Guitarist Tyler Grant, a San Diego East County native, performed in concert Saturday night at the historic Valley Music venue in El Cajon. A member of the media was there and filed this report.
Tyler Grant presented a two-hour concert in the key of H Saturday night at Valley Music before a capacity crowd.
H for history. This was the last in a series of concerts that Grant has presented over the last seven years at Valley Music, providing the audience a stirring finale in this series of his emergence from a young player with skill and dedication to a world-class performer with command of his art and of the stage. Many in the audience were family and friends from Jamul, where Tyler grew up, and he was specific, between – and even during – numbers, in recognizing his old friends and family. The center of his fame as a multi-talented musician has risen from Nashville, his adopted home, but Tyler left no doubt Saturday night about where his roots were, and his heart still is.
History as transition. As well-known as he has become in musical genres such as bluegrass, flatpicking, and Americana music, Grant is struggling with a decision to take his music commercial. He has been the subject of a cover story in Flatpicking Guitar Magazine, and he is the reigning National and Merlefest Flatpicking Guitar champion, but those are niche accomplishments with minimal effect on CD sales. During this visit, he said he was looking for an agent, and he queried the local media, unsuccessfully, about coverage of the Valley Music concert.
It reminded this reporter of musicians like Elvis Presley and Randy Travis. Even Elvis, after his 1954 debut with "That's All Right, Mama," toured the small-town circuits before breaking out in 1955. And this reporter, specifically, remembers covering a Randy Travis concert at an El Cajon venue in 1986, knowing full well that the next time Travis visited San Diego, he would be playing at the Sports Arena.
For Tyler Grant, though, it's more than paying dues. It was clear Saturday night that he is very aware of what he leaves behind, if he decides to move forward. History: he played old country tunes (Waylon Jennings), rock and roll (Marty Robbins), primal bluegrass (Bill Monroe), classical guitar (Bach, for example), championship flatpicking (a la Doc Watson) and his original songs, with country, bluegrass and Cajun influences, from his first CD, "In the Light." He played all of these, in a two-hour concert (backed up by the great Josh Dake on mandolin), with facility and fire. It has been great fun, in his history, for his family and friends to observe his ever-emerging facility, to the point where his playing looks easy. But it was the fire, Saturday night, that revealed his love, and mastery, of the craft.
Agents, though, and the machine, show less interest, in the music business world, in fire than sales predictability. Saturday night, Tyler played the music he owns and loves, like a campfire he has built for friends, that he can manipulate with six strings into a slow glow, or into a hot chimney of flame, shooting up and twisting into a storm of fireworks that, at the end, sets off thunderous applause. Such chemistry and skill is so personal, and at risk of becoming history in the commercial vacuum, where stars may be made of skill, or of simple audience appeal, or the kind of media manipulation so obvious in a CMT-TV video like Justin Moore's "Back That Thing Up."
And so Saturday night will be held by those attending as a moment in the history of an artist they know and love. Grant took obvious pleasure, as he talked about it, in being the last artist to play on the stage at Valley Music, which has been in business at its present location since 1952, and will move this summer to a new site. Tyler is relocating also, from Nashville to Boulder, CO, and relocating with him will be Kathleen Harris, to whom he proposed, successfully, on a late winter day on a ridgeline above his beloved Jamul.
May 30, 2009
Tom Perini, brisket barbecue, and the full Paula
It's always fun to see a kid you have known since grade school get kissed full on the lips by Paula Deen on national television, and knowing he deserved it.
I am speaking about Tom Perini, of Abilene and Buffalo Gap, Texas. I have a black and white photo from the summer of 1955, showing a contingent of Abilene boys sitting on a diving board at Camp Rio Vista, Texas, down by Kerrville. Tom Perini and I are in the photo. I was 13, he was 12.
Tom has been in the cooking and restaurant business for 30-odd years. He is the proprietor of the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, author of "Texas Cowboy Cooking," and a caterer of Texas-style barbecue whose business has taken him nation-wide. On the morning of 9/11, Tom and his crew were setting up on the White House lawn to do barbecue for the President and members of Congress later in the day. After what happened that day, Tom said it took him two harrowing weeks to get him, his crew and his equipment back to Abilene. It is an interesting story.
But not as interesting, this morning, anyway, as getting smacked a good one by Paula Deen. I wasn't expecting it; you can call it true serendipity. I was channel surfing Thursday night and got in right at the top of the hour for Paula Deen's one-hour tour of places offering signature versions of southern barbecue. She went to Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama and Texas, looking for just the right places to represent the particular style of barbecue for which each locale is noted.
In Texas, she said, it was brisket. There are probably 20,000 places in Texas she could have chosen to get her point across that nobody does brisket barbecue like Texans. Who did she choose? Tom Perini. God, I was proud. He came on-screen, wearing his familiar blue long-sleeved shirt and straw cowboy hat and I felt like Pavarotti's brother, sitting in the audience at the Met. He showed her the raw brisket, showed her how to season it, and put it in a portable pit cooker. Twenty hours later (10 seconds, in television time), he took out the brisket, sliced off a piece, and handed it to Paula. She ate it, moved in on Tom, and kissed him FULL ON THE LIPS.
The other experts on the show gave Paula that first bite, and they only got hugs or pats in return. Tom got the full Paula. I would like to say it was his personality, and he has a great personality. But Southerners and barbecue are like dogs and food. I don't care how affectionate the dog may appear, with him it is food first and people second. With Southerners, it is barbecue first and personality second. Tom earned his kiss the hard way, making perhaps the best case ever for Texas brisket as the king of barbecue.
The Food Network Website says the show is scheduled to air again at 6 p.m. Sunday, May 31. Tom's cookbook is available at amazon.com. There is one recipe in there, Jessica's Favorite Green Chile Hominy, on page 148, that is worth the price of the book. If you gave Paula a bite of that, you probably couldn't show the reaction on TV.
I am speaking about Tom Perini, of Abilene and Buffalo Gap, Texas. I have a black and white photo from the summer of 1955, showing a contingent of Abilene boys sitting on a diving board at Camp Rio Vista, Texas, down by Kerrville. Tom Perini and I are in the photo. I was 13, he was 12.
Tom has been in the cooking and restaurant business for 30-odd years. He is the proprietor of the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, author of "Texas Cowboy Cooking," and a caterer of Texas-style barbecue whose business has taken him nation-wide. On the morning of 9/11, Tom and his crew were setting up on the White House lawn to do barbecue for the President and members of Congress later in the day. After what happened that day, Tom said it took him two harrowing weeks to get him, his crew and his equipment back to Abilene. It is an interesting story.
But not as interesting, this morning, anyway, as getting smacked a good one by Paula Deen. I wasn't expecting it; you can call it true serendipity. I was channel surfing Thursday night and got in right at the top of the hour for Paula Deen's one-hour tour of places offering signature versions of southern barbecue. She went to Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama and Texas, looking for just the right places to represent the particular style of barbecue for which each locale is noted.
In Texas, she said, it was brisket. There are probably 20,000 places in Texas she could have chosen to get her point across that nobody does brisket barbecue like Texans. Who did she choose? Tom Perini. God, I was proud. He came on-screen, wearing his familiar blue long-sleeved shirt and straw cowboy hat and I felt like Pavarotti's brother, sitting in the audience at the Met. He showed her the raw brisket, showed her how to season it, and put it in a portable pit cooker. Twenty hours later (10 seconds, in television time), he took out the brisket, sliced off a piece, and handed it to Paula. She ate it, moved in on Tom, and kissed him FULL ON THE LIPS.
The other experts on the show gave Paula that first bite, and they only got hugs or pats in return. Tom got the full Paula. I would like to say it was his personality, and he has a great personality. But Southerners and barbecue are like dogs and food. I don't care how affectionate the dog may appear, with him it is food first and people second. With Southerners, it is barbecue first and personality second. Tom earned his kiss the hard way, making perhaps the best case ever for Texas brisket as the king of barbecue.
The Food Network Website says the show is scheduled to air again at 6 p.m. Sunday, May 31. Tom's cookbook is available at amazon.com. There is one recipe in there, Jessica's Favorite Green Chile Hominy, on page 148, that is worth the price of the book. If you gave Paula a bite of that, you probably couldn't show the reaction on TV.
May 29, 2009
Archives: Jan. 10, 1990 - an illuminating moon
Life is totally complicated, and trying to understand it takes a lot of work. At unexpected moments during that work, you might be looking at something and suddenly everything will "line up." This is a story, published Thursday, Jan. 10, 1990, about one of those moments that, for me, arrived on the evening of Jan. 8.
Looking at the moon Tuesday night, I felt a sudden awareness of betrayal. Oh, the moon was innocent, pretty as ever in its full phase and unusually high in the sky for the 8 p.m. hour. It seemed to be in the company of a star or bright planet that had appeared to keep its relative position (a finger’s width to the south) since nightfall. They might have been two different stars, of course, but that would not be the romantic notion.
Through the years, I put a lot of stock in that moon to do my romancing for me. Most people have. For reasons of their own – and every human on the planet comes as a complete set of reasons of his or her own – people don’t trust themselves to get the job done.
A few people admit that, but it takes enormous courage. You confess your fears – be yourself in other words – and take your chances. Most people won’t go that far. They don’t want to take a chance; they want to get the girl. So even if they could, they won’t present themselves directly. They send what lovers have in common: the moon, the stars, the sky, the sun, the clouds, rain, the ocean, music, champagne, roses and Baby Ruths. It seems very romantic, but romance with the moon as intermediary is mostly an exercise in managing fear.
It would be funny if it weren’t also sad. Those who were doing their first romancing in the 1950s will remember the late, great Tommy Edwards, singing “Please Mr. Sun.” It sounded romantic at the time, but here was a man scared out of his mind. He begged brooks, wind, raindrops, rainbows and moonbeams, among others, to do his romancing for him, with Mr. Sun watching to see they all did. Some of us did Tommy one better. We took all his stuff, and the song, and sent it along as our personal John Alden. It’s amazing, the binding power we give to simple songs. I doubt that my high school girlfriend and I will ever speak again, but neither of us is likely to hear (I am blushing now) “Susie Darlin’” without feeling emotion for days and nights of long ago.
Chris Isaak, singing in the late 1980s, more or less put his finger on it: “Strange, what desire makes foolish people do.” It makes them bay at the moon for one thing. That night, head thrown back, face turned up to the moon, I was a person very much in the baying position. It was the same position foolish people everywhere assume, beaming the most heartfelt romantic thoughts at the moon as if it were a satellite that would bounce them back, across miles and darkness, into the heart of the intended, who would hear, and stop eating, or wake up, or push herself out of the arms of another man, who had naturally brought roses and champagne.
I turned around and looked at my shadow on the driveway and laughed. Then I stared at the moon again and for the first time saw it simply staring back, powerless to commune with anyone but me. I was the betrayer. And the betrayed was time, amounting to years and decades, time on both sides, lost to foolishness, left for fools to measure, in remembered melodies and spent corks and crumbled petals, by the forgiving light of the moon.
For the moment I was angry. But it was a beautiful night, clear and warm and unexacting. The moon moved on, just out of Orion’s reach. I stayed out awhile, wondering how beauty is shared, among fearless lovers.
The next morning I went out to start the car to take my son to school. It was 6:15, and the moon was just setting, in the north-northwest, in the same place the sun would set if it were June, near the solstice. The moon was as gold as a setting sun, and puddled the same way at the horizon. I watched it until it was gone, thinking how romantic it was, or maybe just very personal, that the moon should set at the dawn of this particular day.
Looking at the moon Tuesday night, I felt a sudden awareness of betrayal. Oh, the moon was innocent, pretty as ever in its full phase and unusually high in the sky for the 8 p.m. hour. It seemed to be in the company of a star or bright planet that had appeared to keep its relative position (a finger’s width to the south) since nightfall. They might have been two different stars, of course, but that would not be the romantic notion.
Through the years, I put a lot of stock in that moon to do my romancing for me. Most people have. For reasons of their own – and every human on the planet comes as a complete set of reasons of his or her own – people don’t trust themselves to get the job done.
A few people admit that, but it takes enormous courage. You confess your fears – be yourself in other words – and take your chances. Most people won’t go that far. They don’t want to take a chance; they want to get the girl. So even if they could, they won’t present themselves directly. They send what lovers have in common: the moon, the stars, the sky, the sun, the clouds, rain, the ocean, music, champagne, roses and Baby Ruths. It seems very romantic, but romance with the moon as intermediary is mostly an exercise in managing fear.
It would be funny if it weren’t also sad. Those who were doing their first romancing in the 1950s will remember the late, great Tommy Edwards, singing “Please Mr. Sun.” It sounded romantic at the time, but here was a man scared out of his mind. He begged brooks, wind, raindrops, rainbows and moonbeams, among others, to do his romancing for him, with Mr. Sun watching to see they all did. Some of us did Tommy one better. We took all his stuff, and the song, and sent it along as our personal John Alden. It’s amazing, the binding power we give to simple songs. I doubt that my high school girlfriend and I will ever speak again, but neither of us is likely to hear (I am blushing now) “Susie Darlin’” without feeling emotion for days and nights of long ago.
Chris Isaak, singing in the late 1980s, more or less put his finger on it: “Strange, what desire makes foolish people do.” It makes them bay at the moon for one thing. That night, head thrown back, face turned up to the moon, I was a person very much in the baying position. It was the same position foolish people everywhere assume, beaming the most heartfelt romantic thoughts at the moon as if it were a satellite that would bounce them back, across miles and darkness, into the heart of the intended, who would hear, and stop eating, or wake up, or push herself out of the arms of another man, who had naturally brought roses and champagne.
I turned around and looked at my shadow on the driveway and laughed. Then I stared at the moon again and for the first time saw it simply staring back, powerless to commune with anyone but me. I was the betrayer. And the betrayed was time, amounting to years and decades, time on both sides, lost to foolishness, left for fools to measure, in remembered melodies and spent corks and crumbled petals, by the forgiving light of the moon.
For the moment I was angry. But it was a beautiful night, clear and warm and unexacting. The moon moved on, just out of Orion’s reach. I stayed out awhile, wondering how beauty is shared, among fearless lovers.
The next morning I went out to start the car to take my son to school. It was 6:15, and the moon was just setting, in the north-northwest, in the same place the sun would set if it were June, near the solstice. The moon was as gold as a setting sun, and puddled the same way at the horizon. I watched it until it was gone, thinking how romantic it was, or maybe just very personal, that the moon should set at the dawn of this particular day.
May 28, 2009
Stretch/Seasonal recipe: Unique Tea
This week's recipe isn't so much a stretch recipe as it is a seasonal one, and it isn't a recipe so much as it is a technique.
It requires a bit of planning. Go to Costco as soon as possible and buy a big, huge gallon jar of olives; jalapeno-stuffed are preferred. Relocate the olives into smaller jars and store for future use. There should be enough for about four months' of martinis.
Wash the gallon jar and the lid until it is free of olive aroma; this may take a week. When it is ready, wait for a sunny, warm-to-hot day. About 10 a.m., fill the jar with water. Place in the water four Lipton tea bags with the tags and dipping strings lapped over the mouth of the jar. Put on the lid and tighten it into the closed position, securing the tags on the outside.
