At the Financial Times, “Doubt cast on survival of EMI.”
Hey, John Lennon told us to “Imagine no possessions” — and I don’t recall the Liverpudlian leftist exempting his own record company from the list.
Meanwhile, at the Wall Street Journal, “Sony Pictures to Cut 450 Jobs.”
Given Hollywood’s obsession with global warming, that should make DiCaprio and company awfully happy.
Maybe even part-time filmmakers John Kerry* and Al Gore.
PJTV’s crew really went to town on their latest video; its ultra-slick production values feature everything but the kitchen sink — including Pat Boone to kick it off:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
If only the president would heed its timely message.
I still miss C-Span’s Booknotes, which was must-watch viewing for me in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but this is the next best thing. As Orrin Judd writes, “Brian Lamb, Terry Teachout and Louis Armstrong…what more could you ask?”
What he said! As the Professor writes, Alfonzo Rachel is “Channeling Gil Scott-Heron, and beautifully” — which is only appropriate considering how badly the president himself is trapped in the late ’60s through mid-’70s world of LBJ, Paul Krugman’s Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Related: Lloyd Marcus writes, “Say It Loud — I’m Conservative, and I’m Proud!” Meanwhile, for those in need of a serious 1970s flashback, here’s the video from Gil Scott-Heron that inspired Zo’s clip.
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Come to the cabaret, ol’ chum! “Obama Musical Debuts In Germany.”
What could go wrong?
This AP headline, titled, “Hackers mimic Huffington Post’s Twitter feed” is a bit deceptive, as no actual hacking seems to have been involved:
A Huffington Post spokesman says the left-leaning news and opinion Web site was not hacked when a Twitter social network feed emerged in its name and began issuing insults with a conservative bent.
Mario Ruiz tells The Associated Press in an e-mail Saturday that the account isn’t operated by The Huffington Post, but was set up to appear as though it was. He followed up later Saturday to say that Twitter had suspended the account.
Some Twitter subscribers earlier Saturday mistook the mimicked feed for The Huffington Post’s own commentary when they were alerted to it by other Twitter users. The feed included mostly unpublishable insults about political and media figures, including President Barack Obama and MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann.
There also was an admonition to “Vote McCain” in 2012.
Vote McCain? I thought AP told me in the first paragraph that the insults were of “a conservative bent.”
Incidentally, Moby has posted from time to time at the HuffPo. I wonder what he would think of this operation?
Happy New Year! Hope you’re enjoying it so far. Two important bits of advice to remember this year. First, via John J. Miller:
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
Second, even more important advice from Sir Duke, found via Terry Teachout:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
(Above image via Theo Spark.)
“Will Avatar put actors out of work?”
Perhaps synthespians should start small — say, with music videos — before attempting to take over the big screen.
Related: “Inventor spends Christmas with his perfect woman – a £30,000 custom-made fembot.” I don’t think the Tyrell Corporation needs to worry about the competition just yet, though.
The big show this week, hosted by Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com features my interviews with:
Earlier today, I compared the post-ClimateGate conference in Copenhagen with Al Gore’s Live Earth rock concert in 2007.
With the Goracle’s descent to earth at Copenhagen, Allahpundit writes that the circle is now complete:
It was, says Politico, a Woodstock moment:
If Copenhagen is the enviros’ Woodstock, then Gore is The Who, the Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival as a one-man band. The former vice president drew such a big crowd that security had to shut down access, with hundreds of unhappy activists left outside…
Moeller also quoted the 19th century conservative British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, saying that “to be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge,” drawing a chuckle from Gore who, last week, traded barbs with Sarah Palin, describing her as a global warming “denier.”
Where the Woodstock/Copenhagen analogy breaks down: Woodstock was a success. Note well this data point from the new CBS poll showing just 37 percent consider global warming a high priority (down from 52 percent a few years ago). If the goal of climate-change “awareness” is to convince people that the threat is real and desperately urgent, how is this not an almost total failure?
To rephrase that last question, how do you pass cap-and-trade when even a clear majority of Democrats think green measures should bow before economic development? Answer: You don’t, which is why this issue is going nowhere in Congress until unemployment relaxes a bit. Or, I guess, until newspapers start running a lot more “Eskimos need refrigerators now!” stories.
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of Altamont (and T-shirts to commemorate the event are available in the lobby). This year, the role of the Hell’s Angels will be played by some of the more violent protesters at Copenhagen who are even more addle-minded than those actually attending the conference — 600 of the protesters have been arrested so far. As Jim Treacher quips, “When the cops arrest you for breaking windows to stop global warming, it’s abusive to make you sit outside in the cold.”
(Though this protester looks less like a Sonny Barger-wannabe and more like one of the mimes from an earlier ’60s film, Blowup — or perhaps Billy Crystal in Spinal Tap.)
