"Unlike the Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s..."

"... Carr never needed people to think that he was the smartest guy in the room. He could be self-deprecatingly funny."

From "Postscript: David Carr (1956-2015)," by Jelani Cobb (in The New Yorker).

... Washington journalists, who all but wore cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s...

Good lord! I'd love to know the details of the I.Q.-pride that Cobb witnessed. Cobb's short piece mourns the fallen media critic David Carr, and we are not told about that larger context within which Carr was an outlier. I want to hear what underlies that snarky cufflinks inscribed with their I.Q.s image. It's hard even to understand. If there were cufflinks inscribed with I.Q.s, there would be no point in displaying neediness about being regarded as the smartest guy in the room. We could check your cufflinks and see a number that everyone in a room with such cufflinks would regard as a statement of the actual fact.

I don't live and move amongst the journalists of Washington. I've been embedded in academia here in The North for 30 years. If anyone displayed neediness about seeming to be the smartest guy — only guys, Jelani? — in the room around here, he'd be regarded — I think — as a little embarrassing and less intelligent than the rest, and someone behaving in the Carr manner would be far more likely to be suspected of being the most intelligent. Self-deprecation seems perfectly normal in my habitat.

So tell me, Mr. Cobb, how insufferably obnoxious are these Washington assholes?

I mean, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should honor the humble and brilliant media critic who has departed, but it is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished media criticism which he so nobly advanced.

ADDED: In the I.Q. cufflinks system, at what point on the I.Q. spectrum would it be wise to wear cufflinks displaying a lower I.Q. than your actual I.Q.? How much would people deviate from their actual, tested I.Q.s as they sought business, political, and social advantages? What would be the optimum I.Q. for getting along and getting ahead and how would it vary from Washington to NYC to Madison or wherever? I mean, let's say the best I.Q. for these purposes was found to be 120: How far below 120 could you be and still con people into believing you're a 120? How far above 120 could you go and still pull it off? This hypo is horribly complicated by our suspicions that I.Q. isn't a useful enough metric, but deal with it. In the hypo, people believe in the significance enough to wear I.Q. cufflinks. So the subjective judgments would have a very real effect even if the numbers were junk science.

Ryan Seacrest's "shocking" Jeff Probst routine.

The night they made the "American Idol" contestant vote on whether to nullify the vote America went to all that trouble to phone in.

Caleb Johnson jumped right out in front of the group and proposed they unionize. Yes? Keep the group together?” he asked. Alex Preston seemed hesitant, and said either “no” or “I don’t know”...

When they came back from commercial, Seacrest read the votes —which were cast anonymously — like Jeff Probst reading results at the end of an episode of “Survivor.”...

So what was all this about? Were producers attempting to save Sam Woolf yet again? Or were they just trying to add a dose of intrigue to the show’s lowest-rated season?

Further, who were the two “no” votes?

Well, they all had an interest in acting like they love each other, but Caleb grabbed the most credit for acting out that love. Did any or all of them worry that the truth of how each of them voted would come out, and that the discrepancy would be held against them? Perhaps they are even too honest to act as if they're voting "yes" when they are voting "no."

I found this "twist" really irritating. Don't incite the public to vote and then interpose a veto. The ordeal of watching all those performances is endurable only because you know somebody's getting the boot.

Adam Lambert certainly played the gay card well.

In yesterday's post about Adam Lambert, Christopher Althouse Cohen wrote:

Well, he certainly played the gay card well. He didn't acknowledge it but put out plenty of hints on YouTube prior to the show, refused to answer questions about his sexuality after the show was over just long enough to be "in the closet" and therefore able to stage a big coming out thing, used coming out as a way to get the best magazine cover you could possibly get, and somehow managed to negotiate a deal where that very magazine cover would make no mention of his coming out in the article and would appear to just be about how "wild" he is as a performer. On the show, he got all the credit for being out without having to deal with any of the consequences, and now he gets the big cover but gets the appearance of it not being about his coming out. He is quite media savvy and played the game for maximum attention.

