Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t ready for “Real Time” and it shows

SATURDAY, FEB 18, 2017 10:00 AM PST

Bill Maher’s public service:

Most people have no idea who Milo is, except that he claims to be “Dangerous.” Friday night, Bill Maher showed them

ERIN KEANE

(Credit: Getty/Drew Angerer/HBO/Salon)

When it was announced that this week’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” would feature so-called “right-wing provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos, some people freaked out. Many seemed to believe that bringing Yiannopoulos on the show would legitimize a noxious professional troll, as if that horse hadn’t already escaped the barn when America elected one president.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill, co-founding editor of The Intercept, canceled his own booking in protest. In his one-on-one segment with Maher at the top of the show, Yiannopoulos called that approach out: “If you don’t show up to debate, you lose.” On one hand, not every debate is worth sitting in the makeup chair for. (I’ve seen the Milo show; I’ve seen better.) But Yiannopoulos isn’t leading a political movement; he’s an attention-seeking troll. They don’t feed on legitimacy, but rather scandal and outrage, which Scahill helped deliver. For my part, I was irritated that I’d have to sit through an interview with this guy before getting to Leah Remini’s Scientology Dirt Bag, so it’s not like I had a high horse to climb off of.

It’s easy to forget, if you don’t live on the Internet, that most people in America — and quite possibly most “Real Time” home viewers — likely have no idea who Milo is or if they should care about him at all. (Third *NSync alum from the right?) If their first up-close exposure to Milo Yiannopoulos, C-Lister Famous for Something or Other, was last night’s “Real Time,” I can’t imagine they now understand what all the fuss is about.

Yiannopoulos came out quite saucy and self-satisfied — ain’t I a stinker? — so Maher, ever the comedy veteran, heckled him right out of the gate: “You look like Bruno.” Milo pouted, and then turned his exaggerated frown into a smirk after a beat. “You know I told [the make-up artist] to dial down the contouring.”

Despite their flirty greetings, Maher didn’t let Milo off easy. They agreed on a few things, like how liberals are too easily offended, but throughout the interview, Milo seemed squirmy, a bit flustered and obviously outmatched by his host. Maher wasn’t interested in gossiping about Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, whom Milo lamely joked were funny before they “contracted feminism.” In fact, he dismissed most of Milo’s low-hanging outrage-bait as just kind of stupid.

Maher’s challenge here was not being cast as Principal Skinner arguing with Bart Simpson, and for the most part, he succeeded. “You’re wrong about certain things,” Maher tells him flatly, giving examples from Milo’s own spiels: “Black Lives Matter is a hate group. There’s no such thing as white privilege.”

Maher, a consistent atheist, also dinged Yiannopoulos for “bullshit stupid thinking” when Milo gave Catholicism a pass he doesn’t extend to other religions.

Yiannopoulos insisted that he’s funny and that his jokes “build bridges.” All he cares about, he claimed, is free speech and free expression, which he described as “now a conservative position.”

“I’m the guy who always defends jokes, right up to the point where they pointlessly hurt people,” Maher said, bringing up the campaign of vicious harassment against “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones that got Yiannopoulos banned from Twitter.

Milo’s defense was a mess of facile talking points. “I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll,” he said. He also claimed, “What actually hurts people is murder, violence. Mean words don’t hurt people.”

“Which some people would say you’ve incited,” countered Maher, though he didn’t give any concrete examples.

“They would be idiots,” said Yiannopoulos.

For a couple of years in the 1980s, my family lived in Germany, where Nazi symbols were, for very understandable reasons, forbidden. As an earnest 7-year-old who read a lot of children’s literature set during World War II, it freaked me out to see swastikas scratched and inked into naughty graffiti, presented with as much gravity and political intent as butts-and-boobs doodles were back home. Little kids test social boundaries all the time. They’re drawn to the illicit — like giggling over Nazi symbols, which they know are bad but don’t quite understand — because that which is frightening for abstract reasons can also be thrilling, even titillating. Part of growing up — as I hope the kid at my Catholic school who was responsible for that graffiti did, eventually — is learning how one kid’s abstract illicit thrills can be another person’s concrete and dangerous threats, and adjusting your behavior accordingly.

Yiannopoulos is an intriguing conundrum because even though he’s an out gay man in his 30s, not a doodling child, he refuses to connect his own flippant denigration of gay people as hyper-sexed, druggy and untrustworthy — abstract jokes he’s in on — to the concrete threat of discrimination or even violence that LGBT people face from those who may feel emboldened or justified by those attitudes. Maybe he feels those fears are idiotic. Most of his fans are likely in it for the dark thrill of an illicit giggle alone: the permission to laugh at a gay joke because a gay man made it. But how grotesque of a spotlight-chaser does one have to be to ignore the possibility of the fan that isn’t? And how narcissistic is it to forcibly extend that “in on the joke” intimacy to those who haven’t issued an invitation first, like women, black people or Muslims?

On one hand, it’s a pity Maher didn’t have time to delve that deep into a discussion of the philosophy of “j/k lol” with Yiannopoulos. On the other hand, it’s not like Milo said anything on “Real Time” that indicated he’d be up for a challenging intellectual discussion about where the line is, and what it’s used for.

Throughout the segment, Milo demonstrated that as far as provocateurs go, he’s nowhere near Maher’s level. You can disagree with Maher’s positions on politics and religion, but he’s a pro who can back a gag or a flat statement up with reason and consistency. Milo’s a snarky brunch friend on a second round of Bloodies for people who don’t have snarky brunch friends. (Get off Gab once in a while and buy a round, fanboys! You can get your fill of Lena Dunham jokes in person.) He’s managed to build a public speaking and publishing career on little more than being shameless, disgusting and reasonably attractive at the same time. America, land of opportunity!

