the same exact plot twice, taking two different approaches. The first time, a group of women are stalked and killed and the whole thing ends as tragedy. Even though it’s set in present-day Austin, it feels like the Seventies. In the second version, the group of women work in the film business. Their whole attitude seems more contemporary and they’re certainly strong independent gals. They not only work in film, but also talk about the movies, especially those with car stunts. They seem so aware of the conventions of films that they’re able to recognize the situation they’re in and seize control of the situation and take control. The very ending of the movie, when they catch the villain, comes across as a too-abrupt jump into the universe of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! On the other, it feels a lot like the phony tidy endings one often sees in the cinema.

(Can I mention in passing that, even though it’s a strong cast, that New Zealand stuntwoman and actress Zoë Bell practically steals the whole damn thing?)

So, I still respect both these directors, but Grindhouse was just a diversion. Back to work, men.

Tags: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Grindhouse