Back in 1987, comedian and filmmaker Todd Graham had a thought. What if he combined sequences from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic reboot of “Heart of Darkness” Apocalypse Now with segments of the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree? The short film uses footage from Apocalypse combined with dialog from Winnie the Pooh along with visuals from Winnie the Pooh and sound from Apocalypse. To top things off, he did this originally with VHS copies of the two films.
The version below is a 2012 remastered version done with digital video. One of the best examples ever of remixing.
NOTE: This is a collection of videos I’m going to be using in class this week to go with my discussion of the movies in Global Media Literacy.
You all no doubt think you are of the “cat video” generation. You think your generation invented the short video of cute cats doing cute things. But you are wrong!
Thomas Edison’s studios shot the first cat video back in 1894! I present to you… Boxing Cats!
Kirby Ferguson did a remarkable series of videos about ten years ago under the title “Everything is a Remix.” He’s now in the process of remaking (remixing!) the series for a new decade. Below is the first segment, covering music, from his remix-remix, along with several other videos I use to to discuss the concept of remixing and music. (Note: Click on the image to view on YouTube.)
Remastered Original Version
2021 Revised Version
One of the examples of remixing in this film is from artist Gregg Gillis who records under than name Girl Talk. And his album “All Day” was the basis for a great little dance film called Girl Walk // All Day.
(NOTE: Lots of NSFW lyrics in the following material. Be advised.)
You can download Girl Talk’s entire album “All Day” here.
Visual presentation of playlist in All Day:
(NOTE: Lots of NSFW lyrics in the following material. Be advised.)
Sometimes cover songs can radically transform the original into something entirely new. Consider Robyn’s dance hit Call Your Girlfriend.
And then take a look at how folk singer Lucy Wainwright Roche reimagined it:
And finally… About 15 years ago, singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton recorded a brilliant acoustic version of Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” turning the rap into a sweet ballad. Take a listen:
Lots of fun, and a very distinctive cover. No way you would hear this and not know that this it the Jonathan Coulton cover. (Kinda like the Gary Jules cover of the Tears for Fears song “Mad Love.”)
So now the folks on the Fox show Glee have performed the Coulton version of “Baby Got Back,” but they have made no reference to it being based on Coulton’s cover, nor did they contact Coulton about it.
Now it’s great that Glee is picking up on something so cool. But it would be much cooler if they would have made mention of the independent musician who created this version of the song. Of course, companies like News Corp. (that owns Fox Broadcasting that airs Glee) always wants proper credit and compensation for their creative content….
For the record – here’s Sir Mix-A-Lot’s hip hop original:
Editor’s Note: Please note that nothing in this commentary is intended to minimize the violence perpetrated against Gabby Petito. But there are significant news coverage issues brought up by this case that I think need to be discussed.
Ms. Petito had come to some level of prominence as a “van life” Instagrammer – attractive young people who post photos of themselves traveling around the country and documenting their travels through social media such as Instagram and YouTube. The following video (assuming it stays up) gives Petito’s and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie’s image of themselves on the road.
The trip started in June of 2021 and Petito presented a positive view of their trip through her social media. Then, on Aug.12, the couple had an encounter with the Moab, Utah police who reported them as having “some sort of altercation.” On Aug. 30th, CNN reports that Petito’s family had their last communication from Gabby, supposedly from the area of Yosemite National Park.
Throughout September, Petito’s family reached out to Laundrie’s family, trying to figure out where Gabby had gone, but they heard nothing from either Brian or his family. Laundrie reportedly disappeared from his family’s home on September 14.
A body identified as Petito’s was found in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming on Sept. 21, and an autopsy led to her death being classified as a homicide. Laundrie is being sought as a “person of interest” in the case.
American news media have a long history of paying more attention to crime stories that deal with conventionally attractive, wealthy, white women and girls than to those that deal with women and girls of color or who are in poverty.
