Category Archives: journalism

Moon Landing is Backdrop to Song

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To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, 1969, I’m releasing the video of a song I wrote that includes that very scene as backdrop. The song is called “Miss America,” a raw tableau.

And how strange it is that the venerable Walter Cronkite, who defined that very moment, should pass right now. It’s as if he and Neil Armstrong will somehow launch into eternity together, in a fitting orbit.

I was in a second-rate hotel in Eureka, California the day the Apollo 11 crew landed. I was with my own merry band of pranksters on a cross country trip in my 1948 Cadillac hearse. As we descended into the hotel lobby, Cronkite’s voice crackled from a TV, saying something like, “What a great county…I just don’t understand these hippies…” The TV was a table model that sat on a broken Sylvania console. Behind these proceedings, a broken American Indian lumbered in the hot California sun. What an ironic scene. Could have been out of an Antonioni film.

The “Miss America” video is as raw as the song, which will be released on a forthcoming album. Here are the lyrics:

MISS AMERICA

Her cherry red lights in Tulane
her white fences in Springfield
her black gloves around your neck
dancing to “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”
her white panties always only
a twirl away on the silver screen
her darker dreams always only
a thrill away on the back streets

Oh, Miss America
Oh, Miss America

Her John Garfield Joan Crawford face
in the clutches of industrial light
her cocktail lie under the nightclub table
her tires kissing always kissing the feremoned pavement
her cowboy stand on the drifting plains
her palaces of corn and artichoke queens
her dumb fuck Brooklyn hallways
stinging of Pampers and malt liquor dreams

We hung our balls from a Cadillac hearse
we were young and full of cream
we screwed a waitress in Barstow
to see her dessert hunger breath
we sang the Lord’s Prayer on Market Street
“Uncle John’s Band” in Birmingham
we blew our guts in a Eureka Hotel
the day they took a giant leap for mankind

Copyright Allen Shadow
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The ‘Thriller’ in Wasilla

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It took Sarah Palin to knock the freshly-crowned King of Pop off the front pages. As it turns out, the Queen of Conservativism is as confounding as the King of Pop.

Actually, Palin should skip the talk show route and go directly into comedy. If she could find a good cigar-toting straight man, she’d give Gracie Allen a run for her money. Two minutes into her press conference on abandoning the Alaskan governorship, my head was spinning cartoon-style. It was the most rambling speech in recent memory. Actually, makes a perfect matched set with Miss South Carolina Teen USA’s inane competition comments from 2007.

For a moment, I thought it was me, until I got weigh-in from a few media mavens. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, looking more made-over than ever, featured former McCain/Palin campaign advisor Mark McKinnon:

Watching Sara Palin is sort of like watching a moose on roller skates. It’s never particularly graceful, but it’s always riveting.

But no one ever top’s Maureen Dowd on weigh-in:

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

She continued:

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.

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Jacko and the Media: Turn, Turn, Turn

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All right, enough already with the Michael Jackson.

Talk about a polarizing event. What a strange disconnect between the idolaters and the realists.

First we have the Jackson fans who have, apparently, come out of the closet. During his controversial life, Michael supplicants kept relatively quiet, sheepish in their devotion. His Facebook page until recently had a timid 80,000 fans. Now, it has topped 6 million and counting.

All this has been enabled by the media; the same media, BTW, that played up Jacko as wacko. Now, the Matt Lauers question Jackson contacts in hushed tones as if the moonwalker were lying in state in the next room. Talk about hypocrisy. Everyone in the biz is on it. Nancy Grace — who claims to carry the torch for crime victims, especially children — is all over this like seagulls on a garbage scow. Even the Gray Lady is falling all over herself, begging for pictures from memorial-goers (after all, the desperate gal can’t even afford texting for her reporters).

The sheer breath of the coverage has forced realists into the closet. So the weird world of MJ has been turned upside down, with reasonable folk afraid to open their mouths about Jackson’s dark side for fear of being labeled a spoiler, a pop heretic or worse.

For now, it’s left to Republicans, like New York Congressman Peter King, whose scathing comments on video surfaced on YouTube Monday. Meanwhile, today WFAN morning sports jock Craig Carton weighed in with a balanced review. He said he was the biggest Michael Jackson fan, but pointed out “the man’s a pedophile.” A Jackson fan called in to take Carton to task. Turns out she was a grade-school teacher, and she didn’t know what to say when Carton asked her if she’d let her young male students spend an overnight in the King’s Neverland bed.

Together, the immense fan-mania and the intense media coverage have created one of the greatest collective denials in human history.

Soon the din will settle down to the point where reasonable voices can emerge. And make no mistake, the now hush-toned media will turn on Jackson yet again in the coming months as they dig for a 60th-day story angle. Can’t you hear the Today Show promos of August asking us to question the ‘man in mirror’ once again: “Coming next: Michael Jackson, the reigning King of Pop, but was he a pedophile?”
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What Would the New Iran Look Like?

