Radio

Brave New Films is hosting a live primary coverage over at their Elections 2008 livestream site. I will be on at 10PM sharing my punditry with the world and Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks show on Air America.

The show starts at 7PM and will start lining up bloggers by 7:10PM. Here's the schedule :

7:10: Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films
7:40: Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic
7:50: Robin Abcarian, L.A. Times
8:00: Billy Wimsatt, League of Young Voters
8:10: Rachel Sklar, The Huffington Post
8:20: Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake
8:30: Jim Dean, Democracy For America
8:40: Steve Clemons, The Note
9:00: Lane Hudson, News for the Left
9:10: Isaiah Poole, Campaign for America's Future
9:40: James Rucker, Color of Change
10:00: Liza Sabater, Culture Kitchen
10:10: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters

I am running out to the NPR studio here in Manhattan to record another session of News and Notes with Farai Chideya.

We will talk about how steroids brought the downfall of Marion Jones, an MTV poll that says that white youth is happier than black, Juanita Bynum's messy divorce and .... prepare your selves ... why I hate the word Hispanic.

TADA!

Tune in today to your local NPR News and Notes schedule or catch the whole show online after 3pm.

On Friday, May 11th, the indie circuit will feature the debut of a film titled The Hip Hop Project. One showing is going to be down the street from my law school at The Charles, our independent theater hub in Baltimore. I hear someone making the rounds on our local hip-hop station and our local Fox affiliate, hyping this project, and it sounds very positive and very bold. Being in my usual early morning stupor, I don't know who is behind this voice, but the message was enough to get me moving. Here's a link to the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8emq1rtBnec

Even in the release of the film to the public, the movie has challenged assumptions about its content -- direct and indirect. The MPAA tried to slap an "R" rating on the film because it uses the word "fuck" 17 times throughout the movie, which barely spans an hour and a half. According to XXL Mag, the backers of the movie project appealed, and the board voted to change its rating to "PG-13," meaning hopefully it will reach more audiences and have wider influence. The net proceeds of the movie will be used for the benefit of youth organizations.

Through Hip Hop Press, I found more information about the movie and project initiative:

I am actually surprised that MSNBC has told Imus "allez, out!" I had to check Imus' ratings for the show because, you know it would have made sense if the show was floundering.

Well ... it seems somebody has a spine at MSNBC's parent company, NBC.

The TV Guy reports that Imus' morning simulcast was doing so well, CNN decided to change it's morning anchor line-up to stopgap the ratings blood-bath.

I am still cynical about this whole fiasco, but I'm going to applaud this move by the cable broadcaster. It seems they not only listened to the public uproar but actually follow the advice of key employees in the company. I don't know if Al Roker was one of those employees, but I love what he publish in his post, "Not in my house" :

It's not shocking to see how the corporate masters of people like Ann Coulter and Don Imus to insist in selling them as valuable assets. They prop up and pay bigots because they represent millions of dollars. Hate is the road most travelled.

Hate is easy to exploit, it's an emotion that replicates faster than love thanks to the addictive qualities of adrenaline. Capitalism is based on the mining of adrenaline through the celebration of hate, the use of addictive substances in food, the exploitation of fear.

The big companies behind the likes of Rush Limbaugh will make sure their well-oiled money machines keep on raking in the benjamins. What is shocking to this cynic heart is to see how civil rights advocates fall for the money crap when it comes to gauging the worthiness of a cause.

It's still astounding to me to hear and read people on the left rationalize keeping racists and mysogynists by the measure of money they generate or popularity they have. More than once I've seen people on TV or read emails of people who said "why bother" when it comes to calling for Imus' oust.

And you know this is not just on big media outlets --FireDogLake is the perfect example of the racist pox on the lefty blogosphere being defended by many because of their popularity and for the amount of money they've raised for democrats.

Sigh.

Don Imus' money machine should be unplugged in much the same way Ann Coulter's and Rush Limbaugh's. Here's what Chris Rabb has to say about that :

What follows is completely true and yet unreal.
Stephen Foster met Uncle Ben in my radio reverie this morning. For real, or so it seemed. (Y'all know I hear odd connections in that place between asleep and awake.)

