A week ago or so I saw and loved the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians. Not usually much of a rom-com kinda guy, but this film was clever and smart. One of the things I liked best about it was that none of the main characters acted stupid.(Something I really hate about comedies.) Surrounded by far-fetched circumstances? Certainly. But really good story. Highly recommend.
It also brings to mind what I thought after seeing Black Panther – that we need to see and hear more stories being told by people other than white men.
It’s not that white men don’t have good stories to tell. They have many great ones. But they don’t have the exclusive patent on stories. It is so refreshing to see stories, characters and families who are both the same and different from people from a range of backgrounds.
Just as Black Panther featured black actors from Africa, Europe and the Americas, so does Crazy Rich Asians give us a great range of Asian actors from around the globe.
Such a treat to see Michele Yeoh as a fully formed adult character and not just as a kick-ass action character. (Though don’t get me wrong – I loved her in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies.”)
The movie left me wanting to read Kevin Kwan’s novel that the film is based on.
Another movie I saw recently had diversity of story telling in a very different way. I went to the Alamo Drafthouse to see the newly restored print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Overture, Intermission and post-credits music. While the movie is not diverse in terms of actors, having almost an exclusively white, male cast, it is very different in how it tells its story. Like Christopher Nolan’s recent World War II movie Dunkirk,2001 has almost no dialog and tells its story almost exclusively through stunning visuals, sound and music.
As I first wrote about 3 years ago, my parents took our family from small-town Iowa to Des Moines so we could see the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey at the River Hills 70 mm theater. For you too young to remember, that was the biggest film format of the late 1960s, at least for commercial films. That movie made such an impression on eight-year-old me that I can still tell you what the trailers were that we saw (Ice Station Zebra and Shoes of the Fisherman)
Ever since that night, I have been in love with going to see movies in the biggest theaters with the best projection system. I got to see Interstellar at a museum 70 mm film IMAX theater and Nolan’s followup of Dunkirk at a commercial digital IMAX theater.
This 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.
This week has not suffered from lack of news for people like me who are obsessed with the coverage of news coming out of Washington.
First, there was all the fuss over Nike featuring NFL kneeling protester Colin Kaepernick being featured prominently in Nike’s latest “Just Do It” campaign, along with a tiny number of people getting an enormous amount of attention for destroying their Nike gear.
There was, of course, the ongoing live TV coverage of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings and all the accompanying drama.
And there were also the first excerpts and interviews about Bob Woodward’s new book Fear about conflict inside the White House along with the many comments from people who found it convenient to deny they had said what Woodward said they did. (I don’t have complete faith in many of the people who’ve written recent books about the Trump administration, but I have to say that Woodward has a good, though not perfect, track record.)
But the thing that really made the heads explode of the Twittering and chattering class was the anonymous Op/Ed written by a “senior official” at the White House published in the New York Times. (This has also rightly been called a column and wrongly called an editorial.)
In the commentary, the author writes:
“To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
“But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
“That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
Once this was published Wednesday afternoon, Twitter could find little else to talk about, despite the target-rich news environment.
Paige Lavender, of the Huffington Post, tweeted:
Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, noted:
So looks like the author is a "senior," but not a "top," official? ("a top official complained to me recently…") https://t.co/2m2qIPvd5K
Eric Lach, deputy news editor of The New Yorker, asked:
Which was actually a pretty good question. On the one hand, what a challenge to the reporting staff of the NY Times to find out who the editorial board gave a promise of anonymity to. (Remember: There is no connection between the editorial board/staff at the Times and the reporting staff.) But this could also be a problem for the Times, because as the Supreme Court case of Cohen v. Cowles Media showed, news organizations have a legal obligation to keep their promises to their sources.
University of Maine journalism prof Michael Socolow, pointed out in a series of tweets that the NY Times carrying a anonymous Op/Ed pieces while not common, is not unheard of. He gave several examples over the course of the following day:
And as any fan of the musical Hamilton and the Chernow biography of the first treasury secretary knows:
Absolutely. Was common. And Hamilton’s paper is now the New York Post https://t.co/uYggacETZg
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) September 7, 2018
There was also an extensive debate over what value publishing the anonymous opinion piece had, especially given that virtually everything in it had been reported many times before.
One thing I enjoyed was all the satire that spread from it:
Well, I guess there's no real utility in pitching anything else for the rest of the day, huh?
