Hi,
I wanted to ask everyone if they could, if they have the interest, to refer other people to this blog.. I'm trying to figure out ways to build it...
Also, don't forget to check out my last post on America's light-speed cultural devolution...
Thanks,
Mike
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
No-Brainer
So, the last debate has come and gone. And like all things that go now, it goes fast... hurtling rapidly into to the forgotten archives of the past... That it, after its replayed a thousand times the next day until you could die of boredom watching the news... But after a day goes by, an event or a speech, no matter how shocking or momentous, is OLD...
There are 20 million blogs, fifty million instant messages--flying text and graphics appearing every second everywhere... Not to mention a thousand interviews and moving ribbons and split screens. Twenty-four/Seven news channels eat human emotion, thought and experience like a gang of starving sharks...
Breaking News!!
What happened?
Oh, did you miss it?
Yeah, what happened?
I don't know anymore--it happened two minutes ago...
Oh..
Wait!! More Breaking News!!
What? Where? I looked away for a second.
Too bad, it’s gone now.
What's gone?
I don't know, but it was REALLY IMPORTANT.
This insane pace of experience and information--and the electronic reporting of it--has corrupted the very structure of discussions and the delivery of information. That's why I regret so much the dying of newspapers... The information just sits there and you can regulate the way you take it in... You can actually lay the paper down, or pause to reflect on the meaning of something you read… Perhaps it will set off a series of feelings, thoughts and images; something original, creative and inspiring occurring in your brain...
The speed and the style of delivery has completely taken over the content of the information delivered.
News and information has to have moving pictures and be really short. Otherwise the modern brain, fragmented and hopped up on constant adrenaline couldn't even understand it. You could get rich as a pitcher in baseball if you could figure out a way to throw fifty miles an hour... The hitters would go nuts, swing at each pitch twelve times, then either have a breakdown or fall asleep.
Every news or interview show (I guess there are a couple of exceptions and of course there are commercials that cut into the time) is chopped up into little quick bites of speech... When you listen to even intelligent, well educated and/or reflective individuals, they talk--and are required to talk by their fast-talking hosts--as if someone had pressed a fast-forward button in their brains--set their mouths to moving at twice normal speed.
And what goes along with all this crazy speed and chopped, superficial talk, is the pitch of people's voices...
Everybody on TV YELLS! All the time, as if they were all outside on the street, trying to talk above traffic, rather than sitting in a closed studio.
I regret this too-- because with fewer guests, less speed and quieter voices, you would probably hear something that you could really digest and form a group of thoughts and feelings around...
Listening to news and interview shows on TV and reading stuff on the Net (Posted 12 minutes ago!) is like being on greased slide-- You feel a crazy urgency to gulp it down without even knowing half the time what you're eating...
I know, all of this is partially because I'm just old... Things always go "too fast" if you're old... But it’s not all that-- There really is a clear speeding up of all information everywhere... and anything that is sped up sacrifices nuance, depth and width...
I remember my father coming over for one his rare visits when I was little… I was very disturbed kid--anxious and jumpy all the time; I couldn't concentrate on my homework.
So my mother tells my father: "He can't do his homework right or learn things in school because he goes to fast and is too jumpy."
My father comes upstairs to my room in the finished attic... He takes a sheet of lined paper from my school notebook, draws a small solid circle in the center of the paper and hands me the pencil...
He takes the paper and puts it up with a thumbtack on the opposite wall...
"OK," he says, handing me the sharpened pencil, "Run across the room and stick the pencil in the circle."
Looking at him as the total crazy stranger that he was to me, I did as he said-- Jumped up, ran across the room and jabbed for the circle... Naturally I missed it by about three inches.
"OK, now," he says, "Get up, walk slowly across the room, and stick the pencil point in the circle." So I do—I walk slowly over to the paper and, sure enough, was able to stick the point right in the circle.
"You see," he says, "That's how you need to do your school-work, just slow down and you'll get it right."
Great advice (never-mind it was his fault and my mother's that I was nervous wreck to begin with-- that's another story).
…But that was an old tale from an old man... You read it over one minute ago and probably forgot it already...
I remember--and this was around twenty years ago… A friend of mine on a major commercial talk station in NYC persuaded her program director to listen to a tape of one of my shows (that I did on a non-commercial station); the idea being maybe getting a show on the commercial station.
The Program director listened to it, said I was great but had two faults that disqualified me from getting the job. One was that I was too concerned with presenting a balanced view of issues and the other was that I let the callers talk too long (more than a minute per call).