Carry the jar outside and place it so it will always be in direct sunlight. Leave it there two or three hours until the tea is a very warm brown. During this time, do enough work to develop a sweat, a thirst, and a degree of fatigue. Carry the jar of tea inside. Be careful; it will be very warm to sort of hot. Remove the lid and pull out the tea bags.
Get a quart-sized glass; a Mason jar is best. Squeeze into it half a lemon, then fill it with ice. With one smooth motion, pour the glass full of the hot tea, and as soon as it is full, start counting to five, not slowly, but with restraint. As soon as you reach five, drink all the tea. The first couple of mouthfuls will be almost cold, but then will arrive swirls of cold and warmth, like an ice-and-tea parfait.
When you have drunk it all, you will wish it wasn’t over. You won't want a second glass. This is an experience unique to specific conditions. Refrigerate the remaining tea immediately, before it gets cloudy, and drink in the usual way.
It requires a bit of planning. Go to Costco as soon as possible and buy a big, huge gallon jar of olives; jalapeno-stuffed are preferred. Relocate the olives into smaller jars and store for future use. There should be enough for about four months' of martinis.
Wash the gallon jar and the lid until it is free of olive aroma; this may take a week. When it is ready, wait for a sunny, warm-to-hot day. About 10 a.m., fill the jar with water. Place in the water four Lipton tea bags with the tags and dipping strings lapped over the mouth of the jar. Put on the lid and tighten it into the closed position, securing the tags on the outside.
Carry the jar outside and place it so it will always be in direct sunlight. Leave it there two or three hours until the tea is a very warm brown. During this time, do enough work to develop a sweat, a thirst, and a degree of fatigue. Carry the jar of tea inside. Be careful; it will be very warm to sort of hot. Remove the lid and pull out the tea bags.
Get a quart-sized glass; a Mason jar is best. Squeeze into it half a lemon, then fill it with ice. With one smooth motion, pour the glass full of the hot tea, and as soon as it is full, start counting to five, not slowly, but with restraint. As soon as you reach five, drink all the tea. The first couple of mouthfuls will be almost cold, but then will arrive swirls of cold and warmth, like an ice-and-tea parfait.
When you have drunk it all, you will wish it wasn’t over. You won't want a second glass. This is an experience unique to specific conditions. Refrigerate the remaining tea immediately, before it gets cloudy, and drink in the usual way.
May 27, 2009
One last ride in the Fiat
I get all warm and fuzzy, thinking Fiat may come back to America. I bought a brand new Fiat Spyder in 1970 for $3,600 and drove it for more than 20 years. It was a great car. Just how great was provided by comparing it to my prior car, a 1967 Chevy Chevelle 396 SuperSport. When I parked the Chevelle at the dealers and drove away in the Fiat, with the top down, I experienced a feeling with which I was not familiar. I could feel the street. When I turned a corner, I felt I could turn it at speeds that would have sent the Chevelle tumbling tires over hardtop into the woods or the fronts of department stores.
Let me tell you a story. There was a time when I smoked and drank. I still drink, but I don't smoke, and I no longer drink behind the wheel. That was not the case one Sunday afternoon when my former wife, the mother of my children, and I went for a spin in the new Fiat around Lake Abilene. I had a Winston in one hand, a scotch in the other. We were going about 50. It was hard to go less than 50 in a 1970 Fiat Spyder. A squirrel darted across the road. I steered left, then right, but coming back right, I oversteered, as encumbered as I was.
The Fiat went into a slide. Not a skid. A slide. The rear end broke free and led us into a circular slide, maybe twice in a circle, and then we stopped, in a cloud of dust and possibly a sprinkle of J&B. I would like to say I didn't spill a drop, but I don't remember. I do know that if I didn't spill any, I would credit the car. It spun flat as a turntable and then stopped and sat as if nothing had happened. It was my first awareness of a car that could forgive a driver.
I loved that car. It was green, tan top, black naugahyde upholstery, bucket seats, wood dash, a tachometer(!!), a five-speed manual transmission, and a four-cylinder engine which was all the power the car needed. The Fiat did more with four cylinders than the Chevelle did with eight, though I have to say that digging the Chevelle away from a stoplight was pretty exciting. But I had had a clue. I proceeded directly from OCS graduation, orders to Europe in my pocket, to the Norman, Okla., dealer where I bought the Chevelle – it was a beautiful metallic blue – and then had it shipped to Germany, where I spent two years swaying out of the way of the Porches and the BMWs on the autobahn. In that company, the beautiful muscle car was a bathtub.
My Fiat was the last of the Spyder boy cars. Its hood was a flat, smooth line. In 1971, the design changed. There were twin humps on the hood, that year and the years thereafter, and they became recognized as the girl Fiats. As we entered the 1990s together, I believed the boy Fiat may have acquired antique value, and I hung onto it longer than I should have. It is commonly known that "FIAT" stands for "Fix It Again Tony." I never had a problem with that, until the car aged. Its pretty wood dash cracked and the door handles snapped, but more fundamentally, the parts to keep the four-cylinder running smoothly began to disappear. It was the last car I actually tuned myself, changing plugs and points and adjusting the timing.
Then the tuneup kits started to disappear, as Fiat's presence diminished in the U.S. Fiat mechanics became as precious as restorers of Renaissance paintings. The last straw was a cracked distributor cap. I managed to find one, but the Spyder was becoming more trouble, and more expense, than it was worth. I sold it in 1993 for $1,600. I still had the last cracked distributor cap until a couple of years ago, when it managed to get thrown away. Today I looked at the Fiat Website for the Spyder, but all the models look like lumps of birthday cake icing. My Fiat was a car for a time and a place. I wonder if it survives.
Let me tell you a story. There was a time when I smoked and drank. I still drink, but I don't smoke, and I no longer drink behind the wheel. That was not the case one Sunday afternoon when my former wife, the mother of my children, and I went for a spin in the new Fiat around Lake Abilene. I had a Winston in one hand, a scotch in the other. We were going about 50. It was hard to go less than 50 in a 1970 Fiat Spyder. A squirrel darted across the road. I steered left, then right, but coming back right, I oversteered, as encumbered as I was.
The Fiat went into a slide. Not a skid. A slide. The rear end broke free and led us into a circular slide, maybe twice in a circle, and then we stopped, in a cloud of dust and possibly a sprinkle of J&B. I would like to say I didn't spill a drop, but I don't remember. I do know that if I didn't spill any, I would credit the car. It spun flat as a turntable and then stopped and sat as if nothing had happened. It was my first awareness of a car that could forgive a driver.
I loved that car. It was green, tan top, black naugahyde upholstery, bucket seats, wood dash, a tachometer(!!), a five-speed manual transmission, and a four-cylinder engine which was all the power the car needed. The Fiat did more with four cylinders than the Chevelle did with eight, though I have to say that digging the Chevelle away from a stoplight was pretty exciting. But I had had a clue. I proceeded directly from OCS graduation, orders to Europe in my pocket, to the Norman, Okla., dealer where I bought the Chevelle – it was a beautiful metallic blue – and then had it shipped to Germany, where I spent two years swaying out of the way of the Porches and the BMWs on the autobahn. In that company, the beautiful muscle car was a bathtub.
My Fiat was the last of the Spyder boy cars. Its hood was a flat, smooth line. In 1971, the design changed. There were twin humps on the hood, that year and the years thereafter, and they became recognized as the girl Fiats. As we entered the 1990s together, I believed the boy Fiat may have acquired antique value, and I hung onto it longer than I should have. It is commonly known that "FIAT" stands for "Fix It Again Tony." I never had a problem with that, until the car aged. Its pretty wood dash cracked and the door handles snapped, but more fundamentally, the parts to keep the four-cylinder running smoothly began to disappear. It was the last car I actually tuned myself, changing plugs and points and adjusting the timing.
Then the tuneup kits started to disappear, as Fiat's presence diminished in the U.S. Fiat mechanics became as precious as restorers of Renaissance paintings. The last straw was a cracked distributor cap. I managed to find one, but the Spyder was becoming more trouble, and more expense, than it was worth. I sold it in 1993 for $1,600. I still had the last cracked distributor cap until a couple of years ago, when it managed to get thrown away. Today I looked at the Fiat Website for the Spyder, but all the models look like lumps of birthday cake icing. My Fiat was a car for a time and a place. I wonder if it survives.
May 26, 2009
Carnitas in our past, pot liquor in our future
Following up on last Thursday's Braised Pork Shoulder blog, it is turning out to be one of the all-time best Stretch Cooking recipes. The pork shoulder in the bag from CostCo turned out to be two six-pound hunks, individually wrapped. We were feeding eight people, so I only used one hunk. I cut the other one into entrée-sized hunks and they are now waiting in the freezer for future recipes, one of which will be "Carnitas Houston Style," that I found (and linked to) at Lisa Fain's "Homesick Texan" site.
Saturday's braised "carnitas" turned out to be fall-apart tender and (everyone said) delicious. I made one change to the recipe as I was cooking it. I bought a big bunch of cilantro for garnish, so I rinsed the whole bunch well, then cut off the stems below the rubber band and scattered these with the green pepper strips over the top of the pork. I wondered if the stems would lend their unique grassy pungency to the meat, and they did. I will never throw away cilantro stems again.
In the whole eight-quart pot, with six pounds of pork, a couple of onions, 10 garlic cloves, and the pepper strips and cilantro stems, there was only one cup of liquid at the beginning: the cup of leftover coffee I used to deglaze the pot. After three hours of simmering, enough pot liquor had evolved to almost cover the meat. There was at least two quarts. This liquid came from the pepper strips, the cilantro, and the pork itself. I took out all but one chunk of pork and broke it (or rather it fell apart in my hands) into serving pieces for the carnitas. Left in the pot was the one chunk, plus other smaller pieces that had fallen off during the simmering.
I put the whole pot in the refrigerator and next morning skimmed off a surprisingly thin layer of fat that had hardened on top. What was left was about two quarts of pork-studded, dark, savory, jellied stock that I froze in two batches with visions of some near-future stretch recipe involving potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, zucchini, tortillas, or I don't know what.
One caveat. The stock is still a bit fatty, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are Texan. But next time I will go for a purer stock. Next time, I will strain the pot liquor, place it in a large saucepan, and refrigerate that. It will make for a much easier and more complete skim. The strained-out pork and vegetables I will have for breakfast the next day, migas-style. Let's see, for $17.46 for the meat, so far we have fed eight people at a party, have two quarts of stock in the freezer, had pork migas for breakfast, and we have six pounds of shoulder in the freezer, a couple of pounds of which are destined for Carnitas, Houston Style. What will I do with the other four pounds? Gives me something other than the economy to think about.
Saturday's braised "carnitas" turned out to be fall-apart tender and (everyone said) delicious. I made one change to the recipe as I was cooking it. I bought a big bunch of cilantro for garnish, so I rinsed the whole bunch well, then cut off the stems below the rubber band and scattered these with the green pepper strips over the top of the pork. I wondered if the stems would lend their unique grassy pungency to the meat, and they did. I will never throw away cilantro stems again.
In the whole eight-quart pot, with six pounds of pork, a couple of onions, 10 garlic cloves, and the pepper strips and cilantro stems, there was only one cup of liquid at the beginning: the cup of leftover coffee I used to deglaze the pot. After three hours of simmering, enough pot liquor had evolved to almost cover the meat. There was at least two quarts. This liquid came from the pepper strips, the cilantro, and the pork itself. I took out all but one chunk of pork and broke it (or rather it fell apart in my hands) into serving pieces for the carnitas. Left in the pot was the one chunk, plus other smaller pieces that had fallen off during the simmering.
I put the whole pot in the refrigerator and next morning skimmed off a surprisingly thin layer of fat that had hardened on top. What was left was about two quarts of pork-studded, dark, savory, jellied stock that I froze in two batches with visions of some near-future stretch recipe involving potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, zucchini, tortillas, or I don't know what.
One caveat. The stock is still a bit fatty, which is not necessarily a bad thing, if you are Texan. But next time I will go for a purer stock. Next time, I will strain the pot liquor, place it in a large saucepan, and refrigerate that. It will make for a much easier and more complete skim. The strained-out pork and vegetables I will have for breakfast the next day, migas-style. Let's see, for $17.46 for the meat, so far we have fed eight people at a party, have two quarts of stock in the freezer, had pork migas for breakfast, and we have six pounds of shoulder in the freezer, a couple of pounds of which are destined for Carnitas, Houston Style. What will I do with the other four pounds? Gives me something other than the economy to think about.
Kids tackle an excellence question
Here's a nice story. When the swine flu story was really starting to escalate, Texas authorities suspended all high school sports playoffs leading to state championship meets. After May 11, the edict expired and was not renewed because the threat had diminished.
Playoffs resumed, but the schedule had been totally messed up. State championship meets, in track and field, for example, had to be pushed back. The state meet, for all classifications, is always in Austin, on the University of Texas campus. I have been to several of these state meets, as a Texas sportswriter, and it is a very big deal for these high school kids.
Enter P.J. Martinez and Emily Yates, seniors at Clyde High School. Clyde is a small community on Interstate 20 about 12 miles east of Abilene, my home town. I picked up this story in today's online edition of The Abilene Reporter-News. P.J. is a member of the Bulldogs' 800-meter relay team that qualified for the state meet, which was rescheduled for June 5. Emily is on the girls' 800-meter relay team that also qualified for Austin with the best time (1:44.99) in the state.
Then, a conflict. The state meet was rescheduled to June 5, the same day as Clyde High School's graduation ceremony. But there was an even bigger wrinkle. Emily Yates is the class valedictorian. P.J. Martinez is the salutatorian. Both were to make speeches at the graduation ceremony, an experience for a lifetime.
In their positions, what would you do? To learn what Emily and P.J. did, go here.
Playoffs resumed, but the schedule had been totally messed up. State championship meets, in track and field, for example, had to be pushed back. The state meet, for all classifications, is always in Austin, on the University of Texas campus. I have been to several of these state meets, as a Texas sportswriter, and it is a very big deal for these high school kids.
Enter P.J. Martinez and Emily Yates, seniors at Clyde High School. Clyde is a small community on Interstate 20 about 12 miles east of Abilene, my home town. I picked up this story in today's online edition of The Abilene Reporter-News. P.J. is a member of the Bulldogs' 800-meter relay team that qualified for the state meet, which was rescheduled for June 5. Emily is on the girls' 800-meter relay team that also qualified for Austin with the best time (1:44.99) in the state.
Then, a conflict. The state meet was rescheduled to June 5, the same day as Clyde High School's graduation ceremony. But there was an even bigger wrinkle. Emily Yates is the class valedictorian. P.J. Martinez is the salutatorian. Both were to make speeches at the graduation ceremony, an experience for a lifetime.
In their positions, what would you do? To learn what Emily and P.J. did, go here.
May 25, 2009
Media Literacy: the "American Idol" winner
Webster's defines "literacy," in its most general sense, as "having knowledge or competence," as in "computer literate," or "politically literate." Thus "media literate" means having knowledge or competence in understanding media.
