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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 23, 2024 20:39:41 GMT -5
Followed (eventually) by Hamlet's "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room. Mother, good night."
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 23, 2024 18:38:33 GMT -5
"Act as though" is crucial to much civilized (and moral) behavior--operationally, we can get along if we act like civilized, decent people, no matter what lurks in our hearts. It's the same kind of principle that's behind "equal before the law"--with a handful of status exceptions (children, the mentally impaired) and mitigating conditions, the law's the same for all of us. It's also part of the great theological divide between faith and works and the reason our mothers taught us manners and maybe behind Hamlet's advice to Polonius on offering hospitality to the players--
POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
HAMLET: God’s bodykins, man, much better! Use every man after his desert and who shall ’scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.
(Happy birthday, Willie!)
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 23, 2024 15:18:47 GMT -5
We celebrated Shakespeare's birthday (a high holiday in this household) by taking C. to the ER--not for anything dire, but to make sure that her lousy upper-respiratory infection (AKA "bad cold") wasn't something more serious. This was on the advice of the CentraCare telemedicine nurse and thanks, I suspect, to a protocol designed to minimize exposure to litigation as well as to more completely eliminate the worst possibilities. Her regular doctor is, of course, completely booked up, and the vibe from the nurse was that the Urgent Care clinic would be sub-optimal. It's nice to have a round of tests (including chest X-ray, EKG, and triple respiratory-virus swab, followed by a session with the ER doc) confirm that it's a more or less normal respiratory virus, but the time-effort-resources overhead is significantly greater than it was in the old see-your-doctor days. On the other hand, 78-year-olds with a history of bronchitis maybe do need to be cautious. (But do I wonder how long it took for someone in authority to look at her history.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 21, 2024 11:58:06 GMT -5
The bad news is that C has a miserable headcold. The good news is that it isn't Covid (again). I insisted on testing her, since if she had it, I almost certainly did and would be contagious even if not symptomatic, and I've worked and attended two concerts this weekend and have one more to go. No desire to be Covid Mary.
There are a bunch of not-Covid respiratory viruses loose, and students at all levels are very effective transmitters of all of them. One irony: C's students can find all manner of excuses, many of them health related, for not coming to class--and nevertheless some of them come to class sick and pass on whatever they have. (Personally, my favorite please-excuse-my-absence line was "I have a court date." Not as dramatic as "I have to meet my parole officer," but a bit chilling nevertheless.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 20, 2024 13:03:45 GMT -5
From one of my favorite Mike Dowling albums:
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 20, 2024 10:49:52 GMT -5
Full of the musical (and physical) gestures familiar from the little-girl-singer-songwriter-performance-artist genre. Heavily processed upper-register vocals, trancey-dancey beat, kid-angsty lyric (what I could make out, anyway). Kind of Taylor Swift without the glam. Of course, this is a reaction based on a single sample.
The Pharrel Williams' tune is dancier--maybe because it's more strongly rooted in actual dance music. The lyrics are just another way of nailing down the beat. (I mean, how profound are the words of "What'd I Say"?)
[Short pause to look at review linked by James.]
After a look at the concert photos, I take back the "glam" remark. I suppose the next stage is multiple costume changes.
