Caucus and primary results be damned, you gotta love Dennis Kucinich.


From an sfgate.com article covering his Friday speech at UC Berkeley:

"We have people running for president who say they were fooled by George W. Bush,'' he told his backers in Berkeley. "What a recommendation. You're running for president, and you can be fooled by George Bush...''

...With national poll numbers in the low single digits, there isn't much Kucinich can say that will hurt him. As one of the more liberal members of Congress, he's making an all-out appeal to progressive voters.

Kucinich is calling for a national health care plan that eliminates the current profit-driven system. He wants the United States to pull out of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace and set up a universal education program that will provide everyone with a tuition-free college education.

He also promised to kill the Patriot Act, which he said "is placing our democracy at risk.''

"The administration is taking this country in a direction that's profoundly undemocratic,'' Kucinich said. "Americans are being lulled into a false sense of insecurity.''

Kucinich won't even listen to suggestions that it's time to bow to the apparently inevitable and give up his battle for the Democratic nomination.

"I'm electable if people vote for me,'' he said. "I'm electable if the people of California say I'm electable.''

The Democratic field already has been cut to five, but even if just two people are running, Kucinich will be one of them, he promised.

"I'm going all the way to the convention,'' he vowed.

The Friday Flythrough

The Suntory Times scene is just an example of what Bill is missing out on, I guess...obviously if Coppola really wanted us to know what the director was saying, subtitles would have been provided. But clearly Bill doesn't know what the hell is going on and just says his little "For relaxing times..." line pretty much the same way the whole time, when the director is going on and on about tension and passion. To Bill (and to us), perhaps, giving such treatment to this matter is silly, but it serves to demonstrate how divergent our perspectives are. Because obviously this wild director dude is dead serious about this sheeit.

Ok, now to the media and politics issue. I think that although the internet could have a polarizing affect on politics, the internet is such an enormously powerful medium...we have yet to even see a fraction of the discourse to come about its influence, so I would hesitate to jump to any conclusions. One positive aspect of the internet is its accessibility, which can be further expounded into an argument for the internet as a crucial instrument in our democracy--blogging is a good example of the kind of grassroots political discourse which the internet accomodates.

Of course, I would imagine that there are significant socio-economic divisions present when it comes to who has access to andd who is using the internet...

Interesting interview with a NYU media and culture expert, from the fine folks at Frontline, certainly germane to the topic of commercialism and the media. Since some of us are steeped in school work nowadays, I'll cut and paste a couple of the juicier bits:

Frontline: Give us a good sense of today's commercial imperative and how that's changed things from the past.

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, in a thoroughly commercialized environment, there is very little incentive to be careful of the sensibilities of particular segments of the audience. Thirty years ago, a certain kind of commercial approach to children would have been unthinkable. Thirty years ago, children's TV programs were, by our standards, largely laughable in how slow and elementary and often sentimental they were. People marvel at the miracle that is Mr. Rogers, because he is such an unusual kind of figure in today's media world. Once the commercial logic takes over, children are fair game along with everybody else.

I can give you a very dramatic example from the world of book publishing. Bantam Books was the second mass market paperback company to be formed in the United States just after World War II, and it was conceived deliberately with large masses of young readers in mind. Books like The Grapes of Wrath, Shakespeare's Greatest Comedies, Jane Eyre, sold for 25 cents with the aim of making sure that young people who weren't rich could get hold of really good books. And it did very well.

Well, by now Bantam Books is part of the Bertelsmann empire, which is the largest book publisher in the world, a commercial entity based in Germany that dominates the American publishing landscape. A couple of years ago, Bantam came out with the Barfarama series for young male readers 12 to 15 with titles like Dog-Doo Afternoon and The Great Puke-Off. These are all brainlessly scatological books that were packaged just to make a buck. Now some of the people who do them claim, "Oh, at least we're getting young people reading." That's a very disingenuous thing to say. This is going deliberately and systematically for the lowest common denominator, and the logic there is purely commercial. It has nothing to do with literary quality or with introducing the joys of reading to the young.