Maher closed the segment by scolding his audience. “Stop taking the bait, liberals!” he cried. “You’re all freaking out about this fucking impish British fag! You schoolgirls!”

Maher’s using his words as a blunt instrument here, but the sentiment’s not wrong. Exposing Yiannopoulos as a lightweight “famous for doing nothing” vacuous Twitter celeb on TV — as Maher just did — is likely going to be more effective at limiting his cachet and influence than inadvertently building up his illicit, underground cred through outrage. Pushing a malignant thing like Milo Yiannopoulos out into the spotlight isn’t necessarily normalizing it. Sometimes the cliché is true, and sunlight really is the best disinfectant.

Erin Keane is Salon’s managing editor.

http://www.salon.com/2017/02/18/bill-mahers-public-service-milo-yiannopoulos-isnt-ready-for-real-time-and-it-shows/?source=newsletter

AT&T-Time Warner merger to expand corporate, state control of media

By Barry Grey
24 October 2016

AT&T, the telecommunications and cable TV colossus, announced Saturday that it has struck a deal to acquire the pay TV and entertainment giant Time Warner. The merger, if approved by the Justice Department and US regulatory agencies under the next administration, will create a corporate entity with unprecedented control over both the distribution and content of news and entertainment. It will also mark an even more direct integration of the media and the telecomm industry with the state.

AT&T, the largest US telecom group by market value, already controls huge segments of the telephone, pay-TV and wireless markets. Its $48.5 billion purchase of the satellite provider DirecTV last year made it the biggest pay-TV provider in the country, ahead of Comcast. It is the second-largest wireless provider, behind Verizon.

Time Warner is the parent company of such cable TV staples as HBO, Cinemax, CNN and the other Turner System channels: TBS, TNT and Turner Sports. It also owns the Warner Brothers film and TV studio.

The Washington Post on Sunday characterized the deal as a “seismic shift” in the “media and technology world,” one that “could turn the legacy carrier [AT&T] into a media titan the likes of which the United States has never seen.” The newspaper cited Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at Moffett-Nathanson, as saying there was no precedent for a telecom company the size of AT&T seeking to acquire a content company such as Time Warner.

“A [telecom company] owning content is something that was expressly prohibited for a century” by the government, Moffett told the Post.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in keeping with his anti-establishment pose, said Saturday that the merger would lead to “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” and that, if elected, he would block it.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment on Saturday. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, speaking on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday, said he had “concerns” about the merger, but he declined to take a clear position, saying he had not seen the details.

AT&T, like the other major telecom and Internet companies, has collaborated with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its blanket, illegal surveillance of telephone and electronic communications. NSA documents released last year by Edward Snowden show that AT&T has played a particularly reactionary role.

As the New York Times put it in an August 15, 2015 article reporting the Snowden leaks: “The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.”

The article went on to cite an NSA document describing the relationship between AT&T and the spy agency as “highly collaborative,” and quoted other documents praising the company’s “extreme willingness to help” and calling their mutual dealings “a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

The Times noted that AT&T installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs based in the US, provided technical assistance enabling the NSA to wiretap all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a client of AT&T, and gave the NSA access to billions of emails.

If the merger goes through, this quasi-state entity will be in a position to directly control the content of much of the news and entertainment accessed by the public via television, the movies and smart phones. The announcement of the merger agreement is itself an intensification of a process of telecom and media convergence and consolidation that has been underway for years, and has accelerated under the Obama administration.

In 2009, the cable provider Comcast announced its acquisition for $30 billion of the entertainment conglomerate NBCUniversal, which owns both the National Broadcasting Company network and Universal Studios. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission ultimately approved the merger.

Other recent mergers involving telecoms and content producers include, in addition to AT&T’s 2015 purchase of DirecTV: Verizon Communications’ acquisition of the Huffington Post, Yahoo and AOL; Lionsgate’s deal to buy the pay-TV channel Starz; Verizon’s agreement announced in the spring to buy DreamWorks Animation; and Charter Communications’ acquisition of the cable provider Time Warner Cable, approved this year.

The AT&T-Time Warner announcement will itself trigger a further restructuring and consolidation of the industry, as rival corporate giants scramble to compete within a changing environment that has seen the growth of digital and streaming companies such as Netflix and Hulu at the expense of the traditional cable and satellite providers.

The Financial Times wrote on Saturday that “the mooted deal could fire the starting gun on a round of media and technology consolidation.” Referring to a new series of mergers and acquisitions, the Wall Street Journal on Sunday quoted a “top media executive” as saying that an AT&T-Time Warner deal would “certainly kick off the dance.”

The scale of the buyout agreed unanimously by the boards of both companies is massive. AT&T is to pay Time Warner a reported $85.4 billion in cash and stocks, at a price of $107.50 per Time Warner share. This is significantly higher than the current market price of Time Warner shares, which rose 8 percent to more than $89 Friday on rumors of the merger deal.

In addition, AT&T is to take on Time Warner’s debt, pushing the actual cost of the deal to more than $107 billion. The merged company would have a total debt of $150 billion, making inevitable a campaign of cost-cutting and job reduction.

The unprecedented degree of monopolization of the telecom and media industries is the outcome of the policy of deregulation, launched in the late 1970s by the Democratic Carter administration and intensified by every administration, Republican or Democratic, since then. In 1982, the original AT&T, colloquially known as “Ma Bell,” was broken up into seven separate and competing regional “Baby Bell” companies.

This was sold to the public as a means of ending the tightly regulated AT&T monopoly over telephone service and unleashing the “competitive forces” of the market, where increased competition would supposedly lower consumer prices and improve service. What ensued was a protracted process of mergers and disinvestments involving the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, which drove up stock prices at the expense of both employees and the consuming public.