Consider the story of Casey Anthony. The attractive, young, white mother was accused of murdering her two-year-old daughter. During her trial in 2011, the news media, especially cable television, was obsessed with the case. When Anthony was found not guilty, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites were filled with outraged comments about the verdict. In addition, talk show hosts such as Nancy Grace seemed to be obsessed with the case.
Five years after the court acquitted Anthony, Google News still featured more than 202,000 links to news stories connected to the case. On the other hand, a 2016 Google search for Jhessye Shockley, a five-year-old African American girl from Arizona who disappeared in 2011, only turned up 341 news stories, most connecting to the 2015 conviction of her mother in Jhessye’s death.
Keith Woods, an expert on diversity issues who has worked for both the Poynter Institute (a journalism think tank) and NPR, says stories about minority women tend to receive less attention because reporters are more likely to report about people they see as being like themselves. And since most newsrooms tend to be disproportionately white and middle class, the disappearance of a white woman is seen as a bigger story. This control over which stories are reported means that the public at large is not aware that African American women are disproportionately more likely to disappear than white women.
And so we see the same pattern playing out once again with the the Gabby Petito, with perhaps a few 2020 factors at play.
Ja’han Jones, who blogs for MSNBC, notes that while the “cinematic qualities” of the story and the high level of social media interest in the case accounts for some of the reason the Petito story has been so big, the main explanation is that journalists suffer from “missing white woman syndrome,” a term first used by the late, great news anchor Gwen Ifill during a 2004 journalism conference.
Racial disparity in missing persons cases is an absolutely real phenomenon, according to the evidence. A 2015 study found Black children account for roughly 35 percent of missing children’s cases, but they were only mentioned 7 percent of the time in media coverage about missing children.
(While scrolling to find this tweet, I went past at least five tweets from the NY Post on the Petito case.)
And here are the covers of the NY Post from the last two days:
NY Post, 9/20/21
NY Post 9/21/21
As I started this saying, nothing I’ve written here is to imply that Gabby Petito’s death is unworthy of coverage. It is absolutely a tragedy with a large human interest component. But just as we remember that Gabby’s life matters, so we must also remember that so do those of women and children of color.
Looking for some interesting college students from out here on the prairie to hear from? Here’s your chance. Here are the blogs and Twitter feeds for my #JMC406 Commentary and Blogging students:
Editor’s note: Much of this is drawn from a series of annual posts I have made over the years to commemorate 9/11
It was 20 years ago tomorrow morning that I was teaching my freshman media literacy course at West Virginia University. I had a class with close to 350 students in it.C-SPAN’s Washington Journal morning show was playing on the big screen as students gathered. At 8:30 a.m. I shut off C-SPAN and started teaching. When I got back to my office an hour-and-a-half later, news that our world was changing was in the process of breaking.
9/11 has always been highly personal to me.
One of my (and my Dear Wife’s) student’s father was supposed to be working in the section of the Pentagon that was hit by one of the planes. But since that area was under renovation, his dad ended up safe.
Another one of my students had a mother who was a flight attendant who flew out of the same airport the Twin Tower planes had departed from. She was desperate for news. Fortunately, her mother was not on one of the attack planes.
One of my friends was the public radio correspondent for the area, and he ended up providing much of NPR’s coverage of the United 93 crash in Shanksville, PA.
And one one of my colleagues, who taught advertising, lost an old friend in the Twin Towers collapse.
Here are a few of my memories related to 9/11.
One of the last plays I saw before live theater shut down for the pandemic was the brilliant and heartbreaking musical Come From Away that tells the story of the town of Gander, Newfoundland, where many of the planes crossing the Atlantic were diverted when United States airspace was shut down on 9/11. I still have to be careful when I listen to the soundtrack from the show. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through the show without crying. Here are two of my favorite songs from the show in a radio concert performance.
“Welcome to the Rock,” that tells how everything changed for Gander in just a moment.
“Me and the Sky” is for me the heart of the show where pilot Beverly tells her story of becoming American Airlines first female captain and her horror of airliners being used as weapons.
