An Inspirational Video

So, for a number of summers now, I've been teaching an online class at Fordham, on Writing for Online Media, mainly about blogging. The students get to create and write for their own blogs, on themes and topics of their own choosing. And one of my students this summer has been blogging about art, including galleries museums, and special exhibitions. A recent post on her blog, which is called Mona Lisa by the way, was on A Blog that Inspires: Colossal, which in turn directed me to check out another blog on art and design called Colossal, and specifically a post entitled Where Do Ideas Come From? A Short Film by Andrew Norton Tackles the Nature of Inspiration.

If you're following me so far, well then, that blog post featured a video by a filmmaker named Andrew Norton on the nature of creativity, inspiration, and the source of original ideas. The video, Where Do Ideas Come From?, can be found over on Vimeo, the YouTube alternative favored by many serious and professional videographers. And it's also embedded over on the Colossal blog, so why not include it here on Blog Time Passing, I thought to myself. And so, here it is:


Where Do Ideas Come From? from Andrew Norton on Vimeo.


And you can rightly infer from the fact that I've included it here that I think it's pretty nifty, and worth a look-see. Oh, and here is the write-up from the Vimeo page:

A short film about the mysteries of inspiration.

Featuring thoughts on the subject by:
David Lynch
Robert Krulwich
Chuck Close
Tracy Clayton & Heben Nigatu
Ray Barbee
Lulu Miller
Susan Orlean
and a couple of kids named Mason and Ursula

Presented by transom.org
With funding from The National Endowment for the Arts
For more about this video, visit:
transom.org/2017/where-do-ideas-come-from/

The Transom site is run by Atlanta Public Media, and identified as "A Showcase and Workshop for New Public Radio" in case you were wondering. It's based on an idea by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose work is well-recognized in media ecology circles. And it looks to be an excellent resource for anyone interested in public radio and media, podcasting, audio production, and creative endeavors more generally. If you have those sort of interests, I think it's worth checking out.

Information Overload vs. Facts and Truth

So, back on April 14th, I was the main guest on Connecticut's public radio program, Where We Live, for an installment entitled Information Overload: Finding The Facts And Knowing The Truth In The Digital Age, hosted by David Desroches and produced by Jeff Tyson. 

I've been on the program several times in the past, courtesy of producer Catie Talarski and former host John Dankowsky, but this was the first time in a while, with David Desroches filling in as host, and with producer Jeff Tyson as my primary contact. It was also the first time that I did my part from the WFDU studio at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Teaneck, NJ campus (where I used to teach courses for their MA program in Media and Professional Communication). 

Here's the write-up on the program from their website:

Ever since the Presidential election we’ve heard the buzzwords—“echo-chamber,” “facts,” “alternative facts.” More than ever our country is divided by how we get our information and what we see as the “truth.” Even reality itself has become debatable.

What’s the difference between a fact and the truth? And if people can’t agree on what a fact is, what does that mean for a democratic society?

This hour, we tackle big questions with big thinkers in the age of digital news.

We try to understand just how the complex world of information we live in today has evolved. And we explore how critical thinking and news literacy can help us wade through information overload.

Has the internet and social media shaped the way you understand truth? Or, how about your understanding of what’s real or fake?

Unfortunately, I can't embed the sound file here on Blog Time Passing, but you can go on over to their site to listen to the 49 minute program. Some of the content may be familiar to folks who know me, and/or general semantics and media ecology, but this is more of an interactive format, and there's always something new that emerges out of these events.

Swimming Up Mainstream

So, I had an interesting exchange with Andrew Hoskins, a professor at the University of Glasgow, based on my quotes in the New York Times, as discussed in my recent blog post, How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers. 

Andrew is currently working on a book about news and the concept of the "mainstream" and how that ideal or myth or sociological reality (take your pick, or view it as some combination of all three) might relate to changes in the media environment. As he put it, "You are spot on when you say that broadcast TV at its height served very significant social, cultural and political roles, but I wonder then to what extent its absence/demise today has shaped the current crisis in faith in the ‘mainstream’?"

Here now is my response, with a bit of editing to make it suitable for Blog Time Passing readers:

I think it might be fruitful to trace the idea of the mainstream back to that of the public. At the start of The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan states that the public was a product of printing. And I think that when you look at Elizabeth Eisenstein's study of typography and its effects, the argument that the printing revolution formed the basis of the public sphere as outlined by Jürgen Habermas, among others, makes a lot of sense. 

This is the basis of Jay Rosen's notion of public journalism. Like me, Jay was a student of Neil Postman's, and his idea parallel's Postman's in Teaching as a Conserving Activity in looking at print-based institutions as needing to work against the biases of the electronic media environment. That's why  Jay argues that journalists need to create a public, and not only try to reach one. 

Of course, the problem is that the public is no more in an electronic environment, the effects of which include the blurring of public and private, as McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, and others have noted (much more has been said about the decline and disappearance of privacy, but the fate of the private and the public are intertwined).

I would also note that Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda, explains how individualism, in breaking down ties based on tradition, locality, tribe, etc., leads to the mass, which consists of large numbers of individuals without any organic ties. Perhaps we can break this process down, so that the first stage of individualism, which McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others connect to the isolating effect of literacy, results in the formation of the public. 

Detribalized, able to free themselves from the need, in the absence of any external storage medium, to preserve knowledge through collective memory, able to view and review their thoughts and engage in critical evaluation, to think independently and to think novel thoughts, a group of readers becomes a public. As individual members of a public, they share a common literate culture, but one that also depends on orality in the form of public speaking, discussion, debate, deliberation, etc. We associate this type of speech with the agora and other gathering places, from Eisenstein's printers' shops to Habermas's coffee houses, but again it is an orality produced by literate mentalities, as are the dialogues Plato attributes to Socrates. 

Media environments are always built on and incorporate the environments that came before, so the ideal of the Enlightenment is based on a balance between literacy and orality, as Postman has suggested. And maybe there is an inverse relationship between the amount of dialogue and speech that mediates between print media and readers, and the shift from a public to the mass. 