I remember in one of Spalding Gray's monologues… He didn't get a job on a sit-com because, after doing several takes, the director said--shaking his head ruefully-- "Looking through the camera, Spalding, I see a problem... You seem to have a quality of.. thinking..."
Yeah, the world, even the electronic news world, is full of brilliant people and complex and ironic thinkers-- I watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and I admire their thoughts and opinions... I just wish everyone on TV and, often, on the radio, would just slow down and speak more softly...
This was just posted 1 minute ago...
Mike
mikefeder@nyc.rr.com
There are 20 million blogs, fifty million instant messages--flying text and graphics appearing every second everywhere... Not to mention a thousand interviews and moving ribbons and split screens. Twenty-four/Seven news channels eat human emotion, thought and experience like a gang of starving sharks...
Breaking News!!
What happened?
Oh, did you miss it?
Yeah, what happened?
I don't know anymore--it happened two minutes ago...
Oh..
Wait!! More Breaking News!!
What? Where? I looked away for a second.
Too bad, it’s gone now.
What's gone?
I don't know, but it was REALLY IMPORTANT.
This insane pace of experience and information--and the electronic reporting of it--has corrupted the very structure of discussions and the delivery of information. That's why I regret so much the dying of newspapers... The information just sits there and you can regulate the way you take it in... You can actually lay the paper down, or pause to reflect on the meaning of something you read… Perhaps it will set off a series of feelings, thoughts and images; something original, creative and inspiring occurring in your brain...
The speed and the style of delivery has completely taken over the content of the information delivered.
News and information has to have moving pictures and be really short. Otherwise the modern brain, fragmented and hopped up on constant adrenaline couldn't even understand it. You could get rich as a pitcher in baseball if you could figure out a way to throw fifty miles an hour... The hitters would go nuts, swing at each pitch twelve times, then either have a breakdown or fall asleep.
Every news or interview show (I guess there are a couple of exceptions and of course there are commercials that cut into the time) is chopped up into little quick bites of speech... When you listen to even intelligent, well educated and/or reflective individuals, they talk--and are required to talk by their fast-talking hosts--as if someone had pressed a fast-forward button in their brains--set their mouths to moving at twice normal speed.
And what goes along with all this crazy speed and chopped, superficial talk, is the pitch of people's voices...
Everybody on TV YELLS! All the time, as if they were all outside on the street, trying to talk above traffic, rather than sitting in a closed studio.
I regret this too-- because with fewer guests, less speed and quieter voices, you would probably hear something that you could really digest and form a group of thoughts and feelings around...
Listening to news and interview shows on TV and reading stuff on the Net (Posted 12 minutes ago!) is like being on greased slide-- You feel a crazy urgency to gulp it down without even knowing half the time what you're eating...
I know, all of this is partially because I'm just old... Things always go "too fast" if you're old... But it’s not all that-- There really is a clear speeding up of all information everywhere... and anything that is sped up sacrifices nuance, depth and width...
I remember my father coming over for one his rare visits when I was little… I was very disturbed kid--anxious and jumpy all the time; I couldn't concentrate on my homework.
So my mother tells my father: "He can't do his homework right or learn things in school because he goes to fast and is too jumpy."
My father comes upstairs to my room in the finished attic... He takes a sheet of lined paper from my school notebook, draws a small solid circle in the center of the paper and hands me the pencil...
He takes the paper and puts it up with a thumbtack on the opposite wall...
"OK," he says, handing me the sharpened pencil, "Run across the room and stick the pencil in the circle."
Looking at him as the total crazy stranger that he was to me, I did as he said-- Jumped up, ran across the room and jabbed for the circle... Naturally I missed it by about three inches.
"OK, now," he says, "Get up, walk slowly across the room, and stick the pencil point in the circle." So I do—I walk slowly over to the paper and, sure enough, was able to stick the point right in the circle.
"You see," he says, "That's how you need to do your school-work, just slow down and you'll get it right."
Great advice (never-mind it was his fault and my mother's that I was nervous wreck to begin with-- that's another story).
…But that was an old tale from an old man... You read it over one minute ago and probably forgot it already...
I remember--and this was around twenty years ago… A friend of mine on a major commercial talk station in NYC persuaded her program director to listen to a tape of one of my shows (that I did on a non-commercial station); the idea being maybe getting a show on the commercial station.
The Program director listened to it, said I was great but had two faults that disqualified me from getting the job. One was that I was too concerned with presenting a balanced view of issues and the other was that I let the callers talk too long (more than a minute per call).
I remember in one of Spalding Gray's monologues… He didn't get a job on a sit-com because, after doing several takes, the director said--shaking his head ruefully-- "Looking through the camera, Spalding, I see a problem... You seem to have a quality of.. thinking..."
