I just got a new Treo 650. The keys are very tiny but I think that I'm really going to like it. I have my GMail, MSN IM, and AIM set up. The last step is to being able to blog. My thumbs are tired so let's see if this works.
I don't imagine it's every day that a movie about war is described by Hollywood's Varietyas "as powerful as anything apt to be shown on television this or any other year" and then by Rupurt Mudoch's Weekly Standard as "one of the most difficult hours of television you'll ever sit through--and also the most compelling." Baghdad ER premieres tonight at 8pm. If you have HBO, please do watch. I haven't seen it, but a good smart friend who has said that he really believes that every American should see this film.
After I told some net-savvy friends about something I happened to overhear in Prospect Park about two weeks back, they told me that it was funny enough for Overheard in New York. Turns out, it was:
Mom taking photos of son: Smile, sweetie. [click click] Mom: Smile from within, honey. [click click] Mom: Smiling from within means smile like you're happy on the inside. [click click] Mom: Okay, not that much.
--Prospect Park
One of those times that makes me realize what a strange, wondrous world the Internets have brought us.
The Personal Democracy Forum conference here in New York City on Monday was, like most conferences, an onslaught of information, people old and people new. I find such things a bit overwhelming, but I still enjoyed it. I moderated a panel on the rising power of local political blogs with Juan Melli of Blue Jersey, Gur Tsabar of Room 8, Aldon Hynes of the Lamont campaign, Scott Sala of Urban Elephants, and Liza Sabater of Daily Gotham. I think it went fairly well -- and served to spark some interest in localized political blogging (I called it political blogging 2.0 -- clever no?) -- though who am I to judge how pretty my prom dress was? (I've had a lot of coffee this morning. Please bear with me.)
In the spirit of wrap-up, I offer some quick thoughts and notes on the day's two keynote speakers -- New York gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards.
First, Spitzer. On first impression, he's rather harsh in person, all angles. It's his face, but also his demeanor. (You can take the guy out of the prosecutor's office...) He ran through his prepared remarks like they were on fire. It was a lecture, really, but at least it was on the fascinating-to-me topic of technology policy.
Some of the main points: he wants to expand rural and urban broadband access, build a communications networks for first responders, tear down barriers to municipal wireless, expand the Universal Service Fund (the extra fee on our phone bills to make sure every house, school, and hospital in America can get a phone dial tone) to cover broadband, direct the New York State's Office of Technology should map out all its broadband infrastructure assets, and start figuring out how it can leverage telephone poles and mailboxes (though those are federal, Spitzer admitted) to extend high-speed access.
He hit all the right points, but he left me a bit cold at the end with the roteness with which he hit 'em. His closing line -- "The problem is not a lack of resources, the problem is a lack of imagination and a lack of leadership" -- helped, but not all that much.
But then he sat down for a conversation with Mark Halperin, of ABC's the Note. Perhaps it was simply in contrast to Halperin's, for lack of a better way to put it, utter jerkiness, but the Spitz was much better in this part of the session. (Since I ended up liking him, he is now known to me as "the Spitz.") Halperin (no nickname for you!) began by stipulating to all the political bloggers in the room, "you're all smarter than me," let's just get that out of the way.
Mr. Mark Halperin later tried to trip up the Spitz with some fancy journalistic jujitsu, asking him how much it costs to download a song from iTunes. "Uh, I think $.99," said Spitz. The crowd cheered for several seconds. Other examples of Halperin's wit and wisdom:
"What worked for Dean (in terms of his use of tech)? I don't recall him winning the Democratic nomination."
"Now, what we're talking about is kids going online to read Chaucer and listen to Beethoven..." (Spitzer's response? "Mine do. Yours don't?")
Sigh. Halperin is such a hater, he made that perfectly clear.
In response to an audience question, Spitzer said that, of course, we should move very quickly to a time where we all vote via the Internet. But until we get the bugs worked out, we should be figuring out how to vote by mail, like they do in Oregon. Spitzer doesn't see much of a difference between bloggers and journalists -- it's a difference of medium, is all. He mentioned Wikipedia as a sort of model for a think tank that NY could use to solve the state's problems.
After the conversation with Halperin, I decided that while the Spitz may not be the cuddliest guy in the room, he's incredibly smart in a clever sort of way (which is not a bad way to be smart in politics, though a spot of wisdom would be nice too.) A thoroughly competent progressive Democrat, which goes a long way towards winning my vote. You could hand him New York State, go on a long vacation, and assume that it'd still be standing when you got back.
On to Elizabeth Edwards. She's geeky, in a lovely sort of way. She's built a number of websites herself, in particular this one for a computer learning center in NC dedicated to her son, Wade. Moderator Andrew Rasiej asked her what's on her blog reading list. "If I can only go to one," she said, "I go to Talking Points (Memo)." Mostly, though, she focuses on North Carolina political blogs, like Orange Politics. While she's in front of a computer from about 8 in the morning until 11 at night, her husband's a bit less tech-savvy. She told a story about how his first-ever email to her was in all lower case, and the last line of the message was:
"how do you make a capital letter?"