The shift goes along with new technologies, steam powered printing for shifting the orality-literacy balance away from hearing and towards reading, the mechanical reproduction of images and photography as antagonistic to the word in all modes (spoken, written, and printed), telegraphy and further developments in telecommunications as increasing the potential for mass communication. It would follow that what Daniel Boorstin in The Image describes as the graphic revolution, based on these and other innovations, results in a shift from the public to the mass.

Anyway, what I would say is that electronic technology amplified the effects of print, at first, for example in the way that telegraphic messages took the form of telegrams and wire service reports in newspapers. With radio and then television, print became the content of broadcasting, as McLuhan would put it, as programming was often scripted, including news reporting, while programming following a schedule is also very much a typographic type of structure. 

So typographic biases were initially amplified, but it is important to keep in mind that amplification often turns into distortion. 

It was the internet that fully unleashed the potential of the electronic media, bringing back in a new way a kind of neo-tribalism. This relates to McLuhan's laws of media, specifically the law of reversal, as the mass, as an effect of the first stage of electronic telecommunications, flips into siloing, a reversal from the anonymous heterogeneity of the mass into groups based on affinity and shared identity. And/or, maybe the mass in and of itself is ultimately unsustainable, certainly going against the grain of human nature? 

Certainly, printing was associated with homogenizing culture and society, and electronic media always had the potential and the actuality of undoing that effect, that potential muted as long as print remained the content of broadcasting, but now unleashed as broadcasting and telecommunications become the content of online media.

It follows then, that the crisis of the mainstream, or its actual disappearance, is an effect of the electronic media, and quite possibly an irrevocable one at that. 

So, those are my thoughts on the matter, more or less, at least for now. Where do we go from here? That is a hard question to answer.

From Bunker to Trump (via Reagan)

So, last month I was contacted by Stephen Nessen of WNYC, a New York public radio station, and asked to comment on the parallels and similarities between Donald Trump and Archie Bunker. And I have to admit that connecting the two was not an idea that had ever occurred to me, but as Nessen pointed out, both hail from Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City, or as it used to be called, Greater New York (on account of the fact that Brooklyn and Queens, the two Long Island boroughs, only became part of the city in 1899). As it turns out, I grew up in Queens as well, in Kew Gardens, not far from where Trump came from, which was the private, affluent neighborhood of Jamaica Estates. Archie Bunker, by way of contrast, was from the older, working class section of Corona.

Speaking of Queens, the elementary school I attended in Kew Gardens, PS 99, was the same one that comedian Rodney Dangerfield went to many years earlier. My Junior High School, Russell Sage (otherwise known as JHS 190) in Forest Hills, had boasted of future NBA player and general manager Ernie Grunfeld, who graduated the year before I began there, and my high school, Hillcrest High, in Jamaica, had two major TV stars a year or two behind me, Ray Romano, and Fran Drescher (not that I was at all aware of them). Just to better establish the milieu I hail from.

And anyway, the Queens connection was just a jumping off point for making the connection between the fictional character from Norman Lear's hit TV show All in the Family (1971-1979, succeeded by the spin-off, Archie Bunker's Place, 1979-1983), and the nonfictional character (although some might debate the point) from The Apprentice (2004-2015, including seven seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice, and more recently the reality series we might as well call Who Wants to Be President?). The key similarities for Nessen and his colleagues had to do with the fact that both were labelled as bigots (Bunker quite intentionally as the comic foil in Lear's liberally minded sitcom, Trump more controversially, based on his comments about Mexicans, women, and Muslims) and both became quite popular with the mass American audience (Bunker unexpectedly, as he was intended as the subject of ridicule, not sympathy, while Trump's popularity was certainly his intended aim, but came as a surprise to many, both liberal and conservative).

So now, how about taking a moment or two to listen to the four minute story they wound up airing back on December 10th?





Or go have a look and listen on the WNYC page devoted to the story, Is Donald Trump the Archie Bunker of Today? The text that accompanies the report, which is similar but with some significant differences from the radio version, is also available on that page, and it goes like this:

Before Donald Trump ran a campaign on xenophobia and pledges to make America great again, another Queens native who feared the changes happening in America dominated television.

Archie Bunker, the cantankerous patriarch of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, like Trump, was known for spewing anti-immigrant, unabashedly racist screeds on national TV. He told America how it is from the view of his armchair.

WNYC went to the block in Glendale, Queens where Archie Bunker's house was shot to see how residents there feel about both men.

“Lot of people think, and they don't verbalize, he verbalizes and so does Trump,” Irene Kessler, who lives in Woodhaven, Queens, said. She supports Trumps views on the economy, but not his recent comments on Muslim.

“He's saying what I believe the majority of Americans are thinking,” Joe DaSoro, 55, said of Donald Trump.

DaSoro grew up in Ozone Park, but now lives in Huntington, Long Island. He’s a registered Republican, but considers himself a moderate.

“A lot people are stuck on this political correctness, and he's not, he's just speaking his mind and being honest about it where the others are being phony,” DaSoro said.

He could be talking about Donald Trump, or Archie Bunker.

“Donald Trump is paralleling Archie Bunker and appealing to people who are simply dismayed by all the change that’s going on—by political correctness and the influx of immigrants from other parts of the world,” said Lance Strate, a professor of Communications and Media Studies at Fordham University.

Of course, not everyone in Queens is on board. Linda Morton, 84, from Glendale, thinks Trump is simply a bigot.

“I'm really worried, if he becomes president,” she said. “I really think some of the countries are laughing at us.”

No one knows Archie Bunker better than Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family. Lear believes his creation was more lovable.

“I think Donald Trump is a horse’s ass,” he told WNYC in a recent interview. “A righteous fool. And I've always thought of Archie as simply afraid to be on the precipice of the future, progress baffled him.”

In Archie Bunker's world of the 1970s, young people were having sex out of wedlock, inflation and loss of manufacturing jobs was prevalent, and integration was firmly taking root.

“He wanted to reach back instead of forward,” Lear said. “Blacks moving into the neighbored—‘my god’—the rest of it was just simply poor education and badly informed.”

Today, many Trump supporters are upset by gay marriage, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and minorities becoming the majority.

Near the Bunker family home is a Wendy’s where Pat Ryan, 59, a truck driver from Islip, Long Island stopped for lunch. He said it’s hard to support Trump’s recent comments. But, “if he says something outlandish and at the end of the day something is done positively then I would support that.”