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Excitement spills from the font of freedom fighting in Iran. But so do questions.

How different, for example, would a Moussavi regime be, from Ahmadinejad? And, even if it’s much better, would his policies be reformist enough for the people. Would the clerics still be supreme? Would they still control the militias? Would women be given the freedoms they seek? Would the regime be friendly to the West? Would it recognize Israel? Would a second movement, revolution even, be implemented?

Certainly, none of these questions should deter support for the people of Iran. Certainly, Iranians cannot answer these questions right now. What we do know is that freedom is forming in Iran. But we can’t know for sure what a new regime would look like.

That may explain President Obama’s careful approach. At first blush, his cool hand feels disappointing. Isn’t this the moment to step up to the plate, like McCain and many others are saying?

Perhaps Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column provides perspective on this “cool hand”:

…some Americans fear that President Obama is too prone to negotiation, comity and splitting the difference, that he could have been tougher on avaricious banks and vicious Iranian dictators.

While Dowd’s piece takes off, so to speak, on the “fly” incident (president kills fly on camera; comics kill audiences on late night tv), she divulges how half the president’s aides:

…are more caught up in the myth and magic, feeling that Mr. Obama summons the three-point swishes when he needs them; that his popularity is not so fragile; that the president’s unparalleled vision and buzzer-beating will shape fate.

If half of Obama’s aides are 100 percent right, the president may prove to be ahead of many of us on Iran versus behind us.
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Moon Landing in Iran

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The riveting events in Iran could be compared to the moon landing in 1969. Perhaps because they are world changing, keeping the planet on the edge of its seat, so to speak, wondering what will be?

They are very different, yet they are also similar. The moon landing had nothing but upside, launching the imagination of mankind, exciting us with what could be.

Yet the same could be said for the circumstances in Iran. After all, the Iranian people have harnessed the power of technology, brought it to a new level, caused us to feel the world will never be the same again.

In Iran, dictators may fall at the hands of the people. And, in this case, their hands are nothing more than their voices. Perhaps never again will strongmen be able to suppress the voice of a willful people. It sets the mind and heart to reeling.

It’s 1969 all over again. Isn’t it?

Excerpt:
The riveting events in Iran compare to those of the moon landing in 1969: world changing, exhilarating, setting the mind and heart to reeling.
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Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising

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Totally expected whitewash from Khamenei. Yet there is opposition reported in the clerics’ ranks. Lead cleric and former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a Moussavi supporter, may play a pivotal role. Despite Khamenei’s threats, the demonstrations are continuing. This isn’t over by any extent.
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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Bait and Blame in Iran

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Surprise, surprise. Khamenei whitewashes, err, sanctions election of Ahmadinejad, warning opposition leaders that they will be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos,” if they don’t shut down opposition rallies. The blame baiting continues, following accusations from Iranian leaders of U.S. intervention. According to today’s HuffPost:

Iran directly accused the United States of meddling in the deepening crisis over a disputed presidential election and broadened its media clampdown Wednesday to include blogs and news Web sites. But protesters took to the streets in growing defiance of the country’s Islamic rulers.

In contrast, there may be division in the mullah ranks. The Lede blog recounts New York Times U.N. Correspondent Neil MacFarquhar’s report of an underlying power struggle among Iran’s clerics. He notes that lead cleric and former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a Moussavi supporter, may play a pivotal role:

One of the country’s most influential clerics, Mr. Rafsanjani has been notably silent since Mr. Ahmadinejad was declared the winner last week, and there has been speculation that Mr. Rafsanjani is in Qum trying to muster clerical opposition to the country’s leaders. But those reports are difficult to confirm with any authority.

Mr. Rafsanjani leads the 86-member Assembly of Experts, whose duties include endorsing the performance of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Saturday called the election’s outcome “a divine blessing.” In theory, the group has the power to remove him, but that has never been done and any attempt to do so would probably further inflame the situation, analysts said.

The analysts say about a third of the Assembly members are loyal to Mr. Rafsanjani. Of the other members, perhaps a quarter are considered loyal to Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a mentor to Mr. Ahmadinejad and a staunchly conservative figure who has suggested that allowing the public a voice in elections serves only to sully God’s laws. The rest are viewed as independents who could vote either way.

Meanwhile, Middle East expert Fawaz A. Gerges discussed social underpinnings in Iran yesterday morning on CNN, with John Roberts. A Sarah Lawrence professor, Gerges explained that young women and youth in general want more reforms than even the opposition leader Moussavi offers. He is an excellent source for cultural analysis in Iran. Gerges is a frequent CNN guest. Check out this transcript page from the day of the Iranian election. In it, Gerge provides good background on the workings of Iran’s culture today.
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Twitter Nation

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What to make of this freshet of posts raining down on us on Iran? Here in America, we are naturally excited by any peoples taking to the street in the face of stolen elections, repression, state murder. Furthermore, to see technology level brutality and class the way it has flattened major incumbent industries like music and journalism is downright heady.