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NPR
Apr 19, 2024 11:52:57 GMT -5
Dub likes this
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 19, 2024 11:52:57 GMT -5
John, how many sources do I need to attend to before I'm cleared of living in a bubble or an echo chamber? FWIW, I take a lot of Rachel Maddow with a pinch of salt*, and I follow up comment threads precisely to get a sense of what people-who-aren't-me make of a given story or op-ed. For me, one crucial element in any analysis/commentary piece is how easy it is to follow up on assertions and vet evidence. That's why I found Inskeep's piece useful--he is specific and he shows at least some of his work. As does Erik Wemple in today's WaPo, where the focus is on one segment of Berliner's piece, the treatment of "Russiagate"-- www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/18/npr-russia-coverage-berliner/I've also quickly worked my way through part of the (currently 1800+) comments to see what counterpoints or omissions readers see in Wemple's analysis. One odd and interesting motif (which I've noticed in other comment threads) is posters who claim to be liberal and find NPR not liberal enough--right next to the expected NPR-is-a-leftist-opinion-mill comments. (That alone tells me something about the difficulty of locating the precise political position of a media outlet.) Let me be precise (again) about what I see in Berliner's essay. He makes two kinds of complaints and links them in a familiar way. One is that NPR's internal governance has become dominated by "progressive" intellectual-cultural concerns and protocols (the kind currently gathered under rubrics like "DEI" or, more scornfully, "woke"). The other is that, as a result of this progressive environment, the institution's protocols, attitudes, and finally work product have become unreliable, skewed, and partisan. The argument is a familiar one: an institution drifts into or is taken over by leftist viewpoints, resulting in various kinds of dysfunction. It is not unreasonable to start an examination of Berliner's critique at the work product end, and that is where Inskeep and Wemple start. Then there's the trickier bit, the insider's view of the institutional culture that has supposedly ruined NPR as a trustworthy news organization. Much of Berliner's picture of policies and managerial attitudes is familiar to me from my half-century inside the university. A public-radio version of this comes from former-NPR producer/editor Alicia Montgomery piece in Slate: slate.com/business/2024/04/npr-diversity-public-broadcasting-radio.htmlMontgomery's take is particularly useful because her role was producer/editor, which means she can supply detailed and specific accounts of how various sausages got made. I also find her take on the touchiness of race-related stories and issues useful. And her take on the "core editorial problem at NPR" strikes me as on the money: an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity. That would more than explain the lack of follow-up on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the lab-leak theory, going full white guilt after George Floyd’s murder, and shifting to indignant white impatience with racial justice now. And I find myself especially resonating with her closing paragraph: I guess that’s why I think Uri is most wrong about NPR’s relationship with the rest of the country. It’s a very accurate reflection of America right now, a place where people won’t admit that good intentions don’t always yield good results, and would rather hide behind the myth of its excellence than do the hard work of making it a reality. Neither NPR nor universities are perfect institutions. Good intentions are easy. Good analysis is hard. And good results are very hard. * It's not that hard to see where one of her conclusions goes farther than the evidence she presents.
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NPR
Apr 18, 2024 16:53:28 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 18, 2024 16:53:28 GMT -5
Obviously Berliner made the internet debating error of creating a list with a weak point or two. <snip> If you think the preponderance of the way NPR has presented the stories that Berlniner is criticizing aren't just as biased as Berliner characterizes them , then I suggest you either aren't listening to NPR, or you are a fish who never even considered that the medium you live in is water. Does "a weak point or two" mean Inskeep's specific rebuttals of three of Berliner's major examples of flawed or biased NPR coverage? (I count eight that would be bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation.*) What I see Inskeep pointing to is Berliner's failure to back large claims with sufficient evidence--and where there is evidence, to say that it's badly flawed or erroneous (the Latinx claim, for example). I followed some of these stories as they were covered by NPR, BBC, MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, NYTimes, AP, Forbes, the Guardian, and whatever other sources seemed to have decent sourcing and presentation, and I don't recall seeing the kind of bias Berliner insists exists. (No, I don't watch Fox or read the NY Post--they're beyond "both sides.") Fish might not know what they're breathing, but I'm not a fish. * number of Adam Schiff interviews Mueller Report Hunter Biden laptop COVID virus source Don't Say Gay bill Latinx registered voter numbers in newsroom (in 2021) Gaza coverage/minimizing antisemitism
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NPR
Apr 18, 2024 13:10:14 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 18, 2024 13:10:14 GMT -5
Just a word or two from a word specialist. Wonkette isn't journalism in the straight-news sense--it's a political blog, and explicitly dedicated, right up front, to being "filthy, hilarious, [and] liberal." We've been warned. (And if that isn't enough, the copyright notice is for Commie Girl Industries Inc. For the irony-impaired, that's pretty clearly a joke.)