He said while Trump may be trying to appeal to blue collar workers like him, Archie Bunker really did speak for them.

“Archie was part of middle America, he was a blue collar worker he got to work every day,” Ryan said. “Donald Trump is basically looking down from the towers. I don't know if he has a good grasp of what people go through day to day.”

Now, when I spoke to Nessen, we were on the phone for about half an hour, so the brief quote that was used was only a small portion of my comments. And as you may know from many of my previous posts, whenever possible I try to provide you with the entirety of my comments, both to illustrate the process of journalistic practice, and so they don't have to go to waste. In this case, that's not possible, but I can tell you that I did make reference to the fact that All in the Family was all about the profound generation gap that existed between the baby boomers and what is now known as the greatest generation. That gap is what fully ignited the culture wars that exist to this day, with Archie Bunker representing what is sometimes referred to as the red states, the Republican conservative types that Trump has become so popular with, while the baby boomer counterculture types, like Bunker's daughter and son-in-law, turned into the blue state Clintons and Obamas of today (not to mention Bernie Sanders, and of course Al Gore and John Kerry).

I also pointed out that Queens has been the borough of New York that most resembles middle America, being semi-suburban, almost small town in some respects, certainly more Main Street in contrast to Manhattan's Wall Street (to use a common opposition from contemporary political rhetoric). I suspect that this is less the case today than it was in the past, because Queens has become one of the most diverse places on the planet. But at least back in the 70s, that sensibility is what contributed to Archie Bunker's appeal (although one source of misunderstanding had to do with the fact that Bunker didn't own a car, a sign of poverty almost anywhere other than New York). A working class fellow from Queens fit in very nicely with what Richard Nixon referred to as the silent majority, even though in his case, the silence was not very profound (rather profane, actually).

I did have the sense, in my comments, that I was taking Trump more seriously, less dismissively, than Nessen and his colleagues, by which I mean that I was less willing to reduce Trump to the flat stereotype of Archie Bunker, although I did note that the brilliance of Carroll O'Conner as an actor made his character more well-rounded and much more sympathetic than he was meant to be, less of a joke and more of an ironic icon that many could identify with. Even so, I think there is much more to Trump than Bunker's bigotry and rants, as much as Trump eschews both contemporary political correctness (although not entirely) and the diplomatic caution of the career politician. But the hidden ground connecting Trump to Bunker is none other than Ronald Reagan.

In my comments, I noted the similarity between Trump and Reagan quite a bit, both having backgrounds as media professionals before making the switch to politics, both revolutionary outsiders challenging the Republican Party establishment, both seemingly immune from any consequences for their gaffes, mistakes, and controversial comments. Reagan was referred to as the teflon President, because nothing would stick to him, and I'm surprised that almost no one has commented on the similarity to Trump as a teflon candidate.

Archie Bunker preceded Reagan, but the decade that All in the Family ran was the decade that saw liberalism and the counterculture political movement, aka the movement, go into sharp decline. While it was the decade in which the United States finally withdrew all of its troops from Vietnam and the odious Nixon was forced from the White House due to the Watergate scandal, it also saw the collapse of the movement in the landslide loss of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in  1972, having already been weakened by the necessities of going mainstream for the general election. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, tried to revive American patriotism via the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, and while he gained the Republican nomination that year, he faced a very serious challenge as a sitting president by Ronald Reagan in the Republican primaries. And weakened as he was, Ford was unseated by Democrat Jimmy Carter who, although today viewed as highly liberal, was seen as a relatively conservative candidate during the 70s, certainly more so than McGovern, or Teddy Kennedy, or Eugene McCarthy, or even Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson (Carter was the first born again Christian to become president). And then came 1980, and the Reagan revolution that moved American politics farther to the right than it had been since, at least, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The increasing conservatism of American politics was reflected in the evolution of All in the Family, as Archie Bunker evolved from ironic foil to American folk hero. And in many ways, he reflected the actual demographic of what came to be known as the Reagan Democrats. This was a part of the population that had traditionally voted for Democratic candidates, but had many conservative tendencies, and had grown increasingly less comfortable with the liberalism of the Democratic Party. Reagan Democrats tended to be blue collar workers, like Bunker, who had previously supported the Democrats in conjunction with their association with the labor movement and labor unions. But while union leadership generally endorsed Democratic candidates, the rank and file more and more were ignoring those endorsements, and favoring the more conservative, Republican types; this was a remarkable shift, in that Republicans were traditionally seen as supporters of management rather than workers, and retain that association today in being the party of big business (although Bill Clinton and others in the Democratic Party shifted away from the leftist anti-capitalist stance of other Democrats, that divide now the under current in the rather subdued contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders). It was the beginning of the end of labor unions as a significant political force in American politics, and Reagan's politics were decidedly anti-union. Ironically perhaps, the blue collar workers had come to take the benefits derived from unionizing for granted, seeing them as having outlived their usefulness (and needlessly taking money, in thew form of union dues, out of their paychecks).

The Reagan Democrats were also more hawkish, as opposed to the doves that dominated Democratic politics.  The anti-war protest had resulted in Lyndon Johnson deciding not to run for re-election in 1968, with the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice-President, not coming out against the war out of loyalty to LBJ until close to the end of his campaign. The protests that followed Nixon's refusal to end the war had much to do with McGovern's victory in the 1972 Democratic primaries, and while losing the election, Nixon's resignation was a victory for the left (and for basic decency I would add), putting an end to the Nixonian promise of peace with honor. Instead, anti-war pressure led to what conservatives viewed as a decidedly dishonorable pullout of our troops, followed by the fall of South Vietnam. Ignoring the fact that this occurred under Republican Jerry Ford's presidency, and putting aside various rhetorical technicalities, this was seen as the first time that the US lost a war. That loss was followed by what would appear to conservatives as Carter's mishandling of the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis. There was a sense of defeatism that accompanied these events, Vietnam, Watergate, and Iran, and also the Arab oil embargoes of the late 70s, which resulted in sudden major hikes in gasoline prices, and even more drastically, long lines and rationing at gas stations. This downward trend was exactly was Reagan vowed to reverse, and that is what Trump is echoing when he talks about making American great again, and how we don't win anymore, and how he'll put an end to that. The Reagan Democrats, being altogether patriotic, resonated with those sorts of messages, and not with the critical appraisals associated with the counterculture.