Yeah, the world, even the electronic news world, is full of brilliant people and complex and ironic thinkers-- I watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and I admire their thoughts and opinions... I just wish everyone on TV and, often, on the radio, would just slow down and speak more softly...
This was just posted 1 minute ago...
Mike
mikefeder@nyc.rr.com
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Radio Show 10/11
Taking calls from listeners (as usual) and I get a call from a man...
On the phone-call monitor in front of me, my engineer, who took the call, has typed in that the caller has identified himself as Bob and that he's calling from Idaho--but he could be Anybody from Anywhere... A lot of the callers are truckers or people in cars so they will sometimes identify themselves by their home state but might be anywhere in the country when they're calling on their cell phones. I often get calls from some trucker who is listed as calling from Texas but is currently rolling through Indiana hauling a load of appliances or dog food or plastic bags...They don't much care what they're pulling--its just something that gets picked up, hauled across half the country and delivered.
Some calls I can recognize by the area code (whenever someone calls any radio show these days their phone appears on the screen by area code and phone number-- Once people became aware of this, it cut down quite a bit on prank and outright bigoted, cursing phone calls).
But I digress... So, there I have on the phone, Bob from Idaho-- and not to be doing a kind of racial profiling here-- I can tell right away from his accent and tone and the rhythym of his speech, that I am dealing with someone very dense and probalby very conservative...
Used to be, when I first got to Sirius and took calls from all over the country, that I had to adjust my classic New York City bigoted attitude toward anybody with pronounced Southern or Southwestern accent.
Prior to going on Sirius, I had spent 25 years on a local New York City station--WBAI-FM-- where almost every caller had been from New York City, with a few from Jersey and Long Island... Not that I didn't get my share of idiotic callers and outright loons but, on the whole, the calls I got were mostly from people where pretty well educated or least knowledgable about the subject they were calling on... Growing up in New York City and having traveled a bit around the country (including down South and out West) I had gotten and retained a definite contempt for the intelligence and knowledge of Southerners and Southwesterners... But looking back on it all now, I can safely say that, having done more traveling, especially up to the NorthEast, and recalling my days in New York among all sorts of religious, ethnic and racial groups, that stupidity and bigotry is pretty evenly spread out across the country...
Hoever, having said that, I will say, that in a city like New York, with about fifty different languages and dialects spoken and every different color and religion and sect is represented, that people tend to make room for each other-- They get along pretty well--plain civilization and simple spatial accomadation require it.
You even tend, being so constantly exposed to so many different kinds of people, to develope acquaintances, friendships among otherwise very different groups of people, or, at the very least, there developes in many New Yorkers, a certain wearing away of bigotry...
Its really when you go to place where the population is almostly completely homogeneous that you run into a kind of mental (if not actual) inbreeding.
Lately we've seen this most markedly and frighteningly represented at the rallies for Sarah Palin and John McCain... When you show up at a place where everyone is white, and either lower-middle or middle-class; very conservative and, more likely than not, less educated/informed than the average American, you're going to get more outright bigotry expressed than at a typical Obama-Biden rally--where you get a much broader deeper mix of people...
Of course, you also have to fan the flames with outright demagogic rhetorick Like "Obama pals around with terrorists!" or have a fully uniformed white Florida sherrif, who, while introducing Palin, talk about Barack HUSSEIN Obama.. So, in the end, what you get is what you got this past Saturday--where some poor, frightened, deeply ignorant woman in Minnesota got up from the audience for McCain, took the hand-held microphone and said she was afraid because he (Obama) was an Arab... (an Arab! Oh God and Jesus defend us--call the 101st Airborne!).
McCain, after spending a couple of weeks (along with his scary sidekick, Palin, telling everyone who listened to him, that Obama was, in essence, a terrorist, finally had to take the microphone out this woman's hands and say: "No M'am, he's not an Arab-- he's an American and decent family man..."
Poor old John McCain, his sense of honor and his ambition have met in a head-on crash inside his heart and brain and caused him to fragment completely...
So he himself, and his pit-bull assistant and his campaign managers and the Republican National Committee have been calling Obama a terrorist and foreigner etc. etc. for a couple of weeks now---And then, when stupid, vicious mobs at rallies start calling for Obama to be killed and, incidentally, booing the press and using the word "nigger" when referring to a black camera-man for one of the TV networks, McCain has to backpeddle and tell the crowd (who booed him for saying it!) that Obama needs to be respected...
First you stand up in a crowded theater and scream fire, then condemn everyone for running out and trampling innocent people...