Now, it isn't quite the kind of current-events satire as, say, The Onion or The Borowitz Report, because behind the often-sophomoric language there is actual analysis/commentary that can be followed up on. That is one of the traits I value in op-ed/analysis: claims that I can check, arguments that I can track and vet, sources and evidence I can validate. This does put Wonkette in the journalism department, broadly considered. The same taxonomic principles that allow, say, the National Review or the WSJ op-ed pages to be journalism. Manners don't come into it; process does.
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NPR
Apr 18, 2024 11:17:47 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 18, 2024 11:17:47 GMT -5
A WaPo piece that incorporates more pieces of the extended conversation: www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/04/17/uri-berliner-npr-free-press-bari-weiss/ Included in it are a number of detailed reactions and analyses, including a link to Steve Inskeep's fairly detailed reading, in which he says he shows his work. steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-failed-at-viewpointInskeep's take is that Berliner's "story is written in a way that is probably satisfying to the people who already believe it, and unpersuasive to anyone else—a mirror image of his critique of NPR." I had a similar reaction on my initial read-through, though I didn't articulate it that way to myself. (If I had, it probably would have been "preaching to the choir," the choir being the Free Press management and audience.) The crucial parts of Berliner's journalistic indictment are under-sourced and impressionistic rather than precise and specific--and they echo a number of attitudes and assumptions found in the comment threads on both the WaPo and Inskeep pieces. The WaPo thread in particular has a bunch of commenters who find NPR either center-right or plain-old-right. If it's possible to locate an institution's actual ideological position from where the vectors of its critics' complaints cross, NPR must be fairly centrist. Or maybe just 21st-century-bourgeois-liberal, whatever that turns out to be.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 18, 2024 0:02:18 GMT -5
I'm not going to track the entire Wonkette piece now (other tasks beckon), but if we subtract the snarkiness (which is, to be honest, a lot of the appeal), there remain counter-assertions that match my recollections of coverage of various stories by NPR. It's one thing to kvetch about guilty-liberal programs and sentiments inside the organization, but another to claim that the entire NPR environment has been compromised by liberal groupthink.
And call it questioning the source, but seeing Christopher Rufo's name sets off alarms. As it should, since Rufo not only runs ideological propaganda/attack campaigns, he provides color commentary on them while they're in progress. It's almost as though he's marketing his propaganda chops while exercising them. "We are driving the narrative," he says.
In other comments on other matters, Rufo has made it clear that what he does best is branding--though maybe "demonizing" is more accurate. For example, of critical race theory, he Tweeted (3/15/21):
He is up-front and unembarrassed by his work--though he does make a point of calling himself a journalist, rather than a propagandist or polticial operative. But, as my father used to say, "The truth is not in him."
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 17, 2024 16:26:36 GMT -5
I have a copy of Tin Cup--in fact, I think I have all of Steve's recordings, plus two of his guitars.
I notice that while his YouTube channel is still up, his websites (cloutier.org and frogworks.org) seem to have vanished.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 16, 2024 12:43:01 GMT -5
I know Mancini did a lot of great work and deserved all the accolades but… The Monday Night Jazz on Thursday group closes every weekly set with this: I suppose that orchestration is "easy listening," but when you listen to the details, it ain't so easy to replicate the feel. At least, I haven't quite managed in the six years I've been trying to make it work to my satisfaction.