Going back to the culture wars, Reagan, while touting laissez-faire economics and minimizing government regulation and influence, liberalism in its classic sense, also built a new Republican coalition by appealing to social conservatives, including the growing evangelical and fundamentalist Christian populations opposed to lifestyle liberalism that included civil rights/equal rights for all; social programs including welfare, food stamps, etc; strict separation of church and state; easy availability of birth control options and abortion on demand; the sexual revolution; legalization of recreational drug use; etc. Bunker was nothing if not a social conservative, dismayed in fact by all of the social change going on in the culture. One point that others have made is that while the character is presented as a typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, still at least symbolic of the majority of the American population, in fact the kind of demographic that Archie Bunker actually reflected, the Reagan Democrats, were more likely to be Catholic than Protestant. Of course, Reagan benefited from the support of the newly emerged evangelical Protestant Christian Coalition, and Trump also seems to have gained their approval. Ironically for both, I might add, in that Reagan was the first divorced man to be elected president, and Trump also has a personal history of something less than perfect family values.

So, the bottom line here is that while drawing a line connecting Archie Bunker to Donald Trump is a clever insight, the connection itself has much to do with Ronald Reagan, and while this does not guarantee that Trump will become the next president of the United States, or even the Republican nominee, it does suggest, to me at least, that he needs to be taken much more seriously as a candidate than he has been so far. 





And that's the story, Jerry!

Firesign's Electrician

So, it's time to get back to Firesign Theatre, and their first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, released in 1968. As I noted in my previous posts (Waiting for the Firesigns, Sending Up the 60s, and The Enola McLuhan), side 1 of the album consisted of 3 separate, short (in comparison to most of their releases) pieces. Side 2, on the other hand, is made up of one extended radioplay, the title track, "Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him," clocked in at 17 minutes and 48 seconds. 

This piece is more like the surrealistic journeys that characterize the albums that follow, although it lacks the same amount of textured sound and sense of soundscape as can be found on their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (see my previous posts, A Nick in Time for Firesign and Of Flip Sides and Firesigns).

"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" is framed by a play on instructional record albums, specifically language learning records, a wonderful bit of self-reflexive satire. That the language is Turkish, which then places the subsequent action in Turkey, retrieves the old, radio days/mid-20th century sense of the former center of the Ottoman Empire as an exotic and dangerous place, as well as a crossroads of the world. References to narratives based on the old British Empire and more contemporary (circa 1968) Cold War espionage are also present.

There's also a bit of play with radio eyewitness reporting. And the game show parody, Beat The Reaper, is one of their most memorable segments, generally considered among their best work. But it fits together as part of a larger whole, as you can see, er, hear, here:






The Wikipedia entry on this album refers to this piece as "a Kafkaesque fantasy of paranoia" and there clearly is an influence from The Castle and The Trial in this recording. But I would also point to Hitchcock movies in which an innocent becomes accidentally sucked into a world of intrigue and conflict, such as North by Northwest, and The 39 Steps. 
 
"Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him" employs an acoustic and dramatic variation of stream of consciousness, and an almost Freudian form of free association in humorous form, a real dive into a collectivist unconscious. Following the topsy-turvy logic that their comedy is based on, I guess you could say that their first album was worth the wait.

Why Run & Other Answers to Political Questions

So, in my last post, Long-Shot Candidates in the Marketplace, I focused on the segment Long-shot candidates reap benefits after race that aired on the public radio program Marketplace on July 21st, a 2 minute and 10 second piece that included a couple of quotes from me. And at the end, I promised to share some outtakes in my next post. So, here we are.

Actually, I found the process by which the interview was recorded to be quite interesting. If you listen to the Marketplace segment, my quotes sound more or less like they're studio quality. That's not how recordings taken off of the telephone usually sound. By way of contrast, you can hear how I sound in the telephone interview featured in my recent post, Talking About Talking. It's not bad, but it's clear that there's a drop off in quality, and a significant difference between the interviewee, that's me, and the interviewer on the recording end of the call.

The difference that made so much of a difference had to do with the way the telephone interview was conducted and recorded. And to be honest, this was the first time I had ever taken part in this sort of thing, or even heard of it, which is why I want to relate the process as well as the product to you here on Blog Time Passing. After I agreed to do the interview, it started with the public radio journalist, Nova Safo, asking me if I had an iPhone, to which I responded in the affirmative (love my iPhone). He then directed me to this video on Vimeo that explains the process:




Your iPhone makes interviews crystal clear from Aspen Public Radio on Vimeo.
This video is a helpful guide on how you can use your iPhone to record and send a crystal clear interview with Aspen Public Radio.


So you see, the way this Aspen Public Radio method worked is that he conducted the interview via a regular land line, him asking questions and me answering them, and at the same time I recorded my part of the conversation using my iPhone's Voice Memos app, and then e-mailed the files to him. And the result was, indeed, a crystal clear couple of quotes coming up on the radio segment.

And another result of this process was... outtakes! (Hurray!!!) So I edited the audio files to cut out the parts where I said things like, okay it's recording now, and okay I'm hitting stop now. I also edited out the long sections where there was little or nothing to hear, because Nova Safo's voice was necessarily inaudible in this kind of set-up. 

Which is truly a shame because it was a very stimulating conversation, and it was a pleasure to respond to the series of intelligent questions posed by Safo. 

Instead, however, the resulting effect is kind of interesting, I hope, because you have to infer the questions based on the answers I give. I guess this cools down what would otherwise be a hot, high definition medium, to use McLuhan's good old terminology.

Anyway, I turned the edited audio files into a YouTube video, as the most accessible vehicle for the recordings, and gave it the title of Why Long Shot Candidates Run for President (not terribly original, I know, but it's hard enough, for me at least, just getting all this editing, formatting, and uploading done). Anyway, for what it's worth, here it is:





And yeah, a little typo on the title text, I'd go back and change it, but again, it's so much work just to get it done and up there that I really don't want to put more time into it right now, and I hope you'll just let it pass by.

And I do hope you find something of interest in these outtakes, and the process by which mass media quotes are abstracted out of them (there I go getting all general semantics like again), and/or the interview process Nova Safo used. And if not, oh well, I tried...

