Oscar's Night 2017: Envelope, please!

Watched a good portion of the Oscar's last night and found it faintly amusing. Jimmy Kimmel brought a nice energy to the emcee role. Of course, the Oscar's have a powerful team of comedy writers, and the evening is scripted to the millisecond; but great comedians are capable of delivering unscripted lines in the moment. Kimmel offered some strong impromptu lines during the course of the show. And it all comes down to having a sense of humor. Kimmel is a keeper.

Kimmel handled the most innovative "bit" with great panache. The idea was to bring a busload of Hollywood tourists off of their bus and  surprise them with a visit to the main stage. This bit of agitprop in the midst of Hollywood's creme de la creme could easily have become painful to watch. In fact, the surprised tourists included some pretty humble people, and Jimmy mainly worked with a middle-aged African-American man. Turns out the man was part of a couple. His fiancé was there too. Jimmy handled this well. He commented that the African-American couple seemed more interested in Denzel Washington and other representatives of black Hollywood than the many white movie stars. Kimmel encouraged Denzel to perform a mock marriage ceremony for the them right on the spot. The audience of Hollywood actors played along, trying to reassure and to connect to the tourist visitors-- a few real people, not dressed up in tuxedos and evening gowns.

The evening seemed a bit "low energy" to me. La La Land, a movie with the name Los Angeles repeated in the title at least two times, does not rank with the great cinematic efforts of movie history.  Damien Chazelle, the film's 32 year old director, admitted that he fell in love for the first time during the making of the film. Youth does not provide a great resource of life experience, though Orson Welles made Citizen Kane (1941), at about the same age.

Ironically, the night ended in disarray. The best laid plans sometimes go straight to hell.

Warren Beatty, the notorious Hollywood Don Juan, brought in to add a little of the real macho Hollywood oomph to the final award, ended up center stage to a bunch of chaos. He received the wrong envelope from a PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant! He and co-presenter Faye Dunaway struggled and then announced La La Land for Best Picture. The film's entire cast stepped to the stage. Beatty knew something was wrong. Moonlight, a film made by an African-American producer, was declared the winner just a few moments later. The damage had been done in the poor hand-off of envelopes.

The evening struggle a little to throw off some of the heavy fear hanging in the air of like in these Trump United States.  The low energy reflected a level of exhaustion with Donald Trump era and our era of partisanship. Political statements were minimal. Nobody seemed overly eager to bring on the wrath of Donald. No more Meryl Streep riffs from American actors, nobody wanting to kick that hornet's nest.

Diversity was a major theme of the night. Moonlight getting the award for Best Picture was a step in that direction. The step turned out to be more like a stumble, however, and may have reflected the Academy's reticence to honor a minority film. That kind of stumble occurs when you try to hard. You want to do something new and different, like learning a new dance. So...you're a little awkward, you trip up, you hand over the wrong envelope. But it's a first step-- in the right direction.

McLuhan Predicts Cellphone... and more (1965)

Marshall McLuhan, media guru of the late 1960s and 1970s, predicted the cellphone in 1965! McLuhan explained the significance of digital media prior to the invention of the personal computer and cellphone technology. Our evidence? An article from May 5, 1965 in The New Yorker magazine. The Talk of the Town column at the front of that issue features  a piece entitled “The McLuhan Metaphor .” The article’s publication coincided with the New York World’s Fair. You remember the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, with the famous Unisphere, the globe used in the movie Men in Black…? The globe is still there, not far from LaGuardia Airport and adjacent  to the U.S. Open tennis stadium. The globe is a perfect metaphor for the insights of Marshall McLuhan, the man who coined the phrase “global village” to define the world we now live in. But the real action that May was happening in Brooklyn, the next borough over, where McLuhan delivered a talk at a Presbyterian church.

The New Yorker author describes McLuhan’s lecture at Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and quotes several startling prophecies included in his remarks: “(He) predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information.”

“Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. ‘A kind of computerized ESP,’ he called it, envisioning ‘consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.’”

