the riaa continues to be an ass
April 26, 2004
grim amusements / April 26, 2004 / the riaa continues to be an ass
In which the depths of RIAA assholery are discussed, regarding proposed changes to iTunes and Napster.
Posted by iain at 01:10 PM
we are here, we are here, we are here!tv.
April 14, 2004
The segmentation and segregation of television content continues apace. Sort of.
Despite all the ballyhoo in Washington about cleaning up the airwaves of sexually themed programming, it seems inevitable that a gay cable TV channel will be making its debut. The only question is when.
The answer appears to be, sooner than we may think.
Yesterday, here! TV, currently a pay-per-view provider of gay-themed content to satellite subscribers, said it plans to launch a channel on Oct. 1 offering gay-themed programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including original movies and series. The service will still be pay per view and offered to satellite customers via either a monthly subscription or four-hour programming blocks. But with primetime flooded with gay-themed TV shows ... it would seem the next logical step would be a gay-themed network offered to cable subscribers as a premium channel. Indeed, Viacom, which two years ago played with the idea of a gay launch, is broaching that idea again, with MTV Networks chairman and chief executive Tom Freston currently working on the plan. Here! TV may launch sooner, but Viacom would undoubtedly have bigger distribution and more money behind it.
One wonders why Viacom doesn't just buy here!tv, or at least make a major investment in it, if they're so hot to trot for the market segment. Either that, or buy PrideVision of Canada, although here!tv would seem to make more sense. here!tv is already doing a lot of preproduction on series, they have access to and licenses with all sorts of content providers in ways that will probably lock Viacom out of a great many things. (For that matter, PrideVision Canada may be locked out as well -- here!tv's agreement with TLA Video, especially, will be problematic for both, as TLA Releasing has recently emerged as a producing and distribution powerhouse in this particular niche.) What would make the most corporate sense would be for Viacom to buy both here!tv and PrideVision, unify them into one big wazoo gay television lump, and then go forward with all the power of an existing subscriber base and Viacom's commercial might (recently witness as they bludgeoned DISH satellite into more or less accepting their terms to keep stations they needed and stations they didn't want).
Corporate positioning aside, you still have to wonder if this is a good idea. If the channel had existed a few years earlier -- let's just call it The Big Gay Channel or TBGC -- that means that "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and the other shows cited would likely never have made it to networks or basic cable, because the nets could have just shunted them off the TBGC. The same sort of thing has happened with minority projects on television generally; UPN has been seen, rightly or wrongly, as more friendly to black-oriented projects, resulting in their Monday night black comedy block. Outside of UPN, shows with primarily black casts can be seen in precisely two places that I'm aware of: one new show coming on ABC's TGIF lineup, "The Big House", and "Soul Food" on Showtime, which is coming to an end after this season. BET does surprisingly little dramatic or comedic development. From the heady heydays of The Cosby Show and The Jeffersons, which were generally popular with both black and white audiences, we've created shows which are now primarily seen only by black audiences. You can argue that the fractioning of the audience has been good in that it allows blacks to see those shows of interest in that way, but it also allows nonblacks to more easily avoid them. Some places still don't get UPN; lots of people don't buy Showtime access and wouldn't go near BET if you paid them. Say what you like about the quality and content, but The Cosby Show and the few other network offerings featuring minorites of its period were somewhat harder to avoid -- and judging by the ratings, not many people wanted to avoid them. As far as Hispanics go, historically, the situation has been far worse -- there really wasn't much in comedy or drama in the past focusing on Hispanics. Showtime broadcast "Resurrection Boulevard" for two or three seasons, but that was very recent -- Resurrection Boulevard went off the air only last season. Currently, there's PBS' American Family (which seems to be going into some deep waters this season, dealing with the war being assiduously avoided by most other shows) and ... and ... well.
Although it's far easier to avoid the gay themed content on television these days -- there are many more alternatives available in any given timeslot -- they're located in places that mean that if they do somehow catch people's attention, if they do somehow get that "buzz" going, they're more likely actually to be seen. You can argue about the value of the series, you can argue about the people and characters in them, but there is a certain familiarity value to simply having them present, surrounded by other nongay series that people will watch as well.