The same kind of callousness, the same kind thoughtlessness, the same disregard for propriety and the same uninterest in what kids really need and like dominates throughout the culture industries. If you watch Saturday morning kids' TV, you can see it in programming that is unrelievedly frantic, hyped-up, hysterical, and, in its own way, quite violent and pervasively commercial. It's all about selling, and this, I think, is the primary reason why there is something of a crisis nowadays, a cultural crisis involving children. It is not because there are fugitives from the 1960s generation who are in control of the media. It's not a communist plot. It's not because bad people are involved in those industries. It's because of the inordinate influence of commercial logic and the commercial imperative overall.

What is happening to advertising, and why?

For one thing, it has to do with the fact that we're all far more jaded about advertising than we used to be--more cynical about certain kinds of utopian claims. It also has to do with an increasing desperation on the part of the advertisers to break through the "clutter," as they put it. So they tend to do things that are more outrageous than anything they would have tried 30 years ago. There are other factors at work here, but what it all comes down to is that this all-pervasive commercial propaganda, which sells not only countless products but a whole view of life, has itself become much nastier since, I'd say, the mid-1970s. The utopian element has gone out of advertising, and now it tends to be a celebration of the worst kinds of values.

At some point, that kind of advertising began to be directly pointed to teenagers. When did that happen, and why, and what has been the result?

Teenagers have been a pretty desirable market for quite some time. In a way, teenagers were an important mass market in the 1940s and 1950s, although that whole subculture, that whole market was a controversial one, because rock 'n roll stood in a certain disrepute. The 1960s and the early 1970s were an interesting time, because the youth culture was kind of a non-commercial development. It had certain commercial pay-offs, obviously, but it formed more or less spontaneously, and it was not TV-centered. TV was pretty much irrelevant to the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Well, what happened since then is that youth culture has tended more and more to be defined by the mass media. You no longer get so much of a sense of the advertisers and the media struggling to keep up with developments that are out in the streets. More and more, you get the sense that the youth culture and the youth market for the most part are indistinguishable, which has meant that things like fashion are far more important than they used to be. And this has much to do with the rise of rock videos, for example.

The youth market today may be called the avant-garde of the consumer culture, if you see what I mean. There's an awful lot of money there, and kids don't tend to have many of the same inhibitions or cherish the same notions as their elders do. So that there's more at stake in trying to be on the cutting edge where kids will appreciate what you're doing, if you see what I mean.

So there's often a kind of official and systematic rebelliousness that's reflected in media products pitched at kids. It's part of the official rock video worldview. It's part of the official advertising worldview that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor. That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero of consumer culture. That's the coolest entity of all, and yet they are very busily selling the illusion that they are there to liberate the youth, to let them be free, to let them be themselves, to let them think different, and so on. But it's really just an enormous sales job.

What is it like for kids to grow up in this wall-to-wall media environment and the lowering of standards?
Democracy is based on the assumption that we are able and obliged to make up our own minds to pursue our own interests, to honor our own talents. Democracy requires that we always be able to keep at least one foot outside of whatever propaganda may come along. One of the frightening things about the so-called totalitarian systems is that that governments in those cases were all-powerful and could, as it were, seal off their entire populations through the use of propaganda and indoctrination.

Well, advertising and the highly commercialized mass media that we live with today do something comparable. They may not necessarily exalt the state above all, although they do tend to celebrate violence, and they may be more about selling than conquest or anything like that. But the fact is that that commercial propaganda also strives to be everywhere and contain all of our impulses.

Now, I think we have to appreciate the enormous difference between life for young people and life for young people a few decades back. Now kids grow up in a universe that is utterly suffused with this kind of commercial propaganda. And by that, I mean not only the ads per se, but the shows that sell the ads. What this system does is it closely studies the young, keeps them under very tight surveillance to figure out what will push their buttons. Then it takes that and blares it back at them relentlessly and everywhere, because these are interests with a tremendous amount of power and technological sophistication.

And these are kids who are, to an unprecedented extent, hooked in through their gimmicks, their toys, their computers, and so on. So there's really very little space that these giant interests can't completely fill up with this kind of message. The bombardment is amazing. It's hard, therefore, to keep that kind of crucial distance. It's hard to be critical. It's hard to think about what might be going on at the top, especially if the media doesn't tell you. It's hard to figure out who you are and what you really want. It's hard to make your own music because that thing is always there listening, watching, taking notes, and packaging something so that it can sell you more stuff.