Dallas-based Southwestern Bell was among the most aggressive of the “Baby Bells” in expanding by means of acquisitions and ruthless cost-cutting, eventually evolving into the new AT&T. Now, the outcome of deregulation has revealed itself to be a degree of monopolization and concentrated economic power beyond anything previously seen.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/24/merg-o24.html?view=mobilearticle

“Montage of Heck” captures the contradictions of Kurt Cobain — and the America that shaped him

Smells like doomed genius: 

Yes, it’s Courtney-approved, but this documentary is a moving and powerful portrait of Kurt Cobain’s America

ANDREW O’HEHIR

“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” (Credit: Sundance Institute)

I remember coming to work on the morning Kurt Cobain was found dead, and feeling puzzled that a younger writer at our San Francisco alternative weekly – who would go on to become a prominent newspaper and magazine editor in New York – was so upset that she sat at her desk all day crying. I could psychoanalyze myself at Cobain-like depth, but the reasons I didn’t get it were basically stupid and defensive. Of course I knew Cobain’s music, and I understood that his death was a big story. But I was also deeply committed to my own disillusionment, to never being taken by surprise. I had already been through the first wave of punk rock, the worst years of AIDS, the deaths of a lot of people less famous than him. I would have rejected Cobain’s status as generational icon even more forcefully than he did – which, in retrospect, looks a lot like deep yearning, thinly wrapped in snobbery. His combination of suburban angst, drug addiction and mental-health issues was an old story, wasn’t it? Just another “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a song David Bowie wrote in 1972. Nothing to cry about.

Fourteen years later, I was with my kids at a beachfront amusement park when my friend Laura Miller, Salon’s book critic, called to tell me that David Foster Wallace was dead. I got out of the roller coaster line to talk to her – Laura knew Wallace, but I didn’t – and one of the first things to swim into my brain, addled as it was by sunshine and a friend’s grief, was Kurt Cobain. At the time, I understood the connection as a personal commandment to have this experience, complete with all the Cobain-like and Wallace-like ironic introspection it might require; I took it as an edict not to insulate myself against the shared emotion, and potential shared meaning, of this moment of collective mourning. It took longer to see that the linkages between Cobain and Wallace go much deeper than that, and that many other people registered the connection in approximately the same way.

For many viewers of Brett Morgen’s extraordinary HBO documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” the most fascinating and powerful elements of the film will be found in the intimate home videos shot by Cobain and Courtney Love in the early ‘90s, before and after their daughter Frances was born. (Frances Bean Cobain is an executive producer of the film, and both its remarkable depth and its limitations derive from the fact that it’s an authorized biography, made with the cooperation of Love, Cobain’s parents and various former friends and bandmates.) That footage is absolutely heartbreaking in its depiction of a loving, flawed, high-spirited and essentially normal young family, a long way from the drug-crazed rock-star fiends favored by the tabloids of that not-so-distant era. Yes, rock fans, you do get to see Courtney naked. Impressive as that is, it’s not half as much fun as hearing her ventriloquize baby Frances complaining that her dad’s band are self-indulgent whiners who aren’t as good as Guns N’ Roses. (Footnote for scholars: Cobain’s obsession with GnR frontman Axl Rose is fascinating, but ultimately aren’t they more alike than different?)

But I watched that amazing material with a sense that by that time the die had already been cast. Love and Cobain were famous and their baby, allegedly born addicted to heroin, was famous too. What they were “really like,” as human beings, was irrelevant. As long as they lived they were going to be famous rock ‘n’ roll fuckups, damaged symbols of a damaged generation. For someone with Cobain’s particular set of neuroses, ailments and vulnerabilities, not to mention his philosophical and aesthetic predilections, that might literally be a fate worse than death. I’m not saying that other outcomes, not involving a shotgun blast to the head, were not possible. But there was no easy or painless exit from the prison-house of celebrity available to Kurt Cobain, and he didn’t much like living in it.

Morgen’s title refers both to an extended audio collage Cobain once recorded on cassette tape – just one example of his explosive, unstoppable cultural output – and to the method of the film itself, which assembles an immense trove of public and private material to illustrate a life spent first in obscurity and then in the unbearable spotlight. He has Cobain’s famous notebooks full of lyrics, journal entries, cartoons and momentary observations, of course, but also home movies of his 3rd birthday party, a collection of family snapshots, recordings of early radio interviews and footage of the first Nirvana shows in Aberdeen or Olympia, with a few dozen people in attendance.

He interviews Wendy O’Connor, Cobain’s overly loquacious mother, Don Cobain, his monosyllabic father, and Tracy Marander, who was Cobain’s first serious girlfriend and the first woman he lived with. (He was a total deadbeat, from the sound of things, but Marander doesn’t seem to regret working for a living while he played guitar and watched TV. Here she is in a movie, all these years later.) Oh, and there’s music – a lot of it, the famous tracks and a bunch of lesser-known ones. You will indeed hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in a number of versions and a variety of contexts – and when we finally get the actual Nirvana recording over the closing credits, well, I’m not saying I cried in grief and joy and anger but I’m not saying I didn’t.

Rather than trying to describe all these people who have lived on and gotten older, and who now find themselves sitting on their couches struggling to describe or explain a guy they used to know who became very famous and then died, I would say that “Montage of Heck” paints a bitter but compassionate portrait of the downscale white America that shaped Kurt Cobain. He was born in 1967, which surely felt more like 1957 in Aberdeen, Washington, than it did in the tumultuous climate of big cities and college towns. O’Connor says she remembers Aberdeen as a wonderful place to raise a family, and that her kids had a happy childhood. Not much later in the film we hear Cobain describe Aberdeen, in a recorded conversation with an old friend, as an “isolated hellhole” dominated by moralistic Reaganite conformity. You don’t get the feeling that teenage Kurt was an easy kid to live with, or someone who naturally made the best out of difficult circumstances. But his inarticulate sense that the society around him was fundamentally inauthentic, and his yearning to transform it or destroy it, molded one of the last and greatest voices of what Casey Kasem used to call the “rock era.”