Long-Shot Candidates in the Marketplace

So, how about we take another run at the election, shall we?

This time, I was interviewed by Nova Safo for the public radio program Marketplace, for a segment that aired on Tuesday evening, July 21st, 2015. The segment, entitled Long-shot candidates reap benefits after race, was only 2 minutes and 10 seconds long, and includes quotes from yours truly and University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. And you can click on the link to listen to it over there if you like. They have a very nice web page for it.

Of course, I'm happy to embed their little audio recording player in here as well, and appreciate the fact that they make it available in this way.




And here is the text version, also available over there. It starts like this:

With Ohio Governor John Kasich today entering the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the total number of major contenders has risen to 16. There are also five major candidates on the Democratic side.

A lot of them are long shots, whether due to lack of name recognition, lack of financial support, or low numbers in the polls.

Now, let me interject that the fact that they're long-shots still means that they have a shot. And candidates like Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton for that matter, have started out with little or no broad recognition or support, and gone on to win the White House. Anyway, I'm up now, so let me turn the story over to me:

But long-shot candidates have a reason to be optimistic. For one, sometimes they win. "Our current president being an example of one, where somebody comes out of nowhere," says Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

And things really have changed due to new media and social media, starting with Obama in 2008, where these new forms of communication were used to effectively organize volunteers and grass roots support, although the impact was felt earlier with Howard Dean's strong polling results in 2004, on the strength of favorable support among bloggers. That was before his campaign imploded after the Iowa Caucuses and his "I Have A Scream" speech. But the role of the new media environment in contemporary presidential primary campaigns is a phenomenon that is worthy of note, so let's sound that note:

The reason for so many long-shot candidates in this election cycle is that campaigns are getting better at organizing online and through social media, Strate says. "A political campaign can get started with a relatively small amount of resources to begin with, and then take off," he says.

And now it's Larry Sabato's turn, and the bottom line that whether candidates win or lose, they still win:

Even if candidates don't win, or even get their party's nomination, they can still benefit by improving their name recognition, says Larry Sabato, who heads the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "You can increase speaking fees. You may very well be offered a TV or radio contract," he says.

You may recall that this very same point came up in some previous posts here on Blog Time Passing, most recently in A Fortune in Speakers' Fees, before that in Of Fees, Futility, and Mike Huckabee, and earlier on in Giant Speaking Fees-Fi-Fo-Fum. 

And you know how I like to provide the outtakes, so to speak, in these posts that feature my quotes, not that every word I say is worthy of being immortalized, but just on the off chance that there may be something there of interest to someone out there, and also to show how quotes are abstracted out of a longer series of remarks (to aid in the general semantics goal of consciousness of abstracting).

And you might expect that with a radio interview like this one, including one conducted via telephone like this one, that there wouldn't be anything more. Well actually there is, but I'm going to save that for a follow-up post. I think this short segment, while not going into any great depth, is, for a short news segment, very nicely done, so I want to let it stand on its own in this post.

Sending Up the 60s

So, to pick up where I left off on last week's post, Waiting for the Firesigns, which featured the first of three separate tracks that originally appeared on side 1 of the comedy recording group Firesign Theatre's first album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, the second track on side 1 is called "W. C. Fields Forever" for reasons that are less than apparent.

Of course, W. C. Fields was a 20th century comedy icon whose career path took him from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood. Here's a scene where he's playing the part of a con man turned sheriff/bartender from the 1940 film, My Little Chickadee:





And of course, "...Fields Forever" is an allusion to The Beatles' song, "Strawberry Fields Forever," originally released in 1967, a song that many would argue defined psychedelic rock (at least that's what it says on the song's Wikipedia entry):





So, put them both together and you get "The 'Lazy O' Magic Circle Dues Ranch and Collective Love Farm," which is where "W. C. Fields Forever" takes place. It all fits together in that California was very much a part of the wild west, the western genre was enormously popular through the 60s so it was a big part of the Hollywood film industry, the Hippy movement at the heart of 60s counterculture was centered in San Francisco, and of course Firesign Theatre was a Californian quartet. 

This track, then, merges various aspects of California counterculture with western generic formulas and conventions (which also were used in the first track), as the Firesigns make fun of Hippy communes, health food, yoga, Eastern mysticism and spirituality, the whole guru thing that The Beatles got into for a while (while also incorporating direct quotation of Beatles lyrics, a practice continued in the Nick Danger radioplay on their second album), and provide the answer to the question Elvis Costello would later pose, what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

And, as you would expect, there's also a good number of references to psychedelic drug culture in this bit, with the commune being led by a character clearly based on Timothy Leary, counter culture leader and former Harvard psychology professor, who was the Johnny Appleseed of tripping via LSD (Leary claimed that his famous slogan, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out, was given to him by Marshall McLuhan, a claim that McLuhan denied). The character's name is Tiny Doctor Tim, and in case you think this all very obvious, you are probably of a certain age, so understand that when I mention Timothy Leary in my undergraduate new media classes (in the 90s he became a big booster for virtual reality), no one knows who he was.

"W. C. Fields Forever" clocks in at a little over 7 1/2 minutes, so it stands as one of the shorter examples of Firesign Theatre's soundscapes, this one with less of a sense of acoustic space than some of their other pieces, and also less of a coherent radioplay, much more episodic, but certainly an example of how they were able to take the then relatively new innovations of sterophonic sound and multitrack recording on magnetic tape, and the "fun with audio" genre (at least that's what I call all of the 60s recordings that were all about playing with sound) to an entirely new level. It's not their best work, but still worth a listen. And so, away we go...







"W. C. Fields Forever" stands as a send up of the 60s and also a product of the 60s, the album it appears on, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, having been released in 1968. It's a product of its times, the humor is in many ways topical, and by the time I first listened to the album as a college student in the mid-70s, I didn't get all of the references and jokes. But it didn't matter then, or now (although I think I do get all or most of it at this point), because Firesign Theatre's form transcends their content. As I've noted previously, their recordings are more like music, rather than like simple stand-up routines or straightforward comedy acts. But if you like the 60s or are curious about the counterculture, this track is a great way to get a feel for it all.

Waiting for the Firesigns

So, the recent passing of Phil Austin, one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, prompted me to write a couple of blog posts featuring their second, and most popular album. Just on the off chance that you missed those posts, or are in need of a review, the first was A Nick in Time for Firesign, and the second was Of Flip Sides and Firesigns.