Without media literacy, you can only know what others tell you about "American Idol," such as this story in Monday's New York Times.
.
With media literacy, you have knowledge and competence for looking at "Idol" in a way that gives you information to make your own judgments and decisions. The difference? Without media literacy, you may think that the talk about "conspiracy theories" is all about who won. With media literacy, you will realize that, if there were a conspiracy theory, it was partly about the winner, but mostly the show. You will understand why the Fox TV and the show's producers gave deep, satisfied sighs of relief when Kris Allen won.
The main media literacy tools in play here are timeliness, novelty, prominence, the threat to the status quo, emotional proximity and sensationalism.
"Timeliness," in media, means that everything gets old. News starts to get old as soon as it is published. That is why, in mass media, there has always been a race to be first with the news. But it also applies to entertainment and advertising. It's a longer shelf life than news, but on television (since we're talking about television), sooner or later entertainment gets old. Even "Seinfeld." Even "American Idol." Audiences never tire of conflict, or of the threat to the status quo, which are the core values of "American Idol." But they weary of this particular conflict, or that kind of threat.
After four to six years, the producers start worrying about the show getting old, and the audience losing interest. That was the big story about "American Idol" before the present season began. "Changes" were made, a judge added, auditions modified. "Reinvention" is a media buzzword; Madonna is the ranking expert in "reinventing" herself. Always, timeliness is the enemy, and it is as relentless in the media field as entropy is in physics. The remedy is novelty. How do we make it new again?
This season, the changes didn't work. Ratings were down. Producers got defensive. "It's ridiculous how big this show is," one told The Times. Something needed to happen. Then something did. Nothing like a sudden star, a fresh sensation, startling prominence, to bring the audience back to a show. In Britain, it was Susan Boyle. In America, it was Adam Lambert, whose impact was compared to Elvis Presley. The audience started to fall helplessly in love with him, a phenomenon called emotional proximity.
Trouble is, Lambert became too much of a sure thing. He moved to the front early and stayed there. If there's no horse race, no conflict, no "who's gonna win" threat, people lose interest. People started looking back in the pack, looking for someone to restore the threat, even hoping for someone to make it a race. They were looking for an underdog, which is the "David and Goliath" form of emotional proximity that is even stronger than Elvis worship, because more people identify with it. The economy crisis has turned America into a nation of Davids. Two hundred million adult American backs can hold up a lot of weight, but this is ridiculous.
And now "American Idol" has provided a David. Kris Allen. How lucky can Fox TV get? The threat lives! Millions more Americans, who will take their Davids where they can find them, even ones named Mine That Bird, are aware of "American Idol" than if Adam Lambert had won. Lambert will still get rich, Kris Allen will get rich, and, most of all, the guy that Fox needed to win, did. Next season Fox can play the threat card for all it is worth, framing "American Idol" as the all-American show where anything can happen, and probably will.
Last but not least, the "Idol" David comes with minimal cost to American culture. Critics fret that entertainments like "American Idol" threaten to drag the culture into a mindless, unprincipled wasteland. But the critics overlook another media tool, a law, actually, which states that the mass media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. Nielsen Media says 28.8 million viewers out of a population of 304 million watched the "Idol" finale, meaning 275.2 million of us were doing something else. Remember that, when critics try to call mass media the end of civilization.
Without media literacy, you can only know what others tell you about "American Idol," such as this story in Monday's New York Times.
.
With media literacy, you have knowledge and competence for looking at "Idol" in a way that gives you information to make your own judgments and decisions. The difference? Without media literacy, you may think that the talk about "conspiracy theories" is all about who won. With media literacy, you will realize that, if there were a conspiracy theory, it was partly about the winner, but mostly the show. You will understand why the Fox TV and the show's producers gave deep, satisfied sighs of relief when Kris Allen won.
The main media literacy tools in play here are timeliness, novelty, prominence, the threat to the status quo, emotional proximity and sensationalism.
"Timeliness," in media, means that everything gets old. News starts to get old as soon as it is published. That is why, in mass media, there has always been a race to be first with the news. But it also applies to entertainment and advertising. It's a longer shelf life than news, but on television (since we're talking about television), sooner or later entertainment gets old. Even "Seinfeld." Even "American Idol." Audiences never tire of conflict, or of the threat to the status quo, which are the core values of "American Idol." But they weary of this particular conflict, or that kind of threat.
After four to six years, the producers start worrying about the show getting old, and the audience losing interest. That was the big story about "American Idol" before the present season began. "Changes" were made, a judge added, auditions modified. "Reinvention" is a media buzzword; Madonna is the ranking expert in "reinventing" herself. Always, timeliness is the enemy, and it is as relentless in the media field as entropy is in physics. The remedy is novelty. How do we make it new again?
This season, the changes didn't work. Ratings were down. Producers got defensive. "It's ridiculous how big this show is," one told The Times. Something needed to happen. Then something did. Nothing like a sudden star, a fresh sensation, startling prominence, to bring the audience back to a show. In Britain, it was Susan Boyle. In America, it was Adam Lambert, whose impact was compared to Elvis Presley. The audience started to fall helplessly in love with him, a phenomenon called emotional proximity.
Trouble is, Lambert became too much of a sure thing. He moved to the front early and stayed there. If there's no horse race, no conflict, no "who's gonna win" threat, people lose interest. People started looking back in the pack, looking for someone to restore the threat, even hoping for someone to make it a race. They were looking for an underdog, which is the "David and Goliath" form of emotional proximity that is even stronger than Elvis worship, because more people identify with it. The economy crisis has turned America into a nation of Davids. Two hundred million adult American backs can hold up a lot of weight, but this is ridiculous.
And now "American Idol" has provided a David. Kris Allen. How lucky can Fox TV get? The threat lives! Millions more Americans, who will take their Davids where they can find them, even ones named Mine That Bird, are aware of "American Idol" than if Adam Lambert had won. Lambert will still get rich, Kris Allen will get rich, and, most of all, the guy that Fox needed to win, did. Next season Fox can play the threat card for all it is worth, framing "American Idol" as the all-American show where anything can happen, and probably will.
Last but not least, the "Idol" David comes with minimal cost to American culture. Critics fret that entertainments like "American Idol" threaten to drag the culture into a mindless, unprincipled wasteland. But the critics overlook another media tool, a law, actually, which states that the mass media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. Nielsen Media says 28.8 million viewers out of a population of 304 million watched the "Idol" finale, meaning 275.2 million of us were doing something else. Remember that, when critics try to call mass media the end of civilization.
May 22, 2009
Archives: May 17, 1983 - A Day to Remember
The archive below was published on May 17, 1983, when Tyler was six years old. Tomorrow, May 23, he will be 33. Still too young . . .
We had the house together, he and I. For lunch he had a hotdog. I had cold pizza. On his hotdog he had ketchup and pickle relish. You start to wonder from where these tastes arise.
The ketchup was Heinz, which he believes is too runny. "I'll be glad when we get some Del Monte ketchup," he said. I had put on two hotdogs, thinking he would be hungry after his game. His team won, 28-27, its first victory of the season. This is "tee-ball," where the hitters hit the ball off a rubber tee and the defenses are, well, forgetful.
He played catcher and had four hits. He has a nice stroke, he's a good thrower, and he catches all right, but he does not yet appreciate the concept of turning the glove over for low throws and ground balls.
He didn't want the other hotdog. "For lunch," he reminded me, "I always have only one hotdog, or sometimes one and a half." So I ate the other hotdog, with mustard.
"You have a big appetite," he said. "Let's go sit in the swing," I said. "That's a good idea," he said. "You can read me two stories."
He went by his room and picked out two books. I hoped they were not "Fish is Fish," or "How Engines Talk." He met me at the swing, and Terry the Pup jumped up also. The afternoon was warm, almost hot. But the canopy took the bright edge off, and at the back a little breeze wandered in. It was every bit of all right.
"Read this one first," he said and handed me "The Pumpkin Smasher." "And read this one second." This one – "Mouse and Tim" – he showed to me, but did not hand over. "The Pumpkin Smasher" is preschooler stuff. Every Hallowe'en Eve, someone smashes all the pumpkins in town. It gets so bad that the mayor is thinking about calling off Hallowe'en.
But a couple of kids have a plan. They paint a boulder to look like a pumpkin. Sure enough, the pumpkin-smasher – it turns out to be a witch – tries to smash this pumpkin. Then she gives up and flies away, saying she will never come back to this town again.
This book I handed back, and he handed me "Mouse and Tim," which is better. In fact it is terrific, if you have never read it. The trick is, both boy and mouse give points of view, the mouse in italics. Reading it aloud, toward the end, when Tim is going to let Mouse go, you have to stop every little while to let your sob reflex relax. More is going on than boy frees mouse.
"That's a great story," I said at the end. He didn't say anything. We rocked in the heat and watched the summer bugs dip and dart. I tried to see the afternoon through his eyes, and I almost could, having been there once. The view, I think, doesn't change. Sharing it with him was special.
We could have spent the afternoon, but I had things to do in the kitchen. Company was coming. "Well," I said. "I have things to do."
"No," he said. He rolled onto my lap and wiggled his cheek into my chest and pinned me with his arms.
I would not have had to move a muscle to get to heaven. Someday I will have to let him go, but now I clung to him, clung to the day, and the hour, and the minute, and the pressure of it squeezed free a drop that rolled down my cheek and plopped on the brown bill of his baseball cap.
I was not at this point just going to get up without a good excuse. After awhile I said, "Want to listen to the little records?"
"Yeah!" he said. The little records are 45s of mine, nearly all 1950s rock and roll, that he and I have been listening to for years. He likes it, and I tell him it is better stuff than hits the charts today. Some of these I am taping for a friend. I figured I could do that and other stuff too. He sat on the couch, and I loped between stereo and kitchen.
I was at the stereo when he said, "Dad, do you think I will die in the 20th . . . the 20th . . ."
"The 20th century?" I said. "Naw. I sure hope not." I told him that the 21st century would start in the year 2001, 18 years from now. "You will be 25," I said. "You'll just be getting started. And I will be, uh, 58. I think it will be exciting, living at the turn of a century."
He was not distracted. "I hope I die before you do," he said.
"Why?" I said.
"If you died before I did, I would be sad," he said. Psychologists say such statements are normal because the kid at that age sees the parent as hero. I trust it is also normal for the parent, hearing it, to feel mighty heroic.
"Now wait a minute," I said, and went over and leaned down in his face. "What about me? If you died before me, I would be sad. Ever think about that?"
"Well," he said, "we could just die on the same day."
"No," I said. "You will always be too young." And he always will.
We had the house together, he and I. For lunch he had a hotdog. I had cold pizza. On his hotdog he had ketchup and pickle relish. You start to wonder from where these tastes arise.
The ketchup was Heinz, which he believes is too runny. "I'll be glad when we get some Del Monte ketchup," he said. I had put on two hotdogs, thinking he would be hungry after his game. His team won, 28-27, its first victory of the season. This is "tee-ball," where the hitters hit the ball off a rubber tee and the defenses are, well, forgetful.
He played catcher and had four hits. He has a nice stroke, he's a good thrower, and he catches all right, but he does not yet appreciate the concept of turning the glove over for low throws and ground balls.
He didn't want the other hotdog. "For lunch," he reminded me, "I always have only one hotdog, or sometimes one and a half." So I ate the other hotdog, with mustard.
"You have a big appetite," he said. "Let's go sit in the swing," I said. "That's a good idea," he said. "You can read me two stories."
He went by his room and picked out two books. I hoped they were not "Fish is Fish," or "How Engines Talk." He met me at the swing, and Terry the Pup jumped up also. The afternoon was warm, almost hot. But the canopy took the bright edge off, and at the back a little breeze wandered in. It was every bit of all right.
"Read this one first," he said and handed me "The Pumpkin Smasher." "And read this one second." This one – "Mouse and Tim" – he showed to me, but did not hand over. "The Pumpkin Smasher" is preschooler stuff. Every Hallowe'en Eve, someone smashes all the pumpkins in town. It gets so bad that the mayor is thinking about calling off Hallowe'en.
But a couple of kids have a plan. They paint a boulder to look like a pumpkin. Sure enough, the pumpkin-smasher – it turns out to be a witch – tries to smash this pumpkin. Then she gives up and flies away, saying she will never come back to this town again.
This book I handed back, and he handed me "Mouse and Tim," which is better. In fact it is terrific, if you have never read it. The trick is, both boy and mouse give points of view, the mouse in italics. Reading it aloud, toward the end, when Tim is going to let Mouse go, you have to stop every little while to let your sob reflex relax. More is going on than boy frees mouse.
"That's a great story," I said at the end. He didn't say anything. We rocked in the heat and watched the summer bugs dip and dart. I tried to see the afternoon through his eyes, and I almost could, having been there once. The view, I think, doesn't change. Sharing it with him was special.
We could have spent the afternoon, but I had things to do in the kitchen. Company was coming. "Well," I said. "I have things to do."
"No," he said. He rolled onto my lap and wiggled his cheek into my chest and pinned me with his arms.
I would not have had to move a muscle to get to heaven. Someday I will have to let him go, but now I clung to him, clung to the day, and the hour, and the minute, and the pressure of it squeezed free a drop that rolled down my cheek and plopped on the brown bill of his baseball cap.
I was not at this point just going to get up without a good excuse. After awhile I said, "Want to listen to the little records?"
"Yeah!" he said. The little records are 45s of mine, nearly all 1950s rock and roll, that he and I have been listening to for years. He likes it, and I tell him it is better stuff than hits the charts today. Some of these I am taping for a friend. I figured I could do that and other stuff too. He sat on the couch, and I loped between stereo and kitchen.
I was at the stereo when he said, "Dad, do you think I will die in the 20th . . . the 20th . . ."
"The 20th century?" I said. "Naw. I sure hope not." I told him that the 21st century would start in the year 2001, 18 years from now. "You will be 25," I said. "You'll just be getting started. And I will be, uh, 58. I think it will be exciting, living at the turn of a century."
He was not distracted. "I hope I die before you do," he said.
"Why?" I said.
"If you died before I did, I would be sad," he said. Psychologists say such statements are normal because the kid at that age sees the parent as hero. I trust it is also normal for the parent, hearing it, to feel mighty heroic.
"Now wait a minute," I said, and went over and leaned down in his face. "What about me? If you died before me, I would be sad. Ever think about that?"
"Well," he said, "we could just die on the same day."
"No," I said. "You will always be too young." And he always will.
May 21, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Braised Pork Shoulder
Braising is a great way to make a big, cheap hunk of meat go a long way. On Saturday, we are having friends over, and we are going to feed them braised pork shoulder, served carnitas-style, with tortillas and condiments. I love carnitas, which is also a classic stretch recipe, but hazardous. You need a big pot and boiling oil, which gets to be more trouble than it’s worth, especially for a man who recently positioned himself to be killed by a ceiling fan. Braising is easy, and the pork will be pull-apart tender.
I got the pork shoulder today, boneless, at CostCo, and a package of Porkyland flour tortillas. The pork was $1.39 a pound, and 12 and a half pounds (in one bag) cost $17.46. The tortillas are medium size, about eight inches across, just right for this particular feed.