Two southern stories that seem literally black and white, but turn out to be anything but.

Radio news reported that the Southland's good old-fashioned composer is on his way out; our conservative and affable new governor actually refuses to have our state song played in his presence! (yet in the same breath he says "whatever the people want satisfies me" and that sure sounds unreal to me.)

Nobody said anything unmannerly or politically correct about unpopular language, although that's likely the truth. One legislator did mention the word "darkies" but to hear them tell it, it's not that, just the times they are a'changin' . . .hey, now THAT would make a great state song!

Meanwhile good old-fashioned Uncle Ben got a promotion to Chairman of the Board. He isn't the kindly kitchen rice-cooker anymore, now he's the Donald Trump of Rice, with his own fancy penthouse office, jet-setting schedule and authoritative rice-education curriculum. (You can poke around his empty office, open his travel journal, it feels almost like corporate espionage, with him hanging on the wall watching your every move!)

Thanks to Culture Kitchen's ad lineup, I just learned something I really wanted to know but wouldn't have known to look for any other way, probably. (Keep watching those ads, y'all!)

If Ira Glass' --yes, that's the possessive with an apostrophe and NO extra S! -- new tv show is destined to be as good as his "This American Life" on radio, then I finally have educational justification to add the network airing it to my cable service. His NPR show on superpowers, with John Hodgman interviewing regular folks on the street about whether they'd choose flying or invisibility and why, was an instant classic. And the show about what three things we live and die for -- talk about power of story. . .Ira Glass doesn't tell stories the way anybody else does.

Episode 1 - "Reality Check"
Three stories of people who hatched plans in the hopes of making their dreams come true, but were snapped back to reality by unpleasant outcomes: an elementary school student tries to solve a common childhood problem; a rancher resuscitates a beloved pet, which later turns on him; people team to give an unknown rock band the greatest night of its life.

I remember the last bit, about the unknown rock band, from the radio show. There was a LOT more to it than this, about creativity and community, whether contrived spontaneity and ambush improv is fair (a la Borat?) and whether it's true, for the players OR the unsuspecting audience -- I'm still thinking hard about the cultural questions of meaning it raised for me.

I have that feeling again. I told my mum last night that I was running away to join the circus. I think I was only half-joking. I'm in the midst of trying to sort out a life that, once again, is not making sense. Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it a sense that everything is spinning out of control and I can only hang on for dear life.

Five years ago, I left Ithaca on a mad flight across the country. It's still not clear to me, 60 months later, what I was doing. The thing I remember from that time was the overwhelming urge to run, to leave--really, to flee--a life over which I felt I had lost all control. It wasn't that my life was without meaning--on the contrary, I would say there was too much meaning, too many things going on--and it was as if my brain short-circuited and the primal urge of fight or flight hijacked my brainwaves.
I had just left my marriage of 12 years, had just conquered an addiction to opiates that had enslaved me in a cycle of chronic pain and narced-out bliss, had decided to "become" a writer, and had just had my disability benefits run out. In short, my life was simultaneously chaos and re-birth, and being stuck in a tiny town in the middle of rural New York was not where I wanted to be.

Crack open your umbrellas ... there may be pigs flying.

Doug McIntyre, star of McIntyre in the Morning is a republican apologist who has woken up to reality and apologizes for, not just voting for Bush but using his radio show to ennable his administrations lies and abuses of power.

I'm speechless:

[via McIntyre in the Morning 790 KABC-FM]:

It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We’re about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It’s unspeakable. The liberal media didn’t create this reality, bad policy did.

Most historians believe it takes 30-50 years before we get a reasonably accurate take on a President’s place in history. So, maybe 50 years from now Iraq will be a peaceful member of the brotherhood of nations and George W. Bush will be celebrated as a visionary genius.

But we don’t live fifty years in the future. We live now. We have to make public policy decisions now. We have to live with the consequences of the votes we cast and the leaders we chose now.

After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I’ve reached the conclusion he’s either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.