Hart Up North

George Carlin has died. Here are Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. And, Why Is There No Blue Food?

Just read this on HuffPo: “According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)”

We drove a U-Haul up out of Texas to Colorado in 1994. It took us three days in March on two-lane blacktop to leave Brownsville behind and clear the Texas state line. On that third day we greeted the cold dawn in Amarillo with bad hotel coffee and set off across the loneliest stretch of the country I had ever seen. The llano estacado. On Hwy 387 we rumbled up through Dalhart, aiming to skirt the southwest corner of the Oklahoma panhandle on the way to Raton, N.M., and, eventually, Colorado Springs.

Dalhart was as close to any place to being the center of the Depression-era Dust Bowl. And it is the kind of place where it’s hard, if you’re from somewhere else and you’re passing through on the way to another someplace else, not ask, “Who are these people, and what are doing here?” I recently picked up Timothy Eagan’s “The Worst Hard Time” and got at least part of the way to answering that question — the “who were they?” part. Eagan documents the lives of folks around Dalhart, Clayton, N.M., Boise City, Okla., and other parts therabouts, as they plowed up the grasses of the ancient high plains to cash in on the wheat boom, and then watched their lives and dreams literally dry up and blow away by the ton.

We have a sense of what this world looked like — and what it’s emigrants looked like when they landed in California and elsewhere, because of the work of the FSA photographers. But Eagan adds depth to those images, recounting the hopefulness the settlers harbored upon arrival as they sought a last shot at owning a farmstead of their own, and the helplessness they felt as they watched dust storms a mile wide abrade life right off the earth, and dump it someplace else. He recounts the way boosters whipped their emotions to a froth and the shame they all felt at having to accept a hand from FDR — and how they came to need that hand more than they would have liked.

The Erlichs, Shaws, Folkers, Dawsons; tough, proud families who plowed the plains, intent on seeing life through. John McCarty, editor, publisher and official cheerleader of the Dalhart Texan. The High Plains Deutch and their communitarian idealism. Bam White, the half-Indian cowboy looking for work on ranches that were selling out to wheat farmers. The Herzstein tailors. The plain-as-day racists who threatened to kill any black who dared to get off the train and look for a bite to eat. The desperate housewives who pasted newspapers to the insides of their tiny dugout homes in an effort to keep out the dust. Eagan draws them all and their lives with clarity and awe, telling their tales of survival.

First non fiction all year. Here’s 2008, in order so far:

• The Merchant Of Venice, Shakespeare
• The Sonnets, Shakespeare
• The Making Of A Sonnet
• The Shape Of Things To Come, Marcus
• Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse
• The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
• A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway
• No Country For Old Men, McCarthy
• All The Pretty Horses, McCarthy
• The Road, McCarthy
• The Commitments, Doyle
• No Man Is An Island, Merton
• Good Poems, Keillor (ed.)
• Dubliners, Joyce
• House Of Sand And Fog, Dubus
• Toughest Indian In The World, Alexie
• On The Road, Kerouac
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe
• L.A. Confidential, Ellroy
• The Black Dahlia, Ellroy
• The Worst Hard Time, Eagan
• Water For Elephants, Gruen

I can’t figure out if this excites me, scares me, bores me or just plain puzzles me, but I’ve never seen anything like Getty Moodstream before. Getty tags it’s vast library of photos and video to display full screen as music plays in the background, all driven by your stated mood preferences. You can use pre-sets. You can use a wheel to merge or emphasisize one mood over another. You can build a mood from scratch. Then just sit back and soak it up, or play it in the background. Want to know more about the photos? The video? The music? It’s just a click away. Maybe this’ll be on your plasma screen at your next way-too-cool-for-me downtown condo party. Maybe it’s on a screen in your doctor’s office. Maybe it’s — dare I say it — the next evil development in elevator music. But it’s clerarly a way for Getty to move its collection out into the public sphere in a new way.

The Big Picture: great photojournalism presented massively, startlingly and simply. No Flash. No SoundSlides. No ProTools. Having spent a bunch of years working with content management systems, I would expect the section is easy to edit and produce: Download the images from your wire or agency subscription, give them a quick crop and tune-up in PhotoShop, move them into the CMS with captions, tags and what have you, and boom, instant 1024×768 eye candy for viewers.

Developer Alan Taylor calls The Big Picture a blog. The pictures are huge but the emphasis is on a quick scan, with the option, if the opening photo captures your interest, of seeing a half-dozen — or many more — pictures in the essay all on a single, scrolling page. The edits are driven by the robustitude and newsworthiness of the images and not tossed together for the sake of hoarding pageviews. (Check out Chaiten Volcano Still Active There is an astounding brace of images showing a lightning storm slashing around the cloud of volcanic ash.) You can comment on the posts. You can subscribe to the RSS feed.

What? No pageviews? No metrics to attract banner ads? Nope. There’s one banner over the top of the main navigaton bar, and that’s it. Taylor, a veteran of the Brian Storm days at msnbc.com, writes on his own blog, “When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views — those times are the times I’m glad I was able to get this project off the ground.”

As a former photojournalist, and as an editor who believes in using the Web to present great photojournalism to people who might otherwise ignore it, I say bravo. But, as someone also concerned with making a living, I ask, what’s the value proposition? Like a lot of properties, our shop is measures engagement, or “time on site.” Without direct knowledge of Boston.com’s metrics, I wager The Big Picture aims to capture engagement more than UVs — along with building brand loyalty for a user segment that says, “dude, that’s the site with the awesome photos.”

Barack Obama claimed victory tonight in St. Paul in the race for the Democratic nomination, and after spending the entire afternoon interviewing and photographing his supporters in a line that snaked at least a mile around downtown St. Paul, I stood on the floor of the filled-to-the-rafters Excel Energy Center arena off deadline and watched him make history. It was hard not to be moved by the sound of multicultural Minnesota greeting him with a tornado-like roar, and his yes-it-lived-up-to-all-the-hype oratory. The man knows how to deliver a speech. (Slideshow here.)