McLuhan’s accurate prediction of the personal computer and smaller portable devices merits no further explanation but the second insight--consciousness as the new environment-- cuts to the very essence of the present digital era.   Imagine the hearing aid device, anticipated by  McLuhan, as an iPhone or other mobile device. Every individual typing into a Facebook or Twitter application shares private experiences with the wider world, and McLuhan uses the term “corporate group” to indicate the wider world. The posts are exactly as McLuhan described, personal, random thoughts offered in a dreamlike manner. McLuhan perceived the new electronic environment as consciousness— and no better description exists of the modern social network.

The author mentions the plan of industrial giant Westinghouse to place a Time Capsule for future generations at the site of the  World’s Fair. The author suggests Marshall McLuhan might be better utilized as a better Time Capsule than a display of mere physical objects, “cultural and technological mementos of twentieth-century man.” The anonymous writer, in a brilliant feat of understatement,  suggests that McLuhan will teach us more about his era, than any of the lavish futuristic exhibits sponsored by Ford and General Motors. I visited those exhibits and remember the emphasis on automobiles buzzing around the superhighways of the future.  Of course, the ctual superhighway of the future became the Internet.

The 1965 The New Yorker writer notes McLuhan entered the scene as an author, “by three startling books on Western civilization-- The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and most recently Understanding Media, in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture, casts a cynical eye on the ‘classification traditions’ that came in with print and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age.”

A year later, at the Texas-Stanford Seminar on “The Meaning of Commercial Television” in April 1966, McLuhan explained further. His audacious comments must have surprised the audience of media professionals and scholars:

1)   The western world organizes itself visually by connective, uniform and continuous space.

2)   Every new medium changes our whole spatial orientation.

3)   We are in the business of reprogramming the sensory life of North America, changing the entire outlook and experience of the population.     

                                                              

                                                                                    (Donner 90-93)

McLuhan’s predictions for deepened audience engagement following the shift from print media to electronic media cannot be overstated as essential to understanding the electronic environment. The inability of individuals to separate from the social network even has an acronym (FOMO) referring to a “fear of missing out.” McLuhan’s notion of new technology working as extensions of the human body had achieved new levels of traction in the electronic era, for if clothing extended the skin, and the wheel extended the legs’ ability to achieve movement, “the computer achieved not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole nervous system.”  (New Yorker 1965)

High School Memories

Class of 1967

We were the class of 1967—and those last two digits, class of ’67, linger with the graduating senior well into dotage. Even in the nursing home you’re gonna remember your date of high school graduation. Graduation does not guarantte financial gain, but without the high school degree you’re nothing. May as well get it.  is a Even famous college dropouts, genius billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and guys you wouldn’t figure to be college dropouts, like newsman Walter Cronkite—felt compelled to graduate from high school. My pals, Bruce, my Jewish buddy, Whitey, the baseball pitcher, Bone, the skinny guy who became an airline pilot, and Ronnie, the Italian, all made it through high school. We went to colleges in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, and in my case to the intellectual hothouse at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

I was popular but shy around girls. My cheerleader heartthrob,would go off to a SUNY school, short for State University of New York. And for her I pined for her the most. But I even pined for her when we were just a few feet away from eachother, attending classes together at Peninsula High. We passed notes in class. She knew some technique for drawing a goofy cartoon figure, big hands draped over a fence. She and a few of her cheerleader girlfriends referred to themselves as “the Prudes.” That sums it up. No sex with her. So that adventure had to begin, without the cheerleader, when I got off to college.

Senior year brought some magic but mostly served as a device for letting go; letting go of parents, letting go of friends, letting go of the hometown on the south shore of Long Island. American teenagers get four years to absorb a mammoth amount of hormonal and intellectual growth. Peer pressure presses down like solid steel girders resting on a wooden palette placed squarely on your chest. Of course you don’t know that at the time. The horrid question—“What do you plan to do with your life?” kicks in midway through senior year and persists for the next few decades. The simple answer—“Going to college” takes care of the next few years.

Senior year exists in a blur. Certain images of flashing intensity appear, tell their story and move on.

Whitey shows me a diagram of a baseball stadium of the future—“You see Theo, move this section of seats and the field changes from baseball to football. Everybody has a good seat.”