Tomorrow Rolling Stone will publish an op-ed from an anonymous member of Nickelback explaining how he’s trying to make them suck less behind the scenes
Trying to outline the coverage of this story could (and in some ways has) keep this blog post going forever, so let me just end with this excellent analysis from WaPo media columnist Margaret Sullivan (who used to be the NY Times public editor)
The NYT’s mystery OpEd was newsworthy — and fraught with potential ethical and legal issues. My column https://t.co/Ci6fHTq4mb
There’s been an ongoing battle going on in social media for the year or so over the meaning of Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against black men and the fact that he has not been able to land a job as a quarterback for any NFL team.
As expected, this has set off a flurry of people tweeting about how it will destroy Nike, how it shows how brave Nike is, how it shows… Here’s a sampling of what’s being said:
Radio host and online personality Clay Travis, who loves mocking what he calls the dysfunctional liberal agenda of ESPN and other sports media, was predictably excited on how this campaign would help his conservative sports media brand:
This is also why having people with different opinions in your board room matters more than having people who look different, but all think the same. This will be a PR disaster for Nike. Insanely dumb.
I'd also like to thank @nike for ensuring my new book, "Republicans Buy Sneakers Too," has the perfect title and book cover. It's like Nike PR is trying to make me rich(er). Absolutely fabulous. https://t.co/ud4qRCuVYY
There’s also a host of profane posts from Travis you can check out if you are interested.
From conservative writer Ben Shapiro:
Name the thing he sacrificed. He was benched before he protested. He’s become far more celebrated and famous than his performance would justify. Now he’s got a lucrative ad contract. Ali sacrificed something. Kaepernick didn’t. https://t.co/cvnNAgiG9K
In the end, however, I think that ESPN The Magazine journalist Mina Kimes raised the most interesting points:
it's a powerful ad. so was the serena one. this is a corporation that was recently hit with a class action suit for gender discrimination. all of this matters. https://t.co/rP8ovQy6tw
here's what I find interesting: Nike knows its customers. The NFL ostensibly knows its fans. If we assume both companies are acting in their own self interest (as companies do)….is the demographic gap that wide? or are they making different bets?
There is much about Sen. John McCain that I have admired throughout my adult life, starting when he was my senator in Arizona back in the early 1990s. The wide range of people praising Sen. McCain demonstrates that we do not have to see eye-to-eye with people in order to admire them.
Our country would be a much better place if we had more conservatives and progressives with the character and resolve of John McCain.
One of the things I have found particularly interesting about Sen. McCain is that he requested that both President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush speak at his funeral. These are the two men who came out on top in the race for the presidency with Sen. McCain.
I’m including links to a couple of tributes to Mr. McCain, followed by a blog post I put up in 2011 about President Obama’s 2008 victory speech and Sen. McCain’s concession speech. I consider both of these to be high points in contemporary political rhetoric. This was a hard-fought and consequential presidential race, and the two candidates emerged still able to be respectful to one another.
Both President Barack Obama and his challenger Senator John McCain were credited with giving excellent speeches on election night 2008. Take a listen to these two speeches, then read a transcript of them. Which gives you a better sense of what the speech was like?
I recently was in Washington, D.C. for an academic conference, and fortunately enough, the conference hotel was about three blocks from the National Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art. I’ve been there on several occasions in the past, but given its proximity this time, I was fortunate enough to go there three times this time around.
Matthew Brady Studio portrait of author Nathaniel Hawthorne.
My first stop every visit is to see the Matthew Brady Studio photographs down the hall on the main floor. Photographer Mathew Brady is often credited with inventing photojournalism in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1845, Brady began to become famous for his portraits of noted Americans. (The one at right is of author Nathaniel Hawthorne.) He attempted to sell printed reproductions of his photographs, and though the effort failed because the costs were too high, he set the stage for later celebrity photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz. Brady also realized that much of the value of his photographic portraits came from their being reproduced as engravings, woodcuts, lithographs, and the like. The original was valuable, but so were the reproductions. Today Brady is best remembered for his pictures of the American Civil War, the first war to be photographed from beginning to end. It should be noted that there were a number of photographers working for the Brady Studio who generally did not receive named credit for their work.
Following the Brady exhibit, I headed upstairs. Fans of the Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton (and, of course, the hit musical) will find much to see in the section developed to American history. Two stood out for me. First was the John Trumbull portrait of Hamilton:
Alexander Hamilton, by John Trumbull.