There are other concerns about TBGC or some equivalent thereof, independent of where on the dial the content is located. To date, most productions have depicted gays primarily, if not purely, as well-off white males. Even if they may be the lion's share, as determined by survey responses (and those surveys likely have some serious methodological issues -- it's more probable that they're the people comfortable actually responding to the surveys), well-off white males aren't the be-all and end-all of gays. There are lesbians, for one thing. (No, really, I'm assured they're out there.) Showtime has produced, to date, about the only series dealing with lesbians at all, "The L Word" (that said, the season finale was one of the most wretchedly bad things I've seen in ages -- but that's another issue), as well as the periodically invisible lesbian couple in "Queer as Folk", but you would be hard pressed to find much else. Gays and lesbians of color have, as far as I'm aware, been limited to Jai from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and Jennifer Beals' Bette on "The L Word", and, again, little else. There's a very real chance that TBGC will wind up being even more focused on well-off white gay males, to the near-exclusion of everyone else.
Well. In any event, it will be interesting to see which of the three options winds up being the most broadly viewed in the US. here!tv has the advantage of content licenses and a modest existing subscriber base, PrideVision has the advantage of a very modest existing subscriber base, and Viacom has the advantage of being The Big Bad Boy on the Block with lots and lots and lots of money.
Never bet against the Big Bad Boy.
Posted by iain at 01:42 PM
radical alienation
April 12, 2004
...[McGruder] told the guests that he'd called Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where McGruder was given the Chairman's Award; Rice requested that he write her into his strip.) [...] Last October, McGruder granted Condoleezza Rice’s wish and put her in the strip. In the Monday installment of a weeklong series, Caesar announced that he had a “simple and easy plan to save the world.” On Tuesday, he elaborated: “Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn’t be so hell-bent to destroy it.” Huey agreed. “Condoleezza’s just lonely and bitter,” he said. And so on. The boys began composing personal ads: “Female Darth Vader type seeks loving mate to torture”; “High-ranking government employee with sturdy build seeks single black man for intimate relationship. Must enjoy football, Chopin, and carpet bombing.” Huey even anticipated his critics—this is a favorite device of McGruder’s—by observing, “What I really like about this idea is that it isn’t the least bit sexist or chauvinistic.”
Some readers accused McGruder of effectively calling Rice a lesbian (both McGruder and Greg Melvin, his editor, insist that this never crossed their minds), while others complained that the joke was indeed unacceptably sexist and chauvinistic. The Washington Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., thought so, and he withheld the entire week’s worth of “Boondocks”—the longest such suspension in the paper’s history. (The Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, later sided with McGruder, writing that he “found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire.”)
McGruder, true to form, was unchastened. A month later, Huey and Caesar were still trying to find Rice a date, and in the course of their continued plotting they’d managed to call Ann Coulter a man and to suggest that Larry Elder is gay.
I think this would effectively land in the "be careful what you wish for" category, yes.
I have to admit, it does baffle me that McGruder is still actively trying to get a Boondocks show and/or movie produced. As he himself notes, he pretty much makes a cottage industry out of roasting the hell out of almost every black celebrity in Hollywood, including the few who might ever want to be associated with him. There are likely a lot of people who probably won't touch him until and unless his concepts prove out; association with him may well be the kiss of death to getting your own projects produced, given how assiduously he's working at alientating people in Hollywood, and how well that project seems to be going.
It will be interesting to see how much longer The Boondocks continues. If he could get the sort of deal that Berkeley Breathed had with Outland -- writing one Sunday strip a week -- it would probably be better for both him and for the strip itself. All that said, I have to admit, I'm vaguely looking forward to "Birth of a Nation" graphic novel that he's got upcoming. The concept of "Blackland" alone will have people enraged.
The article does have one or two factual errors here and there.
It’s been twenty years since “Fat Albert,” the last black animated series on a major network, went off the air, so the prospect of “The Boondocks” going to prime time is significant.
This, depending on what exactly they mean, is simply factually wrong. Poor Eddie Murphy. (Now there's a line you never think you're going to say, is it?) He voiced a character in a stop-action animated series called The PJs (as well as being executive producer on the show) which started on that self-same Fox network, moved over to the WB after Fox cancelled it, and then vanished into obscurity. Funny or not (and mostly, it wasn't), it certainly deserves to be counted. Unlike the original Fat Albert series, it started out and stayed in prime time during its entire run; "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" started out and stayed a Saturday morning series throughout.
All that said, what they apparently plan to do to The Boondocks to bring it to television sounds simply vile:
If there are two models guiding the show’s development, they are probably “The Simpsons,” the beacon of virtually all televised satire and animation, and, paradoxically, “All in the Family,” the seventies sitcom starring Carroll O’Connor as the bigoted Everyman Archie Bunker. McGruder has frequently been told by studio executives that they’re looking to re-create “All in the Family”—to be just controversial enough to draw attention, that is, without getting kicked off the air, by creating another Archie Bunker type, a “character who just spouts off ignorance.” He finds this line of reasoning suspicious. “As I understand it, the creators and the networks originally thought, O.K., well, this show’s going to be great, ’cause everybody’s going to get the joke that Archie’s a lovable idiot, and people are going to look at it as a satire of racism,” he said. “They found out that the reason people loved the show is because they agreed with Archie Bunker.”