What the hell was Whitey talking about? I thought a stadium was just a stadium. He had ideas for cool baseball uniforms design for major league teams. I didn’t get it, didn’t see the charm. Hell, was I wrong. Yards got built in Baltimore in 1992, a full 25 years after Whitey showed me his diagrams.. His sensed for professional sports explosion. Hell, ESPN didn’t even start until 1979. Should have invested in Whitey. And yes, he is a millionaire now and sports gear is his main portfolio.

Ronnie and I shot pool in his attic almost every night of senior year. My GPA was top ten in the high school class. Ronnie was way below but smarter in realizing that high school achievement has no correlation to future success. Ronnie retired a wealthy man, at age 45, after a career as an immigration lawyer .

Ronnie and I debated a single point during those nights shooting pool in his attic: “Who’s better—the Four Tops or Bob Dylan?”

I chose Bob Dylan, me being the son of liberal, NY Times reading parents. Ronnie went for the soul music, and the Motown sound of the Four Tops. We camped out in the attic at the top of his house. He had a pool table, and a record player, or turntable. You could play 45 rpm singles and 33 1/3 rpm LP, or long playing albums. I recall the Beach Boys playing a prominent role on the playlist. We actually had surfing on Long Island, just across the Great South Bay on the Atlantic Ocean, but we were not surf practitioners. The Beach Boys great line, “two girls for every boy,” expressed in Surf City, qualifies as the most succinct expressions of male fantasy fufillment every brought to vinyl.

We never resolved Who’s better—Four Tops/Temptations or Bob Dylan? The discussion lasted all of senior year and one thing clearly resolved itself—Ronnie shoots a better game of 8-ball pool than yours truly. I still remember Ronnie looking down his stick with only a corner of his left thumb guiding the front end of his stick, his eyes focused calmly on the shot, just before he nailed it and moved around the table in the cramped attic before lining up his next shoot. Boom, he calls “8-ball, corner pocket” and another game is over. I didn’t mind losing to Ronnie, just hated the predictability of it all.

America 2.0: Immigration Conundrum for USA

A little over 14 million immigrants lived in the U.S. in 1980; by 2014, the number had grown to more than 42 million. There is simply no precedent in istory for the sheer number of human being who recently come, legally and illegally, into America. As a percentage of the entire population, immigrants are now very close to the peak of 14.8 percent set in 1890.

by: Andrew Sullivan

New York magazine (Jan 23-Feb 5, 2017)

Andrew Sullivan, the journalist for New York magazine,  emigrated to the United States from Britain. He seems more honest than most writers about the United States' extraordinary ability to absorb the 42 million immigrants, many from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, and he credits our country with the flexible approach to the demographic and racial shift that has occurred. Pressure seems to be building though, and the rise of President Trump is a clear indicator of the tensions that arise when a population experiences so much change. Trump speaks about wanting people who "love our country" and share our values but it seems like a thinly veiled (no pun intended) reference to racial, cultural and ethnic pressures. The racial composition of the USA is changing in fundamental ways. That's a big deal.

Ironically, the immigrants seem to have made the United States a better place to live. Trump talks about "Make America Great Again" but from my vantage point, living in a prosperous city (Austin, Texas), America seems pretty great already. I remember New York City in the 1960s being a dirty, lousy, dangerous place. Remember Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese cinematic depiction of the mean streets of New York? New York now seems revived and safer and I credit the immigrants as a big part of that improved environment. In fact, back in the 1970s most American cities seemed like dreary, abandoned, economically depressed places with the white middle class having moved to the suburbs. American cities have been revived by a combination of hardworking, law-abiding immigrants and a return of the white intelligentsia back to the urban centers.

Everything works pretty well in America. We have always had great infrastructure-- clean drinking water and highly efficient electrical and utility services. Now we have even more luxury. The land is blanketed with an amazing electronic computer network and almost every citizen has a computer (called a cellphone) in their pocket that would have been the envy of the NASA scientists who put a man on the moon. 