Teenage alienation and rebellion is of course not a new phenomenon, and is not unique to the depressed lumber towns of the Pacific Northwest (although I imagine that lent it a particular coloration). In the animations Morgen’s team has created to illustrate Cobain’s audio montages, we witness the highly familiar quality of Cobain’s childhood and teen years: His parents were unhappy and got divorced, he smoked a lot of pot and had frustrating sexual experiences, he was an intelligent and creative kid who found school to be soul-deadening and found some release in loud music. There may be no comprehensible answer to the question of why he responded so keenly to these stimuli, which were applied with equal force to millions of other kids of the downward-trending ‘70s and ‘80s. From an early age, Kurt Cobain yearned to make memorable art, escape his surroundings and become famous, and from an early age he contemplated ending his life, with the kind of obsessive, repeated “jokes” that are impossible to gauge from the outside.

If Cobain and Wallace worked in different mediums and different registers, and emerged from different sectors of middle-class white suburbia – indeed, you can only call Cobain’s background “middle class” under the postwar convention that all white Americans who have jobs and cars belong to that class by definition – there is no mistaking the kinship of their unnaturally keen responses. They were 1960s babies who grew up amid Vietnam and Watergate and the gas crisis and Whip Inflation Now and Jimmy Carter in his cardigan talking about our “national malaise,” and who were teenagers and young adults as that malaise and turmoil turned to amnesia and denial and the suicidal, delusional counterrevolution of the Reagan years. America has not recovered from the cultural and political whiplash of those years and probably never will.

All of us who lived through that period bear the scars, and we have all tried to react to it and push forward as best we can. Of course Wallace is not the only important writer of their generation, nor is Cobain the only memorable singer-songwriter. But they are joined by the intensity of their response – “Nevermind” and “Infinite Jest” are highly singular works in totally different traditions, but I think they represent the same scale of achievement and possess a similar cultural resonance – and by the way they touched a deep well of passion, hunger and unease that transcended demographic or generational clichés. It’s by no means irrelevant that they were both white heterosexual men who were deeply aware of the problematic nature of the Great Man archetype, and committed to addressing that issue in their work and their private lives. And it’s certainly not irrelevant that they became overwhelmed by the vicious contradictions of fame in our era — or, to put it more simply, that they could not escape the private demons of mental illness and drug addiction and ended by killing themselves.

As I noted earlier, “Montage of Heck” was made with the cooperation of Courtney Love and several other relatives or intimate friends of Kurt Cobain. (The most prominent omission is Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.) Among other things, that means the movie does not traffic in any of the pathological conspiracy theories around Cobain’s death, or indeed depict his death in any way. It may whitewash some details of Love and Cobain’s relationship – I wouldn’t know, and don’t especially care – and it certainly depicts the reporters who raked up dirt on the couple, especially Lynn Hirschberg of Vanity Fair, as unscrupulous vultures.

I would agree that the media’s vampirical obsession with the Kurt-and-Courtney story was not journalism’s finest hour, and that it reflected profound anxiety about the youth-culture moment they were seen to represent. But that’s too large a problem to unpack here; I think it’s best to take the Courtney-centric area of the film with a grain of salt and draw your own conclusions. Those are minor issues in a masterful and often deeply moving portrait of a volatile American genius, a portrait that goes far beyond one man, one family and one rain-sodden small town. It depicts the society that nurtured and fed that genius, and that made his unlikely creative explosion possible, as being the same environment that poisoned him — and suggests that the rise and fall were inextricably connected. Kurt Cobain was a canary in the coalmine, as was David Foster Wallace. You and I are still in it, and it’s getting harder to breathe.

“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” opens this week in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, and then premieres May 4 on HBO.

 

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/23/smells_like_doomed_genius_montage_of_heck_captures_the_contradictions_of_kurt_cobain_and_the_america_that_shaped_him/?source=newsletter

Banksy, gentrification and the end of graffiti

A new HBO doc paints a grim picture of the medium’s future as landmarks are torn down and artists move indoors

Max Rivlin-Nadler, Full Stop

This article originally appeared in Full Stop.

Last week, HBO debuted Banksy Does New York, a documentary on Banksy’s 2013 residency in NYC, where he debuted a new work every day in various areas of the city, each imbued with his trademark wit and moralistic commentary. Each of his pieces ignited some sort of confrontation, be it another artist painting over his work to make a point, or individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit charging admission to see a section of a wall. In Queens last fall, I got to look at one piece just hours after it was created and moments before it was defaced. The graffiti was of a workman erasing a quote from Gladiator — “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Both the piece within the piece and the work itself would now only be echoes, as a local graffiti artist angrily tagged over it while a hissing crowd pleaded him to stop. The next day, it was painted over.

 It was a traumatic year in the world of New York City graffiti — the graffiti’d factory known as 5 Pointz was painted over and is currently being demolished, while William Bratton returned as the commissioner of the NYPD, re-instituting “broken windows” policing, which focuses on low-level violations or misdemeanors, like panhandling, performances on subways, and graffiti. Arrests have already risen by four percent and will continue to climb. That the NYPD was never able to apprehend Banksy during his time in New York City, and the persistence of graffiti across most of the city, demonstrates what an impossible task it is to stop graffiti or tagging. Direct confrontation, however, has returned to the discussion of street art, with the ever-reactionary New York Post declaring that graffiti has again “reared its ugly head.” Not that it ever went anywhere — graffiti has been a constant part of the landscape for the past thirty years, while the city still draws record amounts of tourists and oligarchs. So why does graffiti still remain something so threatening to the powers that be? And why are we being reminded that it doesn’t belong?