Ok, that was a little more than I had anticipated posting, but the interview really is pretty compelling. Here's the link to the entire shhbang. IM me if you read it and tell me what you think.

Ok I dunno who all saw Lost In Translation, but this scene bugged the hell out of me because I wanted to know what the hell the director dude was saying. I've been thinking about this movie quite a bit and although I still don't think it was all that good, it did make me want to go to Japan.


This from a blog called RowBoat. The original nytimes articles is now archived and you have to pay...

...

The New York Times has posted a translation of one of the key scenes in Sofia Coppola's brilliant film "Lost in Translation" which is entirely in japanese, without subtitles.

The scene is brilliant, and seeing this translation in hindsight makes it even more so.

TRANSLATED DIALOG FROM THE MOVIE 'Lost in translation' (from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/fashion/21LOST.html)

Bob, who is in town to make a whiskey commercial, doesn't speak Japanese. His director (Yutaka Tadokoro), a histrionic Japanese hipster, doesn't speak English. In one scene, Bob goes on the set and tries to understand the director through a demure interpreter (Akiko Takeshita), who is either unable or (more likely) unwilling to translate everything the director is rattling on about.

Needless to say, Bob is lost. And without subtitles, so is the audience. Here, translated into English, is what the fulmination is really about.

DIRECTOR (in Japanese to the interpreter): The translation is very important, O.K.? The translation.

INTERPRETER: Yes, of course. I understand.

DIRECTOR: Mr. Bob-san. You are sitting quietly in your study. And then there is a bottle of Suntory whiskey on top of the table. You understand, right? With wholehearted feeling, slowly, look at the camera, tenderly, and as if you are meeting old friends, say the words. As if you are Bogie in "Casablanca," saying, "Cheers to you guys," Suntory time!

INTERPRETER: He wants you to turn, look in camera. O.K.?

BOB: That's all he said?

INTERPRETER: Yes, turn to camera.

BOB: Does he want me to, to turn from the right or turn from the left?

INTERPRETER (in very formal Japanese to the director): He has prepared and is ready. And he wants to know, when the camera rolls, would you prefer that he turn to the left, or would you prefer that he turn to the right? And that is the kind of thing he would like to know, if you don't mind.

DIRECTOR (very brusquely, and in much more colloquial Japanese): Either way is fine. That kind of thing doesn't matter. We don't have time, Bob-san, O.K.? You need to hurry. Raise the tension. Look at the camera. Slowly, with passion. It's passion that we want. Do you understand?

INTERPRETER (In English, to Bob): Right side. And, uh, with intensity.

BOB: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.

DIRECTOR: What you are talking about is not just whiskey, you know. Do you understand? It's like you are meeting old friends. Softly, tenderly. Gently. Let your feelings boil up. Tension is important! Don't forget.

INTERPRETER (in English, to Bob): Like an old friend, and into the camera.

BOB: O.K.

DIRECTOR: You understand? You love whiskey. It's Suntory time! O.K.?

BOB: O.K.

DIRECTOR: O.K.? O.K., let's roll. Start.

BOB: For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.

DIRECTOR: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! (Then in a very male form of Japanese, like a father speaking to a wayward child) Don't try to fool me. Don't pretend you don't understand. Do you even understand what we are trying to do? Suntory is very exclusive. The sound of the words is important. It's an expensive drink. This is No. 1. Now do it again, and you have to feel that this is exclusive. O.K.? This is not an everyday whiskey you know.

INTERPRETER: Could you do it slower and?

DIRECTOR: With more ecstatic emotion.

INTERPRETER: More intensity.

DIRECTOR (in English): Suntory time! Roll.

BOB: For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.

DIRECTOR: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! God, I'm begging you.

Damn, reading shit like this reminds me that there's a lot of shit to be cleaned up after the Bush administration leaves. My cousin Sharon forwarded this e-mail to me--

President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr. W. David Hager to
head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health
Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met for more than two
years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a result, the Bush
Administration is tasked with filling all eleven positions with new
members. This position does not require Congressional approval.