The shoulder is very meaty, and flecked with fat, which provides flavor and tenderness during the long, slow cooking. When you’re finished, there won’t hardly be enough fat in the pot to skim off, but you can, of course, if you want to.
You need a heavy pot, 6 to 8 quarts. I have an 8-quart Le Creuset enameled pot, which is great, and an old 6-quart Club Aluminum pot, which is great too. If there is enough fat on the shoulder, trim it off and render it, just enough to wet the bottom of the pot to get things going. If the shoulder is very lean, use olive oil. Put the pot on medium-high heat. Cut the shoulder into big chunks, the size of your hand. Season with salt and pepper and brown the chunks on all sides. Place the pot lid next to the range, upside-down, and place the browned chunks in it. That way you save all the juices and just pour them back in.
Chop a medium onion and sauté it in the pot, stirring, until it starts to brown. Rough-chop a second onion and add to the pot. Let a dark glaze form on the bottom of the pot. Don’t let it scorch, but it should be dark. This “almost-scorching” step is a favorite of mine and provides deep, savory flavor. Throw in 10 cloves of garlic, smashed (peel the garlic by smashing it under the side of a large knife; the peel lifts right off). Stir the garlic and onions just for a minute. Add a cup of leftover coffee and scrape the bottom to de-glaze the pot; it will make a beautiful, dark sauce. Stir in a teaspoon of ground cumin. Turn the heat to low.
Add the browned pork chunks back to the pot and pour in the juices from the lid. Scatter a large rough-chopped green pepper on top. Cover and simmer gently for 3 hours. Let the pork cool on a platter until it is cool enough to pull apart with your fingers. Warm 2 medium-sized flour tortillas per person in a hot skillet and keep them warm in foil packets in the oven. Serve with condiments on the side: chopped green onion and tomato; slices of avocado; cilantro sprigs; quartered limes; and salsa.
Freeze the leftover pork in pint containers. It can be used all sorts of ways. With blackeyes, say. Yum.
I got the pork shoulder today, boneless, at CostCo, and a package of Porkyland flour tortillas. The pork was $1.39 a pound, and 12 and a half pounds (in one bag) cost $17.46. The tortillas are medium size, about eight inches across, just right for this particular feed.
The shoulder is very meaty, and flecked with fat, which provides flavor and tenderness during the long, slow cooking. When you’re finished, there won’t hardly be enough fat in the pot to skim off, but you can, of course, if you want to.
You need a heavy pot, 6 to 8 quarts. I have an 8-quart Le Creuset enameled pot, which is great, and an old 6-quart Club Aluminum pot, which is great too. If there is enough fat on the shoulder, trim it off and render it, just enough to wet the bottom of the pot to get things going. If the shoulder is very lean, use olive oil. Put the pot on medium-high heat. Cut the shoulder into big chunks, the size of your hand. Season with salt and pepper and brown the chunks on all sides. Place the pot lid next to the range, upside-down, and place the browned chunks in it. That way you save all the juices and just pour them back in.
Chop a medium onion and sauté it in the pot, stirring, until it starts to brown. Rough-chop a second onion and add to the pot. Let a dark glaze form on the bottom of the pot. Don’t let it scorch, but it should be dark. This “almost-scorching” step is a favorite of mine and provides deep, savory flavor. Throw in 10 cloves of garlic, smashed (peel the garlic by smashing it under the side of a large knife; the peel lifts right off). Stir the garlic and onions just for a minute. Add a cup of leftover coffee and scrape the bottom to de-glaze the pot; it will make a beautiful, dark sauce. Stir in a teaspoon of ground cumin. Turn the heat to low.
Add the browned pork chunks back to the pot and pour in the juices from the lid. Scatter a large rough-chopped green pepper on top. Cover and simmer gently for 3 hours. Let the pork cool on a platter until it is cool enough to pull apart with your fingers. Warm 2 medium-sized flour tortillas per person in a hot skillet and keep them warm in foil packets in the oven. Serve with condiments on the side: chopped green onion and tomato; slices of avocado; cilantro sprigs; quartered limes; and salsa.
Freeze the leftover pork in pint containers. It can be used all sorts of ways. With blackeyes, say. Yum.
May 20, 2009
The television faces of tomorrow
We are in the campus television studio this week, taping our newscast projects. Three talents per team, two news and one sports or weather. I sit over in the shadows and feel warm and fuzzy, watching the 20-year-old faces in the bright lights trying so hard to do good on TV.
We began the semester way last January learning the tools that journalists use to write stories. They are the same tools used to create all media products: news, entertainment and advertising, which I also call manipulation. Then we learn to write stories for print, as if we were newspaper reporters. But I tell them from the first that print is also a totally online medium now, also. I don’t know of a newspaper that doesn’t operate a Website.
What the students really need to understand, though, is that in the converging print and broadcast journalism world, they must know how to write the in-depth story, 1,000 words or so, and the quick 30-second story for broadcast. Already in television, reporters are required to write both. Right now, on television at the end of the 30-second story, the anchor will say, “For more on this story, log on to our Website, at knsd.com,” or wherever. There, you will find the 1,000-word version, written by the same reporter.
Very soon, however, the television will also be a computer, and the remote will also be a mouse, and if you want to know more about the 30-second story, you won’t have to go to no steenking Website; you’re already at it. You will only have to point your remote at the screen, click, and you will be taken to the in-depth “print” story. You can stay there, read as long as you like, then click Back to return to the newscast, which will be waiting exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a server.
Amazing, what this convergence will do to watching television. If you are a sports nut, a baseball fan, say, it will take forever to watch a baseball game. Anywhere in the game, at any time, if you want a player’s complete statistics, click on the player and they will appear. Such stats are already available online at mlb.com. Then when you have settled the bet, click Back, and it will take you to the game exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a computer, not an analog train at a crossing anymore, passing in front of you an inning at a time.
Back to my students. Writing for print is difficult for them, because they don’t read newspapers. They aren’t familiar with the rhythm of a story written for print. At mid-semester, when we shift into broadcast, you can see lightbulbs going on over their heads; this is the writing rhythm with which they are familiar, and they are much happier when their papers come back for rewrite without so much of my red scribbling on them.
I give them the raw information for the stories. The news stories are like “Parents Against Porn,” “Yacht Drug Bust,” “Fatal Auto Wreck,” etc. In sports and weather, the home team always wins (San Diego State NEVER loses to BYU), and the weather is always interesting (in our newscasts, it’s very stormy in San Diego). Finally, toward the end of the semester, the three-person teams produce the newscast script package, and we go into the studio where production students tape the show as if it were live. Today we started looking at the tapes in class. Most students are seeing themselves on the screen, at the anchor desk, for the first time. I never get tired of it.
We began the semester way last January learning the tools that journalists use to write stories. They are the same tools used to create all media products: news, entertainment and advertising, which I also call manipulation. Then we learn to write stories for print, as if we were newspaper reporters. But I tell them from the first that print is also a totally online medium now, also. I don’t know of a newspaper that doesn’t operate a Website.
What the students really need to understand, though, is that in the converging print and broadcast journalism world, they must know how to write the in-depth story, 1,000 words or so, and the quick 30-second story for broadcast. Already in television, reporters are required to write both. Right now, on television at the end of the 30-second story, the anchor will say, “For more on this story, log on to our Website, at knsd.com,” or wherever. There, you will find the 1,000-word version, written by the same reporter.
Very soon, however, the television will also be a computer, and the remote will also be a mouse, and if you want to know more about the 30-second story, you won’t have to go to no steenking Website; you’re already at it. You will only have to point your remote at the screen, click, and you will be taken to the in-depth “print” story. You can stay there, read as long as you like, then click Back to return to the newscast, which will be waiting exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a server.
Amazing, what this convergence will do to watching television. If you are a sports nut, a baseball fan, say, it will take forever to watch a baseball game. Anywhere in the game, at any time, if you want a player’s complete statistics, click on the player and they will appear. Such stats are already available online at mlb.com. Then when you have settled the bet, click Back, and it will take you to the game exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a computer, not an analog train at a crossing anymore, passing in front of you an inning at a time.
Back to my students. Writing for print is difficult for them, because they don’t read newspapers. They aren’t familiar with the rhythm of a story written for print. At mid-semester, when we shift into broadcast, you can see lightbulbs going on over their heads; this is the writing rhythm with which they are familiar, and they are much happier when their papers come back for rewrite without so much of my red scribbling on them.
I give them the raw information for the stories. The news stories are like “Parents Against Porn,” “Yacht Drug Bust,” “Fatal Auto Wreck,” etc. In sports and weather, the home team always wins (San Diego State NEVER loses to BYU), and the weather is always interesting (in our newscasts, it’s very stormy in San Diego). Finally, toward the end of the semester, the three-person teams produce the newscast script package, and we go into the studio where production students tape the show as if it were live. Today we started looking at the tapes in class. Most students are seeing themselves on the screen, at the anchor desk, for the first time. I never get tired of it.
May 18, 2009
The Dawn of Media
I closed last Monday's media literacy blog – "The Wizard's Toolbox" – with the argument that journalism, and all media, is practiced exactly the way people want. That is because people, not the media, created the Wizard's tools, the values and definitions that media professionals use to provide the public with news and entertainment. The mass media, created with the arrival of the Gutenberg press, simply took those values and definitions and turned them into a business.
If you want to verify this independently, close your computer right now and do not consume any media for one week. No news, no entertainment, no newspapers, no television, no movies, no magazines, no books, no radio, no recordings, no Internet, no advertising, including billboards.
When you have separated yourself from media, you will be living exactly as people did before media, before Gutenberg, going back to the beginning of humanity. Just as those pre-media people did, you will still react to the immediate world around you, using the same code with which you respond to media, a "reaction package" created from the basic Wizard's tools: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity, plus the "definition of news:" anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.
Where did this reaction package originate? How did it arrive on the planet? Let's go back to "The Dawn of Man," the title that Stanley Kubrick provided for the famous opening scene of his 1969 movie, "2001 – A Space Odyssey." That scene could just as easily be titled, "The Dawn of Media," as it unfolds before us on YouTube.
(Note: the link doesn't show the entire sequence; for the completion of the sequence, click here. The musical score accompanying this section was discarded, happily, before the movie's release.)
That planet was inhabited by primitive humans, still ape-like, in Kubrick’s vision, who lived in groups of 20 or so in forbidding terrain. Watch them, for evidence of the code emerging as they reacted to their world. Conflict surrounded them: the heat of day, the dark of night, the growl of big cats in the darkness, the search for food, the conflict for water, animals competing for the food. Disaster struck suddenly, sensationally: a cat springing from a ledge, bringing a human down, and death was the consequence. The people were never free of the threat to the status quo. They huddled in terror under rock overhangs in the darkness, listening to the cries of the cats.
They knew about prominence. Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight. He acquired prominence.
People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. They were bound demographically, and felt a comfort in their physical and emotional proximity. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 20 to 30 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. They shared a strong human interest. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them.
When two groups came close together there was conflict. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s display dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.
Then something happened. A leader scratching for food beneath a mound of animal bones picked up a bone shaft, a femur, to move it, but it tapped the ground and small fragments flew up. The leader, curiously, tapped again. Bones flew. Again, harder, and harder, and bones broke, a skull shattered, and in the leader’s brain, a connection was made. Something had changed. Now we saw a tapir fall, killed by the bone weapon, who no longer would be a competitor for the food, and that was progress.
Then, in a transfixing moment, the tapir became food. At the end of his bone club, the leader saw a red color. He became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the tapir. He saw the same red color on the tapir’s battered skull, and it gave the same scent. He touched the red with his fingers. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat gathered a growl that grew into a roar of discovery. He knelt and lifted the tapir’s head. This took great courage. With equal care and helplessness, he sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled, and the flesh came away. Then he chewed, and then swallowed, and a novel new circuit in humankind was closed.
It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply that could be killed with a bone club. And at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways. Irrevocable changes had occurred.
At that point, Kubrick had his ape-man throw the bone club into the air and fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, where the reaction package remains intact, but life is not so intense, as you will discover in your week of media deprivation. In fact life in the civilized 21st century can be totally boring, day in and day out, which is why you will yearn for more action. Your reaction package cries for it. That is why, after Gutenberg, and the introduction of the media and shared media codes, for humans, there was no turning back. They discovered they didn't need to witness a sensational conflict; it could be imported to them, from far away.
If you want to verify this independently, close your computer right now and do not consume any media for one week. No news, no entertainment, no newspapers, no television, no movies, no magazines, no books, no radio, no recordings, no Internet, no advertising, including billboards.
When you have separated yourself from media, you will be living exactly as people did before media, before Gutenberg, going back to the beginning of humanity. Just as those pre-media people did, you will still react to the immediate world around you, using the same code with which you respond to media, a "reaction package" created from the basic Wizard's tools: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity, plus the "definition of news:" anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.
Where did this reaction package originate? How did it arrive on the planet? Let's go back to "The Dawn of Man," the title that Stanley Kubrick provided for the famous opening scene of his 1969 movie, "2001 – A Space Odyssey." That scene could just as easily be titled, "The Dawn of Media," as it unfolds before us on YouTube.
(Note: the link doesn't show the entire sequence; for the completion of the sequence, click here. The musical score accompanying this section was discarded, happily, before the movie's release.)
That planet was inhabited by primitive humans, still ape-like, in Kubrick’s vision, who lived in groups of 20 or so in forbidding terrain. Watch them, for evidence of the code emerging as they reacted to their world. Conflict surrounded them: the heat of day, the dark of night, the growl of big cats in the darkness, the search for food, the conflict for water, animals competing for the food. Disaster struck suddenly, sensationally: a cat springing from a ledge, bringing a human down, and death was the consequence. The people were never free of the threat to the status quo. They huddled in terror under rock overhangs in the darkness, listening to the cries of the cats.
They knew about prominence. Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight. He acquired prominence.
People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. They were bound demographically, and felt a comfort in their physical and emotional proximity. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 20 to 30 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. They shared a strong human interest. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them.
When two groups came close together there was conflict. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s display dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.
Then something happened. A leader scratching for food beneath a mound of animal bones picked up a bone shaft, a femur, to move it, but it tapped the ground and small fragments flew up. The leader, curiously, tapped again. Bones flew. Again, harder, and harder, and bones broke, a skull shattered, and in the leader’s brain, a connection was made. Something had changed. Now we saw a tapir fall, killed by the bone weapon, who no longer would be a competitor for the food, and that was progress.
Then, in a transfixing moment, the tapir became food. At the end of his bone club, the leader saw a red color. He became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the tapir. He saw the same red color on the tapir’s battered skull, and it gave the same scent. He touched the red with his fingers. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat gathered a growl that grew into a roar of discovery. He knelt and lifted the tapir’s head. This took great courage. With equal care and helplessness, he sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled, and the flesh came away. Then he chewed, and then swallowed, and a novel new circuit in humankind was closed.
It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply that could be killed with a bone club. And at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways. Irrevocable changes had occurred.