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One early morning this year I was taking the 7 train in Queens, a mostly-elevated line that runs from Flushing to underneath Manhattan. The 7 is a unique vantage into the state of NYC graffiti, where street-level murals meld with larger tags in harder-to-reach places further up on buildings. In fact, it’s almost a museum in itself, with established artists like Klops sharing space with kids who are just learning the art. If you’re lucky on this early train ride, you get to meet some of the artists. At 74th street in Jackson Heights, a group of teenagers got on the train and huddled at the window. For them, it was the first time they were seeing their art the way most people do.

“Oh shit, we got high up!”

They were pointing at a tag that was almost impossibly placed on the side of a building. In the first light of day, they were finally seeing the danger that they had faced during the night before, all in their attempt to have their names echo with the riders of this train. Almost a year later, that tag they put on the side of the building remains, and will possibly stay there until the building is re-painted or torn down.

It’s the tearing down that causes a larger threat to graffiti than even policing. While famous, established groups like T.A.T.S. Cru have set up shop in community centers and been given studio space and walls on which to work, the urban environment itself is presenting less canvas than ever. As the necessary push for density emanates ever outward from the city center, gleaming condominiums have crossed over from Manhattan and into Brooklyn and Queens (one of the few places to still see graffiti in downtown Manhattan, Chinatown, has so far remained resistant to massive upscaling . . . but stay tuned), and quite symbolically, 5 Pointz is being torn down to make way for condos. While graffiti presents itself as an art with a rather low cost-of-entry, works of graffiti are now being absorbed by these massive developments, who advertise their galleries as one day hosting a show featuring the very same graffiti they replaced. The canvas has moved inside the building — to the benefit of developers, a select group of artists, and the architects of the city, who badly want more apartments built on former industrial sites as soon as possible.

So the canvas moves ever outward — not that it ever knew a boundary in the first place. When the MTA finally cracked down on graffiti artists who turned their trains into murals in the 1970s and 80s, graffiti remained on overpasses and buildings, and still appeared in subway tunnels and, every now and then, on a train. But as parts of New York City might finally become the first graffiti-exclusion zones, either by design or by their sheer inaccessibility, one wonders where the push will end. Because we’re not really talking about graffiti at all, but how one can leave their mark on what was home. And, however cheesy, how long that mark can echo.

 

Max Rivlin-Nadler is a freelance writer who has covered culture and politics for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and Gawker.

 

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/30/banksy_gentrification_and_the_end_of_graffiti_partner/?source=newsletter

Stop calling this TV’s golden age. It’s still the Idiot Box.

Stephen Colbert won’t save us, “Game of Thrones” is not that good: This “golden age” of TV is a big sham

…even if you like “Girls,” Jon Stewart and “The Wire”

Alexander Zaitchik

(Credit: xavierarnau via iStock/Salon)

I think it happened around Season 3 of “The Wire.” Maybe it was “The Sopranos.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”? “Lost”? I can’t say. I just know I woke up one day confused.

Everyone, it seemed, had become a walking TV Guide: debating a bubbling vat of dramas and comedies, gossiping and blasting alerts about their pundit show bookings, filling out Which-character-are-you? quizzes. TV coverage had overtaken the media, where magazines, newspapers and websites dissected anticipated serial finales like D-Day.

It wasn’t the existence of new cult shows that left me befuddled, or even the tonnage of critical praise heaped on them. It was the hungry-hippo, remote-happy tone that continues to define this “golden age of TV.” Kill Your Television has morphed into Love Your Television. I find this transformation deeply disorienting, but not in an old-person, out-of-touch kind of way. Because watching TV is an activity I associate with retirement homes, it feels more like the world around me has prematurely aged.

For years I’ve dreaded writing this. There’s no way to do it without sounding like that stock villain of the postwar American dinner party, the tweedy bore and pretentious prick who makes a loud public show of not owning a TV. For the record, I’m not that guy. But it’s time to call bullshit on the new consensus that TV, in any of its Internet-age mutations, has become our harmless friend, deserving ever-greater amounts of our time and critical coverage limited to endless plot exegesis. It’s time to shout from our dish-cluttered rooftops what has been obvious for years: this celebration of TV’s new “golden age” is out of control. It’s dangerous, and it’s sad.

Not long ago, the culture, and especially the left, wrestled with television. It was accepted to represent a bit of a mass media riddle: neither easily dismissed, nor easily accepted. It was hard to imagine forcingchange or even organizing modern society without utilizing and harnessing its power and reach. At the same time, it was understood, by its very nature, to be a potent conduit for saturation levels of corporate and state propaganda. It was thought to breed passivity and weaken the capacity for critical thought. These debates had been going for decades when they disappeared early in the new century. The rising sea of “must-see” TV drowned ideas that were part of the bedrock of the left’s heritage.

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When I began hashing out a worldview as an adolescent in the late 1980s, initiation into this heritage meant reckoning with television. I’d watched my share of “Brady Bunch” reruns and “Silver Spoons,” ingesting millions of commercials along the way, and it took its toll. In my mid-teens I started to intuit TV was causing me problems, both with schoolwork and more generally with my ability to make sense of the world. When I eventually found my way to the then-standard critiques of television, it was revelatory. The arguments rested on multiple pillars: the political economy of the networks; the way that political economy leads to content designed to reinforce the status quo in often subtle but effective ways; the impact of advertising; the medium’s structural limitations and psychological effects; and, most important, how all of this interacted to shape the potential for mass organization and social and political change. It wasn’t called the Idiot Box just because “Hill Street Blues” wasn’t written as well as “The Wire,” or because there were no shows where Nation and Mother Jones writers could talk about their work.

