Posts Tagged ‘television’
“Cleveland Rocks”*…
How can a city change its image? Vince Guerrieri unspools the complete account of one city’s infamous attempt…
No city fits a punchline quite like Cleveland. “In every country, they make fun of city,” comedian Yakov Smirnoff once said. “In U.S., you make fun of Cleveland. In Russia, we make fun of Cleveland.”
It goes back even longer. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In once claimed that Velveeta can be found in the gourmet section of Cleveland supermarkets. “What’s the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic?” Johnny Carson asked on The Tonight Show. “Cleveland has a better orchestra.”
Unfair? Cleveland can be a target-rich environment. The city’s sports teams vacillate between hilarious ineptitude (there’s a reason Major League was set there) and being just good enough to get fans’ hopes up. Fans got drunk and rioted on Ten-Cent Beer Night. In a ceremonial “ribbon-cutting” involving an acetylene torch and a bar of metal, Mayor Ralph Perk accidentally lit his hair on fire. His wife Lucille once declined an invitation to the White House, saying it was her bowling night. The city nearly defaulted on its loans in the late 1970s.
Cleveland became known as an industrial wasteland for frequent fires on the Cuyahoga River. That was a little unfair: In an 18-month span from 1968–69, the Rouge River in Detroit and the Buffalo River in New York also caught fire. But it was the Cuyahoga that Randy Newman wrote a song about.
In 1986, the Cleveland United Way, for its annual fundraiser, wanted to garner some positive publicity for the city, and planned a balloon launch on Public Square. Not just any balloon launch, either, but the biggest balloon launch in human history—they were shooting for a Guinness World Record.
If you’ve heard of Balloonfest ‘86, you’ve heard all about how terrible it was. A cold front blew in, keeping balloons from reaching their intended heights and destination, instead littering the city’s highways and lakefront. Some accounts even call it fatal for two boaters on Lake Erie. Neil Zurcher, a Cleveland journalist, included the balloon launch in his book Ten Ohio Disasters, right up there with the Who concert stampede in Cincinnati, the Xenia tornadoes, and the Silver Bridge collapse. Among the wares sold by Cleveland’s T-shirt–industrial complex is a shirt that boasts, “I survived Balloonfest.”
But has history done Balloonfest dirty? Was it really as bad as everyone says?…
Fascinating: “Balloonfest Made Cleveland A Laughingstock. Did It Deserve It?” from @vinceguerrieri in the always illuminating @DefectorMedia.
* Ian Hunter (on his 1979 album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic); also well-known via the cover by The Presidents of the United States of America that was the theme song of The Drew Carey Show.
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As we study stunts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that what had been a series of shorts running in The Tracey Ullman Show debuted on Fox as a 30-minute animated comedy– The Simpsons.
Now in its 35th season, the show has won dozens of awards, including 35 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 Annie Awards, and 2 Peabody Awards. Homer’s exclamatory catchphrase of “D’oh!” has been adopted into the English language, and The Simpsons has had a powerful influence on many other later adult-oriented animated– and live-action– sitcoms.
“In the nineties, culture jamming has been used extensively for the subversion of advertising and brand culture”*…
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists smuggled political messages into Melrose Place…
… Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.
It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing.
The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended. Twenty-five years later, discovering this project while researching a book about the culture wars of the late 20th century, I was left with several questions: Who were these people? Is what they made art? Did it matter? And how in the hell did they get away with it for so long?
Television,” Mel Chin [see here] told me, “is the modern cathode ray etching products into our brains.” Chin is the MacArthur “genius grant”–winning artist who was the mastermind behind the GALA Committee. On the phone from North Carolina, where he now lives and works, he explained the confluence of factors that led to him making secret art for a blockbuster prime-time soap opera…
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… Over Melrose Place’s fourth and fifth seasons, the GALA Committee wound up smuggling more than 100 pieces of subversive art—VHS boxes marked STD, a baby’s crib mobile designed to look like an enormous remote control, a painting of “fireflies” based on the U.S. military’s bombing of Baghdad—onto American television screens. Some of the artworks were quite small—a cigar box that couldn’t be opened, for example, symbolically referencing the Cuban embargo—but some were massive. GALA went to the set of Shooters, the local watering hole frequented by the show’s characters, and relabeled all of its liquor bottles with works meant to document the intertwined histories of slavery, agribusiness, and alcohol in the United States. The committee designed an ad campaign for D&D called “Family Values,” which featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children. (The “campaign” won the character of Billy a fictional advertising award.) Over those two and a half years, nearly every Melrose Place episode contained some large or small political statement, crafted by contemporary artists, tucked into shots with the show’s bombshells and hunks as they faked blindness, abruptly drowned, and tricked one another into thinking they had epilepsy…
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… It is very seldom that we get the opportunity to see art in its original context. When we go to a museum, we are viewing work that was originally intended for religious spaces, or Parisian salons in the 19th century, or the Leo Castelli Gallery at 4 E. 77th St. in Manhattan. Yet you can experience In the Name of the Place in its original context right now: Just stream an episode of Melrose Place from the show’s fourth or fifth season. Knowing what to look for transforms both the art project and the TV show that incubated it. Instead of a series of random curios, what emerges is a surreal embedding of the subtext of 1990s American life into the urtext of 1990s America: the American unspoken, slipped into the biggest, brightest, blondest version of America there was.