The strategy for the “The Boondocks” revolves, in part, around confronting this fact head on and—what else?—undermining it. Among the new characters that McGruder and Hudlin plan to introduce is a neighborhood handyman called Uncle Ruckus—“just the worst, most bitter, angriest motherfucker you could imagine,” as McGruder sees him—who will serve as the town bus driver, the school janitor, the local gardener, the babysitter, the massage therapist. “Everywhere you look, he’s there,” McGruder said, almost giddily. “This guy just loves all the little white children in the neighborhood”—Uncle Ruckus is black—“and he’s basically straight out of the eighteenth century. I mean, he is a slave.” Uncle Ruckus brings a new, fully realized archetype to the varieties of haters in McGruder’s universe; he is “the world’s most self-hating black man.”
Who on earth would be the audience for a show with a major character like that? Why would any black people anywhere want to watch "the world’s most self-hating black man” do anything? Given that he's likely to be the object of unceasing mockery, what nonblack people would want to watch, even if they agreed with the character's views? Given that the character's contact is apparently mostly with children, McGruder is going to have to be very careful about whatever message he wants to send with this character. Moreover, in order to make him work -- in order to pull the audience from the comic strip along -- they'll need to introduce him into the strip itself. That will likely alienate the readers as well. It just seems a terribly wrong-headed way to take the series.
The article, overall, makes it sound like McGruder is burning out very badly on The Boondocks, that the seven-strips-a-week demands, plus all the other things he's trying to do are simply dragging him down.
Posted by iain at 01:45 PM
fine, just fine
April 8, 2004
Howard Stern, America's most popular shock jock, is about to be the cause of a large indecency fine -- possibly as much as $495,000 -- against radio-station giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. (CCU) as the federal government attempts an election-year cleanup of the nation's airwaves, Thursday's Wall Street Journal reported.
Mr. Stern had in recent years largely avoided the wrath of regulators. This fine, however, marks his second in the past month (the earlier one was for $27, 000). It is sure to escalate a battle between the Federal Communications Commission and Mr. Stern, who is using his loyal flock of listeners to drag everyone from Oprah Winfrey to President Bush into the national debate over indecency.
The FCC is expected to levy the fine for a Stern show Clear Channel aired last year, which was the target of a listener's complaint, say people familiar with the matter. Details of the fine were still being finalized late yesterday and could change, but the statute of limitations for responding to the listener's complaint expires today.
Wait ... they're going to fine that much money over ONE complaint?
Good grief. When did the FCC become such delicate passion flowers? For that matter, when did we become such delicate passion flowers? What on earth could Stern possibly have said that would warrant such a grotesque overreaction? I mean, I'm no fan of Clear Channel as such, but this is just silly.
One wonders if Our Glorious Leader's corporate masters -- er, I mean, if the ever-enthusiastic donors to his campaign might lean over to him and say, "Yo, George, you might want to back off on this a little. You're hitting us in the pocketbook, guy, which means you're hitting YOUR pocketbook. Really, maybe you could have that lapdog you call Secretary of State go talk to his son and make everyone ease off a little."
Locally, the FCC also affirmed the fines against WKQX Chicago (PDF, Adobe Acrobat required), for indecent comments on the Mancow Morning Show. (Mancow is also suing the person who lodged that complaint -- and quite a few others -- for harrassment.)
(Previously: radio ga-ga.
Posted by iain at 03:34 PM
he's victoria's secret?
April 6, 2004
CNN.com - Latest Victoria's Secret model: Bob Dylan - Apr 6, 2004
I think it is safe to say that many people could now be pondering the ageless question: What in heavens name was Bob Dylan THINKING?
More importantly, what was the ad company for Victoria's Secret thinking? On the one hand, yes, lots of buzz all over the place for getting Bob Dylan to do his first commercial endorsement ever. LOTS of buzz. (Granted, mostly along the lines of, "What the HELL?" But still, buzz is all.) On the other hand ... well.
Say you're, like, a heterosexual-type kind of guy. (And let us be quite clear: Victoria's Secret television ads and catalog are aimed at your basic heterosexual-type guy. Any benefit received by women of any sexual persuasions whatsoever is purely incidental. Although I do understand from a couple women that some Victoria's Secret undergarments are actually quite comfortable. But I digress.) Victoria's Secret ads catch your eye because, hey! the eye candy! Scantily clad supermodels! Woo-hoo! And this commercial at first would seem to be right along those lines ... and then you see Bob Dylan's mug.
