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Everyone's becoming the media | Aug 18, 2005 10:15
Morning Report devoted a remarkable amount of time today to discussion of Labour's and National's first official campaign ads for television. Everyone seems to think National's Taxathon ad is done in the style of South Park. DPF says he loves the "South Park style characters" and KeepLeft, is claiming that "last night came the best proof yet of our growing influence. The National Party has stolen our animated Don Brash for their taxpayer funded television advertising."
Without wishing to sound too much like an animation geek, the style of National's ad (online here) is not (unlike KeepLeft's) that of South Park but quite clearly that of Jibjab. Anyway, the ad is cleverly produced and clearly already has word of mouth, but perhaps National is taking a risk in depicting its leader as a puppet. I can't venture on the Labour one because it doesn't seem to be online and I took a break from TV last night.
Hey, look how fancy Scoop's getting! The video ads are very clever indeed, and the multiple formats are most welcome.
And Three Point Turn has pitched into the election advertising satire game with efforts for Labour and National whose slightly primitive production values are more than compensated for by the fact that they're actually quite good.
Woo! Looks like everyone's becoming the media.
Fighting Talk's Kelly Pendergrast spots an inspired alteration of an Act party billboard. I think even the victim - Rodney - would find that funny.
KeepLeft has another weekly round of awards recognising foolishness in the local blogosphere. Might I suggest a regular special award for unintentionally humorous pomposity? I think it would be keenly contested.
Brilliant satire in The Onion: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With Intelligent Falling Theory:
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Synthetic Thoughts correctly interprets my comments yesterday re the release of the Lange speech to mean "we should not be pinging archivists from either organisation. The real issues are at a policy and a funding level." He also points to the first release under the BBC Creative Archive project: a swag of stock footage aimed at VJs (oh, very groovy) and notes that "the bad news is that unless you, or your web proxy, are based in the UK the clips are unavailable." I'd expect it'll be easier to wait for them to appear on file-sharing networks - the Creative Archive licence doesn't seem to preclude it.
WaPo analysis: war on the "Axis of Evil" not going at all well this week.
Liberated! | Aug 17, 2005 10:04
Today, we post the full recording of David Lange's 1985 Oxford Union debate speech. It's been quite a long road here. Ever since I published the original transcript, readers have been asking after the recording itself and I've been negotiating with Radio New Zealand Sound Archives Nga Taonga Korero, which provided me with "listening access" for the transcript, for permission to make it available.
After an appeal higher up last week I thought I'd cracked it, but RNZ's final offer proved to be that I provide a letter of indemnity against copyright claims (which, with a note in hand from Margaret Pope expressing her and David's strong wish that I be able to use the recording, I was happy to do), but that I could not make the file available in any form that could be downloaded.
This was not great for me: streaming means lower quality, and difficulty in access for people on dial-up connections. I really wanted people to be able to download a good quality file and play it offline.
My ideal scenario was to release the speech under a Creative Commons licence: specifically, one composed of the Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike components. This would allow derivative works, but would not allow them to be sold without explicit permission from the copyright holder. (David seemed to quite like the idea of being sampled into a dance track.)
I saw it as an opportunity to establish some good practice behind the government's fine words about a New Zealand Creative Commons. That iconic speech by a New Zealand Prime Minister seemed an ideal candidate for such practice. (In any case, I was in no position to meet the $45,000 ratecard price for the global rights implicit in posting the 30-minute recording on the Internet.)
Why make these things available? Public good. When we published the transcript here, 10,000 people read it in a week and a half. It took about two days to rise to the top of Google rankings for the relevant search queries. This week, since David's death, about 600 people have come to the transcript from Wikipedia's David Lange entry, which links to it.
The MP3 file posted today is encoded at 96kbit/s and is about 20MB. If you want to link to the recording - and you are naturally very welcome to do so - please use this link.