Soap operas have always been vehicles for our anxieties about marriage, domestic life, the workplace, and whether we could trust—or truly know—one another. In Melrose Place, those anxieties manifested in delicious plot twists, but the origins of those anxieties—the tyranny of heteronormativity, the AIDS crisis, the legacy of slavery—also popped up, subliminally but repeatedly, in a hundred or so mysterious, often hilarious objects. It’s as if the characters are dreaming, as if all of us are dreaming, and our subconscious keeps trying to show us something: something we could see, if only we could pay close enough attention…
The remarkable story of “The Virus Inside Your TV,” by @parabasis in @Slate. Eminently worth reading in full.
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As we plant Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that NBC aired a made-for-TV movie, The Steeler and the Pittsburgh Kid, which was based on a commercial Mean Joe Greene had done for Coca-Cola two years earlier.
In the ad, a young boy offers the football player a Coke after he loses the game. As a thank you, the player tosses his sweaty jersey to the kid. Considered one of the best commercials of all time, the film expanded the story so that Greene and some of his teammates adopt the boy (played by Henry Thomas, who would later star in E.T. The Extraterrestrial).
Possessed of the cloying sweetness of Original Coke, it is, as far as we know, free of covert political messages.
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons”*…
Further to yesterday’s post on the poverty created by manufacturing displacement, and in the wake of the sturm und drang occasioned by the coup at OpenAI, the estimable Rana Foroohar on the politics of AI…
… Consider that current politics in the developed world — from the rise of Donald Trump to the growth of far right and far left politics in Europe — stem in large part from disruptions to the industrial workforce due to technology and globalisation. The hollowing out of manufacturing work led to more populist and fractious politics, as countries tried (and often failed) to balance the needs of the global marketplace with those of voters.
Now consider that this past summer, the OECD warned that white-collar, skilled labour representing about a third of the workforce in the US and other rich countries is most at risk from disruption by AI. We are already seeing this happen in office work — with women and Asians particularly at risk since they hold a disproportionate amount of roles in question. As our colleague John Burn-Murdoch has charted [image above], online freelancers are especially vulnerable.
So, what happens when you add more than three times as many workers, in new subgroups, to the cauldron of angry white men that have seen their jobs automated or outsourced in recent decades? Nothing good. I’m always struck when CEOs like Elon Musk proclaim that we are headed towards a world without work as if this is a good thing. As academics like Angus Deaton and Anne Case have laid out for some time now, a world without work very often leads to “deaths of despair,” broken families, and all sorts of social and political ills.
Now, to be fair, Goldman Sachs has estimated that the productivity impact of AI could double the recent rate — mirroring the impact of the PC revolution. This would lead to major growth which could, if widely shared, do everything from cut child poverty to reduce our burgeoning deficit.
But that’s only if it’s shared. And the historical trend lines for technology aren’t good in that sense — technology often widens wealth disparities before labour movements and government regulation equalise things. (Think about the turn of the 20th century, up until the 1930s). But the depth and breadth of AI disruption may well cause unprecedented levels of global labour displacement and political unrest.
I am getting more and more worried that this is where we may be heading. Consider this new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, which analyses why AI will be as transformative as the industrial revolution. It also predicts, however, that there is a very good chance that it lowers the labour share radically, even pushing it to zero, in lieu of policies that prevent this (the wonderful Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson make similar points, and lay out the history of such tech transformation in their book Power and Progress…
We can’t educate ourselves out of this problem fast enough (or perhaps at all). We also can’t count on universal basic income to fix everything, no matter how generous it could be, because people simply need work to function (as Freud said, it’s all about work and love). Economists and political scientists have been pondering the existential risks of AI — from nuclear war to a pandemic — for years. But I wonder if the real existential crisis isn’t a massive crisis of meaning, and the resulting politics of despair, as work is displaced faster than we can fix the problem…
Everyone’s worried about AI, but are we worried about the right thing? “The politics of AI,” from @RanaForoohar in @FT.
See also: Henry Farrell‘s “What OpenAI shares with Scientology” (“strange beliefs, fights over money, and bad science fiction”) and Dave Karpf‘s “On OpenAI: Let Them Fight.” (“It’s chaos… And that’s a good thing.”)