Oh, I do like that he acknowledges in the article that he's fat. Bad skin isn't quite as much of a revelation, and people can forgive bad skin, but people act like he's hot when he's quite out of shape and can't possibly look good naked. But props to him for admitting it.

Ouch!

From: The internet is killing our culture... to: The people look like ants.

Here's a fascinating NPR interview with Andrew Keen, who wrote "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture." Needless to say, he's negative about blogging and the like, but I love his attitude. When the NPR guy questions his theory and says that "cultural gatekeepers" are "often protecting entrenched interests who happen to be rich and powerful," he sneers: "That is a neo-Marxist argument."

But isn't it good the way the internet has enabled musicians to leap over the music business and get their work out to the public? Keen is negative. The people who are good at marketing will win, not the best artists. But he seems to think well of the the Arctic Monkeys.

Later, poking around on the bad old internet, I see this:

[Prefixmag]: So you guys didn't even know how to [put] your music on the Internet?
Arctic Monkeys: No, no.

PM: Are you guys Internet users?
Arctic Monkeys: Only to e-mail or whatever; iTunes, stuff like that. But none of us really knew how to. It was a guy at college who made the Web site. We had tried putting music on the site, but it didn't work properly. People couldn't listen to it properly.

PM: I notice you have a pretty popular site on Myspace.
Arctic Monkeys: We don't know about that, either.

PM: So that's not you guys?
Arctic Monkeys: No, no. The other day someone said to us, "I looked at your profile on Myspace." I said, "I don't even know what Myspace is." [When we went number one in England] we were on the news and radio about how Myspace has helped us. But that's just the perfect example of someone who doesn't know what the f*ck they're talking about. We actually had no idea what [Myspace] was.

What would Keen think of that? The musicians were good enough to inspire fans who were web-savvy enough to market them. It doesn't seem as though a whole lot of business genius is involved. But the group's name stuck in my head, and I happened to see a video of theirs when I was idly clicking around on YouTube today, and got to this video of "Leave Before the Lights Come On," which I liked enough to link to in an IM with John.

John responds:

mm, i'd like to hear more from them since they're playing a style of music I've been listening to a lot, but I'm not really a fan of that song. I think it's pretty generic....

the gimmick of starting a video out with someone on the ledge of a building contemplating suicide has been done.

He sends me this link to a video by Collective Soul, "The World I Know."

me: this is a much more professional video

john: yeah

me: I like the way the bird makes him think maybe life is worth living, then the ants seem especially cool, and then "the people look like ants" either means that seeing a cliché made real is so amusing that he wants to live or he actually suddenly appreciates humanity because he started off liking ants and then it was like oh, okay, since i know I like ants, maybe if people are like ants I want to live.

john: ha

john: you should blog that...

John was thus doing some gatekeeping, of the go on, go ahead variety that I'm sure would make the snobby old Mr. Keen cringe. What? We're publishing 9 p.m. IMs now? Yes, we are, old man.... like a million little ants.

ADDED: I see that Glenn Reynolds trashed Keen's book here:

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture... is basically an extended paean to the lost Golden Age of middlebrow taste-makers and big-media megaphones, and an extended jeremiad against an age in which people are free to make up their own minds, and make their own contributions. Keen is even sad about the declining influence of small-scale taste-makers: He decries the absence of the "deeply knowledgeable Tower clerk" in the world of online record sales, and he seems to think that the musical snobs in the book (and film) High Fidelity were supposed to be appealing characters.

Ha ha.

"It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to...."

Christopher Hitchens is having a fine old time working the Jerry Falwell death story.

Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the show!" What a fool Don Imus was. If he had paid the paltry few bucks to make himself a certified clergyman, he could be jeering and sneering to the present hour.

Yeah, well, I saw you on TV jeering and sneering over the death of a man. How did you get on?



I love the way Anderson Cooper preens about how CNN presents all sides of a story and brings on Hitchens to piss about "the empty life of this ugly little charlatan." Okay, fine, Anderson, but I want to see all your death stories spiced up like this from now on.

Why NBC?

Everyone wonders why the murderer chose NBC to receive his package of promotional materials. Does NBC have some special reputation for evil PR?