Anyway, on Monday I took another tack and approached TVNZ CEO Ian Fraser for permission to use the TV broadcast audio (which so far as I can tell is the original source of the radio copy). He came to the party with no conditions, for which I am extremely grateful, and I trust you are too. In the circumstances, it was simpler not to proceed with the Creative Commons idea this time.
I must make it clear that I'm not bagging Sound Archives. It's a brilliant resource, they're nice people and they're simply operating to their current rules; rules they had to bend to originally give me listening access. I intend to work with them on some other ideas in future. It's much easier for TVNZ to be generous with the audio when it can still hold the pictures close. But I look forward to the development of a government policy on archive access, one that the answers the demand for actuality in the network age.
On another matter: the current One News Colmar Brunton round focuses on Clark v Brash and the viability of a New Zealand First coalition. A member of the household was polled last night, and in addition to the usual questions, answered a series of binary questions as to whether Clark or Brash were better equipped to handle foreign affairs, taxation, social welfare, the brain drain, the Treaty and forming a coalition with Winston Peters. There were also questions on whether the driving age should be raised and whether the engine capacity of young drivers' cars should be limited.
UFOs | Aug 16, 2005 10:05
It's emerging as the paradox of the United Future party that it will profit by invoking "common sense", even as its official communications increasingly veer toward the loopy. There was that short-lived and really bizarre PowerPoint presentation on the party website. And yesterday, Peter Dunne issued this press release, warning of the perils of a Labour-Green coalition.
In it, Dunne invents a whole new drug - "pseudo methamphetamine" (presumably the methamphetamine you have when you're not having a methamphetamine) - and claims that under such a coalition: "no new roads will be built" in Auckland or Wellington; and "Nandor Tanczos will sit in Cabinet as Attorney-General." Um, really? It's hard to tell where the satire ends. Assuming, of course, satire is actually the intention.
And then (hat tip to Craig Young) there was yesterday's Stuff story headlined Adams family quits United Future. No, you can't make this stuff up …
Meanwhile, the Beatles + Yoko respond to criticism from across the political spectrum about this video posted on KeepLeft and pick a fight with Molesworth and Featherston over the wanton theft of M&F's "rolling poll of polls" concept. ("This week we're introducing the 'Poll of Poll of Polls' - a rolling average of the rolling polls. We're plugging the poll gap," Paul said.)
Also, KeepLeft offers a replay of the privatisation moment in the TV3 leaders' debate rolls out its first round of political blog awards. It's funny. I'm for keeping the Beatles around. Any show of a couple of new tunes, you reckon?
Meanwhile, Blogging It Real promises to stage its own survey on, um morality and stuff, to be "conducted in the flawless, classy style of the SST …"
My column in this week's Listener contains the following brief:
TWO QUESTIONS: Given Holmes's demise, does Alison Mau regret leaving the TVNZ mothership, especially as husband Simon Dallow is being talked about to replace Judy Bailey? And how secure is the future of Metro after the resignation of editor Nicola Legat?
Well and good. Except I didn't actually write it. My apologies to people at Metro and Simon and Ally. If I'm going to pass comment on you I'll do so in my own words.
Synthetic Thoughts looks at Promise.tv; a fridge-sized box that dispenses with the need to even plan your TV recording schedule by simply recording everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't keep your beer cold.
This thread on Kiwiblog yesterday discussed this story about a speech by Business Roundtable guest Tyler Cowen, generating the usual reflexive tosh about arts funding being theft from the taxpayer etc.
The story said Cowen held that "Better art is produced when artists generate their own income and take risks in the marketplace rather than rely on taxpayer-funded grants," which, once again, demonstrated his alarming lack of knowledge of the sector on which he was imported to pronounce. Local artists do take risks in the marketplace, and they largely do generate their own income. Most of the local hit albums of recent years have benefited from NZ On Air's Phase 4 scheme, which makes recoupable grants, matched dollar for dollar with private investment. Even the much-pilloried NZSO derives a third of its income from the private sector.
