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“Ballad of the Black Gold”
video by Sam Ellison (Ashley/Amber’s cinematographer!)
song by Reflection Eternal (Talib Kweli & DJ Hi-Tek)

From Jay Rosen’s “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press“:

1. The Church of the Savvy. This is my name for the actual belief system that prevails in political journalism. I’ve been keeping a kind of public notebook on it via my Twitter feed.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, “the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his or her observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy. This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.

2. The Quest for Innocence, which is the agenda (I say) the press must continually serve, even as it claims to serve no one’s agenda.

Innocence [is] a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved… The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade.

3. Regression to a Phony Mean, an especially dubious practice that is principally about self-protection.

Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

4. The View from Nowhere, the taking of which journalists associate with their claim to legitimacy.

Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for “vocal critic,” and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism. It can’t be that simple, that beautiful, that symmetrical… can it? Temptation says yes.

When you have an obligation to remain outside the arena, it is also tempting to feel above the partisans who are struggling within that arena. (But then where else are they going to struggle?) You learn the attractions of a view from nowhere. The daily gift of detachment keeps giving, until you’re almost “above” anyone who tries to get too political with you, or at least in the middle with the microphone between warring factions. There’s power in that; and where there’s power, there’s attraction.

5. He said, she said journalism, a formation I have been trying to bust up by pushing for more fact checking.

“He said, she said” journalism means…

– There’s a public dispute.
– The dispute makes news.
– No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
– The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
– The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

When these five conditions are met, the genre is in gear.

6. The sphere of deviance. The power to place certain people, causes and ideas within the deviant sphere is one of the most ideological things journalists ever do.

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible…

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate

skip ahead to around 1:12 if you are impatient.

[via InfectiousGreed]

Watch “Repeat Viewings”, a very impressive animation thesis by super talented Dan Ashwood. Seriously, watch it now. Sooooo good.

I met Bert over the internet. He had seen the casting call for Ashley/Amber and wanted to know if I needed any crew. I was a little reluctant because he was a complete stranger, but I had a good feeling about it. He turned out to be a total MVP on set— I don’t know how we could have gotten through production without him. On top of that, he’s an awesome guy.

Anyway, now Bert is fundraising for his own thesis, a low-budget horror film about a lake monster. He is shooting on 16mm, so all you film-lovers out there especially should really should look inside your hearts & wallets to support the art students trying to prove that real film is not a dying medium.

You can donate as little as $1 ($20 gets a DVD), and speaking from experience, small donations really make a difference on set! Think about all the media you watch for free on the internet— and all the people who make art out of love, maxing out their credit cards in the process. You get to enjoy it and not pay a penny. Well, here is an opportunity to make a tangible contribution. It is a good feeling!

Lake Horror – A 16mm Monster Film — Kickstarter

The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation is more highly valued than truth, beauty or thought.

While the severing of intellectual property rights from their creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says.

Chris Hedges: The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig

As a founding (now lapsed) member of Harvard Free Culture and a former employee of Creative Commons, these are some pretty hard truths, thoughts I’ve been harboring for over 3 years now but reluctant to state publicly. But perhaps as a result of working on my thesis film— by far my most substantial endeavor to date— combined with getting ready to graduate— meaning next year not only will I no longer have institutional/financial support for making art, but I will have to actually earn a living— that I feel like it’s time to come out about my growing ambivalence towards “free culture.”

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He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

The New Yorker

(For those of you fortunate enough to have missed it, he’s speaking about these 17 minutes of institutionally-sanctioned musical theater hell.)

I would have shot in Iraq if it had been possible. That’s kind of a joke, but we did get close, at times five kilometers from the border. Architecturally, Jordan is a very good match for war-torn Baghdad. Plus, the military equipment was available. A bonus I had not anticipated was the one million Iraqi refugees in Amman, a contingent of whom were actors. All of our extras were Iraqi actors. Two of them told me they had been prisoners of the Americans in Iraq, and now they were playing prisoners in the film. It was surreal — and a little uncomfortable — but they laughed and said they were happy to have the work.

Q&A: Kathryn Bigelow | Men’s Journal