Other highlights:
She told Bob Fertik that nope, she's not in favor of pursuing the impeachment of Bush. "I'd like to see him not be President. Obviously, I worked very hard for that not to be the case," but by going for impeachment, "we will have wasted a lot of time," created new enemies, and deepened old hatreds. Next.
Edwards was asked if she worries that by being open and honest online, she might turn off potential voters. She responded, "If people don't like you and don't want to vote for you, maybe they shouldn't."
Yeah, she's pretty appealing in person. Honest-seeming and quite personable. An audience member started a question to her by saying "hello, Mrs. Edwards," and she responded, "haaay" in a carolina drawl that could really just charm your pants off. If I'm being honest, I have to admit that she's clearly a tremendous asset to any campaign that John Edwards might decide to pursue.
Nation contributing editor Marc Cooper reflects on my story on the Internet in Cuba. It's funny. This story seems to be a little bit of a Rorschach test -- you see in it what you look for. Marc sees in it another example of Castro's smothering of the island. I see it more as part of the ongoing fight over control of the Internet and whether the global network will survive.
I love hearing from a guy who's actually had boots on the ground in Cuba. Me, I sit with my passport waiting for the first legal flight from JFK to Havana. As he tells it, it's a dull place after dark:
I find the Cuban situation particularly pathetic. Anyone who has been to Cuba -- as I have many, many times -- knows that finding "something to do" can be quite the existential problem. Few families have any spending cash and those who do find a rather anemic offer of entertainment and distraction, especially from the overbearing presence of Senor You-Know-Who. I remember starkly the nights I have been in Havana when, all of a sudden, the streets went empty as a ghost town as the 10:00 o'clock hour rolled around. The entire nation would sit transfixed before their TV screens, squeezing what free pleasure they could out of a trash Brazilian soap-opera. Forty years of "socialism" and the mass culture it fosters is the Spanish-sub titled equivalent of Dynasty?
It's one interesting way to think about the Internet. A robust connection changes an evening at home in Havana from a night of passively watching Brazilian soap reruns into one of downloading episodes of Lost, blogging about its mysteries, editing Lostpedia.
What's been so great about moving to New York is that there are so many interesting events. I have, um, a large handful of interests, some personal and some professional (most both, which is nice) and just about every day there's some event in New York City to attend. In fact, often there's so many that they conflict and you have to pick just one. Tonight, for example, there's an event at the United Federation of Teachers on how the labor movement and progressive bloggers can create some synergy:
LABOR AND BLOGS: Can labor and blogs work together?
A panel discussion coordinated by Kombiz Lavasany
Featuring Nathan Newman (PLAN, TPMCafe), Chris Bowers and Scott Shields (MyDD), and Micah Sifry (PersonalDemocracy.com)
6:15, United Federation of Teachers
52 Broadway, 10th Floor
But there's also an event that I've waiting two months for, since my row-mate on the plan down to SXSW told me about it. The Internet Telecommunications Program at NYU is hosting its annual spring show. ITP is part of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and is a two-year program that sees itself as "a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds." The spring show is the ITP's students' chance to show off the projects they're working on. The projects are, um, creative -- one that I previewed online was a shirt that allows you to hug yourself more effectively. Still, I think I'm going to get a chance to see and play with a lot of neat interactive technologies.
The ITP show runs tonight and tomorrow. But unless it's so terrific that I want to go back a second time, tomorrow I'm going to go to an event hosted by the Drum Major Institute. (DMI's name comes from the MLK quote "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice." Yeah, I don't know what that means.) DMI is hosting an event for David Sirota's his new book, Hostile Takeover, about the influence of big business and corruption in Washington. It's at the SEIU Serkasky-Davis Conference Center at 330 West 42nd Street. Someone -- I can't remember who -- once described Sirota as "a man without an off switch," so I'm looking forward to what should be a high-charged event.
Monday is the Personal Democracy Forum's annual conference on the convergence of politics and technology. New York gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer is giving keynote address. The guest(s) for the "keynote conversation" is still a surprise, but I'm guessing it's John and Elizabeth somebody or other. I'm going to be moderating a panel on "The Rising Power of Local Political Blogs." I don't know much at all about localized political blogging and so I'm looking forward to being in the position to force my panelists to answer the questions rattling around in my head. I'm curious as to how political blogs tied to one offline space differ from national blogs. Does it matter that a local blogger and the community he or she creates interact, you know, offline a great deal too? (Both because they would have anyway in the course of their normal lives and because they're drawn together by the blog.) Do people manage identity differently as a result? I have a sneaking suspicion that localized political blogs might have a special knack for "preaching beyond the choir." If that's true, then why? Should be interesting.