Well, NBC had been conspicuously in the news, as it dealt with the Imus story. But it cracked down on Imus, so if anything, its immediate reputation is for being puritanical and moralistic. Maybe Seung-Hui Cho wanted to be shamed. But maybe it was just the most famous network at the particular moment when he had to make the decision. Or maybe it's just outright offensive to try to perceive the reason in a decision by a patently deranged mind.

Should we condemn NBC? Here's the way you could go with that:

Don Imus calls some young women "nappy headed hos" and we're all supposed be to shocked, shocked I tell you. Cho blows away 32 human lives and not only do we hear no condemnation of the vile person from the big media, but NBC is going to oblige the piece of human debris by airing his "manifesto." Democrat presidential contenders refuse to appear on a Fox Network debate, citing bias, but I guess it's okay for NBC is going to realize Cho's dreams of celebrity status at the expense of 32 lives.

Cho may have been a deranged psycho, but he was sharp as a scalpel when it came to playing NBC News for his personal patsy. Anything for a point in the ratings. I'm sure the families of the deceased will appreciate the Cho Show as much as they appreciate [NBC News President Steven] Capus's inevitable defense of freedom of speech and the public's right to know. Though I don't NBC will delete any of Cho's possible references to "nappy headed hos."

There's just so much wrong with that free-swinging attack. For one thing, professional journalism isn't about expressing condemnation or praise. It's about reporting newsworthy facts. There shouldn't be extraneous statements of condemnation. Imus, on the other hand, was an employee of the company, and a business decision had to be made about whether to continue the affiliation.

Moreover, it's ridiculous to think that a mass murder demonstrates that we shouldn't also be concerned about things less horrible than killing. Of course, calling someone a bad name hurts much less than a murder, but the existence of murder doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about our more ordinary social interactions.

What Imus did is trivial compared with murder, but all normal persons already understand that murder is wrong and we're not likely to cross that line. But we really aren't sure where the lines should be with respect to speech about race and sex. We don't understand the full effect of what we say, and we don't agree about how far satire can go and when listeners are being oversensitive. So there's plenty of good reason to talk about this, much more, in fact, than about the vicious murderer.

"And people are going to have to take better care of themselves. We cannot afford all the illness that folks are bringing on themselves."

So said Hillary Clinton the other day. I just heard it on C-Span this morning, and it really struck me.

My reaction on seeing her say it on TV: Hillary Clinton wants government to take over our lives, nagging us about what to eat. She's playing the female role and acting like she's somehow going to take care of us, but she's really demonstrating that she either won't stick to the proper role of a President or she think she can hoodwink people by talking about things that are utterly irrelevant to the position of power she's trying to get her hands on.

My reaction reading the very same quote in print: Hillary Clinton is saying that she knows the government cannot solve every problem, and that people are largely responsible for their own lives, and they need to face up to that reality.

How bizarre! Why does TV make me so much more hostile to her? Is the important message in the words or in the whole picture as experienced via television? Is this just about me and Hillary, or is this something more general about TV and print? I think I've developed a strong set of defenses against manipulation by television. For reading, I'm extremely practiced at seeing what texts mean literally, and I separate that from my critical thinking about whether the person who wrote the words has ulterior motives and so forth. It may be largely a matter of timing, that, watching TV, you have to merge the task of understanding the words and judging the speaker in an instant. If I'd had the speech on TiVo, I would have backtracked and listened to the words to see if they justified my reaction, but would rewatching have had the same effect of looking up the quote as pure text.

In law, we speak of the "cold record," the written transcript of a trial that an appellate court is forced to use, as contrasted with the live testimony at trial. This is, of course, seen as reason to defer to the trial judge and the jury.

Does that mean TV gives us better insight into political candidates? But writing down my own honest reaction to the televised performance, I see my perception of the text spoken was quite distorted. And yet which reaction, to TV or to print, seems more true? I'm fascinated by the way she got conservative on paper but came across -- to me -- as liberal on TV.

If a bear fell from a tree in suburban New Jersey...

... would anybody hear it?