I understand that rural America does not feel it is enjoying the economic benefits of the present day. The jobs have left their communities. The wonderful cars we drive are often built by Japanese or Korean companies. Even in the great Apple iPhone is manufactured in China. If you walk past a construction site the crew of workers usually speaks Spanish. The quality of the work is impeccable on new home construction and in the home improvement projects done by Hispanic workers, legal and illegal. Everything in Austin is humming along-- from great restaurants to clean streets.

None of this solves the problem. Many Americans feel treated and under siege by the vast numbers of people who do not look like the original white European settlers and citizens. The Europeans and African-American population brought here forcibly and enslaved dominated the North American continent from 1600-1950-- a 350 year run of dynamic change and prosperity, though clearly not for everyone. Now we seem to be on America 2.0. And the upgrade, just like computer upgrades, seems to have advantages and flaws. 

The question remains-- does President Trump have any insights into how to work out the bugs and problems that plague and drag down America 2.0?

Commander Chaos: Trump moves faster

Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian media guru, explains that a faster system destroys a slower system. The faster medium circles around the slower medium, surrounds it, consumes it and destroys it. Television moves faster than film. The Internet surrounded newspapers and destroyed them. The Internet destroyed bookstores; digital music did away with record stores; bookstores, likewise, fell out of sight. The cellphone moves around the desktop computer and personal computers decrease in number.

Donald Trump learned the television world as an insider with his own show. Cable TV moves faster than the networks. Twitter moves faster than cable TV and Trump keeps several steps ahead of the "mainstream media" through his Twitter account.

I laugh to hear people, including cables news media pundits, exclaim "can't somebody take that cellphone out of Trump's hand." That's like saying Robin Hood should put down his bow and arrow. What-- and pick up a spear and shield. Robin moved lightly and stayed ahead of the king's men.

Trump has a tool, his Twitter account, for getting to people faster than any of the cable outlets allows. He has a knack for moving quickly. He tries a strategy. If it fails, he never admits failure, just steps to the side, tweaks it, spins the story long enough for the story to get muddled and moves to the next thing. The man is a master of movement. His campaign struggled. He changed campaign managers. The next crew, including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway did better and stayed. He found his audience, responded to the narrative they liked and moved ahead like a bull in a china shop.

Trump runs roughshod. His casino business didn't work. He went bankrupt and kept moving. We all wonder if this modus operandi works for running the free world. The story goes that his White House staff is in a state of constant turmoil. To quote a book of a few years back, he doesn't sweat the small stuff.

Presidents usually reassure us. President Franklin Roosevelt had his fireside chats and reassured the nation across the radio waves. That soothed anxieties through a Depression and a World War. How does the Trump method of stirring the hornet's nest compare to the peacefulness of a Barack Obama? A chorus of angry people, from the Tea Party rabble rousers to the Republican congressmen, hurled a constant chant of invectives at Obama. The right wing radio crowd led by Rush Limbaugh gnawed on Obama like he was a kind of satanic, malevolent force and never relented. Steve Bannon falls into that category. Be careful what you wish for--

Now Commander Chaos is in power. Trump sleeps 4 hours a night and wakes each morning stirring for a fight. Remember "speak softly and carry a big stick" came from Teddy Roosevelt, another master of imagery.

Trump insulted a Judge who rejected his Muslim ban. He called the man a "so-called judge." That move upset me. He spit in the face of the American system, the balance of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Trump knows no boundaries-- hence the Commander Chaos moniker.

He continues to move at warp speed and exhausts everybody, even in the media hounds who thrive on the campaign trail. They love the jab and parry of electoral politics. That election season, the horse race of politics, was supposed to slow down with the election of a new president. Not for Trump, he enjoys King Lear's blasted heath. He refuses to slow down. We all suck wind to keep up and long for quieter days.

Melissa McCarthy's parody of Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, on Saturday Night Live, captured the insane, fever pitch of the present situation better than just about any rational analysis presented these last few weeks. She captured the Alice in Wonderland aspect of Mr. Trump's White House with brilliance and Trump-like intensity. Alec Baldwin has done a great job as Trump. SNL 
seems like a voice of sanity in this whirlwind. Is this the new normal? That's the question we all must ask ourselves. Just look at that cellphone in your hand.