That might just kind of throw you a bit, mightn't it?
Plus, there's only the one supermodel! What kind of Victoria's Secret ad is that? Multitudes of supermodels, that's what it's supposed to be! And, given that it's only a 30 second ad, there's really rather a surprising amount of Bob Dylan and a surprising lack of scantily-clad supermodel.
This really is one of those ads that makes you scratch your head and wonder exactly who it's selling to and what it's supposed to be selling.
The Ad is for the moment online at AdAge's news page. It's actually an amazingly quiet and somewhat tasteful ad, given Victoria's Secret's propensity for pretty much just sticking the boobies in the camera and yelling, "Buy our undies, and your woman can have boobies like these!" (... OK, their normal ads are not quite that bad, but that's more or less the feel they're aiming for.)
Just remember: it's supposed to be all about the pretty pretty girls, the boobies, and the undies (in just about that order). It's not supposed to be about the slightly creepy looking dirty old man in the overcoat, wandering through looking possessively at the pretty pretty girl showing her boobies in the pretty pretty undies. THAT is just plain wrong.
Posted by iain at 12:30 PM
hellboy (a quick take review)
April 3, 2004
Went to see Hellboy tonight. Highly recommended. If you're a fan of the comic, it works, and if you've never read it before, you won't be lost, because they start at the beginning. In fact, they give him a somewhat different history altogether, smushing together "Seed of Destruction", "Wake the Devil", and a teensy bit of "The Corpse" and coming up with some new backstory as well. That sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does.
There are a couple mild quibbles. Trying to sell Ron Perlman as a 20-year-old anything, demon or human, is simply not going to fly, even when he's covered in red makeup. (Although I will say that for someone who's 54, he's in phenomenal shape.) And the fact that they made Rasputin actually kind of sexy was somewhat disconcerting. Plus there's the whole thing with the mallet, which should have produced something more in the way of injury. (You'll know it when you see it.)
Ebert mostly gets it right, except for the part where he misses (1) a minor plot point that they are, in fact, very careful to explain in the first ten minutes of the movie, and (2) the entire plot, apparently. (He complains about a shift in the action which happens to occur when the characters are unconscious, which would allow villains to do what they will, one would think; you can also only make that particular complaint if you've missed a few not-terribly-subtle statements along the way, including one about how the abilities of one of the characters work to produce said unconsciousness.
Nonetheless, Ebert is right in that it's loads of fun, and everyone should go see it so that del Toro and Mignola can make another one.
I do warn you, however: if you're even vaguely considering getting a cat, this will be a difficult movie to watch. Cats and utterly, desperately adorable kittens everywhere. (I'm pretty sure they must have just rolled Ron Perlman in cod liver oil at some point, given the way the cats looooooooove him. Either that, or he's violently allergic.) And it is quite violent ... although astonishingly bloodless about its violence; there's one quite deliberately bloody scene, and that's about it.
(UPDATE, April 5: Hellboy wins its opening week box office with $23 million. Since it only cost $35-$50 million to make (depending on whose figures you read, and that low cost is a true shocker), even with the normal 50% or so dropoffs in the second and third week, it should make back production costs, at least. Unfortunately, unless it somehow sustains itself around $20 million per week for a while, it doesn't look to head over $100 million, which would likely ensure a second movie. Ah well. A good first one is really more than you can expect, these days, and it was that. )
Posted by iain at 04:21 PM
straight gaydar
April 2, 2004
Courier-Journal.com: Features: Guess who's gay (Louisville Courier Journal, March 12, 2004)
....I would be the worst possible candidate for the new Fox reality show and ultimate gaydar test, "Playing It Straight," which premieres at 8 tonight. In this deceptive dating game, Appleton, Wis., college girl Jackie will be pitted against 14 potential paramours, some of whom are secretly gay, all of whom are set on seducing her. If Jackie chooses a straight contestant, both she and her dream man split a million dollars. If she selects a gay player, he pockets the full fortune.
The same concept was used last year on Bravo's "Boy Meets Boy," but in that case, it was a gay man navigating his way through a group of gay and secretly straight guys...
VH1 Outing 'Gaydar' Pilot (Reuters, April 2, 2004): NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - VH1 has ordered a pilot for "Gaydar," a reality project in which celebrity guests try and guess whether contestants are homosexual.
Filming on the half-hour pilot is under way in Los Angeles, with Brian Dunkleman ("American Idol") serving as host.
The pilot features a three-person panel comprising celebrity guests and a permanent cast member encountering three contestants who keep their sexual orientation a secret. The panelists try to determine whether contestants are straight by playing a series of games with them intended to yield clues. The prize for each correct guess is a donation to a selected charity.