John Trumbull was a prominent revolutionary era painter who is perhaps best known for his Declaration of Independence painting. There’s a song on the Hamilton Mix Tape that was cut from the musical that sums up the events of the political side of the revolution really well:
“You ever see a painting by John Trumbull? Founding fathers in a line, looking all humble Patiently waiting to sign a declaration and start a nation No sign of disagreement, not one grumble The reality is messier and richer, kids The reality is not a pretty picture, kids Every cabinet meeting is a full on rumble What you’re about to witness is no John Trumbull”
—Cut song from Hamilton
The other standout was Nelson Shanks’s “The Four Justices” featuring the only four women to have served on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The painting is huge and dominates the second floor rotunda with these four very different women. (By the way, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic RBG will be showing on CNN Labor Day weekend.)
The America’s Presidents is probably the best known of the gallery’s exhibits, containing many of the iconic images of our early presidents we grew up with in our textbooks. But it was the collection of the presidents of my lifetime that really captured my attention.
John F. Kennedy, painted by Elaine de Kooning.
Something about the colors, brushwork and “gestural” style really seems to capture who this young, dynamic president was in his too short life.
Bill Clinton, painted by Chuck Close.
I don’t know quite how to react to this portrait of President Clinton created out of a series of tiny abstract paintings. I have to say that it is oddly compelling.
George W. Bush, painted by Robert Anderson.
In something that was a bit of surprise to me, one of my favorite portraits of a contemporary president was that of George W. Bush by his Yale classmate Robert Anderson. President Bush requested an informal portrait painted at Camp David. While I am not a big fan of Bush’s presidency, I feel like this painting really captures who Bush is, and who he might have been if the September 11th attacks had not happened.
Barack Obama, painted by Kehinde Wiley, the first presidential portrait painted by an African American artist.
The Obama portrait was the biggest draw at the museum while I was there with a modest line of mostly young people waiting to take a selfie with the painting. Obviously Obama is the last of the presidential portraits, but it is located in the doorway that connects the hall of presidents to an exhibit called The Struggle For Justice about civil rights in its many forms. What perfect placement, seemingly in both exhibits at the same time.
Young woman looking at Amy Sherald’s portrait of first lady Michelle Obama.
The final portrait I’d like to highlight is the stunning portrait of first lady Michelle Obama, painted by Amy Sherald.
I’m not an artist and have had only the simplest level of art appreciation education, but the time I spent at the portrait gallery gave me a lot to think about. Seeing the portraits of Hamilton, John Jay, and Presidents Washington and Jefferson gave me such a connection to the time of the Revolutionary War and the era Hamilton lived in. We obviously have no photos from this time, but the portraits painted from life give us a direct connection these historic and vibrant figures. The modern presidential portraits have a huge range of styles, from the realistic, casual portrait of George W. Bush, to the more stylized images of Presidents Kennedy and Clinton. But the two Obama portraits were the real standouts. The realistic image of the president stands in contrast with the more minimalist painting of the first lady.
I think my reaction to these paintings was heavily shaped by the context in which I viewed them. The line of young people who were so eager to take their smartphone pictures with President Obama’s portrait. The young African American woman with the close-cropped hair starring lovingly, admiringly, hopefully at the first lady. Doreen St. Felix, who reviewed the Michelle Obama portrait for The New Yorker, summed it up this way, “The portrait, beautiful and discomforting, is like a memory of what we never knew.”
Years ago, back when my Dear Wife and I lived in Arizona, we saw film composer Jerry Goldsmith conduct an evening of his music with the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra. Now, more than 25 years later, I still think about what an incredible evening it was hearing his music and the stories behind it.
Jerry Goldsmith’s music from Star Trek
And from Chinatown – which I consider his masterpiece of scoring.
Great scores by composers like Goldsmith, James Horner, Michael Giacchino, and – of course – John Williams are such a key part of so many movies that I love. Lately at the gym I’ve been watching movies with isolated scores – that is, with no dialog or sound effects, just the music. And in many cases this is with a more complete score by the composer, much of which didn’t make it into the finished film.
I got interested in looking for these when it was announced that Star Wars: The Last Jedi would have an isolated soundtrack as an online bonus feature where there would be no sound effects, no dialog (and no subtitles), just the soaring John Williams score. That got me interested to see how many movies I own copies of that have an isolated score.
John Williams conducting the Star Wars fanfare.