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NPR
Apr 16, 2024 11:22:12 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 16, 2024 11:22:12 GMT -5
I should reread Berliner's piece to really nail this down, but my recollection is that it makes two sets of claims: that NPR's coverage (both in stories chosen and angles taken) skews disproportionately "left" or "progressive"; and that especially since Trump's entry into poltics and events such as the murder of George Floyd, the organization's hiring and internal personnel practices have skewed in the direction of "woke." And it's pretty clear that he sees a connection--which is also the view taken by the majority of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. Whatever one thinks of hiring/staff-training policies at NPR (or in universities or corporations), the proof of the journalistic pudding* is in the "news product" itself, and Dan Kennedy's analysis suggests that some of Berliner's claims about actual coverage are not to be taken as gospel. And as someone who listens to NPR and BBC and reads range of reporting and analysis, my immediate reaction to Berliner's list of NPR reporting failures was, "Really? That's not how I remember it." * BTW, if the proof is in the pudding, what is it proof of? See www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/proof-of-the-pudding.html
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 15, 2024 12:02:02 GMT -5
B) How much a country supports the arts isn't indicated by those numbers that the NEA provided. How much Americans support the arts is measured by the number of self-supporting artist we have relative to the rest of those countries. If by THAT measure you prove that we are yet again inferior (as we are with health care and climate awareness and gender sensitivity ... as we appear to be by every other woke measure under the sun) then perhaps we are due the scolding. I suppose "scolding" is a matter of reception--the vibe I get from that NEA document is mostly explanatory, though obviously with an eye toward advocacy. One of the through-lines is that organized arts support in the US is decentralized (the point of the opening pie chart). In any case, the document is from 2012, so linking it to current hot issues (particularly anything "woke") is a bit of a reach. Now about that "open market by which most artist/craftsmen are thriving" from the original post. The two areas I know well are literature and music, and while there are certainly practitioners in both who thrive and more, there are overwhelmingly more for whom the day job (or the spouse who has one) is the only way to avoid poverty and/or have medical insurance. Without CMAB grant money, the Folk Society would not be able to mount a 19-concert season. In fact, without grant support, there would be no acoustic music in St. Cloud beyond tip-jar or play-for-food gigs. (In pre-grant days, concert overhead was carried by the music-loving venue owner and artist pay was entirely from ticket sales. Now we offer decent guarantees and maintain a cushion for concerts that don't break even.) The local Chamber Music Society operates on a similar model, though with much more expensive artists and a correspondingly bigger budget and array of public and private funders. On the literary end, I can guarantee that just about nobody makes a living writing short fiction (as for poetry, it is to laugh), and even producing "commercial" novels is unlikely to generate a living wage.* I'm not a big believer in public support for individual writers, but the free market is no friend to the scribbler. Gainful employment that offers a bit of space for writing--or even subsidizes it, as some universities do by hiring writers to teach in MFA programs--is about as good a deal as most writers can expect. And despite the number of self-publishing writers who claim to have made decent (or even big) money, I can guarantee that most of them are doing about as well as poets, financially. And the ones who claim to have built writing careers are spending at least as much time in marketing and other functions once carried out by the publisher as they do in writing. Being an indie novelist means also being an indie agent, editor, proofreader, and designer--or contracting out those functions, which reduces income. * We've been tracking this for a good 40 years and are personally acquainted with a number of professionals. C never counseled her students to expect to make a living writing fiction.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 14, 2024 21:29:56 GMT -5
I can't say much about academic arts grants, since what I see* are entirely state/federal (Minnesota state-wide and regional and NEA/NEH), plus private foundation and corporate programs. If fact, aside from artist-in-residence situations (which are basically faculty appointments for artists, often short-term), I don't recall any university-based direct-to-artist funding--though there are various kinds of programmatic support (concert/drama series, museum/gallery shows, speakers). And just in case I'd missed something, I looked at the NEA's How the US Funds the Arts and found no mention of university-based funding of the kind done by arts councils and foundations. www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/how-the-us-funds-the-arts.pdfWhich doesn't mean that the attitudes common in university environments aren't also found in the official arts-funding world. But then, those values (and anxieties) have spread across much of our public-policy/social-attitudes