 
I met Carleton College students who insisted they weren’t skipping class; a posse of Scandanavian moms from the Twin Cities suburbs; a bunch of guys from Ethiopia; a t-shirt vendor who got up at 4 a.m. in Gary, Ind., to drive all the way here to earn a buck. I heard shouts of “Si! Se Puede,” “We love you!” and African dialects I couldn’t understand. Folks in the stands did the wave. Muslim women in headscarves danced along to Stevie Wonder on the PA. And when Obama took the stage, the noise they made together was deafening.

Prints from Alec Soth’s career-launching series “Sleeping by the Mississippi” have been acquired by the Minnesota Institute of Arts, and a collection of 26 of the prints went on display Saturday. It’s hard not to be impressed by the presentation of the Magnum photographer’s vision, in a space that does justice to the large-scale chromogenic prints and their simple white frames. (The collection includes a photograph of William Eggleston, a man Soth has identified as an early influence. In contrast to the great local — and justifiable — press Soth receives, Eggleston is captured in his Memphis music room in a moment of utter indifference to the photographer and his 8×10 view camera. I found the juxtaposition amusing.)

Part documentary, part travelogue, this is an essay on dreamers bound together by Old Man River, from the frozen north to swampy south; photographs informed by an idea rather than a reaction to an event. Bearded “Charles,” in his overalls, holding toy airplanes. “Peter’s Houseboat” in Winona, and its frozen laundry line. “Patrick, Palm Sunday,” in the suit that doesn’t fit, holding the Peacock feather. The four vaguely menacing guys, one of them with a chainsaw, in “Fort Jefferson Memorial Cross.” And “The Reverend Cecil and Felicia,” he in church robes, she in a sort of African headdress; had Soth not captured them proselytizing beside their old car in a nondescript parking lot, armed with a microphone and speaker, and put them instead in a studio, they might have looked downright regal. But he didn’t. And they don’t. And we know more about them as a result.

The scale renders Soth’s work so large that one feels as though it is possible to step inside the images and walk around. “The Farm, Angola State Prison” on the page isn’t enough to do justice to the play of humanity against the void. Stand beside it and it is overwhelming in its loneliness; the prisoners and their blue shirts just specks in a vast, hopeless emptiness. “Bonnie, With A Photograph Of An Angel,” in a book, reminded me of Robert Frank’s work. Unsentimental. Almost judgmental. She’s a modest woman of a certain age in a modest home on a modest couch, too-perfect hair, no makeup, no jewelry, and she looks almost cartoonish on a printed page. Life size? All softens. Her eyes look innocent and filled with hope and pride. And fun. Mischievous even. 

“You are learning about the space between you and the world,” Soth says in a 2005 interview describing his process and method. As he works his way through setting up the massive camera, disappearing under the cloth over his head to fidget with the focus on the ground glass, he says that as he sets up a dynamic with his subjects that is both intimate and remote, in which the camera becomes the medium through which photographer and subject meet. They know he’s there, but because they can’t see him they drop their self consciousness. He’s in the dark, staring at their image on the ground glass with an intensity that borders on voyeurism. For him, the final image “isn’t the detail or sharpness or depth of field or any of that that is really so profound. It’s really the viewing experience on the ground glass.” The final print is “a picture of the space between us.”

Dick Polan at Philly.com posts the results of a Democratic focus group conducted by Peter Hart:

Here’s Dorita, opining about Obama: ”I’m a little concerned. I don’t know enough about his Muslim background and their beliefs and how he views everything. I’m a little concerned. I need to check his background.”

You do that, Dorita.

Here’s Josh on Obama: “He’s representing a minority in more than one case. He is African American and he is Muslim. And in light of that…it does feel like we’re being judged or pounded down on because we want to carry a gun or we want to wear the American flag pin.”

Here’s Melinda, clearly the GOP’s dream voter: “I just really feel like he’s…not a people pleaser as in the Americans, but the other people who don’t necessarily need to be pleased, the other, the enemies if you will, I don’t know. I’m just not real positive on that.”

Hart reports that whenever somebody volunteered that Obama is a Muslim (which he isn’t), nobody in the room protested or sought to correct the inaccuracy. Hart writes: “When asked to raise their hands if they think that Obama is a Muslim, seven of the 12 do, including two voters who currently support him over McCain. One person mentions that she has heard something about him and the Pledge of Allegiance” - this would be the lie that he doesn’t place his hand over his heart while reciting it - “and another believes that he was sworn in to the Senate with his hand on the Koran,” whereas, in factual-reality world, this Christian was sworn in on a Bible.

Hart continues: “The importance is not that they are misinformed, but that there is such a gross lack of awareness about a presidential candidate who has written so fully and completely on his background and his childhood.” But Hart is being too kind. These people — and millions like them, by his estimate — are willfully ignorant because they won’t take five minutes to educate themselves on the basics. 

Too busy watching American Idol.

Here is an adult American, married with children, speaking to The Associated Press about American Idol winner David Cook:

Linda Sharp, smitten as a schoolgirl, voted 473 times for Cook after Tuesday’s final performance show. The 42-year-old married mom used her land-line and cell phone — as well as her three daughters’ cell phones — to show support for the singer.

“The biggest thing: He’s legal, and that goes a long way,” said Sharp, who’s from Austin, Texas. “He’s 25. That’s old enough that we can openly ogle him, and we can drool over him, and it doesn’t make us feel like we could be his mother.”

Wow. Total equality there. Can we assume her hubby openly ogles the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and they exchange notes over Cherios in the morning?