So far I’m working my way through science fiction/horror movies with Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien, James Horner’s Aliens, and John Williams Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And while Dunkirk does not offer an isolated soundtrack, one might come close to arguing that the movie as shown in the theater has an isolated soundtrack. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, Christopher Nolan’s movie about the World War II boat lift has very little dialog and Hans Zimmer score that is a major part of the movie’s storytelling.)
James Horner on writing the score for Star Trek II – The Wrath of Kahn
And here is the complete soundtrack for Wrath of Kahn
Watching a familiar film this way is an interesting experience. Seeing the movie as essentially a silent film forces you to focus on the visual storytelling within it, along with the score.
Take a look at the movies you own as DVDs, Blu Ray or digital downloads. You might be surprised how many have an isolated score audio track, or even a composer’s original score track.
Take a step back and just watch and listen to the movie and its music. You might be surprised at what a great experience it is and how much more you will discover.
James Gunn, director of first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Last week, Disney fired director James Gunn from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie franchise over a number of offensive tweets he posted dating back to 2009. Though the tweets were not hidden, they were brought to people’s attention when alt-right activist Mike Cernovich dug them out and started publicizing them. The tweets have since been deleted.
To be clear: Eight to 10 years ago, when James Gunn was an edgy, independent filmmaker, he had a habit of posting highly offensive homophobic, pedophiliac rape “joke” tweets.
Gunn accepted his firing from GOTG 3 with grace, and apologized for the old tweets. Gunn wrote in a statement:
“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative. I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.
“Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies. Love to all.”
Cernovich, of course, was not offended by Gunn’s tweets. Instead, he appears to have been looking for a way to cause trouble for Disney because they fired Roseanne Barr for a series of recent racist tweets. He also was after Gunn because he has been a vocal critic of President Trump.
Cernovich attempted to portray Gunn as a pedophile who genuinely liked what he was joking about in his tweets. This connects to a larger conspiracy theory that people in Hollywood and members of the Democratic Party have a secret pedophile conspiracy. (Dig into “Pizzagate” if you are so inclined.) (If you must read what Cernovich wrote, here’s a link. I’m a bit reluctant to give him the traffic, but I always think it is useful to see the original source material. )
“The post is dated February 11th, 2011, and apparently sat around for nearly two years before it was noticed recently. It was still live late last night when I noticed pretty much every comics-related blog I follow on Tumblr talking in various shades of disgust about its content, but it has since been taken down. Naturally, it’s still available by Google Cache.
“Lets be clear: there’s nothing wrong about running a poll for the most sex-able superhero on your site, especially one where you embrace the fact that Batman and Gambit come in within the top five. There isn’t anything wrong, in that context, of choosing art that sexualizes the characters in it. There isn’t even anything wrong with talking explicitly about sex in your commentary on the poll results. What’s wrong is the sheer amount of slut-shaming (on only the female characters) and anti-gay language that Gunn directs towards the majority of the male characters. These are not opinions befitting somebody who’s been given the task of bringing a major part of the Marvel Universe to the big screen (a set of characters, I might add, that includes a lesbian superhero couple, not that they’ll be appearing in Guardians).”
“A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all. People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all”
Gunn has had substantial support from the Hollywood community, with generally supportive tweets coming from multiple members of the GOTG cast, and this support has generated its own hashtag campaign – #WeAreGroot.
The big question to come out of all of this to me is: How long should people pay for their online sins?
Should their be some kind of statute of limitations for how long old tweets and blog posts can haunt a person? Are we all responsible for everything we wrote when we were in college? (I, for one, can be happy that everything I wrote in college existed in the pre-Internet age.) Does every ill-advised post, even when made repeatedly over an extended period of time, carry a lifetime statute of limitations? Should it matter that you like/dislike the person apart from their post? Does it matter whether the revelation comes from someone acting in good faith or as a troll? Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle asks these and several other questions that we are going to need to deal with repeatedly in the new social media era. She writes:
“We don’t have a statute of limitations for murder, of course, and I’m not advocating a blanket amnesty for heinous offenses. … But people who merely made dumb jokes should be offered the chance to apologize and to start with a clean slate, rather than seeing their lives wrecked over ephemeral missteps. Few of us are the sort of relentless prig who has never made an off-color suggestion even in jest. Which means that few of us can survive in a world that refuses to let the dead past stay buried.”