You could trace the lineage of these critiques back to guys like Marx and Adorno (the first asshole to brag about not owning a TV) but it wasn’t necessary. There was no shortage of popular books that modernized and developed the old ideas about culture reflecting and reinforcing society’s underlying economic relations — books like Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and Bill McKibben’s “Age of Missing Information,” to name a few. Less than a generation ago, the essence of these books could be found on ringed-binders, skateboards and first cars, distilled to that three-word battle cry, Kill Your Television, which captured a truth that has yet to be upended by TiVo, streaming, HBO or Chris Hayes. That truth, then as now, is this: Staring at images on a little screen — that are edited in ways that weaken the brain’s capacity for sustained and critical thought, that encourage passivity and continued viewing, that are controlled by a handful of publicly traded corporations, that have baked into them lots of extremely slick and manipulating advertising — is not the most productive or pleasurable way to spend your time, whether you’re interested in serious social change, or just want to have a calm, clear and rewarding relationship with the real world around you.

But wait, you say, you’re not just being a killjoy and a bore, you’re living in the past. Television in 2014 is not the same as television in 1984, or 1994. That’s true. Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” set out during cable’s late dawn in “Manufacturing Consent,” is due for an update. The rise of on-demand viewing and token progressive programming has complicated the picture. But only by a little. The old arguments were about structure, advertising, structure, ownership, and structure, more than they were about programming content, or what time of the day you watched it. Less has changed than remains the same. By all means, let’s revisit the old arguments. That is, if everyone isn’t busy binge-watching “House of Cards.”

It’s been something to watch, this televisionification of the left. Open a window on social media during prime time, and you’ll find young journalists talking about TV under Twitter avatars of themselves in MSNBC makeup. Fifteen years ago, these people might have attended media reform congresses discussing how corporate TV pacifies and controls people, and how those facts flow from the nature of the medium. Today, they’re more likely to status-update themselves on their favorite corporate cable channel, as if this were something to brag about.

None of this could be happening at a worse time. According to the latest S.O.S. from climate science, we have maybe 15 years to enact a radical civilizational shift before game over. This may be generous, it may be alarmist; no one knows. What is certain is that pulling off a civilizational Houdini trick will require not just switching energy tracks, but somehow confronting the “endless growth” paradigm of the Industrial Revolution that continues to be shared by everyone from Charles Koch to Paul Krugman. We face very long odds in just getting our heads fully around our situation, let alone organizing around it. But it will be impossible if we no longer even understand the dangers of chuckling along to Kia commercials while flipping between Maher, “Merlin” and “Girls.”

One of the effects of watching so much TV is we start to confuse it with reality. In extreme cases, this can lead to ratings wars as a form of politics. As in, “Ha ha, more of the 25–54 year-old viewers prized by advertisers are sitting in front of a box watching my favorite television personalities than are watching your favorite television personalities.” Let’s skip by the fact that the fantasy abuse on “Game of Thrones” gets as much attention as abuse in our prison system, and go right to the aircraft carrier loads of type dedicated to parsing the representation of young women and feminism on cable shows. Last week, the front page of the Guardian website featured a column called “Genius TV,” in which Ann Friedman gushed that the Comedy Central show “Broad City” was “a huge step forward,” if not for equal pay, then for her crowded viewing schedule. She sent up a loud “Amen” to the words of Grantland’s Molly Lambert, who wrote: “I [once] dreamed of a world on the screen … populated with chill women who refer to everyone as ‘dude.’ ‘Broad City’ is that world. May it run forever.”

Dare to dream, Molly.

Louder “hallelujahs” are often expressed about Stephen Colbert, the quickest-witted TV host since Groucho and with better politics. The problem starts when we forget he’s just a TV personality, and that his show is burdened with the same baggage as every other. The fact that his (and Jon Stewart’s) coverage of current events is often the best around was once seen as a condemnation of everyone else. Now, as Colbert takes over from Letterman, it is just as likely to be seen as a justification for watching more TV. Earlier this month, Salon’s Joan Walsh wrote about Colbert the way a previous generation might have written about a major labor organizer or investigative reporter. Citing his ability to get under the skin of Bill O’Reilly, another TV personality, Walsh wrote, “[Right-wing] bullies see Colbert clearly as an ally to progressive causes and a threat to their privilege.”

Much respect to you, Joan, but only two people feel threatened by Stephen Colbert, and their names are Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. The closest Colbert has ever come to real politics, as opposed to making satirical points, was his mushy cool-in on the Washington Mall. He had nothing to do with the biggest blip of real street politics since the televisionification of the U.S. left. That was Occupy, which was loud, aggressive, smelly and under no illusions about Comedy Central’s interest in televising the revolution. One of the best things about Colbert’s show has always been its length: 22 minutes, four days a week. It’s a sign of the times that so many of his fans will now transition to watching him five nights a week for a full hour, more of which will be devoted to commercial breaks and interviewing celebrities like Seth Rogen. The right-wing bullies must be quaking in their wingtips. Not that the powers that be were all that worried about the 22-minute version. The last time I streamed Colbert on the Viacom server, I enjoyed four beautiful Boeing ads featuring its new line of laser-guided missiles. Why would Boeing underwrite this “progressive threat”? While the left has forgotten the substance of the old TV debates, the Fortune 500 has not.

Maybe a few missile commercials are a small price to pay for all this great programming. This is the view of our best-paid media critics, whose ranks have enjoyed boom times in the last decade. Reviewing a book that promised TV’s “golden age” will last forever, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2012, “If you happen to be feeling frustrated by the current state of television—fearing that the economic model won’t hold up, or biting your nails about whether ‘Homeland’ can actually pull off the high-wire act of its second season—[this] collection will cheer you up.”

More recently, a few days after Nielsen released its 2014 numbers (the average American watches more than five hours a day) New York Times media reporter David Carr wrote a piece mock-complaining about all the boob tube bounty. His weekly viewing schedule contains 11 shows, you see, and Carr is worried that “Broad City” might tip the waiter’s tray. As for dialing back his viewing, this is not an option, because people might think he’s a fuddy-duddy.