Well, now I'd like to turn to their first album, Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him, released in 1968. Like side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which features "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," side 1 of Waiting for the Electrician of Someone Like Him includes some of their more accessible, mainstream material, relatively speaking.

In fact, side 1 consists of 3 short pieces, again relatively speaking, as opposed to "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which takes up an entire side of the album, and as opposed to side 1 of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which, while listed as several separate pieces, is really one long journey through an insane, hallucinogenic landscape, and mediascape.

So, let's start with the first track of side 1, which is given the name, "Temporarily Humboldt County" for reasons I could not fathom. A quick hop over to the wikipedia entry for the album, however, reveals that, "the group had been told by friends in Humboldt County, California, that the local Indians added 'Temporarily' to the county's name as a way of saying no one could really own the land."

"Temporarily Humboldt County" is a parody of narratives that tell the story of the discovery of the New World, colonization, westward expansion, and our treatment of Native Americans. It's just over 9 minutes long, so here, take a listen:






As I recall, some time ago I was speaking to someone who was teaching a class on audio production, and he used this particular track as an example of what can be done with an acoustic medium and a radioplay format. No doubt, he also used it because it is relatively straightforward as a narrative.

Clearly, this recording also reflects the understanding, still not all that widely held in the 60s, about how Europeans treated the "Indians" (as they are are still officially referred to by the US government), and satirizes not only mainstream, but also the counterculture mythologies. Coming out of California, the Firesigns would have been much more attuned to both the stories of the wild west, and of the Spanish conquest, than us northeasterners.

Waiting seems to be a theme here, whether it's for the electrician referred to by the album title, or someone like him, or the "true white brother" the Indians are waiting for in "Temporarily Humboldt County" (and disappointed to discover it wasn't us). 

Perhaps the connection can be traced back to Waiting for Godot? Certainly, Firesign Theatre can be seen as heir to playwright Samuel Beckett's absurdism, creating sonic environments that place the listener at the center of the play, immersed in the action, spatially rather than sequentially in medias res. Orson Welles referred to radioplays as theater on the air, and the Firesigns also are part of that lineage, creating an acoustic theater of the absurd.

Waiting... what a concept! As much as we live in a temporal environment measured by nanoseconds, even picoseconds, as much as we eschew delayed gratification, as much as we want everything to be available on demand, it seems that waiting is as much a part of our lives as ever, and in some ways, due in large part to all of our technological innovations, more so than ever. It's like sports journalist Tim McCarver used to say when he was calling the New York Mets baseball games, nothing slows the game down more than speed.

Of Flip Sides and Firesigns

So, in my previous post, A Nick in Time for Firesign, I wrote about the significance of the passing of Phil Austin, the second of the four members of Firesign Theatre that we have lost over the past few years. And I wrote about Austin's most memorable character, Nick Danger, and included the audio recording of "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," which appeared on the second record album Firesign Theatre released, back in 1969.

I want to follow up on that post now, and note again that the Firesign Theatre produced comedy audio recordings that were entirely unique, not recordings of stand up routines like most other albums in that category, nor recordings of film and television soundtracks, a la most Monty Python albums. No, what they did, drawing on a background in radio, was to produce spoken word comedy that was multilayered, complex, and comparable to music.

Paul Heyer, drawing on Marshall McLuhan, has written about Orson Welles, and makes references to his media sense, the fact that Welles understood the nature of the particular medium he was working with, and utilized its biases to full effect, whether it was film (e.g., Citizen Kane, generally considered the greatest film ever made), or live theater, or radio, notably the notorious 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. And media sense is as good a way to characterize the Firesigns as any. They understood the concept of acoustic space, and were able to produce elaborate soundscapes that were so much more than simulating the experience of listening to performers up on a stage.

So, now, in that previous post, I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" was one of their most accessible recordings, as well as their most popular overall, which makes it a great way to introduce the group to anyone not familiar with them. And I explained that "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" took up all of side 2 of their second album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, and that there were a couple of references to the other side of the album.

Okay, so now, let's get to side 1 of the album, shall we? If you want to just go ahead and listen to it, here it is, right after the next paragraph. Actually this is the complete album, so once the first side concludes, the second side plays. And that does make it easy to connect the reference in "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" to the segment it specifically refers to on side 1. 

When I reviewed this clip, I noticed it was interrupted by commercials, something new on YouTube, and even less desirable than the other forms of advertising that can be tagged onto videos. The ads show up as yellow bands on the timeline at the bottom of the video, where the red area represents the portion of the video that you have passed and the gray what is yet to come. You can move the marker up and down to access different points on the video, and I found that if I go through the commercials one time, and then go back, the video plays straight through a second time. Since the interruptions ruin the effect of the recording, I recommend moving the marker to each of the ads ahead of time, so that once you've paid the piper, you can listen to the album uninterrupted, the way it was meant to be.







So, now, as I noted in my last post, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" is more mainstream, in being a single radioplay parody of an episode from an old time adventure series. The other side is more surreal, and also a better example of how their recordings are like music. It's divided into 6 or 7 tracks (depending on whether you go by the original record album or CD reissue), but the tracks are a fiction, not really being separated from one another. Instead, the side forms one long, hallucinogenic, well, trip I guess you could say. But for what it's worth, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on the album, and here's the track listings they had:

Side one

"How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All" – 28:27:

"Drink to Me Only with Thine Fox" (Mr. Catherwood and Ensemble) [CD retitle: "The Ralph Spoilsport Mantrum"] – 4:21

"The Policemen's Brawl" (Officers Bradshaw and Henderson) [CD retitle: "Zeno's Evil"] – 4:34

"Yankee Doodle Came to Terms" (All Fecal People's Chorus) [CD retitle: "The Land of the Pharaohs"] – 2:47

"Über Dubbing Over Alice" ('Arry 'N' Friends) [CD Track retitle: "VACANCY-NO VACANCY"] – 1:34

"You Ain't Got No Friends on the Left" (Babe and the Unknown Soldiers) [CD retitle: "The Lonesome American Choo-Choo Don' Wan' Stop Here Any Mo'"] – 7:34

""We're Bringing the War Back Home!" From Babes in Khaki" (Lilly Lamont*) (*Miss Lamont Courtesy of Paranoid Pictures) – 7:31 [split into 2 tracks on the CD, track titles below]:

"Babes in Khaki" – 3:53

"TV or Not TV" – 3:38

(This side of the vinyl LP was not divided into separate tracks, but the liner notes list the above titles and tracks.)