The following guest blog post comes from Matthew Warder, who at one time was lead guitarist for a great indie power pop band called “The Argument.” In addition to providing us with lots of entertainment, he was also my eldest’s bass guitar teacher for several years. I’ll let Matt give you the background on how this post came to be. He’s now a financial and equity markets analyst. Thanks for the post, Matt.
Following a recent blog post – “The Changing Face of Media Ownership” – Dr. Hanson and I struck up a conversation on Facebook about its implications. The blog’s context, you may remember, concerned the red light-green light-red light acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, the sordid corporate love triangle of Disney, Comcast, and 21stCentury Fox, and the divorce/reconciliation of CBS and Viacom.
Let me start off by saying it’s pretty easy to see why our government has allowed these sorts of deals to happen. While it may scream anti-trust on the surface, we found out during the 70’s and 80’s that smaller companies do have a heck of a lot of trouble staying well-capitalized, and are vulnerable to competitors – and that does not necessarily benefit consumers (or shareholders) at all.
In addition, the larger the number of entities in an industry, the harder it is for government to effectively regulate them. The banking industry leading up to the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession is probably the most obvious recent example.
But the legislation that essentially made these media mega-mergers possible – the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – also had far-reaching effects on other industries that, at least for me, hit a lot closer to home.
I met Dr. Hanson in the early 2000’s, when I was teaching guitar and bass to his eldest son Erik in Morgantown, WV. My band at the time, the Argument, enjoyed a modicum of success in the music industry, touring the East Coast and Midwest in support of our two records, both of which are still available on iTunes (hint, hint; wink, wink).
The Argument on stage
Now, it’s not exactly a trade secret that the business of touring is tremendously enhanced by the business of selling records and merchandise, which is in turn tremendously enhanced by an effective marketing strategy. But it might not be well-known that for most of the industry’s existence, that marketing strategy centered around terrestrial radio.
That’s because from the dawn of radio through the mid-90’s, radio was primarily community-based. Though record industry payola had existed in some form for a long time, regional managers and station managers kept a fair amount of latitude for their own personal tastes and business ideas. And because they were so plugged in to the community, it also meant they knew their demographics better than anyone, and they generally had a good feel for what kind of music would fly on the air, and what wouldn’t.
When it was appropriate, those station managers were great supporters and advocates for musical artists in their community; most especially so when there was a coherent “scene”. Think Chicago in the 70’s (Cheap Trick, Styx, Chicago), Los Angeles in the 80’s (Guns ‘N’ Roses, LA Guns, Motley Crue), or Seattle in the 90’s (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana). All of those bands were at one time local acts who were bolstered by local radio.
The business model of record labels was a little different then. In order to recoup enough investment, labels had to find acts that had the potential to play nationally. And one of the most logical methodologies to use was:
Start with something already popular;
Find something similar that’s already working somewhere else;
Throw at wall;
Measure relative stickiness.
So it wasn’t exactly a leap of logic for LA-LA land A&R guys in 1988 to think, “Hmmm, this LA hair band thing is winding down…I need to call all my radio buddies here on the West Coast and see if there’s some band up there that will let me keep my awesome job”.
But after President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TCA96 from here on out) into law, we immediately saw some of these dynamics change.
The first thing I remember noticing personally was that stations often switched formats. While I was studying jazz guitar at William & Mary, I listened pretty heavily to a small station based out of either Newport News or Norfolk, VA (can’t remember) that had about 4 hours of jazz programming every day. A few months after TCA96 was signed, new DJ’s greeted my Monday lunch with the latest hot 40 hits. The classical station based out of Richmond, VA that I’d frequently put on to study now played country music. The one Tejano station that I remembered in the area became some term called “active rock” that I had never heard before.
No more bluegrass, no more blues, no more folk…no more niche music whatsoever.
What I didn’t realize had happened was that the commercial radio lobby – the National Association of Broadcasters – requested as part of this legislation that the caps on the number of stations one entity can own be lifted…and Congress obliged. Whereas one owner could previously only hold 4 stations in a local market or 40 nationally, those limitations were now eliminated.
In short order, the radio industry went from almost entirely a locally-controlled, community-connected industry to a giant national network where two-thirds of listeners and revenue were controlled by 10 companies.
So at this point, the nature of radio’s business model had to drastically change. Instead of only having to appeal to a concentrated local market – the demographics of which were intimately known by the local station managers – radio now had to appeal to ALL markets, all at once, all the time.
And what’s the one thing that almost all adults in the country have in common?