For a different point-of-view, see: “OpenAI and the Biggest Threat in the History of Humanity,” from Tomás Pueyo.
And for deep background, read Benjamin Labatut‘s remarkable The MANIAC.
* R. Buckminster Fuller
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As we equilibrate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1874 that electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist Ferdinand Braun published a paper in the Annalen der Physik und Chemie describing his discovery of the electrical rectifier effect, the original practical semiconductor device.
(Braun is better known for his contributions to the development of radio and television technology: he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi “for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” (Braun invented the crystal tuner and the phased-array antenna); was a founder of Telefunken, one of the pioneering communications and television companies; and (as the builder of the first cathode ray tube) has been called the “father of television” (shared with inventors like Paul Gottlieb Nipkow).
“Success is in making money, not in the size of the airline”*…
Airlines make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes—and it shows. Ganesh Sitaraman explains…
… From the late 1930s through the ’70s, the federal government regulated airlines as a public utility. The Civil Aeronautics Board decided which airlines could fly what routes and how much they could charge. It aimed to set prices that were fair for travelers and that would provide airlines with a modest profit. Then, in 1978, Congress passed a sweeping law deregulating the airline industry and ultimately abolishing the CAB. Unleashed from regulation, airlines devised new tactics to capture the market. American Airlines was one of the most aggressive. In the lead-up to the deregulation bills, it created discount “super saver” fares to sell off the final few remaining seats on planes. That meant cheap prices for last-minute travelers and more revenue for American, because the planes were going to take off whether or not the seat was filled. But these fares upset business travelers, who tended to buy tickets further in advance for higher prices. So in 1981, American developed AAdvantage, its frequent-flier program, to give them additional benefits. Other airlines followed suit.
In the early years, these programs were simple, like the punch card at a café where your 11th coffee is free. But three big changes transformed them into the systems we know today. First, in 1987, American partnered with Citibank to offer a branded credit card that offered points redeemable for flights on the airline. Second, in the ’90s, the airlines proliferated the number of fare classes, charging differential prices for tickets. With more complicated fare structures came the third change: Virgin America realized that the amount people spend on a flight, based on the fare class, is more important to their bottom line than the number of miles flown. So, in 2007, it introduced a loyalty program rewarding money spent rather than mileage accrued.
These three shifts fundamentally transformed the airline industry. They turned frequent-flier systems into the sprawling points systems they are today. And they turned airlines into something more like financial institutions that happen to fly planes on the side.
Here’s how the system works now: Airlines create points out of nothing and sell them for real money to banks with co-branded credit cards. The banks award points to cardholders for spending, and both the banks and credit-card companies make money off the swipe fees from the use of the card. Cardholders can redeem points for flights, as well as other goods and services sold through the airlines’ proprietary e-commerce portals.
For the airlines, this is a great deal. They incur no costs from points until they are redeemed—or ever, if the points are forgotten. This setup has made loyalty programs highly lucrative. Consumers now charge nearly 1 percent of U.S. GDP to Delta’s American Express credit cards alone. A 2020 analysis by the Financial Times found that Wall Street lenders valued the major airlines’ mileage programs more highly than the airlines themselves. United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.
Is this a good deal for the American consumer? That’s a trickier question. Paying for a flight or a hotel room with points may feel like a free bonus, but because credit-card-swipe fees increase prices across the economy—Visa or Mastercard takes a cut of every sale—redeeming points is more like getting a little kickback. Certainly the system is bad for Americans who don’t have points-earning cards. They pay higher prices on ordinary goods and services but don’t get the points, effectively subsidizing the perks of card users, who tend to be wealthier already.
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The strange evolution of airlines into quasi-banks reflects how badly deregulation has gone. Regulation carefully set the terms under which airlines could do business. It was designed to ensure that they remained a stable business and a reliable mode of transportation. Deregulation, in turn, allowed the airlines to pursue profits in whatever way they could—including getting into the financial sector.
The proponents of deregulation made a few big promises. The cost of flying would go down once airlines were free to compete on price. The industry would get less monopolistic as hundreds of new players entered the market, and it would be stable even without the government guaranteeing profitable rates. Small cities wouldn’t lose service. In the deregulators’ minds, airlines were like any other business. If they were allowed to compete freely, the magic of the market would make everything better. Whatever was good for the airlines’ bottom line would be good for consumers.
They were wrong. As I explain in my forthcoming book, most of their predictions didn’t come true, because air travel isn’t a normal business. There are barriers to entry, such as the fixed supply of airport runways and gates. (And, for that matter, mileage programs, designed to keep customers from ditching an established airline for a rival.) There are network effects and economies of scale. There are high capital costs. (Airplanes aren’t cheap.) The idea that anyone could successfully start an airline and outcompete the big incumbents never made much sense.