Side two

The Further Adventures of Nick Danger – 28:11

"From the Archives of the Original Firesign Theatre Radio Hour. As First Broadcast December 6, 1941. Rebroadcast Courtesy of Loostners Bros. Soap Co."

So, the album begins with a parody of a radio ad for a car dealer (the Firesigns started out doing radio in Los Angeles, after all), then slips into a customer being shown a car, buying it, and driving off. If you are new to this sort of listening experience, you have to be a little patient with it, because the next sequence is the one I would especially point to as a brilliant example of creating a sense of acoustic space, as the Firesigns generate the feel of driving down a highway via talk alone, by giving voice to the signs you would see as you pass them by. There is also a wonderful little bit involving Zeno's Paradox included in this segment. They then move into a bit of an Alice in Wonderland sequence that winds up taking us to the "Land of the Pharaohs," and a hotel, where we get a sequence involving patriotic song and a parody of American history straight out of the 50s. That brings us into a parody of an old war movie, set during the Second World War, which then turns out to be broadcast on television, so there's a bit of channel flipping, and a return to the car dealer commercial that somehow slips into the finale of James Joyce's Ulysses!

How's that for a recap? It is truly difficult to do the recording justice with any kind of summary, but I hope this helps to get a sense of it all across to you, if you have not listened to it yet. 

The first side actually does have a reference to side 2, towards the end, when the channel flipping briefly lands on some kind of crime drama, and a couple of guys are talking about how they hate cops, and one of them says he's going to get even with them, the punchline being that he's going to do so by turning in his badge. And the character saying that is named Nick, presumably the same Nick Danger who is the hero on side 2, before he became a private detective. So the album has self-reflexive moments where it acknowledges that it is an album on both side 1 and side 2.

And one last point. Again, in my previous post, I provided a bit of explanation about the significance of record albums having two sides, and I want to emphasize the importance of the concept of the side. I remember it being said that iTunes in some sense retrieved the single, which in the early days of rock and roll from the late 50s to the mid 60s was the format emphasized in popular music. But singles were not purchased as individual songs, but as little 45 rpm records, and you may be buying it for the song on the A side, but it also came with another song on the B side. And that was not the same thing as downloading one isolated song. B sides often held unexpected surprises, and delights. They were listened to.

Anyway, when the emphasis shifted to record albums, sometimes we'd just play one track on the album, but often we'd put the album on and let it play through. But that meant play through the one side. It was quite common to play a side, then rather than flip it over to the other, switch the record to another album, and just play one side from that record. That was how we experienced recordings. The fundamental unit was the side, not the song, and not the album. With CDs, the side as a unit disappeared, except as a notation in track listings.

And I want to point out that sides really were a good unit to use. A side was usually at least 15 minutes, and less than 30 minutes. As a unit of time, it felt just right. So while it was perfectly fine to listen to both sides of an album, a recording like How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere At All would often be heard as isolated sides. And if you were going to listen to the whole album at one sitting, you would have to get up after side 1 was over, and flip the album over to listen to side 2. You could not help but be aware of the side as a unit.









So, the side as a unit is something that has been lost, for all intents and purposes, with the transition from vinyl records to CDs and MP3s. And so has the idea of flipping the record, and with it, of flipping for the recording (or something or someone else), flipping out over the recording (or something or someone else), and of course, see ya on the flip side, flippity flip, and so, my friend flipper, over and out!

Keep Calm and Don't Panic

One of students in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University, Kevin Levin, brought this popular bit of internet culture to my attention, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I don't know how I missed it!

This came up in regard to our class discussion of memes, itself a concept made popular by the internet, so let me say a few words on that topic (and if you've heard me go on about this before, feel free to skip ahead).

As you may know, the concept of the meme was introduced by British scientist Richard Dawkins in his 1974 book, The Selfish Gene.  There, Dawkins made the novel argument that evolution is driven by genes rather than organisms, that genes are biological replicators, and organisms are mechanisms by which genes reproduce themselves. That reverses the more common view that genes are the mechanism by which organisms reproduce themselves. This view, I might add, while intriguing, has been solidly criticized and, in my view, disproved by the arguments put forth by Terrence Deacon in his recent book, Incomplete Nature.

In any event, Dawkins mostly was writing about genes, but also threw in a chapter on the concept of ideas having a life of their own, being in effect self-replicators. To follow his line of thought, the idea of memes spread from his thoughts to his book, and then reproduced itself when I read it, the copy or offspring of the idea taking up residence in my brain. And whenever I tell someone else about memes, assuming they haven't heard about it before, it's replicated itself once more, again and again and again.

This idea did not become popular, though, and therefore was not a terribly successful meme itself, until the internet. Once email became popular, and people started forwarding interesting items to a bunch of other people, and they in turn forwarded the item to still more, and so on and so on, all with the forwarding history accumulated within the email, so you can see how the message has spread, and maybe even have your item sent back to you after several forwards, only then could people actually see the spread of ideas at work and relate it to the concept of the meme.

At that point, folks starting talking about memetics as the science of memes, and also invoked the more familiar term for self-replicating genetic matter, the virus.  The idea of a computer virus became well known in the early days of the internet, as connectivity was the key to the spread of such malware (to use a newer, and less metaphorical term). The computer virus, however, was not simply a replicator, but rather a program that also carries out functions that are unwanted and harmful, like deleting your hard drive or transmitting  information from your computer to some other location. A program that does nothing more than replicating itself is called a worm, which, while not actively harmful, could crash systems by filling up all available memory and data storage capacity. But despite the fact that there is more to computer viruses than replication, the metaphor of the virus got picked up as an alternative to meme, especially in the adjective form of going viral, viral marketing, etc.