Most of them have kids.
So instead of the next commercial evolution of grunge, music enthusiasts in 1997 were rewarded for their patronage by such heady acts as…The Spice Girls! They, of course, were followed closely by the Lou Pearlman-managed boy bands (Backstreet Boys, NSYNC), and former Disney Channel child stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
In retrospect, that was probably an auspicious year for a recent college graduate to start a power-pop band with legitimate industry goals. But of all the areas in the country where I could do so, I was fortunate enough to do so in an area of the country that was still very community-centric.
My fellow bandmates and I knew most of our local station managers and DJ’s personally. We were welcomed into their world. We supported their local events wholeheartedly. And when we eventually made commercially viable records with legitimate industry producers, we were rewarded with local radio play, which turned into regional radio play, which turned into some record label interest.
Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out for us – I’m writing this now as a financial and equity markets analyst rather than the next teenage guitar hero – but I can’t say we weren’t lucky.
What I can say, though, is that the music industry hasn’t been quite as engaging since.
“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
My late mother, who taught first one-room school and later special ed, recognized early on that I could not sit still, and that I was always interested in three things at once. She worked with my teachers to help them see I was not trying to be disruptive, that I just couldn’t sit still. She also worked with me on better focusing my attention. I suspect on the spectrum of hyperactive – attention deficit disorder, I’m somewhere to the right of “normal.” The thing that I always appreciated is that my mother always recognized that and helped me harness it to my benefit rather than try to coerce or drug it out of me. (For the record, my mother never did approve of my motorcycle riding.)
My father also recognized it. All my life I’ve had an interest in photography and journalism, as well as science. My father, as well, had interests in all these areas. But my father went into physics – first nuclear physics and later acoustics, while I studied science journalism, anthropology and sociology. In a conversation Dad and I had several years (decades?) ago, he noted quite accurately that I did not have the patience for physics, and he did not have the impatience for journalism.
Ralph and Howard on Idaho 55.
I’ve never viewed this as a handicap or defect – rather I view it as being different. But it does mean that I’ve always been in motion. The local newspaper wrote a story about me a couple of years ago when Howard and I returned from our trip to British Columbia, the Yukon, and southern Alaska with the headline “Ralph Hanson Likes to Go.” Truer words were never written.
I’m home now, recovering from my injury. I mishandled some deep gravel on a dirt road. I’ve got a hairline sacral fracture that keeps me from putting much weight on my right leg. In addition to the mobility difficulties, I have a low level ache associated with it. Being stuck in the house and limited by crutches is pretty hard on me, but it’s even harder on my Dear Wife, who has to pick up all the slack from the things I can’t do.
I’ve long been a fan of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He was another one who was always in motion and found excitement and pleasure from motorcycles. (Also from alcohol and drugs, which are not my style…) He wrote a lot about being in motion (The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and perhaps most notably The Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.) Almost everything he wrote was about discovering limits. But as much as I have always admired Thompson for his writing, I’ve always found my limits at a much lower level than he has. In his legendary article for Cycle World magazine, “Song of the Sausage Creature,” Thompson wrote:
Some people will tell you that slow is good – and it may be, on some days – but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….
But while I’ve never lived the sentiment of the quote, I’ve always loved it. I suppose in my own mind I’ve always substituted “motion” for “speed.” And except when I’ve been executing a pass on a secondary road, I’ve never felt a big need for lots of power and instant speed on tap.
I suspect that’s why in the 20 years I’ve been riding as an adult, more than 10 of them have been spent on two different Kawasaki KLR 650s. This is a single-cylinder motorcycle that has 35 horsepower on a good day. It has many virtues, including that it can go almost anywhere, but speed is not one of them. But the KLR excelled at keeping me in motion.
With this most recent injury, I have cause to ask myself where my limits are. I have seen how close to the edge I’m willing to go. I suspect that riding on two-track mountain dirt roads more than 1,000 miles from home is on the other side of how close I can go. But I know I need to stay in motion, and a motorcycle is a great way to do that.
Howard’s and my route through the Idaho backcountry. Funny that the track ends in what looks like a question mark.
A week ago or so I saw and loved the popular movie Crazy Rich Asians. Not usually much of a rom-com kinda guy, but this film was clever and smart. One of the things I liked best about it was that none of the main characters acted stupid.(Something I really hate about comedies.) Surrounded by far-fetched circumstances? Certainly. But really good story. Highly recommend.