Last month, Bruce Springsteen committed every rock star’s worst onstage nightmare, when he misidentified the town he was performing in:
The curse of Friday the 13th struck Bruce Springsteen in a most unusual way: it made the 60-year-old rock legend forget where he was.
The Boss bellowed “Hello, Ohio!” to his fans at the Auburn Hills Palace in Michigan.
I’ve read of Eric Clapton making a similar gaffe while touring America in the mid-1970s. But far left actor and far-gone BDS sufferer Viggo Mortensen took this routine to extremes last year, in the midst of a film junket in Canada:
The actor Viggo Mortensen has apologized to Canada after inadvertently accusing the country of policy misdeeds for which he meant to chastise political leaders of the United States. The go-round occurred Sunday night at a Toronto International Film Festival panel discussion introducing ”The People Speak,” a documentary about dissent and resistance to power based on the book ”A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Mr. Mortensen wore a T-shirt that read: ”Impeach Remove Jail.” By way of explanation Mr. Mortensen, in Toronto to promote the movie ”Appaloosa,” began a plaint about things ”that have been happening in the last eight years in this country.” He was checked by the moderator, Tom Powers, the festival’s documentary programmer, who asked if Mr. Mortensen was referring to Canada. ”Ladies and gentlemen, the angry left,” said a laughing Matt Damon, who was joined on the panel by Josh Brolin and Marisa Tomei, among others. Mr. Mortensen allowed that Canada may have committed misdeeds of its own, without leveling a specific charge against either country. ”My apologies,” he concluded.
Of course, Damon has also had dalliances of his own with the angry left.
“‘Facing a clock some say* has ticked down to zero, today 192 nations came together to take on a potential global catastrophe,’ a dire ABC reporter Bob Woodruff ominously intoned from Copenhagen on Monday’s World News with ‘Saving the Planet?’ on screen.”
Huh. I thought things started from zero once the left took over, not crashed into it instantly.
Recording all the hopenchangin’ at Copenhagen, the Atlantic’s Megan McCardle quips, “C’mon Everyone: It’s Time for Mass Editorials!”
Considering LiveAid’s success at ending hunger in Africa**, I’m awfully glad newspapers are finally applying this model to global warming. There’s nothing like the sight of fifty-four newspapers performing a synchronized exercise in smug self-congratulation to induce life-altering change.
I am, of course, in favor of not slow-roasting the planet. But these sort of exercises in mindless collectivism are excruciatingly silly. Unsurprisingly, the op-ed it produced was puerile and unlikely to be read by anyone who does not already agree with its premise. If fifty-four newspapers had wanted to make a serious statement about the environment that their readers were sure to pay attention to, they might have stopped printing and distributing their energy intensive product for a day.
Or at least given fellow Atlantean Marc Ambinder the day off today before he wrote (ellipses in original):
….cap and trade will be expensive in the short term…..even though it might save the world in the longterm.
There’s a choice we’re making; we’re saving our own lives….
Related: At PJTV, Alfonzo Rachel has a high-MTV flashback of his own: “Milli Vanilli, Blame It On The Pagans: The New Green Religion.”
Meanwhile, Ann Althouse quotes the New York Times “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril” and asks:
Affirm? We’re doing affirmations now? “Skeptics”… affirmations… is this religion?
Yes.
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure Ben Bradlee was more of an old school Last Poets kind of guy when he was editing the paper, anyhow.
(H/T: Andy Levy)
I couldn’t let the recent spot of bother at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit go without doing a Silicon Graffiti video on how climate change has changed over the years. In six and a half minutes, look back at:
Click here to watch:
To paraphrase critic-turned svengali Jon Landau’s most famous sentence, written immediately before he drained all of the joy out of Bruce Springsteen’s music, I have seen the future of centrist punditry, and its name is David Brooks!
Or not. I loved David Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise, but his latest op-ed is remarkably silly, although it does have the benefit of inadvertently defining one aspect of the Bobo mindset absolutely perfectly:
Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.
But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.
We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.
In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.
This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.
The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.
From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.
Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.
I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.
Ironically, one of the best criticisms of Bruce Springsteen’s music came from a source that one would assume would be even more sympathetic to “the Boss” than Brooks himself: Slate, where Stephen Metcalf wrote in 2005:
By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it’s hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn’t even Bruce Springsteen. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau’s future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce’s musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen’s image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.
Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He’s a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You’re either in or you’re out. This has solidified Bruce’s standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it’s killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers—they’re not saying Bruuuce, they’re booing—Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than “the new Dylan,” as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we’ve reached a strange juncture. About America’s last rock star, it’s either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.
Naturally, Brooks has fallen into the former camp, when it comes to his worship of one of the establishment’s biggest musicians. I’m surprised he didn’t cop to admiring the cut of Springsteen’s jeans.