 

Now, as a media ecology scholar, I have to add that the concept of the meme, while popular, is problematic. In one sense, there is nothing new about studying the spread of ideas. There is a longstanding research area known as diffusion of innovations, sometime social diffusion, and it is closely related to ideas such as two-step flow theory in mass communication (the idea that ideas spread by the mass media do not directly influence the attitudes, opinions, and behaviors of individuals, but instead are mediated by influential individuals referred to as opinion leaders), by the sociological study of rumors, not to mention studies of folklore , and also research into social networking.

So there is nothing new about memes except for the biological metaphor, and the metaphor itself is problematic.  Genes are a logical construct, a way of talking about the behavior of actual genetic material, you know, chromosones, and those amazing double helix molecules of DNA. In other words, genes are not real, in the sense that DNA is real, which is to say that they are not concrete phenomena. The only sense in which genes can be said to exist is insofar as they are based on a material medium (in this case, the medium is the molecule), they don't exist in a vacuum, in the ether, as an ideal form as it were.

But when it comes to memes, as they were originally presented by Dawkins, and as the idea has been picked up by others, the material basis that is taken for granted in regard to genetics is either overlooked, forgotten, or simply thrown out of the window. So in memetics, the talk typically is of ideas having an existence independent of any physical phenomenon. This is where media ecology is essential, because we need to remember that there is no content without a medium. Indeed, we need the medium to begin with, to provide the raw material out of which to form the content.

Now, let me just pull back a little and say that this does not mean that nothing interesting has come from the discussion of memes. It can be useful, it's certainly a compelling metaphor, and I myself have used the term on occasion. But it needs to be used with caution, and understanding of the larger context.

A further complication has been the appearance of meme generators, which I assume are connected to the sudden rise of Pinterest in the social media world to a position only surpassed by Facebook and Twitter. Of course, Facebook itself also has a lot to do with it, so even if you're only on Facebook, you may have noticed an explosion of these visual images plus text, all very formulaic. For example, there's the still from the first Lord of the Rings film, where the original line in the movie was, "one does not simply walk into Mordor," and here are some generated memes:

You get the picture, I'm sure. And as for memes having a material basis, it's clear that these types are entirely based on the specific medium of personal computers and the internet, and would not exist in this way without them. The Keep Calm and Carry On meme has also existed in similar form, and well before the advent of meme generators, which after all simply make it easier and more accessible to do the kinds of things that folks have already been doing with Photoshop (and that has been made famous by sites like lolcats). So here are some variations on the the Keep Calm theme:

And on and on and on.  Now, when it comes to the study of rumors and folklore, one of the most fundamental, and interesting questions, is where did it begin? Who started the ball rolling? How did it spread? Well, in this instance, there is an answer, and it is quite fascinating, involving as it does an accidental find, a kind of revival, and the power of the internet. It's all explained in this video that my student Kevin turned me on to, that I want to share with you now, The Story of Keep Calm and Carry On:





And to be fair, here's the write-up from YouTube:

 To find out more about Barter Books visithttp://www.barterbooks.co.uk to download the 'Keep Calm' iphone app visit http://bit.ly/keepcalmapp

A short film that tells the story behind the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster. Its origins at the beginning of WWII and its rediscovery in a bookshop in England in 2000, becoming one of the iconic images of the 21st century. Film, music, script and narration by Temujin Doran. http://www.studiocanoe.com/index.php?... Concept and production by Nation. http://www.wearenation.co.uk/

Now, what I want to emphasize at this point is how very, very British this all is. Stiff upper lip, and all that. I mean, it sums up much of what is distinctive about English culture, the emphasis on rationality, determinism, sheer grit. Keep calm and carry on indeed! 

The downside is that it makes one a bit stiff, overly formal, and quite a bit repressed. That is the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stereotype, and while we here in the United States are not as extreme as the Brits, we do tend to share in that cultural trait, even if we're Catholic or Jewish, from varying ethnic backgrounds, and even non-white. You don't have to be a WASP to love this behavior pattern, but it is associated with affluence and being a member of the social elite, or trying to be part of that class. Personally, I admit to having some of that sensibility, and oft times wishing I had more, but I'm also grateful that I have the freedom to move back and forth between that type of behavior and other alternatives.

I should also note that the current fascination with Keep Calm and Carry On clearly involves a bit of irony. The propaganda value of the poster and saying are clear enough, and folks today cannot and would not take it as seriously as it would have been taken back during the Second World War. To take a page from Neil Postman, the poster originally had a bit of an Orwellian cast to it, but now is used in a Huxleyian mode, as an amusement. 

But it's not either/or, I hasten to add. Nowadays, we can have our cake and eat it to, be ironic and be ironic about being ironic, which is almost like being serious, except we're being serious while being ironic at the same time. It's nonlinear, non-Aristotelian, as Korzybski would have it, and what some would term postmodern. But media ecology scholars understand that to mean that it is a product of the electronic age.

So, anyway, after seeing that video, it hit me that the motto used by the science fiction humorist Douglas Adams for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Don't Panic, comes from the same sensibility.   If you're not familiar with the work, it started as a BBC radio program, then was turned into a series of novels, then into a TV miniseries (again BBC), and then adapted into a motion picture somewhat less than faithfully. The film is ok, but the novels and recordings are brilliant comedy, in my opinion. Sadly, Douglas Adams was taken from this world much too soon. 

In case you're not familiar with the Hitchhiker's Guide, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't be, I was pleasantly surprised to find over on YouTube the BBC television adaptation, so here is the first 9 minutes for your viewing pleasure. But if you're the impatient type, the bit about Don't Panic comes up during the first 2 minutes:





So yes, it's very British humor, and that was always very apparent, but I have to confess that the very British quality of the phrase Don't Panic simply never occurred to me until I watched the video about Keep Calm and Carry On.  Maybe I'm just a little slow on the uptake, maybe it's just that Don't Panic is more common to our shared Anglo-American culture than Keep Calm and Carry On? 

Or maybe there is something altogether universal about Don't Panic after all, as it never quite pays to lose your cool, at least not to that extent. But, on the other hand, there is something that seems to be unavoidably specific to Keep Calm and Carry On. Funny how much difference it makes to take similar sentiments and phrase them in negative and positive terms. To avoid the negative seems universal, to promote a positive comes across as particular.

Well, all this speculation is perhaps more than you care for, and maybe it's just me, but I won't worry about it. No, I think I will just keep calm, don't panic, and keep on carrying on...