At that point, Kubrick had his ape-man throw the bone club into the air and fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, where the reaction package remains intact, but life is not so intense, as you will discover in your week of media deprivation. In fact life in the civilized 21st century can be totally boring, day in and day out, which is why you will yearn for more action. Your reaction package cries for it. That is why, after Gutenberg, and the introduction of the media and shared media codes, for humans, there was no turning back. They discovered they didn't need to witness a sensational conflict; it could be imported to them, from far away.
May 17, 2009
May 16, 2009
The heroine in "Madama Butterfly"
I keep going to the opera, I keep running into world-class heroines.
Three years ago (well, how many operas have YOU been to in the last three years?), it was the Queen of the Night, in "The Magic Flute." The heroine wasn't the Queen of the Night, it was Cheryl Evans, who sang the Queen's role. I was damned impressed – floored, actually – and I blogged about it:
"Both of the night’s big moments belonged to the Queen of the Night. First, she floated earthward from the loft in a huge cradle of crescent moon and cascading bows of purple gossamer (color of eggplant, I thought), like a brooch you would see Zandra Rhodes wearing on an airplane.
"Later, she sang an aria into which Mozart had inserted a lightning series of notes placed sort of like tiny footstep leaps of faith across a yawning void. Hit them all, he is saying, live to sing another day. Miss just one, just slightly, and down you go, into the void, falling until the end of time. She hit them all. I don’t know how. Imagine a hockey goalie, stopping eight shots in three seconds, left, right, up, down, middle. And then doing it again, a couple of minutes later. At the end, she got the night’s loudest ovation."
Cheryl Evans read it and sent me a nice email. She is a Pittsburgh native and enjoyed being compared to a hockey goalie but really wanted to be compared to Pittsburgh hockey legend Mario Lemieux. She also said she was a big fan of the Steelers' Troy Polamalu, which made sense. He plays strong safety the way she sings Mozart.
This time – last night, in fact – it was "Madama Butterfly." The heroine wasn't Madama Butterfly, though she did leach out the total of my paternal instinct. The heroine was Patricia Racette, who sang and performed the Butterfly role. This opera was two hours and twenty-five minutes long, in TWO ACTS. The first act was an hour, then a divine intermission. The official program showed Act Two and Act Three coming after intermission, but that was propaganda. There was no break in the action until the final curtain. Opera aficionados talk about the demands "Madama Butterfly" makes on an audience, and the audience is SITTING DOWN.
Patricia Racette NEVER sat down. In the 2:25, she was offstage for about two minutes. The rest of the time she was singing, not like you or I would sing, but in a voice of beauty and power that causes critics to pull out all the superlative stops. She was also a hell of an actress. Anybody who can sing for 2:23 straight, and act, too, is not an opera star, she's a world-class athlete. I was thinking, during a slow part early on, about all the stories in the theater, the 3,000 in the audience, each with a story being lived in real time that perhaps included, at that moment, individual commitment associated with being at an opera. Not all the good stories, I gravely intuited, were onstage.
But Patricia Racette kept singing, and in time she eroded that point of view. There was no other individual story of commitment in the room to compare to hers. At the end – and I must say the finale, in this San Diego Opera production, is stunning – she has stabbed herself and is sprawled on the stage, dying. The boor Pinkerton appears, kneels next to her, takes her hand, tugs so her shoulder rises and her lifeless head lolls. At the last note, he lets go, she slumps heavily to the boards. After what she has been through, it is the night's easiest bit of acting for Patricia Racette. The personal stories reverse. The scene blasts away the audience's fatigue, which rises, recharged, while on the stage the heroine has time for a relaxed inhalation or two before receiving our applause. We should applaud for two hours, but we can't.
Three years ago (well, how many operas have YOU been to in the last three years?), it was the Queen of the Night, in "The Magic Flute." The heroine wasn't the Queen of the Night, it was Cheryl Evans, who sang the Queen's role. I was damned impressed – floored, actually – and I blogged about it:
"Both of the night’s big moments belonged to the Queen of the Night. First, she floated earthward from the loft in a huge cradle of crescent moon and cascading bows of purple gossamer (color of eggplant, I thought), like a brooch you would see Zandra Rhodes wearing on an airplane.
"Later, she sang an aria into which Mozart had inserted a lightning series of notes placed sort of like tiny footstep leaps of faith across a yawning void. Hit them all, he is saying, live to sing another day. Miss just one, just slightly, and down you go, into the void, falling until the end of time. She hit them all. I don’t know how. Imagine a hockey goalie, stopping eight shots in three seconds, left, right, up, down, middle. And then doing it again, a couple of minutes later. At the end, she got the night’s loudest ovation."
Cheryl Evans read it and sent me a nice email. She is a Pittsburgh native and enjoyed being compared to a hockey goalie but really wanted to be compared to Pittsburgh hockey legend Mario Lemieux. She also said she was a big fan of the Steelers' Troy Polamalu, which made sense. He plays strong safety the way she sings Mozart.
This time – last night, in fact – it was "Madama Butterfly." The heroine wasn't Madama Butterfly, though she did leach out the total of my paternal instinct. The heroine was Patricia Racette, who sang and performed the Butterfly role. This opera was two hours and twenty-five minutes long, in TWO ACTS. The first act was an hour, then a divine intermission. The official program showed Act Two and Act Three coming after intermission, but that was propaganda. There was no break in the action until the final curtain. Opera aficionados talk about the demands "Madama Butterfly" makes on an audience, and the audience is SITTING DOWN.
Patricia Racette NEVER sat down. In the 2:25, she was offstage for about two minutes. The rest of the time she was singing, not like you or I would sing, but in a voice of beauty and power that causes critics to pull out all the superlative stops. She was also a hell of an actress. Anybody who can sing for 2:23 straight, and act, too, is not an opera star, she's a world-class athlete. I was thinking, during a slow part early on, about all the stories in the theater, the 3,000 in the audience, each with a story being lived in real time that perhaps included, at that moment, individual commitment associated with being at an opera. Not all the good stories, I gravely intuited, were onstage.
But Patricia Racette kept singing, and in time she eroded that point of view. There was no other individual story of commitment in the room to compare to hers. At the end – and I must say the finale, in this San Diego Opera production, is stunning – she has stabbed herself and is sprawled on the stage, dying. The boor Pinkerton appears, kneels next to her, takes her hand, tugs so her shoulder rises and her lifeless head lolls. At the last note, he lets go, she slumps heavily to the boards. After what she has been through, it is the night's easiest bit of acting for Patricia Racette. The personal stories reverse. The scene blasts away the audience's fatigue, which rises, recharged, while on the stage the heroine has time for a relaxed inhalation or two before receiving our applause. We should applaud for two hours, but we can't.
May 15, 2009
Archives: A reminiscence from the 56th grade, June, 2006
Can animals talk?
Sure they can. The most famous talking animal in the world reigns over an international entertainment empire worth billions. He dresses up and strolls the grounds of his entertainment fantasylands from California to France and we happily pay $65 (last time I checked) a head, including kiddies, so the kiddies can find him and run up to him and tell him all their secrets while the parents stand to one side and smile as happily as if their children were talking to the President of the United States. We even try to get a word in edgewise, and at the end we always say, “Thanks, Mickey.”
Believe in talking animals? I cried watching “The Lion King.” People buy insurance from a company whose spokesman is a gecko. But my favorite talking animal is – still is – Hobbes, the charming, witty, erudite tiger in the old comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”
And it is Hobbes who tells the secret of our affection, and our need, for talking animals. Hobbes, of course, is Calvin’s sidekick. Calvin is about seven years old and lives almost every moment of his life outside the box, in his imagination. It is in our imagination that animals can talk. Calvin and Hobbes can be having the grandest time, and then one of Calvin’s parents comes into the room. When the parent is there, Hobbes is a stuffed animal propped up against a chair. The parent at that moment is inside the box, and Hobbes can only live where imagination lives.
Imagination is so important to us all. Inside a box is no way at all to live. All you can see are the insides of the box. I was in the 32nd grade when I learned I was in the 32nd grade. An adult is living way too boxy a life when he doesn’t know what grade he is in. Wouldn’t you know, the day I learned that I was in 32nd grade (gosh, that was 25 years ago) was a day I was at Disneyland. We were standing in Main Street, looking up the street at the Fantasyland castle. I had seen the castle before, on earlier Disneyland days, and I was sure its spires soared with all the majesty of the finest castles of Europe and other romantic lands.
But this day, workmen were sprucing up the castle with new paint and other maintenance, and they had scaffolding up. I knew the dimensions of scaffolding, and looking at it now, it looked like a grid of known dimensions overlaid on Snow White’s castle.
And the castle was incredibly small. The grid to me represented a known box – data – and inside the box, the soaring castle was no bigger than a two-story house.
In that instant, I learned something of vital importance that I had not known before, and in that same instant I realized that happened all the time. I had learned things that year that I did not know the year before, and I would learn things next year that I did not know now. I was, and ever would be, in a grade in school. That day at Disneyland, I figured out that I was in 32nd grade. Now I am in 56th. My God, I have learned a lot since then. Just last Sunday, I learned one of the most beautiful lessons of my life, and so now I know much more about love than I did in the first 55 grades.
What I learned at Disneyland, staring at the amazing shrunken castle, was the importance to me of imagination. I was six years old once and, like Calvin and Hobbes, lived life freely, every day, outside the box. Then I started to school, and I started acquiring data. It was data I had to have – two plus two and so forth – but it was also data that overlaid my imagination and started to contradict it.
Staring at the castle, I knew that I never wanted to lose that imagination. In that moment, I learned that the perfect life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. At the time, I had to settle for keeping the imagination and my, what a difference that has made.
But I would have to wait to acquire the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Now, in 56th grade, I am drawing perilously close to that goal, but a goal it still is, which must be why I feel so damn happy this morning. Great God Almighty, I am outside the box.
Sure they can. The most famous talking animal in the world reigns over an international entertainment empire worth billions. He dresses up and strolls the grounds of his entertainment fantasylands from California to France and we happily pay $65 (last time I checked) a head, including kiddies, so the kiddies can find him and run up to him and tell him all their secrets while the parents stand to one side and smile as happily as if their children were talking to the President of the United States. We even try to get a word in edgewise, and at the end we always say, “Thanks, Mickey.”
Believe in talking animals? I cried watching “The Lion King.” People buy insurance from a company whose spokesman is a gecko. But my favorite talking animal is – still is – Hobbes, the charming, witty, erudite tiger in the old comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”
And it is Hobbes who tells the secret of our affection, and our need, for talking animals. Hobbes, of course, is Calvin’s sidekick. Calvin is about seven years old and lives almost every moment of his life outside the box, in his imagination. It is in our imagination that animals can talk. Calvin and Hobbes can be having the grandest time, and then one of Calvin’s parents comes into the room. When the parent is there, Hobbes is a stuffed animal propped up against a chair. The parent at that moment is inside the box, and Hobbes can only live where imagination lives.
Imagination is so important to us all. Inside a box is no way at all to live. All you can see are the insides of the box. I was in the 32nd grade when I learned I was in the 32nd grade. An adult is living way too boxy a life when he doesn’t know what grade he is in. Wouldn’t you know, the day I learned that I was in 32nd grade (gosh, that was 25 years ago) was a day I was at Disneyland. We were standing in Main Street, looking up the street at the Fantasyland castle. I had seen the castle before, on earlier Disneyland days, and I was sure its spires soared with all the majesty of the finest castles of Europe and other romantic lands.
But this day, workmen were sprucing up the castle with new paint and other maintenance, and they had scaffolding up. I knew the dimensions of scaffolding, and looking at it now, it looked like a grid of known dimensions overlaid on Snow White’s castle.
And the castle was incredibly small. The grid to me represented a known box – data – and inside the box, the soaring castle was no bigger than a two-story house.
In that instant, I learned something of vital importance that I had not known before, and in that same instant I realized that happened all the time. I had learned things that year that I did not know the year before, and I would learn things next year that I did not know now. I was, and ever would be, in a grade in school. That day at Disneyland, I figured out that I was in 32nd grade. Now I am in 56th. My God, I have learned a lot since then. Just last Sunday, I learned one of the most beautiful lessons of my life, and so now I know much more about love than I did in the first 55 grades.
What I learned at Disneyland, staring at the amazing shrunken castle, was the importance to me of imagination. I was six years old once and, like Calvin and Hobbes, lived life freely, every day, outside the box. Then I started to school, and I started acquiring data. It was data I had to have – two plus two and so forth – but it was also data that overlaid my imagination and started to contradict it.
Staring at the castle, I knew that I never wanted to lose that imagination. In that moment, I learned that the perfect life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the wisdom of a 65-year-old. At the time, I had to settle for keeping the imagination and my, what a difference that has made.
But I would have to wait to acquire the wisdom of a 65-year-old. Now, in 56th grade, I am drawing perilously close to that goal, but a goal it still is, which must be why I feel so damn happy this morning. Great God Almighty, I am outside the box.
May 14, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Texas brisket barbecue
Of course in Stretch Cooking one good way to make a little go a long way is spend a little money for a big piece of meat. Like a brisket. Many supermarkets won't have the whole brisket, in the bag, but most meat markets do, and butcher shops in neighborhood grocery markets. They sell for around $2 a pound.
You can cook a brisket in several delectable ways, such as braising or baking, but these instructions are for turning a brisket into home-style Texas barbecue. When you say, "Barbecue," to a Texan, he or she will reply, "Brisket," whereas a Tennessean will say, "Pork," a Kentuckian might say, "Mutton," and a Californian will say, "Back yard."
When you drive through Texas, go slow through the towns, and in every one you will pick up the scent of barbecue, rising from the barbecue joints. Therein, the Texas masters barbecue briskets in huge pits, with a firebox at one end, from which smoke from smouldering mesquite is drawn through the pits and over the briskets for long, slow, magical hours. What I offer is a way to obtain a reasonable replication at home.
You start with a whole brisket, “in the bag,” as they say. You need one that is around 10 pounds, with a decent slab of fat on it. Don't be intimidated by the fat; some of it cooks away, and the rest gets trimmed off. The fat does the basting, and if you get a brisket that is too lean, it will be dry. Take the brisket out of the bag and sprinkle it liberally with salt and fresh-ground pepper.
My cooker is a 22-inch Weber. I can actually do two briskets on it, if you are feeding that many (one brisket is plenty for eight). Use a chimney fire-starter to make a fire of 35 charcoal briquets (I use Kingsford Mesquite) Pile it against one side of the fire grate. On the fire, place two or three chunks of lump mesquite charcoal (available at most supermarkets). On the grate opposite the fire, place a drip pan – I use a big, rectangular aluminum baking pan – lined with foil. Open the bottom vents all the way.
Start no later than 7 a.m. Place the grill so one handle is over the fire, providing briquet access. Place the brisket over the drip pan, and place the cooker cover so the vent is over the meat. This vent should be open no more than halfway. Every 45 minutes to an hour, flip the brisket, and add seven or so briquets and a couple more chunks of mesquite charcoal (break up the large chunks with a hammer). You want a fairly slow fire. If you can rest your fingertips on the grill behind the brisket for two or three seconds, that is about right.