A performance by many of the original members of the Broadway cast is now airing on Apple TV+.
My next memory is a look at cameos the Twin Towers made in numerous Hollywood films. Those two giant buildings defined the New York skyline from the 1970s until 9/11:
Finally, Paul Simon singing his achingly beautiful American Tune is a good way to remember our beautiful country.
This last memory has nothing to do with the media. It’s a brief story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.
Took a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.
Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)
Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.
Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.
Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.
The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.
A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)
It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.
The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.
The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.
It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.
I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.
One of my first assignments for my commentary and blogging students is to have them put together a post of 10 Twitter feeds worth following. Overall, I want them to be the kind of people who would be of value to their blogs, but one or two could be fun. Here’s my list for this year. What does yours look like?
Michael is a journalism prof for University of Maine and writes commentary for the Washington Post and other outlets. He’s also a friend of the blog.
"My students see 9/11 as long-gone history, a kind of black-and-white reel of events that happened long ago, alongside the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War"
Professor at Lehigh University. Master of long-form twitter. Friend of the blog.
One of the frustrating things about the way news orgs decide to peddle junk food instead of something of value is we end up with stories like this. Entirely about a quote controversy but miss the big story lurking behind the quote.
Lincoln Journal Star News reporter who does great live tweets of legislative and other government events. Some epic threads.
This is the most media I’ve seen at a University of Nebraska Board of Regents meeting. The boardroom is also at overflow right now. Meeting will begin at 9 am. pic.twitter.com/mECzeiaCd9
Up to the minute Twitter on space and space launch news.
Oh this is quite interesting. China is studying the development of "kilometer-scale" spaceships in LEO for long-duration exploration. https://t.co/O1f5Kg9mUi
What is Rachel Maddow going to be doing going forward? Hint: It’s not going to be business as usual at MSNBC. If you pay any attention to the cable news business, you will know that Rachel Maddow is the only liberal commentary host that can command an audience on the same scale as Fox’s top stars. So when she hired a big-deal talent agency to negotiate her new contract, no one figured it was primarily about money. She has clearly been worn out by writing and appearing on a prime-time show five days a week for the last 13 years. And along with putting out that show she has written two well regarded books and co-produced a podcast called Bag Man on the fall of Vice President Spiro Agnew. What Maddow’s future looks like isn’t completely clear, but sometime in the spring she will likely end her five-day-a-week show and move to either a weekly show or a series of specials.
I have said many times over these past weeks that no matter the outcome, I’ve won. The outpouring of love and support from family, friends, and fans alike has been incredible! If love is the ultimate blessing and I believe that it is, I am truly blessed beyond measure. 🙏🏾
The one guest host no one on social media seemed to be interested in was show executive producer Mike Richards. But it was Richards who was named as the permanent host, and he managed to last eight days in the job as people remembered his sexist and racist behavior from the past. So Richards has stepped down and management has declared a do-over and gone back to guest hosts. Apparently no one gave this a serious thought.
Who can replace long-time Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts?
While I’m certain someone will, no one can really replace the steady and sure-handed beats Watts provided. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards garnered all the attention, but Watts was clearly at the core of the band. Here’s an interesting video of Jumping Jack Flash in concert that keeps Watts front and center, all the way through.
Remembering Stones' drummer Charlie Watts – Jumpin' Jack Flash focusing just on Watts.https://t.co/vg8o1ytsm2
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) August 25, 2021
There’s been an awful lot of loose talk about “critical race theory” (CRT) and how it is being taught in everywhere from grade school to college. Most of the people who use the term have little idea what CRT actually is – instead it’s used as a catch-all for any kind of talk or lessons about the history of race in the United States that deals with racism and white supremacy.
In part one of this series, we got a brief introduction to what critical theory is. In this second post in a series, we’re going to take a simplified look at how critical theory gets applied to race aka Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic gives a good overall introduction to the topic of critical race theory.
Historian and author Justin Hartwrote an excellent series of tweets a month ago that sum up the rhetoric surrounding CRT in which he points out that CRT “originated in legal scholarship in the early 1980s with scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams and others.”