“The idiot box,” writes Carr, “[has] gained heft and intellectual credibility to the point where you seem dumb if you are not watching it … Even at the Oscars, TV seemed like the cool hipster at the party … All these riches induce pleasure, but no small amount of guilt as well. Am I a bad person because I missed ‘Top of the Lake’ on the Sundance channel?”

No, Carr, you’re not a bad person for missing “Top of the Lake,” whatever that is. What you are is an exceptionally shallow media critic, if you think the problems with television ever had anything to do with the quality of the scripts.

 

Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist living in New Orleans.

 

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/05/stephen_colbert_wont_save_us_game_of_thrones_is_not_that_good_this_golden_age_of_tv_is_a_big_sham/?source=newsletter

 

The petty politics of “House of Cards”

Scheming without substance

 

This season, actual issues seem to matter little, and the only true believers are outside the halls of power

Ari Melber

 

 

The new season of “House of Cards” falters in many of the very places where the first season excelled.  The story is now chiefly about success, not struggle; politics crowds out what little passion stirs between Beltway professionals; and careful strategy has given way to a stampede that is as blunt as it is bland.  Last year, Frank Underwood, the scheming House whip played by Kevin Spacey, carefully massaged the rules to build his empire. This year, he just breaks them.

None of which is to say the season offers no excitement.  The center of action shifts from Congress to the White House, and the schemes for power, revenge and violence are all bigger this season.  The issues are not, however, and, interestingly, the strongest players are people outside of the political arena.

Policy junkies will find little to feast on.  It’s no spoiler to report Underwood’s supposedly ingenious proposal for avoiding a government shutdown – he pushes fellow Democrats to raise the retirement age.  What a concept!  Some liberals balk, a Tea Party senator has second thoughts, but in the end, Underwood’s parliamentary hardball wins.  What are viewers to make of this portrait, a man with the tactical abilities of LBJ and the policy instincts of the Peter Peterson Foundation?

It doesn’t matter. The story careens on, expending no explanatory energy on Underwood’s supposed breakthrough. Other issues come in for the same treatment – a sort of narrative objectification.

U.S.-China relations are just a chip in a battle between Underwood and a major donor.  Mrs. Underwood pushes a bill on military sexual assault, a reference to the Military Justice Improvement Act, and there are passing discussions about the policy tradeoffs.  When the bill’s backers back down, however, it is simply to show that the posturing mattered, not the issues. Just like the China fight. And the retirement age. And, you know, everything else.

Surely viewers can relate to the critique that Washington has no values. The premise begins to grate, however, in a story where everyone keeps fighting so hard for opposing policies. Are they all faking? Does anyone believe anything in this town?

Yes.  But not the pols.  The most striking argument in the new “House of Cards” is the few true believers it does offer – a reporter, a source, a hacker and a billionaire.

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The billionaire is Raymond Tusk, a donor and presidential confidante played with a tony gravitas by Gerald McRaney.  The name Tusk, like Spacey’s direct addresses to the camera, is knowingly overwrought. The man locks tusks with Underwood repeatedly, and while it’s hard to make a scheming billionaire relatable, Tusk emerges as a straight-shooter who stands for something – his business.  Fiduciary duty may not be the highest of moral obligations, but it proves more grounded than Underwood’s endless and often pointless scheming.

There are few themes pressed more relentlessly in the show than “money versus power,” a theme Underwood highlighted in the first season. “Choosing money over power is a mistake almost everyone makes,” he tells viewers, “Money is the big mansion in Saratoga that starts falling apart after ten years — power is that old stone building that stands for centuries.”

Yet the battle with Tusk demonstrates that money can be swifter than power and, in a world of secret Super PACs, it can also be more discreet.  Michael Dobbs, the author of the original “House of Cards,” said last week that Netflix’s American take on the show offers a more skeptical view of the “power of big business,” while “the British version dwells much more on the power of press barons.”

British tabloids were cast as a part of the problem – literally intertwined with the ruling class – while in the American imagination, a reporter can still be democracy’s backstop.

This year, that reporter is Ayla Sayyad, a meticulous young journalist at the fictional Washington Telegraph.  Her scoops drive the entire plot arc of this season.  She stands out immediately as the polar opposite of Zoe Barnes, the reporter/blogger who spent the first season trading sexual and media favors with Underwood, and decamped from the establishment Washington Herald for a gig at the upstart website Slugline. Barnes’ leads went cold when her transactional sources no longer needed her stenography, and her career went cold when she tried a more adversarial approach with only a blog to stand on.

By contrast, Sayyad puts the M. in M.S.M.  She invokes her paper’s institutional authority to make sources respond, from big business to big government.  Her work evinces the Watergate reporting model of a bygone era – disclosures catalyzing the government to investigate itself.  The real Washington may be enthralled with Twitter and BuzzFeed, but “House of Cards” longs for Woodward and Bernstein, if only to save the town from itself, one more time.

Still, there is hope on the Internet.  The most intellectually consistent character in this sad, dark town is Gavin Orsay, a hacker who teams up with Lucas Goodwin, a friend and former colleague of Zoe’s, to pursue alleged government corruption.  Orsay takes personal risks for his beliefs – a crisp contrast to the show’s depiction of politicians – and champions the real-life case of Barrett Brown, a writer currently facing federal prosecution for linking to stolen materials.

“Most of my friends are locked up and rotting away ’cause they poked the bear one too many times,” Orsay tells Goodwin, who is taking his own risks in the hope of exposing Underwood.  There are undertones of Snowden here, as Orsay gains leverage by turning the tools of digital surveillance back against the government – a political practice known as sousveillance.