Continue this way all day long. About 7 p.m., feed the fire one last time and let it die out overnight. In the morning, wrap the cooled brisket loosely in foil. Empty the drippings into a saucepan. Put a little water and vinegar in the drip pan and heat it carefully on the stove to loosen up burned-on drippings and add these to the saucepan. Place the saucepan in the freezer until the fat hardens on top. Remove the fat and discard, carefully warm the drippings, and strain them into a separate saucepan. Add a medium bottle of ordinary barbecue sauce (I use KC Masterpiece) and heat through to blend drippings and sauce. Add fresh-ground black pepper to taste, a splash more vinegar, and a tablespoon or so of oregano.
Trim the excess fat off the brisket. An hour before you're ready to eat, start a new fire in the Weber. Place the trimmed brisket on a sheet of foil on the grill opposite the fire and let it reheat. Slice it across the grain into long, thin slices (an electric knife is great for this). There will be "burned ends" that break off; pass these around as teasers. Serve the meat on a platter; it will be tender enough to cut with a fork. Gently warm the sauce and serve it on the side. Classic side dishes are pinto beans and potato salad.
You can cook a brisket in several delectable ways, such as braising or baking, but these instructions are for turning a brisket into home-style Texas barbecue. When you say, "Barbecue," to a Texan, he or she will reply, "Brisket," whereas a Tennessean will say, "Pork," a Kentuckian might say, "Mutton," and a Californian will say, "Back yard."
When you drive through Texas, go slow through the towns, and in every one you will pick up the scent of barbecue, rising from the barbecue joints. Therein, the Texas masters barbecue briskets in huge pits, with a firebox at one end, from which smoke from smouldering mesquite is drawn through the pits and over the briskets for long, slow, magical hours. What I offer is a way to obtain a reasonable replication at home.
You start with a whole brisket, “in the bag,” as they say. You need one that is around 10 pounds, with a decent slab of fat on it. Don't be intimidated by the fat; some of it cooks away, and the rest gets trimmed off. The fat does the basting, and if you get a brisket that is too lean, it will be dry. Take the brisket out of the bag and sprinkle it liberally with salt and fresh-ground pepper.
My cooker is a 22-inch Weber. I can actually do two briskets on it, if you are feeding that many (one brisket is plenty for eight). Use a chimney fire-starter to make a fire of 35 charcoal briquets (I use Kingsford Mesquite) Pile it against one side of the fire grate. On the fire, place two or three chunks of lump mesquite charcoal (available at most supermarkets). On the grate opposite the fire, place a drip pan – I use a big, rectangular aluminum baking pan – lined with foil. Open the bottom vents all the way.
Start no later than 7 a.m. Place the grill so one handle is over the fire, providing briquet access. Place the brisket over the drip pan, and place the cooker cover so the vent is over the meat. This vent should be open no more than halfway. Every 45 minutes to an hour, flip the brisket, and add seven or so briquets and a couple more chunks of mesquite charcoal (break up the large chunks with a hammer). You want a fairly slow fire. If you can rest your fingertips on the grill behind the brisket for two or three seconds, that is about right.
Continue this way all day long. About 7 p.m., feed the fire one last time and let it die out overnight. In the morning, wrap the cooled brisket loosely in foil. Empty the drippings into a saucepan. Put a little water and vinegar in the drip pan and heat it carefully on the stove to loosen up burned-on drippings and add these to the saucepan. Place the saucepan in the freezer until the fat hardens on top. Remove the fat and discard, carefully warm the drippings, and strain them into a separate saucepan. Add a medium bottle of ordinary barbecue sauce (I use KC Masterpiece) and heat through to blend drippings and sauce. Add fresh-ground black pepper to taste, a splash more vinegar, and a tablespoon or so of oregano.
Trim the excess fat off the brisket. An hour before you're ready to eat, start a new fire in the Weber. Place the trimmed brisket on a sheet of foil on the grill opposite the fire and let it reheat. Slice it across the grain into long, thin slices (an electric knife is great for this). There will be "burned ends" that break off; pass these around as teasers. Serve the meat on a platter; it will be tender enough to cut with a fork. Gently warm the sauce and serve it on the side. Classic side dishes are pinto beans and potato salad.
May 13, 2009
Getting her feet wet in Ancillary Dilemmas
The highlight reel advances from the ceiling fan last week to the kitchen yesterday morning, where Karen is calling to me: “Michael, can you come in here for a minute?”
I am in the bedroom, dressing, in a bit of a hurry. But her tone is beckoning. Not alarmed, or hysterical, so I know it’s not a spider or a snake. It says, “No need to call 911, but there’s something in here that you really need to see, right now.” I drop my pants, walk down the hall and into the kitchen and there is Karen, standing over a dishwasher that is about one-third full of soap suds. Tongues of suds have trickled out at the corners and are spreading alluvially onto the floor. It looks like a dishwasher with rabies.
I hate this. I have had some success as a handyman in my homeowning history, but sick dishwashers are unapproachable by amateurs. You put dishes and soap in, close the door, turn it on, and behind the closed door things of unimaginable wisdom occur until the hissing stops, you open the door, and the dishes are clean. There is only one thing I know to do, before we call the appliance people. “It could be the drain is blocked,” I say.
She tells me that in fact she had found a cap loose in the bottom of the washer. It is the cap that screws into the opening of a reservoir in the door that holds a kind of rinsing product. Years ago I poured some of this rinsing product, called Jet Dry, into the reservoir and have not thought about it again since. Karen has now screwed the cap back into the opening, but the machine is not draining. I have another thought. “You were washing pots and pans in the sink while the machine was running,” I say, starting to glow with brilliance. “Maybe the volume was too much for the drain.” Karen closes the door, starts the machine, soap pours out. I shrug.
“Call the plumber,” I say, and head off up the hall. Then Karen says, “Oh no!” in a stricken sort of way that brings me back. She is standing in front of the open sink cabinet, a bottle of Dawn Dishwashing Soap in one hand, a bottle of Jet Dry in the other. They are very similar. She doesn’t have to speak; I can reconstruct the truth. Loading the washer, she finds the cap, decides to fill the reservoir, but instead of Jet Dry she has poured in a three-month supply of Dawn Dishwashing Soap. I ache with empathy for her. This is what I call an Ancillary Dilemma, when an act meant to correct some situation in fact turns it into a completely different situation that is geometrically more complex than the original. I have dozens of Ancillary Dilemmas in my handyman record. Once again, as with the ceiling fan, I feel a bit of pride stirring, this time for Karen standing there with the two bottles in her hands. As Ancillary Dilemmas go, this one is pretty good.
So good, in fact, that it resists Googling. “Wrong soap in dishwasher” yields 1,270,000 results, so common as to be plebian. From the dishwasher manual (which I recommended), she discovers that the reservoir is called simply the “rinse agent.” For historical purposes, I undertake this search myself. “Wrong soap in rinse agent” yields no results at all, but invites a further search of wrong soap in rinse agents “without quotes.” That search yields 234,000 results, with this caveat at the bottom of the first page: “Tip: these results do not include the word ‘wrong.’ Show results that include ‘wrong’.” That search yields 12,000 results, including a link to WikiAnswers, which provides this solution:
“Take the door apart and remove the jet dry reservoir. Thoroughly rinse out the reservoir, then put everything back together.” Right. This is the same as a recipe for hamburgers that begins, “Go out and kill a cow.” The appliance repair people are coming tomorrow. Though you would think that a human who can navigate himself through Google to get to a WikiAnswer for “Wrong soap in rinse agent” should be able to find his way through a dishwasher door. There are some truths that just don’t make sense.
I am in the bedroom, dressing, in a bit of a hurry. But her tone is beckoning. Not alarmed, or hysterical, so I know it’s not a spider or a snake. It says, “No need to call 911, but there’s something in here that you really need to see, right now.” I drop my pants, walk down the hall and into the kitchen and there is Karen, standing over a dishwasher that is about one-third full of soap suds. Tongues of suds have trickled out at the corners and are spreading alluvially onto the floor. It looks like a dishwasher with rabies.
I hate this. I have had some success as a handyman in my homeowning history, but sick dishwashers are unapproachable by amateurs. You put dishes and soap in, close the door, turn it on, and behind the closed door things of unimaginable wisdom occur until the hissing stops, you open the door, and the dishes are clean. There is only one thing I know to do, before we call the appliance people. “It could be the drain is blocked,” I say.
She tells me that in fact she had found a cap loose in the bottom of the washer. It is the cap that screws into the opening of a reservoir in the door that holds a kind of rinsing product. Years ago I poured some of this rinsing product, called Jet Dry, into the reservoir and have not thought about it again since. Karen has now screwed the cap back into the opening, but the machine is not draining. I have another thought. “You were washing pots and pans in the sink while the machine was running,” I say, starting to glow with brilliance. “Maybe the volume was too much for the drain.” Karen closes the door, starts the machine, soap pours out. I shrug.
“Call the plumber,” I say, and head off up the hall. Then Karen says, “Oh no!” in a stricken sort of way that brings me back. She is standing in front of the open sink cabinet, a bottle of Dawn Dishwashing Soap in one hand, a bottle of Jet Dry in the other. They are very similar. She doesn’t have to speak; I can reconstruct the truth. Loading the washer, she finds the cap, decides to fill the reservoir, but instead of Jet Dry she has poured in a three-month supply of Dawn Dishwashing Soap. I ache with empathy for her. This is what I call an Ancillary Dilemma, when an act meant to correct some situation in fact turns it into a completely different situation that is geometrically more complex than the original. I have dozens of Ancillary Dilemmas in my handyman record. Once again, as with the ceiling fan, I feel a bit of pride stirring, this time for Karen standing there with the two bottles in her hands. As Ancillary Dilemmas go, this one is pretty good.
So good, in fact, that it resists Googling. “Wrong soap in dishwasher” yields 1,270,000 results, so common as to be plebian. From the dishwasher manual (which I recommended), she discovers that the reservoir is called simply the “rinse agent.” For historical purposes, I undertake this search myself. “Wrong soap in rinse agent” yields no results at all, but invites a further search of wrong soap in rinse agents “without quotes.” That search yields 234,000 results, with this caveat at the bottom of the first page: “Tip: these results do not include the word ‘wrong.’ Show results that include ‘wrong’.” That search yields 12,000 results, including a link to WikiAnswers, which provides this solution:
“Take the door apart and remove the jet dry reservoir. Thoroughly rinse out the reservoir, then put everything back together.” Right. This is the same as a recipe for hamburgers that begins, “Go out and kill a cow.” The appliance repair people are coming tomorrow. Though you would think that a human who can navigate himself through Google to get to a WikiAnswer for “Wrong soap in rinse agent” should be able to find his way through a dishwasher door. There are some truths that just don’t make sense.
May 11, 2009
Media Literacy: The Wizard's Toolbox
Media professionals – the new Wizards of Oz – use a deceptively simple set of tools in their work. There are 12 "event values:" conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity. There is one definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.
There are other tools that come into play as needed, but these are the basic set. Let's call them the Wizard's Tools. They are the starting place for all existing media literacy education: Media Code 101. The Wizard's Tools create the code that resides in every scrap of print, video, and audio content produced by the seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. Professionals who work in those businesses learn the media code in schools of journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, script writing, filmmaking, campaigning, and terrorism.
Yes, terrorism. Terrorists in the last 20 years have realized they aren't in the bomb business at all. They're in the television business, just like the National Football League. Terrorists are frighteningly expert in the media code. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately. The answer is at the bottom of this blog.
All media has but three functions: to inform, entertain, and manipulate. The information stream includes news of all kinds. “News” has been defined in any number of ways, but the media wizards use a good generic definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. A plane crash, an economy crash, right-doing, wrong-doing, or a city council vote changes the status quo. Anything that may happen, but hasn't yet, is a threat to the status quo. Sports and weather are classic threat stories. In fact, sports is a multi-billion dollar business based on nothing more than the threat to the status quo.
The entertainment stream reaches the public through all seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. The most visible, literally, entertainment stream is television. Manipulation, or persuasion, shows up in media products such as books, commentaries, terrorism and advertising, intended to influence thought, inspire reaction, impact choices, and trigger spending.
Media professionals, knowing the media code, know how it works, and how they can make it work, to inform, entertain and manipulate the public. The public, at its end, is unaware of this. The media/media code/public circuit runs in one direction only, from the media toward the public, a dangerously unbalanced equation. When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, the power equation will start to change.
The American educational system never has exposed the general student population to the code, and that is strange, and dangerous, given the dominance of media in our lives. Even half a century ago when media was slow, and arrived in a newspaper, a couple of television and radio stations, a movie house, and some magazines and books, the media was still a significant part of a person's week, both as news and entertainment, and advertising.
Now, early in the 21st century, 100 years after the media code escaped into the air, the population is inundated in a media code hurricane. With their growing power, since the 1950s, to reach, inform, entertain, and manipulate people, media producers have learned to embed the code with sophisticated skill. The media codes themselves have evolved, and in many cases mutated into forms that in turn feed the sophistication. People have become aware of this new media power, and they complain about it, without having any knowledge of the power's source. This power, according to reports published in the summer of 2007, has turned American teenagers and pre-teens, down to age six, into a fifty-billion-dollar consumer group, obviously highly prized by media producers and marketers. Shouldn't their parents, and the kids, know more about media code? Like starting in third grade? Shouldn't the curtain be pulled back, on the new Wizards of Oz?
The media code is to media as DNA is to a human being. A human being, in all of his or her improbable complexity, is based on four DNA codes, A, T, C and G. Bringing a media product to life may involve divine inspiration, hundreds of sophisticated techniques, and cadres of highly skilled professionals, but the finished product is always based on the codes created by the Wizard's tools. This isn't rocket science, but media code is as genuine, and real in its discipline, as DNA is in biology, or the physics code on which Albert Einstein founded his great equation e = mc2. Media students typically go to school for four years to learn what the media codes are, how to identify them, how to quickly find them in huge piles of raw information, and how and where to embed them in media pages, scripts, layouts, campaigns, and plots.
The 12 media values, for example, are all present, each on their individual strength scales of zero to 10, in every media product you consume. You in the general public haven't seen them, until now, because you didn't know what to look for; no one ever showed you. When you see it, you will start to understand how and why the code influences and manipulates your reactions. Those strength scales, incidentally, are grossly simplified, for illustration purposes. A human being, reacting to an event on the ground, or one in the media, effortlessly produces a code combination whose composition may be described in parts per million, and is an exact, individual measure of response, unique to that individual. That combination, in its precision, is also an exact reflection of the individual’s identity; no two of us are alike.
Much of the time, your reactions are spontaneous and legitimate as you gain information being reported to you about events as they happen in the world. And much of the time, your reactions are being manipulated by code users whose job is to make you feel a certain way, particularly desirous, or make a particular choice, or decision. These code users create vastly lucrative markets composed entirely of American consumers who are too young to get a driver's license.