Now Twitter, for one, an almost so-yesterday communications channel has suddenly been pressed into the service of freedom. Just a few weeks back Ashton Kutcher was turning the mini blog into a joke. Then this week, the U.S. State Department convinced Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance downtime, to keep the Iranian movement of packets and pixels from shutting down. The CIA is likely stepping up efforts to recruit social-media gurus with the urgency of the Yankees seeking a starting pitcher in late July. Name your price.

Maybe YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are the newest class of drones. Maybe the people of the world are the new army. And no one saw this coming. Even the relatively progressive CNN was left clueless in the rush, failing to compete with the reportage from the electronic front over the weekend. The Grey Lady, too, has had scant front-page real estate devoted to these events, handling them instead in The Lede, their news blog (which is itself well done).

As a pr guy, I read the journal Ragan.com daily. For months Twitter has dominated the headlines. Yes, because it is a useful tool, but more because it made for trendy headlines. So, where are they now? Today’s e-mail newsletter contains no Twitter coverage. I suppose they don’t do revolution.

Now for an over view of today’s coverage:

HuffPost’s Nico Pitney is leading the field, tirelessly collecting and analyzing coverage from all media and social-media quarters. Late this afternoon he posted a heated debate between American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka, the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan and a Twitterer named khoobehi. It all started with Pletka’s op-ed piece in the New York Times that minimized the five-day-old Iranian uprising as “little more than a symbolic protest” that was “crushed by the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.” Sullivan uncovered her neocon pedigree and suspect motives, while this khoobehi character managed via tweets to get Pletka to backpedal a tad.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on the social media phenom:

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. It has more than 7,000 followers.

BTW, mousavi1388 doubled his followers since the Times’ citation this morning.

Update: the Twitter maintenance occurred early this evening.
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Twitter to Ahmadinejad: ‘Tear Down this Wall’

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Where’s Don Johnson when you need him? It was Don and New-Wave South Beach deco that brought down “the Wall.” You know, the one in Berlin. Reagan? Nah. That’s a bunch of Republican rubbish.

No kidding. An AP story back in 1989 made a case for how the fall of the Berlin Wall was largely due to yearning among West Berliners for the good life, the goodies, in particular, portrayed in the seminal “Miami Vice,” which breached the Wall via satellite transmissions from the West. It was technology, after all, killed the beast — iron-fisted communism, in the case.

Now, the new Iron Curtain that is being spun around Iran is already threatened by technology. This time in the form of YouTube, Facebook, and, yes, the Almighty Twitter.

Isn’t it fitting on the day that freedom-starved Iranians harnessed Twitter and YouTube to tell its story to the world, the Associated Press’ Stylebook sanctioned the lowercasing of the verb form of Twitter (as in to tweet) and the noun form (as in a tweet). On this momentous day, they should have declared them all caps.
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YouTube: the New Cinema?

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My friend Gary sent me a Washington Post article that ponders the phenomenon of viral video vis a vis YouTube. The story features the disturbing yet funny grimaces of Brandon Hardesty, a teen loner who indulged his inner lunatic before a camcorder in the seclusion of his parents’ basement. Brings to mind De Niro’s brilliant Rupert Pupkin of Scorsese’s undersung “King of Comedy.”

Only Hardesty remained underground, entering the real world solely through the interactive lens of YouTube. There, he and his antics grew geometrically, reaching click levels that were only recently eclipsed by Susan Boyle.

The Post article explores the workings of viral vid, and how even Madison Avenue studies its mysteries. Sure. What eyeball hunter worth his pixels wouldn’t have designs on the formula. And if it’s vexing to Mad Ave., it’s maddening to serious musicians, filmmakers and artists struggling to keep their hard-earned heads above these electronic waters.

But so much for frustration. What of the phenomenon? Why is watching a low fi close-up of a subject — sans camera movement — so fascinating?

Think of it. Personal images like slides, home movies — we would cringe when friends pulled them from a dusty shoebox. How excruciating viewing these dull frames, pretending interest, praying the house would catch fire.

Then came “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Viewers sat laughing at clunky home footage, because it contained a slapstick payoff. Now, enter YouTube, where loopiness gets real personal.

I have a theory. I think we crave intimacy in the footage we watch. In the early and mid-20th century, the camera paused on faces, lingered on close-ups. Picture Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca,” Piper Laurie in “The Hustler,” Janet Leigh in “Touch of Evil.” Then, the camera invited us in – to watch.

By this century, jumpy pacing and action took over, with hyper-managed production that became as boring and predictable as it was slick. Intimacy and authenticity — watching — were history.

Even in the 60s, in titles like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Blowup,” the camera dwelled on scenes, took time, allowed existential aura to breath. It was often a matter of what was not said.

Certainly, there were movements and schools of film that contributed to the resonance of actuality on celluloid: Rossellini and cinema verite, Bergman, Cassavetes. How about Clint Eastwood making our day more recently with entries like “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River.”

Maybe, with YouTube, we’re home again. Sort of.
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