Any nod to these characters’ resolve, however, does not mean they receive karmic protection.  They are brave, but that doesn’t make them victorious. Being a true believer is dangerous, and the whistleblowers are soon facing charges of their own, while the lawbreakers in government float away.  That’s no surprise to the insiders.  Prosecution is always about evidence – not crime.  And Frank Underwood doesn’t leave much evidence behind.

 

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/18/scheming_without_substance_the_petty_politics_of_house_of_cards/?source=newsletter

 

 

 

Esquire’s astoundingly homophobic “Looking” review expects gay men to be “mincing”

 

How did this get published? A straight critic slags gay men for not being stereotypes

Daniel D’Addario

 

 

 

HBO’s “Looking,” which debuted over the weekend, was extremely unusual — a program about and created by gay men. The show, even before it’s found its creative footing, exists as a document of a segment of human experience not often on TV. In terms of representation, it’s a good thing. So of course a writer for a major publication had to write a piece for a straight male audience dismissing the show entirely.

One Mick Stingley published a piece on Esquire’s website titled “The Straight Man’s Guide to HBO’s ‘Looking’” — a piece that avails itself of casual homophobia and actually incorrect facts. It’s deeply typical of the sort of work produced by straight men who walk into unfamiliar rooms and, rather than listening and seeking to learn, reframe the entire conversation around their own experience and limited worldview. From the jump, the piece fundamentally misunderstands what it’s about:

“HBO has a new show called Looking that’s about three gay guys in San Francisco who are single and looking to hook up. Get it?”

Well, the thing is, most gay men would and do get it, because “looking” is common slang among that community. Making a snarky joke about how a show’s title is unimaginative, when in fact it’s part of an argot a community other than Stingley’s own shares, is an inauspicious start. But at least it seems to have passed by an editor, unlike:

“People will be talking about it for a while wherever you get your coffee, in the media and probably a lot of women, too. So there are a few things you should know while you’re waiting for Mad Men to start up again.”

Yes: As you wait impatiently for a show about heterosexual couplings to return, you may as well occupy your attention with this gay show so as to keep up with “the media” and “women,” two groups that necessarily are obsessed with gay men and will cover them even if, as Stingley goes on to allege, they don’t deserve the attention.

Because Stingley was bored by “Looking”! Yes:

“It’s a big deal because it features gay men being gay and doing whatever without resorting to stereotypes. But instead of, say, funny, mincing guys with witty one-liners and put-downs, Looking introduces three ho-hum characters you wouldn’t hang around with if they were on SportsCenter.”

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Leaving aside the sympathetic magic by which Stingley imagines himself a friend to sportscasters inside his television, the idea that “funny, mincing guys” are somehow better is ludicrous on two counts: one, that gay people ought to exist for straight men’s entertainment even when Stingley himself acknowledges that that entertainment generally relies on stereotypes, and two, the use of the incredibly coded word “mincing.” The term is a nasty, homophobic put-down when used onstage at the Golden Globes by Michael Douglas, and is one, too, when used in the pages of a magazine that needs to reassure itself about its heterosexual bona fides even though they run pictures of Chris Hemsworth on the cover.

The piece draws out comparisons to “Sex and the City,” a broad comedy that bears no similarity to “Looking” except for its ability to discomfit straight men by being frank about the fact that other people enjoy having sex. “Sex and the City” gets called “occasionally funny” by Stingley, while “Looking” is, to his mind, boring:

“Guys hook up without fear of STDs yet no one looks like they’re having any fun. It commits the heinous sin of being gay and boring. You’ll be praying for a car chase and checking your phone a lot watching this.”

Stingley’s writing commits the heinous sin of being factually untrue and ideologically repulsive. On a date in the first episode, one fellow asks our protagonist if he’s been tested for sexually transmitted diseases, shocked by the admission of public cruising. And why is being “gay and boring” a sin? Ought gay people to be de rigueur delightfully entertaining, forbidden from expressing any shades of emotion short of campy glee? Or must gay people clear a special bar to be worthy of Stingley’s consideration?

The craziest thing of all is that only one episode has aired. And yet Stingley feels free to dismiss the show as not worthy of existing, noting that it neither depicts gay men as “extremely fun and funny” or “starkly sad and depressing,” two modes with which he is comfortable.

Why should any of us be surprised? This sort of thing just keeps happening. Heterosexual men, confronted with something they don’t understand, bellow. Bill Keller, in the New York Times, is unconcerned with factual accuracy as he slags a cancer patient as somehow undignified. Michael Douglas has expressed disdain for gay people every time he’s picked up an award for being brave enough to play one. A trans woman and private citizen trying to keep her status to herself is treated as half-charlatan, half-wonder of science by the good people at ESPN.

There are — still! — very few programs on the air featuring gay characters in any capacity, and those that exist tend either to mindlessly indulge stereotypes (as does the work of Ryan Murphy, when he indulges his worst tendencies) or to winkingly announce that this gay guy is different because he’s not a queen (as did the departed, and very good, “Happy Endings”). “Looking” is not for Mick Stingley or for Esquire readers. It’s for a group of people who almost never see themselves on television allowed to simply be people. Why he felt the need to put the show down is befuddling; I don’t write Op-Eds about how boring I find “Pardon the Interruption.” Indeed, I don’t watch it. If Stingley were to watch “Looking” with an open mind, he might discover that a series about how quotidian and melancholy the lives of gay men can be would actually be enlightening. But, one week in, that ship has evidently sailed.

Esquire has, like a surly child, apologized if you got mad, appending to their piece:

“UPDATE: We apologize to anyone offended by our attempt at humor in this piece. It reflects one man’s viewing experience. He does not think all gay people are boring. Just this show, a little.”

Right. He doesn’t think gay people are boring. He thinks they’re fabulous, and he doesn’t want to hear anything that complicates that! That’s exactly the problem.

 

Daniel D’Addario is a staff reporter for Salon’s entertainment section. Follow him on Twitter @DPD_