In the meantime, Americans are losing faith in the media. In its 2007 report on "The State of the News Media," the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that less than 20 percent of Americans "believe what they read in print." They claim bias and manipulation, even in the legitimate news flow. The study cites "continuing doubts" about whether print journalism "is being practiced in a way people want," a phrase I want you to come back and read again, when you realize how it screams with irony.
Yet evidence routinely surfaces, indicating these same people, in their doubts, really have no idea how the media does its job. In September, 2006, my home-town newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, stripped across the top of its Letters to the Editor page a series of letters complaining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.
One griped about a huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another letter thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of local teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.
Such reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions are there for all to see, right there in the page. Those values and realities are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. People know, without knowing, what the values are, because they created them. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business.
But the people don't realize that. Glance up at the Wizard's tools again. For now, just look at the event values. We know now that there are in fact 12 such values, each with a strength measured on a scale of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the newspaper, each on its strength of zero to 10.
When a media professional, in this case an editor, looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune the day after Hoffman sets a new Major League record, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.
Novelty is the event value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego! Clinton jumps to GOP!). Setting a record in major league baseball, "America's pastime," is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, and they were talking again in 2007 about Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades, until Trevor Hoffman achieved it in 2006. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.
The proximity value means the story happened close to you, either physically or emotionally, or both. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. San Diegans are physically close to stories about the home-town team. If Hoffman pitched for far-away Cleveland, or even Los Angeles, in San Diego the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page.
Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Winning releases strong feel-good emotions; most of us like to win, and millions of Americans get a vicarious charge from watching their team win, and, in San Diego, from watching Trevor Hoffman become the best relief pitcher ever. A "sports fan" is one who gets to share the famed "joy of victory and agony of defeat" without ever doing any work.
Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. Aside from 9/11, which is in a media code league of its own, the biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in San Diego against the Chicago Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.
Even after they know the code, and are able to see its presence in the page, more people than not may gripe about the front-page content selection. Why? Because of demographics, defined in the media code as "the science of dividing people into groups." Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see, based on personal interest. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story?
On that day, it was Trevor Hoffman. The "largest number of readers," in the editor's estimation, may have been only 20 percent of all readers, inviting 80 percent to gripe. But because of another code phenomenon, the Second Law of Media, the 20 percent was enough. In fact, a 20 percent response is enough to make an editor, or any media producer for that matter, weep with gratitude. It would be good if the paper could please everybody, get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 15 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader. It's the Abe Lincoln rule of media. You could give all the people all the news all the time, but it would be terrible for business. A reader knowing the media code would understand that, and perhaps be less inclined to doubt that journalism is practiced in a way that people want. In fact it's practiced exactly the way they want. As we shall see.
Quiz answer: The Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks, and the foiled airliner plot, were scheduled on routine weekdays to ensure maximum events values, and timed to maximize the hours of daylight that television cameras could focus on the disastrous, novel, sensational, images.
There are other tools that come into play as needed, but these are the basic set. Let's call them the Wizard's Tools. They are the starting place for all existing media literacy education: Media Code 101. The Wizard's Tools create the code that resides in every scrap of print, video, and audio content produced by the seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. Professionals who work in those businesses learn the media code in schools of journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, script writing, filmmaking, campaigning, and terrorism.
Yes, terrorism. Terrorists in the last 20 years have realized they aren't in the bomb business at all. They're in the television business, just like the National Football League. Terrorists are frighteningly expert in the media code. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately. The answer is at the bottom of this blog.
All media has but three functions: to inform, entertain, and manipulate. The information stream includes news of all kinds. “News” has been defined in any number of ways, but the media wizards use a good generic definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. A plane crash, an economy crash, right-doing, wrong-doing, or a city council vote changes the status quo. Anything that may happen, but hasn't yet, is a threat to the status quo. Sports and weather are classic threat stories. In fact, sports is a multi-billion dollar business based on nothing more than the threat to the status quo.
The entertainment stream reaches the public through all seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. The most visible, literally, entertainment stream is television. Manipulation, or persuasion, shows up in media products such as books, commentaries, terrorism and advertising, intended to influence thought, inspire reaction, impact choices, and trigger spending.
Media professionals, knowing the media code, know how it works, and how they can make it work, to inform, entertain and manipulate the public. The public, at its end, is unaware of this. The media/media code/public circuit runs in one direction only, from the media toward the public, a dangerously unbalanced equation. When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, the power equation will start to change.
The American educational system never has exposed the general student population to the code, and that is strange, and dangerous, given the dominance of media in our lives. Even half a century ago when media was slow, and arrived in a newspaper, a couple of television and radio stations, a movie house, and some magazines and books, the media was still a significant part of a person's week, both as news and entertainment, and advertising.
Now, early in the 21st century, 100 years after the media code escaped into the air, the population is inundated in a media code hurricane. With their growing power, since the 1950s, to reach, inform, entertain, and manipulate people, media producers have learned to embed the code with sophisticated skill. The media codes themselves have evolved, and in many cases mutated into forms that in turn feed the sophistication. People have become aware of this new media power, and they complain about it, without having any knowledge of the power's source. This power, according to reports published in the summer of 2007, has turned American teenagers and pre-teens, down to age six, into a fifty-billion-dollar consumer group, obviously highly prized by media producers and marketers. Shouldn't their parents, and the kids, know more about media code? Like starting in third grade? Shouldn't the curtain be pulled back, on the new Wizards of Oz?
The media code is to media as DNA is to a human being. A human being, in all of his or her improbable complexity, is based on four DNA codes, A, T, C and G. Bringing a media product to life may involve divine inspiration, hundreds of sophisticated techniques, and cadres of highly skilled professionals, but the finished product is always based on the codes created by the Wizard's tools. This isn't rocket science, but media code is as genuine, and real in its discipline, as DNA is in biology, or the physics code on which Albert Einstein founded his great equation e = mc2. Media students typically go to school for four years to learn what the media codes are, how to identify them, how to quickly find them in huge piles of raw information, and how and where to embed them in media pages, scripts, layouts, campaigns, and plots.
The 12 media values, for example, are all present, each on their individual strength scales of zero to 10, in every media product you consume. You in the general public haven't seen them, until now, because you didn't know what to look for; no one ever showed you. When you see it, you will start to understand how and why the code influences and manipulates your reactions. Those strength scales, incidentally, are grossly simplified, for illustration purposes. A human being, reacting to an event on the ground, or one in the media, effortlessly produces a code combination whose composition may be described in parts per million, and is an exact, individual measure of response, unique to that individual. That combination, in its precision, is also an exact reflection of the individual’s identity; no two of us are alike.
Much of the time, your reactions are spontaneous and legitimate as you gain information being reported to you about events as they happen in the world. And much of the time, your reactions are being manipulated by code users whose job is to make you feel a certain way, particularly desirous, or make a particular choice, or decision. These code users create vastly lucrative markets composed entirely of American consumers who are too young to get a driver's license.
In the meantime, Americans are losing faith in the media. In its 2007 report on "The State of the News Media," the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that less than 20 percent of Americans "believe what they read in print." They claim bias and manipulation, even in the legitimate news flow. The study cites "continuing doubts" about whether print journalism "is being practiced in a way people want," a phrase I want you to come back and read again, when you realize how it screams with irony.
Yet evidence routinely surfaces, indicating these same people, in their doubts, really have no idea how the media does its job. In September, 2006, my home-town newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, stripped across the top of its Letters to the Editor page a series of letters complaining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.
One griped about a huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another letter thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of local teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.
Such reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions are there for all to see, right there in the page. Those values and realities are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. People know, without knowing, what the values are, because they created them. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business.
But the people don't realize that. Glance up at the Wizard's tools again. For now, just look at the event values. We know now that there are in fact 12 such values, each with a strength measured on a scale of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the newspaper, each on its strength of zero to 10.
When a media professional, in this case an editor, looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune the day after Hoffman sets a new Major League record, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.
Novelty is the event value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego! Clinton jumps to GOP!). Setting a record in major league baseball, "America's pastime," is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, and they were talking again in 2007 about Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades, until Trevor Hoffman achieved it in 2006. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.
The proximity value means the story happened close to you, either physically or emotionally, or both. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. San Diegans are physically close to stories about the home-town team. If Hoffman pitched for far-away Cleveland, or even Los Angeles, in San Diego the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page.
Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Winning releases strong feel-good emotions; most of us like to win, and millions of Americans get a vicarious charge from watching their team win, and, in San Diego, from watching Trevor Hoffman become the best relief pitcher ever. A "sports fan" is one who gets to share the famed "joy of victory and agony of defeat" without ever doing any work.
Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. Aside from 9/11, which is in a media code league of its own, the biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in San Diego against the Chicago Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.
Even after they know the code, and are able to see its presence in the page, more people than not may gripe about the front-page content selection. Why? Because of demographics, defined in the media code as "the science of dividing people into groups." Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see, based on personal interest. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story?
On that day, it was Trevor Hoffman. The "largest number of readers," in the editor's estimation, may have been only 20 percent of all readers, inviting 80 percent to gripe. But because of another code phenomenon, the Second Law of Media, the 20 percent was enough. In fact, a 20 percent response is enough to make an editor, or any media producer for that matter, weep with gratitude. It would be good if the paper could please everybody, get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 15 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader. It's the Abe Lincoln rule of media. You could give all the people all the news all the time, but it would be terrible for business. A reader knowing the media code would understand that, and perhaps be less inclined to doubt that journalism is practiced in a way that people want. In fact it's practiced exactly the way they want. As we shall see.
Quiz answer: The Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks, and the foiled airliner plot, were scheduled on routine weekdays to ensure maximum events values, and timed to maximize the hours of daylight that television cameras could focus on the disastrous, novel, sensational, images.
May 10, 2009
Add journalism to the list of national stories
One of the revolutionary features of the Internet is that news is no longer local. Whether it is The Abilene Reporter-News or The New York Times, the news in that newspaper is available globally.
That means I, from where I sit in Southern California, can refer all interested parties to a powerful story I read this morning in The Times. Those parties, if they agree, can forward the story on. Frank Rich this morning wrote about the future of journalism. His topic was the first law of media, which states: the media is a business. Hence a conflict: a democracy such as ours depends directly on journalism, but somebody has to pay for that journalism. Thus the crisis of the journalism business – who will pay for it – is also the crisis of democracy.
The print circulation of The Times is minuscule, compared to the power of the Internet to distribute this news. The Internet, representing a death threat to the journalism business, is also the voice that shouts the threat to a circulation without boundaries, in which some new business model exists. Revolutionary times. Quoting Mr. Rich, ". . . the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end, we will get what we pay for."
That means I, from where I sit in Southern California, can refer all interested parties to a powerful story I read this morning in The Times. Those parties, if they agree, can forward the story on. Frank Rich this morning wrote about the future of journalism. His topic was the first law of media, which states: the media is a business. Hence a conflict: a democracy such as ours depends directly on journalism, but somebody has to pay for that journalism. Thus the crisis of the journalism business – who will pay for it – is also the crisis of democracy.
The print circulation of The Times is minuscule, compared to the power of the Internet to distribute this news. The Internet, representing a death threat to the journalism business, is also the voice that shouts the threat to a circulation without boundaries, in which some new business model exists. Revolutionary times. Quoting Mr. Rich, ". . . the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end, we will get what we pay for."
May 08, 2009
Archives: The Circle of Life, arriving at Gate 34 - January, 2005
Interesting flight. Nonstop, Singapore to Heathrow. At one point, 361 cellphone conversations under way all at once. Seventeen arraignments on assault and battery charges before the magistrate in the tiny but sumptuously appointed court chambers on the lower deck between the Baccarat Lounge and the Raquetball Court.
But now the captain brought the superjumbo Airbus 380 to a full and complete stop at the Heathrow gate and 800 passengers rose as one to collect belongings from overhead bins.
At the back of the aircraft, Laura, in Seat 221-T (aisle), made eye contact with Tommy, in 223-W (window). The airplane’s vastness made it possible for them to stand upright, even beneath the overhead bins, and Tommy could readily appraise Laura’s bosom, as her eyes surveyed his lean jaw and wide shoulders. Though her bin was above Row 219, Laura glanced up at the bins over 223, the last row in the aircraft, as if her belongings were there and so the reason for her maneuvering back to 223.
In the silence typical of passengers waiting to deplane, but made distinguished by their number, like 800 people riding one elevator, Tommy whispered to Laura: “Hello.” She smiled at him and said “Hello.” Several hours later, they were holding hands and could speak at conversational level, the silence having dissolved into numerous conversations between and among passengers discovering mutual backgrounds, making business deals, comparing childhoods, starting novels, falling in love. And for a time there was the thrum of cellphone conversations until batteries steadily began to go dead.
At the front of the aircraft, passengers struggled with overstuffed luggage, skis and ski poles, baby carriages, musical instruments in their hard cases, exotic Malaysian totems, disassembled rickshaws, office equipment, computers, mystery crates strapped in duct tape and yellow “Police Control” ribbon, etc., until one by one the items yielded and fell heavily to the aisles, making room for the next passenger’s struggle. With each success, the victor joined the queue at the stairway descending to the metered ramp for merging into the queue of passengers moving forward from below.
Just as they detected the first deplaning motion far ahead, Laura and Tommy shared their first kiss. It was at Row 207 that Tommy said, “Laura, will you marry me?”
“I need time,” Laura said, smiling and pleased, but confused. Eddie was waiting to meet her, out on the concourse. Yet she had never known the pleasure of lovemaking such as she and Tommy had shared at Row 214, where they had paused to watch a movie.
At 199, Laura embraced Tommy and said, “The answer is yes.”
“I’ll make your wedding dress,” said a kindly woman behind them. “My Singer is in the overhead bin, and several bolts of Javanese silk.”
At 171, Laura’s dress was ready. The magistrate married them in Row 167, and they drank champagne and danced at their reception in the galley between Rows 165 and 164 while the London Chamber Orchestra (flying in from Sydney) played.
They honeymooned at 143 and enjoyed the birth of twins behind the curtain separating Coach and Business Class. The children, Full and Upright, completed first and second grades in the 20-seat elementary school below First Class and emerged with their parents from the jetway into the concourse happy children well adjusted to the new age.
Furtively, Laura searched for Eddie and actually walked right past him but didn’t recognize him for the beard.
But now the captain brought the superjumbo Airbus 380 to a full and complete stop at the Heathrow gate and 800 passengers rose as one to collect belongings from overhead bins.
At the back of the aircraft, Laura, in Seat 221-T (aisle), made eye contact with Tommy, in 223-W (window). The airplane’s vastness made it possible for them to stand upright, even beneath the overhead bins, and Tommy could readily appraise Laura’s bosom, as her eyes surveyed his lean jaw and wide shoulders. Though her bin was above Row 219, Laura glanced up at the bins over 223, the last row in the aircraft, as if her belongings were there and so the reason for her maneuvering back to 223.
In the silence typical of passengers waiting to deplane, but made distinguished by their number, like 800 people riding one elevator, Tommy whispered to Laura: “Hello.” She smiled at him and said “Hello.” Several hours later, they were holding hands and could speak at conversational level, the silence having dissolved into numerous conversations between and among passengers discovering mutual backgrounds, making business deals, comparing childhoods, starting novels, falling in love. And for a time there was the thrum of cellphone conversations until batteries steadily began to go dead.