Then: Shut Up And Play Your Guitar, as Frank Zappa used to say. Now: shut up and call your attorney, as Gibson Guitar Corporation’s Nashville manufacturing plant runs afoul of the eco-police, and gets raided:
Federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local police today seized wood, guitars, computers and boxes of files from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road manufacturing facility.
Sources say the Nashville-based guitar manufacturer is being investigated for violating the Lacey Act, a key piece of environmental law, for importing endangered species of rosewood from Madagascar.
Rosewood is widely used in the construction of guitars and sells for $5,000 per cubic meter, more than double the price of mahogany. The island nation off Africa’s east coast is a key producer of the hardwood, the export of which has links to international criminal activity.
A statement from Gibson released late Tuesday afternoon says the company is “fully co-operating” with the investigation.
“Gibson Guitar is fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood. Gibson is a chain of custody certified buyer who purchases wood from legal suppliers who are to follow all standards. Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO [Henry Juszkiewicz] sits on the board of the Rainforest Alliance and takes the issue of certification very seriously. The company will continue to cooperate fully and assist our federal government with all inquiries and information,” the company’s statement said.
Madagascar has struggled financially since a January coup and new President Andry Rajoelina issued an executive order in September legalizing the export of rosewood and ebony. The move was decried by environmental groups and political leaders worldwide, as hardwood forests are key to Madagascar’s unique ecology and serve as a habitat for a dwindling lemur population.
Sources tell NashvillePost.com Gibson was involved in a scheme that shipped the wood from Madagascar to Germany and then to the United States.
Ironically, if they made a movie of this, as the old Hollywood legend goes, it would likely be cut up into guitar picks after failing at the box office, thereby bringing things full circle.
By the way, Gibson wasn’t the only wood-based industry to get raided on Monday.
L. L. Cool J, currently starring in NCIS: Los Angeles:
“I don’t necessarily subscribe to all her beliefs,” he says, “but I do like Ayn Rand. That’s why I made the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ comment. I think she’s interesting. I don’t do the atheist thing; I believe in God. But some of it works for me.”
If you’re stumbling around for Ayn info, Mr. Cool J, definitely tune in to our interview this weekend with Rand biographer Jennifer Burns.
As I did this weekend with John Lennon’s ancient “War Is Over” billboard, Moe Lane dusts off another relic of the late 1960s and brings it up to date:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
As James Taranto writes:
Even more risible, though, is the claim that the administration “is going to speak truth to power.” Hello, Valerie? Your boss is the president of the United States! No one is more powerful. As we suggested Friday, it really seems as if Obama and his men do not understand what it means to be president. Because their power is constrained–thank you, Founding Fathers!–they labor under the delusion that they are powerless.
Yet while this is all hilarious, it is also scary when you think it through. Great power entails great responsibility. There is little to suggest that Obama and his aides appreciate their responsibility, and much, including their incessant complaining that the previous president did a lousy job, to suggest an attitude of total irresponsibility.
The job of those in power is not to “speak truth to power,” though it would be nice if they spoke the truth once in a while.
One of the Glenn Reynolds’ readers notes:
The link to Taranto’s taunt of Valerie Jarrett was timed well with Barbara Curtis’ latest post at PJM. These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing. There’s a story in Newsweek about how Obama wasn’t going to be like Redford in The Candidate wondering, “What now?” (Maybe I found it on Instapundit.) But he’s finding out that governing by fiat doesn’t work for long in this country. The tags for his presidency so far seem to be Radical, Naive, FDR, Jimmy Carter, Socialism and Screw Up.
The Professor adds, “Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.”
Meanwhile, Allahpundit has a flashback to a more recent deja vu experience. When the Lincoln bedroom starts a- rockin’, don’t bother knockin’. (Unless you’re about to drop off a wheelbarrow full of money, of course.)
Queen may or may not have been the first fascist rock group as Rolling Stone once rather astonishingly claimed, but Kanye West seems to be doing his damnedest to catch up:
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
Mark Tapscott writes, “Rolling Stone Report: Tea Partiers, Town Hall demonstrators too dumb to know they’re being used by evil rich guys”:
Well, isn’t that interesting – an Obamacare advocate and former health insurance communications strategist explains why all those angry mobs showed up to protest at the August Town Hall meetings. Those folks thought they were there because they chose to be there, on their own volition, but they were deceived.
Why? Because it turns out that the protesters were actually just a bunch of puppets, unconsciously being manipulated by sinister hidden forces of evil Rich Right Wingers determined to frustrate health care reform yet again, just as they did when the heroic Hillary Clinton tried in 1993. And how do we know this? Because a former top strategist in the manipulation told a Rolling Stone reporter all about it!
That reporters’ boss was once considered, forty years ago, as part of a counterculture that was no longer interested in money and material goods. (I know, I know, but that was what they told themselves back then.) In 2000, he was reported to have a net worth estimated at “somewhere between $500 million and $750 million, with earnings in the $40 million-to-$60 million range.”