An article on CRT published by the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Group by Janel George provides a good introduction. She writes that legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “critical race theory” to describe “a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal cademy and spread to other firelds of scholarship.” Crenshaw points out that like with so much of critical theory, it is a process rather than a thing – a verb, not a noun. It is a method of study, not a set of answers.
The article lists several key principles of CRT:
Race is not biologically real but is a “socially constructed and socially significant.” Race is sociology, not biology.
Racism is a normal part of society and is build into our systems and institutions, including our legal system. It is not he product of “racists” but of how society operates.
Racism is not the product of a few bad people, of racists; instead it is built into our laws and public policy.
People’s everyday lives shape their scholarship and the way they see the world around them. It is important to look at how people of color see and experience the world. Their lived experiences matter.
If you go back to the previous post, you can start seeing how this clearly comes out of the history of critical theory. The principles are critical theory and CRT are clearly connected.
“For example, Harvard law professor Derrick Bell took a critical lens to one of the court’s most hallowed decisions: Brown v. Board of Education. Despite the unanimity of the court’s 1954 decision, little actual desegregation took place in the United States until the Supreme Court began enforcing Brown in the late 1960s. In 1976, Bell published a provocative law-review article that argued that the focus on implementing Brown through elaborate desegregation plans came at the cost of the pursuit of meaningful educational equity for Black children. The courts were consumed with the minutiae of busing plans and student assignments. But this focus on busing, Bell argued, failed “to encompass the complexity of achieving equal educational opportunity for children to whom it has so long been denied.” Bell was not just theorizing — he knew school desegregation litigation intimately through his work on hundreds of cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1960s.”
This is, of course, far from a comprehensive look at CRT. If you are interested in diving in a bit deeper into how critical race theory is seen as a realm of academic investigation, I would recommend reading Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic for a good overall introduction to the topic.
Coming next: How critics portray critical race theory.
There’s been an awful lot of loose talk about “critical race theory” (CRT) and how it is being taught in everywhere from grade school to college. Most of the people who use the term have little idea what CRT actually is – instead it’s used as a catch-all for any kind of talk or lessons about the history of race in the United States that deals with racism and white supremecy.
So let’s try to take a quick look at what critical theory in general is about before we get to critical race theory in specific is about. (I’ve heard jumping into CRT from scratch is like jumping into advanced electrical engineering.)
In the decades between World War I and World War II came the rise of a revolution in social science thinking known as critical theory. Originated by a group of German scholars known as the Frankfurt School, these cultural critics were trying to make sense of a changing world that was leaving people alienated, exploited, and repressed with no good way of making sense of what was happening. Many of these scholars were Marxist in their political and social views, and deeply concerned by the upheavals brought about by the end of World War I. These upheavals led to the rise of fascism in some parts of Europe and communism divorced from Karl Marx’s ideas in others. There are several key principles to this approach:
There are serious problems that people suffer that come from exploitation and the division of labor.
People are treated as “things” to be used rather than individuals who have value.
You can’t make sense out of ideas and events if you take them out of their historical context.
Society is coming to be dominated by a culture industry (what we might call the mass media) that takes cultural ideas, turns them into commodities, and sells them in a way to make the maximum amount of money. This separates ideas from the people who produce them.
You cannot separate facts from the values attached to them and the circumstances from which these facts emerged.
Political science scholar Stephen Bronner writes in his book CRITICAL THEORY A Very Short Introductionthat it is out of critical theory that people saw the rise of environmentalism, racial equality, sexual equality, and the examination of privilege. While critical theory cannot always help us understand ideas themselves, it can, Bronner writes, help us understand where they come from:
“To put it crudely, critical theory can offer fruitful perspectives on the historical genesis and social uses of, say, the theory of relativity introduced by Albert Einstein. But it should not attempt to make philosophical judgments about its truth character.”
Hint: It’s not going to be business as usual at MSNBC