After a relatively short period of fierce competition, the deregulated era quickly turned to consolidation and cost-cutting, as dozens of airlines either went bankrupt or were acquired. Service keeps getting worse, because the airlines, facing little competition, have nothing to fear from antagonizing passengers with cramped legroom, cancellations, and ever-multiplying fees for baggage and snacks. Worse still, without mandated service, cities and regions across the country have lost commercial air service, with serious consequences for their economies. And when a crisis like 9/11 or the coronavirus pandemic comes along, the airlines—which prefer to direct their profits to stock buybacks rather than rainy-day funds—need massive financial relief from the federal government.
Deregulation even failed to deliver the one thing it is sometimes credited with: lowering prices. Airfare did get cheaper in the years after the 1978 deregulation law. But the cost of flying had already been falling before deregulation, and it kept falling after at about the same rate.
The old system of airline regulation wasn’t perfect. Barred from competing directly on price, the airlines got into an amenities arms race that notoriously included in-flight piano bars. But the cure was worse than the disease. The industry went from being a regulated oligopoly, which had real problems, to an unregulated oligopoly, which we are now seeing is much worse…
Painful reading: “Airlines Are Just Banks Now” (gift article) from @GaneshSitaraman in @TheAtlantic.
* Gordon Bethune (Long-time chair of Continental Airlines)
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As we pray for an aisle seat, we might console ourselves that at least we’re not boarding the S.S. Minnow; on this date in 1964 Gilligan’s Island premiered on CBS. Seven castaways– five paying passengers who’d booked a “three hour tour” from Honolulu, and their two-person crew– spent the next three seasons marooned on an uncharted island.
“I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better”*…
Was Walter Benjamin the ur-podcaster? Peter E. Gordon on Benjamin’s audio adventures, how they relate to his cultural theories, and what they suggest about what has become (and may yet become) of audio…
No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.”
Today Benjamin is widely esteemed as one of the foremost cultural critics and theorists of the 20th century. But his career was uneven and marked by failure. In 1925, after the faculty of philosophy in Frankfurt rejected his enigmatic study of German Baroque drama and dashed his hopes for an academic career, he found himself adrift, with little assurance of a regular income. But this failure also brought freedom. His untethering from the university meant that he could indulge in his interests without restraint, and he turned his talents to writing essays that took in the whole panorama of modern life—from high literature to children’s books and from photography to film—and, for nearly six years, he supplemented his earnings with radio broadcasts, some for adults and others meant especially for children. Of the many broadcasts, about 90 in all, that he produced for the radio stations in Frankfurt and Berlin, only a fragment of a single audio recording has been preserved; unfortunately, Benjamin’s voice cannot be heard.
Now transcripts of these broadcasts have been assembled and translated into English in a new volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal, whose incisive introduction assists the reader in appreciating their true significance. One can’t help but wonder what Benjamin would have made of all this attention, since he was inclined to dismiss his radio work as unimportant. In correspondence with his friend Gershom Scholem, he wrote with some embarrassment of “piddling radio matters” and condemned nearly all of it as having “no interest except in economic terms.” Today we know that he was mistaken. The transcripts are more than mere ephemera; they are perfect specimens of Benjamin’s interpretative method, exercises in a style of urban semiotics that he would later apply during his exile in Paris. Hannah Arendt once likened her late friend to a pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the rarest of treasures. The radio transcripts offer further evidence of a genius whose career was ended far too soon…
A fascinating– and illuminating– read. Walter Benjamin’s radio years: “President of the Moon Committee,” from @thenation.
* Alistair Cooke
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As we listen in, we might spare a thought for Hugo Gernsback, a Luxemborgian-American inventor, broadcast pioneer, writer, and publisher; he was born on this date in 1884. Gernsback founded radio station WRNY, was involved in the first television broadcasts, and is considered a pioneer in amateur radio. And he was a prolific inventor, with 80 patents at the time of his death.
But it was a writer and publisher that he probably left his most lasting mark: In 1926, as owner/publisher of the magazine Modern Electrics, he filled a blank spot in his publication by dashing off the first chapter of a series called “Ralph 124C 41+.” The twelve installments of “Ralph” were filled with inventions unknown in 1926, including “television” (Gernsback is credited with introducing the word), fluorescent lighting, juke boxes, solar energy, television, microfilm, vending machines, and the device we now call radar.
The “Ralph” series was an astounding success with readers; and later that year Gernsback founded the first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories. Believing that the perfect sci-fi story is “75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science,” he coined the term “science fiction.”
Gernsback was a “careful” businessman, who was tight with the fees that he paid his writers– so tight that H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith referred to him as “Hugo the Rat.”
Still, his contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, he is sometimes called “The Father of Science Fiction”; in his honor, the annual Science Fiction Achievement awards are called the “Hugos.”
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