The very next day, Saturday, both McCain and Palin have switched to issues, like abortion, etc. (lying completely of course, but what else can you expect)--and taking a break-who knows for how long--from Bill Ayers and this shameful stuff about terrorism...
But wait! I digressed again...
So, Bob from Idaho calls and he has this thick, slow, dumb tone to his voice and he proceeds to tell me how scary Obama was because he's not an American and he's a Muslim and he's a terrorist and his ex-pastor, Reverend Wright, hates America, etc. etc.-- One dumb piece of drivel after another... (Being tired after 2 and 1/2 hours on the air, I didn't even think to call the guy on the most obvious stupidity in his little deck of cards-- That Obama was "a Muslim" and his pastor, Reverend Wright hated America... How could Obama be a Muslim and have a Christian pastor... Oh well, who care?
Anyway, I tried to very calm and factual and patient with Bob-- Telling, with each wrong fact he utttered, that it WAS wrong, and the opposite was the case--
I asked where he heard this stuff-- He said: "Its all over TV". I told him that wasn't the case and asked him which TV channel... He just repeated: "TV."
You have to assume it was a local Fox affiliate somewhere...
If its not that, its some right-wing local or national radio show--
This really gets to me. I've met Rush Limbaugh and I know that he and the clowns on Fox TV, are not stupid people. They really are, with a couple of exceptions (Sean Hannity being the most prominent) at least average or above average intelligence. They are deliberately and cynically pouring this stupid inflammatory poison into people's minds... And because they seem to be or pretend, by the surrounding graphics and their serious tone to be, "reporters" or "hosts" like at a legitimate news channel, the mass of frightened and ignorant people in this country, and there are tens of millions of them apparently-- these people take this nonsense for the gospel truth...
I've listend occasionally to the hosts and callers on right-wing radio and you always tend to get (in response to the loud and angry drivel being issued by the host) much stupider, more bigoted people calling into these shows..
Its an old rule of talk radio--maybe the most fundamental rule--that on radio, you always gets back what you put out.
If you talk in a reasonable, balanced, mature and intelligent way about something (which I manage to do maybe 80% of the time with the occasional spectactular lapse), then that's the kind of caller you will get when you pick up the phone....
There are millions of Bobs from Idaho and there wouldn't be half as many if the people they look up to (their political leaders) and the people they get their information from (TV and radio mostly) attempted to be honest, respectful and more factual than opinionated...
But what am I saying?! How can you win an election or swindle or lie to millions of people on a daily basis unless you keep than as ignorant and scared as possible?
Mike Feder
mikefeder@nyc.rr.com
On the phone-call monitor in front of me, my engineer, who took the call, has typed in that the caller has identified himself as Bob and that he's calling from Idaho--but he could be Anybody from Anywhere... A lot of the callers are truckers or people in cars so they will sometimes identify themselves by their home state but might be anywhere in the country when they're calling on their cell phones. I often get calls from some trucker who is listed as calling from Texas but is currently rolling through Indiana hauling a load of appliances or dog food or plastic bags...They don't much care what they're pulling--its just something that gets picked up, hauled across half the country and delivered.
Some calls I can recognize by the area code (whenever someone calls any radio show these days their phone appears on the screen by area code and phone number-- Once people became aware of this, it cut down quite a bit on prank and outright bigoted, cursing phone calls).
But I digress... So, there I have on the phone, Bob from Idaho-- and not to be doing a kind of racial profiling here-- I can tell right away from his accent and tone and the rhythym of his speech, that I am dealing with someone very dense and probalby very conservative...
Used to be, when I first got to Sirius and took calls from all over the country, that I had to adjust my classic New York City bigoted attitude toward anybody with pronounced Southern or Southwestern accent.
Prior to going on Sirius, I had spent 25 years on a local New York City station--WBAI-FM-- where almost every caller had been from New York City, with a few from Jersey and Long Island... Not that I didn't get my share of idiotic callers and outright loons but, on the whole, the calls I got were mostly from people where pretty well educated or least knowledgable about the subject they were calling on... Growing up in New York City and having traveled a bit around the country (including down South and out West) I had gotten and retained a definite contempt for the intelligence and knowledge of Southerners and Southwesterners... But looking back on it all now, I can safely say that, having done more traveling, especially up to the NorthEast, and recalling my days in New York among all sorts of religious, ethnic and racial groups, that stupidity and bigotry is pretty evenly spread out across the country...
Hoever, having said that, I will say, that in a city like New York, with about fifty different languages and dialects spoken and every different color and religion and sect is represented, that people tend to make room for each other-- They get along pretty well--plain civilization and simple spatial accomadation require it.