space. When I fill out the application for the Granite City Folk Society community arts support grant (administered by the Central Minnesota Arts Board), there are sets of questions about what demographic segments we serve--ethnicity, age, (dis)ability status. These are in a part of the application form marked as informational and not used to affect the award--nor does the GCFS membership and target audience profile (old and white) seem to affect our success--we have gotten full (modest) funding over the 14 years I've been writing the grants. I suspect the most important factors in our success are our modest needs (all volunteer, nearly no overhead, no paid staff) and the fact that 75-80% of what comes in goes back out to the artists we book. Of course, GCFS is one data point, and I know that elsewhere there are grant applications that make appeals based on X or Y identity group or cause, and that there are private philanthropic foundations that focus explicitly on under-represented groups. And a few years ago, the Bush Foundation turned away from arts funding altogether in favor of social-action causes. But then, it's their money, not yours or mine. (Both Bush and McKnight Foundation money came from 3M-based fortunes.) It's probably worth discussing the virtues of individual-artist vs. institutional support from public funds, but even institutional grants wind up supporting individual practitioners and support people--and even non-artists, like venue owners or caterers or stage-hands or equipment-renters. And I wonder about the problem of art practices that require serious capital investment. How much does it cost to set up a kiln? * I do the seeing through C's grant-applications efforts and my own grant writing for the Granite City Folk Society.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 14, 2024 11:49:19 GMT -5
This is a topic worth unpicking--which is to say, it's actually a family of topics, some of which are mostly about the "arts" proper (and the reasons for those scare quotes are part of that discussion), some are about economics, and some about the role of public policy/politics/private action.
I don't have time to do all of that unpicking right now--I have to get ready to spend several hours making "art" at a jam hosted by a for-profit enterprise (a tap house) for no money. But the subtopics I would unpick include how and to whom public money is distributed and how qualifications for and the benefits of that distribution are measured. Some of these questions are not unlike those asked of other public activities and institutions--schools and libraries, for example. Then there's the history of the economics of artistic production and consumption (to use some bloodless and rather reductive terminology), which needs to parallel examination of the role of "art" in general.
But playing starts in just over an hour, and my guitar and banjo aren't going to tune themselves. So more later.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 12, 2024 19:04:57 GMT -5
I have a lot of ancestors from the 17th century. No idea who they were or where they lived, but I'm sure were some because, well, here I am.
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NPR
Apr 11, 2024 12:12:14 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2024 12:12:14 GMT -5
Dan Kennedy's take is interesting and useful because it is a point-by-point examination of specific claims and it (as we used to have to do with math problems) shows its work. Which doesn't mean that Kennedy's take is 100% right, only that it can be field-stripped and checked for accuracy and rigor. That is what I value in analysis/commentary/op-ed writing. Emotive language and snarkiness are optional ("Fox News, Murdoch’s 800-pound gorilla, reported took a pass on it"), but they're not required. One does like a little sauce with the dry stuff of precise examination, though.
BTW and TBH, I do resonate with big chunks of Berliner's complaints about the internal NPR environment, since it resembles the parts of the university environment that have gotten even more liberal-guilty-sentimentally-righteous in the last few years.
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NPR
Apr 11, 2024 11:48:47 GMT -5
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 11, 2024 11:48:47 GMT -5
Then why, in the context of this discussion, bring into question the source if not to tie the article to it and thereby discredit the article? Not to beat this to death, but The Free Press is expressly an outlet for journalists who believe that other outlets are biased or otherwise compromised, and founder Bari Weiss is pretty famously an "Intellectual Dark Web"* contrarian. I also suspect, from her work history, that she does not much like being an employee or subordinate, which has led her to devising her own platforms and being her own boss. And there's nothing wrong with that--it's as American as pizza. (Sorry-not-sorry if that sounds flippant. I'd rather make bad jokes than get all wound up over stuff that I can't control.) So to repeat my point: The Free Press is not the first place I'd go for disinterested analysis, but I don't dismiss Berliner's account of his workplace because of the venue he chose to publish it. Nor does that venue validate it. * For an interesting take on that, see Jonah Goldberg's NatRev piece: www.nationalreview.com/corner/intellectual-dark-web-bari-weiss/And Weiss's own take: www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html
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