At the front of the aircraft, passengers struggled with overstuffed luggage, skis and ski poles, baby carriages, musical instruments in their hard cases, exotic Malaysian totems, disassembled rickshaws, office equipment, computers, mystery crates strapped in duct tape and yellow “Police Control” ribbon, etc., until one by one the items yielded and fell heavily to the aisles, making room for the next passenger’s struggle. With each success, the victor joined the queue at the stairway descending to the metered ramp for merging into the queue of passengers moving forward from below.
Just as they detected the first deplaning motion far ahead, Laura and Tommy shared their first kiss. It was at Row 207 that Tommy said, “Laura, will you marry me?”
“I need time,” Laura said, smiling and pleased, but confused. Eddie was waiting to meet her, out on the concourse. Yet she had never known the pleasure of lovemaking such as she and Tommy had shared at Row 214, where they had paused to watch a movie.
At 199, Laura embraced Tommy and said, “The answer is yes.”
“I’ll make your wedding dress,” said a kindly woman behind them. “My Singer is in the overhead bin, and several bolts of Javanese silk.”
At 171, Laura’s dress was ready. The magistrate married them in Row 167, and they drank champagne and danced at their reception in the galley between Rows 165 and 164 while the London Chamber Orchestra (flying in from Sydney) played.
They honeymooned at 143 and enjoyed the birth of twins behind the curtain separating Coach and Business Class. The children, Full and Upright, completed first and second grades in the 20-seat elementary school below First Class and emerged with their parents from the jetway into the concourse happy children well adjusted to the new age.
Furtively, Laura searched for Eddie and actually walked right past him but didn’t recognize him for the beard.
May 07, 2009
Surviving in the age of fruits and vegetables
I am a man in his 60s who is married to a gorgeous woman who tells me she wants me around for 30 more years. To that end, at my age, it becomes important to eat healthy. Eating healthy, she says – insists, actually – means eating more fruits and vegetables. They are not only healthy, she says, but eating five servings of them a day means less room for things like charred-rare ribeye and calamari fritti.
In decades prior, I would have argued that life was not meant to be spent in a way that on the day you die, you will be in a state of perfect health. In my 60s, though, I can start to see this lovely woman's point. Through no fault of mine, or hers, my appetite for death-hastening cuisine has declined in what I can only describe as a natural sort of way. No longer will my body let me consume six tacos for dinner. I can go two, at the max. If it is a natural thing, that must mean something.
I wouldn't have a problem if five fruits and vegetables a day left room for two tacos at dinner and a brisket sandwich for lunch, with a few chips. But they don't. A "serving" of fruits and vegetables is one cup. You'd be surprised (if you haven't tried it) how much focus is required to pack in five cups of fruits and vegetables a day and leave room in the 60-year-old appetite for just a little of the good stuff.
There is a secondary problem. I am a man who does not much like fresh fruit, or frozen, canned, jarred, dried, candied, powdered or juiced fruit, for that matter. Oranges aren't bad. Strawberries are okay, but NOT A CUP AT A TIME. After long consideration - months, she says - I decided I could probably handle one orange every morning, and some strawberries, if they were disguised, and so I would try joining her in the fruits and vegetables – aficionados call them F&Vs – routine.
After three weeks, I am holding my own, mainly because I like vegetables, even spinach. Three cups of packed fresh spinach cooks down practically to nothing and tastes great with a skillet-grilled steak with onions and mushrooms (which of course contribute to the F&V count). I realized that the F&V scheme can be connected to the traditional Southern "meat and three" (meat and three sides of vegetables) style of eating. This cheered me up.
Then, Tuesday afternoon (it was Cinco de Mayo), F&V merged with Stretch Cooking. In celebration of my new direction, Karen had given me a sturdy, skillet-shaped wire basket from Williams-Sonoma, with which to grill vegetables over charcoal. Last Saturday, on the Weber, I grilled a big batch of carrots, zucchini, summer squash, baby broccoli, onions, mushrooms, and green and red peppers, in batches, with this device, then dumped them in a baking pan and left them in the covered Weber (I was worried about the carrots being done) for half an hour. They turned out very nicely.
Tuesday afternoon, Cinco de Mayo, I contemplated enchiladas for dinner. I had half-pound packages of hamburger in the freezer, some great enchilada sauce from Trader Joe's, and Porkyland's tortillas, the best on the planet. Then I thought: how can you stretch that? I thought about the cache of grilled veggies. With the enchiladas, I had planned to scarf a mound of lettuce and tomatoes for my three evening V's. That is a lot of lettuce. And of course that is the purpose: eat more lettuce, less room for enchiladas. You see how Stretch and F&V were merging. In each, once they are opened in your life, there is a bit of the Pandora's Box.
In a 6-quart dutch oven, I browned the hamburger and added a bit of olive oil and half a chopped onion to soften the onion. I chopped and added two roma tomatoes (the V count was skyrocketing tonight) and let them cook, stirring, until they were mushy and starting to act as a thickener. I added half a cup of leftover coffee and stirred to deglaze the bottom of the pot. Then I rough-chopped and added the leftover grilled vegetables, probably six cups in all, and half a cup of the Trader Joe's enchilada sauce. I stacked four Porkyland's tortillas, sliced them into eighths, and threw them in, stirred the pot, and let it simmer for an hour.
The result was pretty darn good, packed in my three V's with ease, and made at least two meals worth of leftovers. Recipes are essential, of course, in the kitchen. But a lot of my cooking comes from head-doodling, of which this is an example.
In decades prior, I would have argued that life was not meant to be spent in a way that on the day you die, you will be in a state of perfect health. In my 60s, though, I can start to see this lovely woman's point. Through no fault of mine, or hers, my appetite for death-hastening cuisine has declined in what I can only describe as a natural sort of way. No longer will my body let me consume six tacos for dinner. I can go two, at the max. If it is a natural thing, that must mean something.
I wouldn't have a problem if five fruits and vegetables a day left room for two tacos at dinner and a brisket sandwich for lunch, with a few chips. But they don't. A "serving" of fruits and vegetables is one cup. You'd be surprised (if you haven't tried it) how much focus is required to pack in five cups of fruits and vegetables a day and leave room in the 60-year-old appetite for just a little of the good stuff.
There is a secondary problem. I am a man who does not much like fresh fruit, or frozen, canned, jarred, dried, candied, powdered or juiced fruit, for that matter. Oranges aren't bad. Strawberries are okay, but NOT A CUP AT A TIME. After long consideration - months, she says - I decided I could probably handle one orange every morning, and some strawberries, if they were disguised, and so I would try joining her in the fruits and vegetables – aficionados call them F&Vs – routine.
After three weeks, I am holding my own, mainly because I like vegetables, even spinach. Three cups of packed fresh spinach cooks down practically to nothing and tastes great with a skillet-grilled steak with onions and mushrooms (which of course contribute to the F&V count). I realized that the F&V scheme can be connected to the traditional Southern "meat and three" (meat and three sides of vegetables) style of eating. This cheered me up.
Then, Tuesday afternoon (it was Cinco de Mayo), F&V merged with Stretch Cooking. In celebration of my new direction, Karen had given me a sturdy, skillet-shaped wire basket from Williams-Sonoma, with which to grill vegetables over charcoal. Last Saturday, on the Weber, I grilled a big batch of carrots, zucchini, summer squash, baby broccoli, onions, mushrooms, and green and red peppers, in batches, with this device, then dumped them in a baking pan and left them in the covered Weber (I was worried about the carrots being done) for half an hour. They turned out very nicely.
Tuesday afternoon, Cinco de Mayo, I contemplated enchiladas for dinner. I had half-pound packages of hamburger in the freezer, some great enchilada sauce from Trader Joe's, and Porkyland's tortillas, the best on the planet. Then I thought: how can you stretch that? I thought about the cache of grilled veggies. With the enchiladas, I had planned to scarf a mound of lettuce and tomatoes for my three evening V's. That is a lot of lettuce. And of course that is the purpose: eat more lettuce, less room for enchiladas. You see how Stretch and F&V were merging. In each, once they are opened in your life, there is a bit of the Pandora's Box.
In a 6-quart dutch oven, I browned the hamburger and added a bit of olive oil and half a chopped onion to soften the onion. I chopped and added two roma tomatoes (the V count was skyrocketing tonight) and let them cook, stirring, until they were mushy and starting to act as a thickener. I added half a cup of leftover coffee and stirred to deglaze the bottom of the pot. Then I rough-chopped and added the leftover grilled vegetables, probably six cups in all, and half a cup of the Trader Joe's enchilada sauce. I stacked four Porkyland's tortillas, sliced them into eighths, and threw them in, stirred the pot, and let it simmer for an hour.
The result was pretty darn good, packed in my three V's with ease, and made at least two meals worth of leftovers. Recipes are essential, of course, in the kitchen. But a lot of my cooking comes from head-doodling, of which this is an example.
May 05, 2009
A newspaper reader's market, at least for a day
You wouldn't ordinarily go to a newspaper's letters to the editor column if you were looking for a multimedia work of art, but one showed up this morning in The New York Times. From the headline – "In the Old Balducci's, a Hollywood Sighting" – to the writer's signature – Michael Tilson Thomas – the presentation was distinguished. It was a unique story, with provenance, sentiment, surprise, erudition, humor, whimsy, affection, correct writing, and stunningly illustrated – yes, a letter to the editor with an illustration – and, for complete enjoyment, requesting of the reader a degree of cultural awareness.
Balducci's was a Manhattan gourmet food shop, founded by an Italian immigrant in 1946, expanding from a single shop into a chain. Last week, its corporate owners (since 1999) shut down Balducci's Manhattan locations. Michael Tilson Thomas was one of thousands of New Yorkers, in New York and around the world, who read the news "with regret." At the end of the letter, Thomas is identified as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and artistic director of the New World Symphony.
In his letter, Thomas recalled a Christmas Eve morning in the 1980s when he went to Balducci's for some Christmas dinner fixings. It was early, before opening time, "but if you were there a few minutes early and they knew you, there was never any problem." In the deserted store, Thomas saw a woman, in fur coat and hat and oversized sunglasses. Thomas artfully describes how he recognized her – Greta Garbo – and honored her space when she recognized his recognition. She resumed her conversation with a Balducci's meat man.
Then, Thomas wrote, "At a certain moment, she turned toward me and said, 'It must be a fine old bird to make strong soup for a sick friend – at least five pounds!' " She got her chicken, paid, and left the store. When he got home, Thomas said he called his parents and told them he had had "an ultimate Jewish show business experience! I saw Garbo buy a chicken!" And then, with understatement and class, Thomas simply signed off: "I'll always be grateful to Balducci's for fresh food and lasting memories."
Above the letter and below the headline was the illustration, by Louise Fili and Jessica Hische: a caricature of Garbo, in an art nouveau style, one eye and famously arched brow, and a brush of hair, and in cursive script these words: "I vant to buy a chicken." Perfect. You can see it, with the entire letter, here.
It blew me away. Maybe I am overeager in a search for signs that newspapers should not, cannot, be abandoned. The new argument says don't worry about newspapers, it's not newspapers, but journalism, that must be preserved. Of course that is correct. The true battle for the future of the democracy is to move journalism online at as high a professional level as it has enjoyed in newspapers. But what about the future of casually turning a page and, in the midst of the journalism, discovering a short letter that has been recognized as a work of art, and presented in that way? You cannot link to discoveries, of art or anything else unique.
And the complete enjoyment of this art depended not on anything new or searchable, but on the individual reader's awareness that Greta Garbo was sensitive about her space, and she knew her chickens. It does in fact take a fine old bird – at least five pounds – to make a strong soup. I am beginning to think it's that reader awareness that I am really going to miss, after newspapers are gone. I wonder if that has become part of the editors' thinking, at least those who treated us to this art, in The New York Times.
Balducci's was a Manhattan gourmet food shop, founded by an Italian immigrant in 1946, expanding from a single shop into a chain. Last week, its corporate owners (since 1999) shut down Balducci's Manhattan locations. Michael Tilson Thomas was one of thousands of New Yorkers, in New York and around the world, who read the news "with regret." At the end of the letter, Thomas is identified as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and artistic director of the New World Symphony.
In his letter, Thomas recalled a Christmas Eve morning in the 1980s when he went to Balducci's for some Christmas dinner fixings. It was early, before opening time, "but if you were there a few minutes early and they knew you, there was never any problem." In the deserted store, Thomas saw a woman, in fur coat and hat and oversized sunglasses. Thomas artfully describes how he recognized her – Greta Garbo – and honored her space when she recognized his recognition. She resumed her conversation with a Balducci's meat man.
Then, Thomas wrote, "At a certain moment, she turned toward me and said, 'It must be a fine old bird to make strong soup for a sick friend – at least five pounds!' " She got her chicken, paid, and left the store. When he got home, Thomas said he called his parents and told them he had had "an ultimate Jewish show business experience! I saw Garbo buy a chicken!" And then, with understatement and class, Thomas simply signed off: "I'll always be grateful to Balducci's for fresh food and lasting memories."
Above the letter and below the headline was the illustration, by Louise Fili and Jessica Hische: a caricature of Garbo, in an art nouveau style, one eye and famously arched brow, and a brush of hair, and in cursive script these words: "I vant to buy a chicken." Perfect. You can see it, with the entire letter, here.
It blew me away. Maybe I am overeager in a search for signs that newspapers should not, cannot, be abandoned. The new argument says don't worry about newspapers, it's not newspapers, but journalism, that must be preserved. Of course that is correct. The true battle for the future of the democracy is to move journalism online at as high a professional level as it has enjoyed in newspapers. But what about the future of casually turning a page and, in the midst of the journalism, discovering a short letter that has been recognized as a work of art, and presented in that way? You cannot link to discoveries, of art or anything else unique.
And the complete enjoyment of this art depended not on anything new or searchable, but on the individual reader's awareness that Greta Garbo was sensitive about her space, and she knew her chickens. It does in fact take a fine old bird – at least five pounds – to make a strong soup. I am beginning to think it's that reader awareness that I am really going to miss, after newspapers are gone. I wonder if that has become part of the editors' thinking, at least those who treated us to this art, in The New York Times.
May 04, 2009
Media Literacy: The Gutenberg Singularity
In physics and mathematics, a “singularity” is a point or an event where the rules break down: nothing makes sense anymore. Thus, nothing about the future can be predicted. There is no way to “describe” the singularity or the world on the other side of it. It’s a world we can’t see, because we have no system for looking at it.
It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.
It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.
In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.
Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.
That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.
In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.
The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?
Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.
Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.
Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.
You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.
After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:
1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.
He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.
Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.
Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.
Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.
So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.
“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”
“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”
“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”
The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.
The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.
Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?
Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.
Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.
In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.
Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.
Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.
Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.
That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.
It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.
It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.
In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.
Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.
That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.
In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.
The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?
Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.
Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.
Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.
You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.
After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:
1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.
He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.
Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.
Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.
Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.
So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.
“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”
“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”
“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”
The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.
The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.
Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?
Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.
Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.
In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.
Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.
Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.
Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.
That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.
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