Cowen was also glib and poorly informed in his Linda Clark interview last week. He cited the German investment in Lord of the Rings as evidence of what private capital could do in the globalised world. Sure, it's great to get foreign investment (although whether that would have been forthcoming without the tax break is a matter of conjecture), but who helped fund Jackson's first three or four films? The taxpayer, via the Film Commission.
Why was Jackson able to call on relatively skilled and experienced local crews and cast, willing to work for scale? Because those people had largely learned their trade making NZ On Air-funded TV. Same deal with the Pacific Renaissance productions in Auckland (ie Herc and Xena), which ran for years. This stuff doesn't come out of a vacuum, you know.
Cowen also played the hip card with Clark by noting that he'd bought a Scribe album in Sydney. Jolly good. But Scribe (on a local indie label with a long-term distribution deal with a company owned by Rupert Murdoch) probably wouldn't have happened without the development work that has gone into the industry. In recent years some of the major labels here have had to fight for the right to keep on signing and developing artists, and not be reduced to mere distributors. The fact that there are NZ On Air video grants and recoupable recording funds has helped keep them in it, and now New Zealand music has a steadily rising share of a declining overall market. And of course, because it was still in the signing business, one of them signed Hayley Westenra. She's done quite well.
Commercial radio music repertoire is now 20% local, up from two per cent 10 years ago. That means a living to the artists, through their rights revenues. You can put that down to NZ On Air plugging and distributing samplers to radio, and, most of all, to the voluntary music targets scheme the RBA agreed with the government.
I had my doubts about the scheme when it launched, but it really has worked. Muriel Newman et al shrieked that radio would go out of business if it had to play inferior local music. Actually, the broadcasters seem to rather like it.
Anyway ... I interviewed Gil Simpson once and he talked about the "cultural infrastructure" that made it possible for him to get skilled people to work at the end of the earth in Christchurch: a working theatre, opera, a symphony orchestra, a great art gallery. All of them to some extent funded through local and national taxation.
This is the thing: If you don't take care to nurture and where necessary support a cultural sector, you're just a shitty little trading post at the bottom of the Pacific.
Pride and Astonishment | Aug 15, 2005 09:30
One Saturday morning in 1985, New Zealand television screened live satellite coverage not of some distant game of rugby, but of a debate at Oxford University, in which our Prime Minister was taking part. As I have written elsewhere, my response to what I was seeing was a mixture of pride and astonishment.
Pride, because a New Zealand Prime Minister was commanding a room; arguing on an international stage with wit, presence and intellectual virtuosity. Astonishment, because it was happening at all. We had lately emerged from the Muldoon years, when our Prime Minister was a small, intensely parochial man whose forays into the world were almost always cause for embarrassment. He was a tinpot leader for a tinpot country.
And yet, here was this big, booming man, full of a confidence that was not common to us at the time, arguing an independent foreign policy for New Zealand. David Lange said recently that in the years from 1984 to 1990, New Zealanders "stood up" in the world and began to assert an identity. I think that was how I felt watching him, right then.
I never got to meet Lange, although in the past year I've spoken to him on the phone a couple of times, and exchanged emails. I'm grateful for the ready support both he and Margaret Pope offered when I set out to make what turned out to be the first published transcript of that speech. I invited him and Margaret to the last Great Blend event we held, where I would be talking about the Great New Zealand Argument book where the transcript ended up.
"Good morning Russell," he emailed back swiftly. "I wish I could be with you but I'll be on the end of a tube."
Feel free to have another look at the speech; it still reads well. I agreed a little while ago to allow The Press to have it, and I guess all or part of it will be in the paper today. I've been reading his new memoir, My Life., and the prose is lovely. I recommend it.
I could say a lot more, but I guess it really comes down to this: I was proud of him.
Anyway, I was going to do my bun about the Sunday Star Times' shonky Great Morality Debate survey yesterday. But Keith has done it for me. It's not so much the project itself as the claims the paper makes for it, and its consequent pronouncements about what "we" think. It is, to put it mildly, unscientific.