The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial
decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of
obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone
therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical
alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization and pregnancy
termination.

Dr. Hager's views of reproductive health care are far outside the
mainstream for reproductive technology. Dr. Hager is a practicing
OB/GYN who describes himself as "pro-life" and refuses to prescribe
contraceptives to unmarried women. Hager is the author of "As Jesus
Cared for Women: Restoring omen Then and Now." The book blends biblical
accounts of Christ healing women with case studies from Hager's
practice.

In the book Dr. Hager wrote with his wife, entitled "Stress and the
Woman's Body," he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual
syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying. As an
editor and contributing author of "The Reproduction Revolution: A
Christian Appraisal of Sexuality Reproductive Technologies and the
Family," Dr. Hager appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate
assertion that the common birth control pill is an abortifacient.

Hager's mission is religiously motivated. He has an ardent interest in
revoking approval for mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486) as a safe
and early form of medical abortion. Hagar recently assisted the
Christian Medical Association in a "citizen's petition" which calls upon
the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone in the name of women's
health.

Hager's desire to overturn mifepristone's approval on religious grounds
rather than scientific merit would halt the development of mifepristone
as a treatment for numerous medical conditions disproportionately
affecting women, including breast cancer, uterine cancer, uterine
fibroid tumors, psychotic depression, bipolar depression and Cushing's
syndrome.

Women rely on the FDA to ensure their access to safe and effective drugs
for reproductive health care including products that prevent pregnancy.
For some women, such as those with certain types of diabetes and those
undergoing treatment for cancer, pregnancy can be a life-threatening
condition. We are concerned that Dr. Hager's strong religious beliefs
may color his assessment of technologies that are necessary to protect
women's lives or to preserve and promote women's health.

Hager's track record of using religious beliefs to guide his medical
decision-making makes him a dangerous and inappropriate candidate to
serve as chair of this committee. Critical drug public policy and
research must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics. Members of
this important panel should be appointed on the basis of science and
medicine, rather than politics and religion. American women deserve no
less.

Ok, Democratic voters in 7 states will be having their say in which of their party's candidates will go up against Bush in November. An interesting poll by Gallup/CNN/USA Today had Kerry leading Bush by 7 points if the election were held today. The same poll had Edwards over Bush by 1 pt, and Bush over Clark and Dean by 3 and 7 points, respectively. While I think the poll is good news for those of us inclined to favor the Democrats, I don't think it's very indicative of what will actually happen. Bush hasn't even really started campaigning yet and he's got a ton of money to work with, so when he starts swinging, look out.

Polls are pretty much a snapshot of how America is thinking at any given instance, so although number geeks like me might like them, they should be taken with a grain of salt. Momentum is often overemphasized in polls; the 'flavor of the week' phenomenon tends to skew things. The Democrats have been getting a lot of media attention as of late, which may explain Kerry and Edwards' lead over Bush.

Ah, looks like I have some catching up to do... First to respond to some old posts:

Regarding the space plan: I agree that space exploration is important and I don't think that anyone would really argue against increased funding to NASA with an argument other than that helping this program will hurt other (presumably, more important) programs. The government spends its budget on a lot of things that are way stupider than NASA so dissenters should argue against making more nukes or going into costly wars if they want to talk about the budget. I don't mind giving more money to NASA, which takes up about 1% of the federal budget right now. I do mind if Bush is hoping to work towards something idiotic like the Star Wars program. The problem is that this moon and Mars plan will cost a lot of money, probably a lot more than the billion or two Bush is planning on throwing to NASA. So this thing needs to be thought out more carefully, which should lead any reasonable person to seek international help. The concept of a space race is silly; the U.S. needs to set aside their ego and be willing to work with other countries on something that will hold great rewards for humankind.

Regarding Tadano: Like the article mentioned, Tadano will probably get most of his shit from the fans who don't have the "I play in a hyper-masculine and testosterone-filled environment" excuse to hide behind (that's exactly what it is: a poor excuse). God knows that baseball players slap enough male asses everyday; Tadano ain't gonna up the count by THAT much.

Regarding the Presidential race: Dean, Kerry, honestly I don't care. As long as it isn't Bush for another term.