All in all, an exciting week to be a young-ish progressive geek in New York City. Then again, seems like many of them are. Yeah, I'm in love with the big apple.
When I first moved to New York about six months ago, I ended up one night in the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital with a guy named Matt O'Neill. Matt and I ended up there because we had been at an event when a mutual friend started to feel sick. During the course of a long night, as we waited for our friend to get treated, we got to know each other and I found out that Matt's a documentary filmmaker.
This was exciting to me because documentary films is one of the top things on my list of the things that I really wanted to dig my teeth into when I fled left DC. And so a few weeks after our night in the ER, Matt and I got together for a Chinese food lunch, and he very generously took a couple of hours to talk to me about doc making. After lunch, he walked me through his production studio and introduced me his editors. I came in particularly interested in the actual process by which you go from an idea -- a mere glimmer in the eye -- to a finished film, but we ended up talking about what's the point of non-fiction films, and what they can accomplish.
We agreed (and I'm hoping that I'm not putting words in Matt's mouth) that what docs are so great at is telling rich, compelling stories. And there's much power in that because, of course, it's through stories that we learn much of what we know about the world.
I think one reason that non-fiction filmmaking is so appealing to me so much because of my background in and frustrations with academic anthropology. Anthro tells amazing stories. It's a way of looking at the world holistically that, I think, is uniquely powerful. But let's be honest -- nobody reads what anthropologists write except other anthropologists. Film can't teach theory in the way that written texts can, but it can go very far to share the interesting stuff that the field knows about the ways of the world.
When we talked, Matt had been in the final stages of editing a project about the time he and another filmmaker, Jon Alpert, had spent in another ER -- an American military ER in Baghdad. I asked if the film was, for lack of a better way of putting it, political. A polemic against the Iraq war, if you will. Matt said no, that the point of the film was to show the physical costs of war, any war, and if it should make people question whether this war is worth it, so be it. Yesterday, Bob Herbert (Times Select) said that they succeeded:
In the first few moments of the documentary film "Baghdad ER," we see a man dressed in hospital scrubs carrying a bloodied arm that has been amputated above the elbow. He deposits it in a large red plastic bag.
This HBO production is reality television with a vengeance -- war-fare as it really is. And while it is frightening, harrowing and deeply painful to watch, it should be required viewing for all but the youngest Americans.
Matt's movie will premiere on May 21 on HBO. I will be watching with popcorn. I mention it both to congratulate him and to give me a chance to harp on the enormous potential of non-fiction filmmaking. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of smart progressives (Matt, for one, is also a co-founder of Drinking Liberally) using the medium to show, not tell, why liberal ideas are the way to go.
I fell even more deeply in love with the medium after watching "When We Were Kings" this weekend. That's the phenomenal film on the "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (angry George Foreman, not happy grill-shilling George Foreman) in Kinshasa, Zaire. It was so good and so rich, I sat staring at the screen with my mouth open for five minutes -- for real -- after the credits played. I highly recommend it and here's a link so you can put it in your Netflix queue. (Why is that word so long? Wouldn't "que" be sufficient? I say it in my head, "que-yoo." And fear that may prove embarrassing, like the time when I was a kid and said "libs" when I meant to say pounds.)
But "When We Were Kings" is also good example of what's tough about making documentaries. It took Leon Gast more than 20 years to get all the rights and financing together so that he could finally release the movie in '96. There's a real problem now with non-fiction filmmakers having to license the pop-culture that shows up while they're shooting. For example, go here for what "Mad Hot Ballroom" had to go through to clear the music in the film, including the "Rocky" ring tone that plays on a woman's cell phone for six seconds. And then there's the Smithsonian's new deal with Showtime that's making some filmmakers think that it's going to get trickier to use footage from their archives.
Still, documentary filmmaking is set to take off. There's the relative inexpensiveness of the equipment. A decent camera and the microphones, batteries, cables, that you need to film a basic documentary costs about $3500. The Final Cut Express software that you can use to edit your movies on your Mac goes for three hundred bucks. There's the new distribution and promotional possibilities opened up by the Internet. Those will (if all goes well) only get wider and more reliable as time goes by. And I think we're all primed to take in, process, and even expect rich media now. Witness the fact that even the big news guys like the New York Times and Washington Post have taken to pulling together text, audio, video, and photos in getting their jobs done.
Given all that, given the general public's seemingly renewed hunger for facts over spin, for experiencing reality (even a reality as mediated by the filmmaker) rather than just being told what truth is, I'm not sure there's a better medium today than the documentary film through which to tell a story.
Here's YouTube video of Obama's speech from yesterday's Darfur rally in DC. The crowd seems to take a little while to warm up to him -- he opens by quoting Proverbs, but as he starts on his "we don't always know who the good guys are and the bad guys are, we don't always know what the proper course of action is -- this is not one of those times", you remember what the big deal with him is.
Well worth watching, or at listening to. The video is crap.