By way of context, here's where the Maxim institute urged its followers to participate in the survey. And here's a column I wrote about another Star Times bout of frottage with the moral backlash earlier this year, when it ran a story headed 'Morals, ethics top New Zealanders' list of concerns' based on a 2004 wrap-up of the UMR Mood of the Nation Survey that showed nothing of the kind. And here's last May's post about the same paper's shabby and inaccurate lead story 'Sex at age 12 okay under law change'. Is there some sort of obsession in the editorial office?
No Debate | Aug 12, 2005 09:47
Small children howled as my car sprayed them with gravel on its headlong, desperate dash to Christchurch Airport. Their mothers held them tight, faces frozen in in rictuses of fear, and burly rugby players blanched and sobbed like silly little girls. My own jaw was clenched. Nothing, but nothing, would keep me from the TV3 leaders' debate.
Actually, I lie. I did make the journey to Christchurch Airport as dusk gathered yesterday, and my jaw was clenched, but we were not hurrying. Indeed, it appeared that my taxi driver was deliberately trying to prolong our fascinating conversation about the relative merits of various radio talkback hosts. At one point, in the midst of what passes for rush-hour in the Garden City, we sat stationary at a green light while he looked across at the elderly driver in the next lane, who appeared to be having a bit of dementia moment. I had a chardonnay when I finally got on the plane, and played Goldenhorses's 'Emptied Out' three times in succession on my iPod.
In truth, I was never going to catch the leaders' debate. I'll watch it on tape. But fortunately, agents K and T of the oriental insurgency group Big Embedded Asian Underground (BEAU) were smuggled into the green room and have filed reports on Public Address today. I am concerned about K's apparent familiarity with porn industry jargon.
No Right Turn, who watched Doctor Who, has rounded up the responses from blogland. Apparently Don Brash lost and John Campbell talked a hell of a lot. Francis Till has a rundown from the NBR perspective.
But it was a wholly satisfactory trip south yesterday. In the morning, I spent two hours explaining the Big New Media Picture to students of the New Zealand Broadcasting School (I am slightly shocked at my ability to talk for two hours) and in the afternoon I nailed something I've been working on for a long time. Details next week. You'll like it.
And although I'm not quite ready to reveal the lineup, I will say that if media frontiers are your bag, you might want to clear a space in your diary for Sunday November 13, the date of the final Public Address Karajoz Great Blend for 2005 …
So what about that judge then? Pardon me while I thunderously equivocate, but when the media go all hive-mind in their own interests, it does bring out my contrarian side. It is extraordinary to have a court direct the editorial choice of a private media organisation. But when a private media organisation seeks to play an important public role, perhaps its responsibilities extend further than what fits its format.
Now here's a way to blow your monthly JetStream limit in a week: the first beta of an open-source Internet TV app that effectively offers video podcasting. The clever part? It handles both conventional downloads and torrents. Cool.
Locally, The Voice Booth is open for podcasting, with Election 2005 coverage.
From 95bFM, available via podcast or plain ol' download, my interviews with Wilson da Silva of Cosmos magazine, and Finlay Macdonald on the making of the Lange book.
The New York Review of Books has Peter W. Galbraith's Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic. The new Harper's magazine has a wonderful essay by Bill McKibben; 'The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong'. The full essay is print-only, but there's an except here. Pogblog is calling it "one of the most important watershed moral upheavals of our generation."
McKibben, a former New Yorker staffer and current Methodist Sunday School teacher, has also been interviewed in a piece headed What Would Jesus Drive?
A soldier's videoblog from Iraq. Two minutes' noise, confusion and chaos.
And, finally, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson has explicitly endorsed terrorism: so long as it's French. He said, on air, that the fatal attack on the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland made him "respect" France and "won me over". I've always thought he was a tosser, but …
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