You even tend, being so constantly exposed to so many different kinds of people, to develope acquaintances, friendships among otherwise very different groups of people, or, at the very least, there developes in many New Yorkers, a certain wearing away of bigotry...
Its really when you go to place where the population is almostly completely homogeneous that you run into a kind of mental (if not actual) inbreeding.
Lately we've seen this most markedly and frighteningly represented at the rallies for Sarah Palin and John McCain... When you show up at a place where everyone is white, and either lower-middle or middle-class; very conservative and, more likely than not, less educated/informed than the average American, you're going to get more outright bigotry expressed than at a typical Obama-Biden rally--where you get a much broader deeper mix of people...
Of course, you also have to fan the flames with outright demagogic rhetorick Like "Obama pals around with terrorists!" or have a fully uniformed white Florida sherrif, who, while introducing Palin, talk about Barack HUSSEIN Obama.. So, in the end, what you get is what you got this past Saturday--where some poor, frightened, deeply ignorant woman in Minnesota got up from the audience for McCain, took the hand-held microphone and said she was afraid because he (Obama) was an Arab... (an Arab! Oh God and Jesus defend us--call the 101st Airborne!).
McCain, after spending a couple of weeks (along with his scary sidekick, Palin, telling everyone who listened to him, that Obama was, in essence, a terrorist, finally had to take the microphone out this woman's hands and say: "No M'am, he's not an Arab-- he's an American and decent family man..."
Poor old John McCain, his sense of honor and his ambition have met in a head-on crash inside his heart and brain and caused him to fragment completely...
So he himself, and his pit-bull assistant and his campaign managers and the Republican National Committee have been calling Obama a terrorist and foreigner etc. etc. for a couple of weeks now---And then, when stupid, vicious mobs at rallies start calling for Obama to be killed and, incidentally, booing the press and using the word "nigger" when referring to a black camera-man for one of the TV networks, McCain has to backpeddle and tell the crowd (who booed him for saying it!) that Obama needs to be respected...
First you stand up in a crowded theater and scream fire, then condemn everyone for running out and trampling innocent people...
The very next day, Saturday, both McCain and Palin have switched to issues, like abortion, etc. (lying completely of course, but what else can you expect)--and taking a break-who knows for how long--from Bill Ayers and this shameful stuff about terrorism...
But wait! I digressed again...
So, Bob from Idaho calls and he has this thick, slow, dumb tone to his voice and he proceeds to tell me how scary Obama was because he's not an American and he's a Muslim and he's a terrorist and his ex-pastor, Reverend Wright, hates America, etc. etc.-- One dumb piece of drivel after another... (Being tired after 2 and 1/2 hours on the air, I didn't even think to call the guy on the most obvious stupidity in his little deck of cards-- That Obama was "a Muslim" and his pastor, Reverend Wright hated America... How could Obama be a Muslim and have a Christian pastor... Oh well, who care?
Anyway, I tried to very calm and factual and patient with Bob-- Telling, with each wrong fact he utttered, that it WAS wrong, and the opposite was the case--
I asked where he heard this stuff-- He said: "Its all over TV". I told him that wasn't the case and asked him which TV channel... He just repeated: "TV."
You have to assume it was a local Fox affiliate somewhere...
If its not that, its some right-wing local or national radio show--
This really gets to me. I've met Rush Limbaugh and I know that he and the clowns on Fox TV, are not stupid people. They really are, with a couple of exceptions (Sean Hannity being the most prominent) at least average or above average intelligence. They are deliberately and cynically pouring this stupid inflammatory poison into people's minds... And because they seem to be or pretend, by the surrounding graphics and their serious tone to be, "reporters" or "hosts" like at a legitimate news channel, the mass of frightened and ignorant people in this country, and there are tens of millions of them apparently-- these people take this nonsense for the gospel truth...
I've listend occasionally to the hosts and callers on right-wing radio and you always tend to get (in response to the loud and angry drivel being issued by the host) much stupider, more bigoted people calling into these shows..
Its an old rule of talk radio--maybe the most fundamental rule--that on radio, you always gets back what you put out.
If you talk in a reasonable, balanced, mature and intelligent way about something (which I manage to do maybe 80% of the time with the occasional spectactular lapse), then that's the kind of caller you will get when you pick up the phone....
There are millions of Bobs from Idaho and there wouldn't be half as many if the people they look up to (their political leaders) and the people they get their information from (TV and radio mostly) attempted to be honest, respectful and more factual than opinionated...
But what am I saying?! How can you win an election or swindle or lie to millions of people on a daily basis unless you keep than as ignorant and scared as possible?
Mike Feder
mikefeder@nyc.rr.com
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