Comedian Scott Kennedy has been tapped as one of the panelists.
Should "Gaydar" get picked up, it also could conceivably be a programing asset that would fit in the lineup at Outlet, the gay-themed cable channel in development at VH1 parent company Viacom.
... Oh, I give up. I just give up.
For some desperately inexplicable reason, the world is into watching people figure out who is straight and who is gay, ideally with more than a soupcon of abject public humiliation attached. For some desperately inexplicable reason, television seems to suddenly be more than willing to provide an outlet for that desire to see public humiliation and (ideally) thoroughly inaccurate gaydar combined.
I do understand that, buried very very very very very VERY deeply under the entertainment and humiliation factors, there is technically a point being made: that for the most part, you're not going to be able to tell who is gay and who is straight. I get that, really, I do. I just don't quite understand why it has to be made into game shows and reality shows.
Posted by iain at 12:13 PM
switchblade honey (a quick take review)
April 1, 2004
If you're in the mood for some space opera, you could do much worse than reading Warren Ellis' Switchblade Honey graphical novel (also known as a longer form comic book). Switchblade Honey isn't typical Warren Ellis -- there's relatively little railing against the government in general (and our government in particular) which you see in his other titles. It's his response to Star Trek Voyager, which he utterly hated--pretty predictable, that, although I'd love to know what he thought of the last seasons of Deep Space Nine. He also had issues with Roddenberry's "perfect people in space" concept, so he wanted to make it a little grittier. On the other hand, it's space opera, so it's very fluffy, especially for Ellis.
Really, it reads like the first episode or two of what would be a very cool BBC/ITV television show. (Not an American show; the lead characters are very British.)
For the most part, it's well drawn and illustrated and the black-and-white approach fits the story, somehow. It would be nice if the artwork on the last two pages were clearer; although you can tell, in the grandest sense, who wins, you have absolutely no idea how they win. Seriously, no clue here. It's a great book up to that point, but I really am not quite sure what happens just before the end.
(Purely a side note: I'm actually looking forward to seeing what the WB does with Ellis' Global Frequency, which is supposed to be a series next season. He loved the first script, and he said that although it was different, they came up with a twist that he wished he'd thought of, so that's a good sign. Given people's peculiar television viewing habits, and the way networks will schedule their strongest prospects against another network's strongest shows, Global Frequency will probably last all of two episodes. Oh, well.)
Posted by iain at 05:07 PM
the horrors of nudity!
An Adelaide-based art magazine, Artlink is facing a ban in the United States over its cover. The publishers have been told by the American distributors that their March issue, Adelaide And Beyond, will not be sold in Barnes and Noble stores unless it is in opaque bags because the cover depicts a "completely nude male".Artlink manager Tory Shepherd says she is disappointed because it is actually a sculpture by Adelaide artist Christian Burford.
"It's a fibreglass scultpure of a young man. It's completely not sexual in any way," she said. "It's not salacious or pornographic, it's art. It's actually got the same marble sheen on it as the statue of David, so we're considering on our next issue of putting a photo of Michaelangelo's David on the front."
You know ... I'm by way of thinking that perhaps -- just perhaps -- some people in this country need to get a grip.
Below is a very low resolution image from the Artlink site itself of the terribly controversial cover.
Now, granted, low resolution, so in this image we can't see all the salacious detail of the sculpture's twig and berries, as it were. But given that position and that setting ... just how salacious could it possibly be?
Moreover, think about how most magazines are placed in racks in your average Barnes and Noble. At least two thirds of the cover -- the bottom two thirds, containing most of the sculpture of the young man -- will be hidden by whatever is in the rack below it. If retailers were all that concerned about it, they could simply make certain that it was covered by issues on the lower shelf.
The text description of the cover at Artlink does make you wonder if perhaps there might not have been some attempt to deceive, however, or some unintentional mistakes might have come from it. After all, given what some artists do with modern sculpture, it wouldn't be terribly surprising if some people had initially thought it might be an image of a whizzing statue. (Although that said, those Italian whizzing cherub fountains don't seem to bother anyone.) That paragraph also indicates that they were expecting some resistance -- although, interestingly, it does imply that they were expecting the resistance to come from Australians primarily.
Even so, once they saw the cover, that fear should have left. There's just nothing offensive in that cover to your average thinking human being. So all you're left with is a terribly stupid overreaction on the part of the chain.
Well, it's likely to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
(Yes, I know. Two updates to this part in the same week. Don't get used to it.)
Posted by iain at 11:17 AM