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Monday, January 27, 2003
A cut above 
| | I visit my mother in Graham, North Carolina, every few months. Put another way, I visit whenever I need a new haircut, which is how it turns out, schedule-wise. |
| | So my barber is Kenneth Wood, the sole surviving operator of the Graham Barber shop, located under the marquee of the town's only theater. |
| | Mr. Wood gives his age as "older than your mother" (who's almost 90). He's been cutting hair since 1927, most of the time at in this same shop, in this same chair. He did take some time out to serve his country during World War II, and he still goes to Missouri for regular gatherings with his old buddies, most of whom he's outlived. |
| | When he met me, he remembered cutting my cousins' hair ("all five of 'em," he says), plus their Dad, my uncle, who was the town doctor for many years. Now he'll remember me as his most out-of-town customer. |
| | If you're anywhere around Central North Carolina, it's worth a visit not only to Mr. Wood's barber shop, but to the picture show next door. It's not a first-run theater, but that's a large part of the charm. Movies are hand-picked by the owner, who provides amusing reviews on the theater's answering machine. Seats are comfortable, the movie is just two bucks, and they give free refills on popcorn and sodas. |
| | In fact, it's worth a call just to hear the reviews. Here's the number (first of the two listed): |
| | If you're looking for small town America at it's best, it's hard to top what you'll find right here. |
Rambling on
| | I just heard Tommy Thompson died. Heavy news. My friends here in North Carolina knew him much better than I did; but his passing makes the world smaller for all of us. Tommy was the largest and most charismatic member of the Red Clay Ramblers, a treasured musical institution in these parts for several decades, and members of my social network back when I lived here from '74-'85. |
| | Tommy did so much in his life. It's hard to believe that at my age he already had the Alzheimers disease that would need another decade to claim him. What a powerful soul. |
Weighing evils
| | William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune: Europe and America — Some know more about war. It's a javascript catastrophe, but if your browser renders it, you'll get a useful Euro perspective on the upcoming U.S war against Saddam Hussein. |
| | Note that I don't say the upcoming U.S. war against Iraq.That's because the Bush administration is being careful to isolate enemy status to one man and his "regime," which Bush hopes to "change." In other words, what he wants is a coup, preferably from inside, but from outside, if need be. |
| | So: we need a word, or a phrase, for this. Since the French gave us coup d'etat, how about an expression that means the same thing, imposed from the outside by military force? |
Human cuisine
| | Meanwhile the Travel Channel (or was it the Weather Channel? ... doesn't mattter) had a feature on Extreme Weather — hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and so on — with lots of real-world footage of houses washing away, mobile homes blowing apart, and people huddled under bridges trying not to be sucked into funnel clouds roaring overhead. |
| | It was compelling television, in both cases. |
| | The success of shows like "American Idol," "The Bachelorette" on ABC and "Joe Millionaire" on Fox was so impressive that numerous executives said they were now ready to embrace plans for a radical restructuring of the network business, which previously had been talked about only as dimly possible, long-term adjustments. |
| | Not only will reality shows continue to flood network's schedules next fall, but television executives are also predicting such developments as an end to the traditional television season. Instead of the time-honored formula of introducing shows en masse in September and ending them in May, broadcast networks want to stagger the shows' debuts and banish repeats from the schedule almost entirely. |
| | There could also be fewer orders for dramas and comedies, with a resulting shrinking of jobs for Hollywood writers and actors. And, perhaps most significant, executives are preparing for a fundamental rewriting of the economic model underpinning network programming. |
| | "The world as we knew it is over," said Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Television, exaggerating for effect, but only a little. |
| | Gail Berman, the president of entertainment for the Fox network, echoed that sentiment. "The 50-year-old economic model of this business is kind of history now," she said. |
| | The result of all the network maneuvering could be a rewriting of the industry's practices. The network programming system has been based largely on the creation of scripted series by Hollywood studios. They are the ones that maintain large staffs, sets and equipment, hire actors and writers, and produce weekly episodes at considerable financial deficits, counting on future sales of repeats to provide profits. Reality shows are not repeated, but they cost far less to produce in the first place (because they have no costly writers or actors). And since they give networks a way to win viewers at much lower prices, they can make more money than some first-run dramas and comedies, as well as low-rated repeats. |
| | Okay, now think of what the same kind of thing will do to Journalism. |
| | What kind of thing, exactly? Oh, how about blogs? Hm? |
| | Think of blogs as reality-based journalism. Like all these TV shows, they cost relatively little to produce, they're done largely by amateurs, and they threaten Business As Usual, with its large paid staffs, etc. |
| | It ain't quite the same as TV, because most magazines and newspapers have paying subscribers, meaning that advertising isn't their only business (just the way they make most of their money). Commercial TV still has no direct market relationship with viewers (who pay cable and satellite companies, not show producers or networks, with the minor exception of premium channels like HBO). |
| | So I think big-J Journalism is still safe. |
| | But it kinda makes you think, no? |
Air support
| | Yesterday I had an enjoyable 25 minutes or so on the radio with Mike Taht, roughly during the brief period when it looked like the Superbowl would be a tight game (when my segment was over, the score was 3-3). Mike mentioned on the show that his mother was in the studio with him. I said that mine was too, sitting right across the table from me out in the garage, where I had gone to get away from the noise of the television and three other loud men, all cousins of mine who live nearby (here in central North Carolina) and had come over to watch the game. |
| | Also coincidentally, one of my cousins told me a friend of his from church, a retired Lucent engineer, was not only busy reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, but was also so inspired by Mike's Uncle Bill's Helicopter speech that he has leveraging the speech in his own ongoing work as a consultant. |
| | Another coincidence. These cousins are all sons of my Mom's younger sister. And one of them reminded me that another cousin, a son of Mom's older sister, actually flew Uncle Bill's helicopter during his military service. |
| | By the way, I've been listening to some of Mike's nephew Josh's music, (Josh is the grandson of Uncle Bill) and I agree that it oughta be on the radio. It's terrific stuff. |
It ain't radio if it ain't free.
| | In Stunted Streams, Dean Landsman points to two stories on WFUV's struggle to keep its streams on the Web, given the still-insane royalty regime imposed on webcasters last year. Here's what WFUV says: |
| | You're going to hear some 'holes' in the live web stream, and some of our archives have been removed. |
| | Federal law has restrictions on what songs can be played within a webcast. The new year greets us with complex requirements for reporting every song played on our web site. Shows with a song list that fall outside these restrictions cannot be streamed, and are being removed from our site. There's also a rule against moving forward and backward through a stream, so we've had to disable "scrolling." |
| | We're doing everything we can to make sure that we stream as much of the music as possible - and we hate this even more than you do. |
| | So WFUV is like those daytime-only AM stations, only they're off the air for some shows and not for others. It's weird and sad. |
| | It's also interesting that most people who bother listening to Internet radio, and who used to listen to KPIG on the free and open webwaves, consider the station's Web signal dead. |
| | Because in fact KPIG still has a webwave signal. It's just one you have to pay $5.95/mo to hear, and then only through a RealONE RadioPass. |
| | Now, I love KPIG. And I appreciate what Real and KPIG have done together to keep the station's streams alive. But I haven't subscribed, and I probably won't. |
| | The reason is simple: I don't want to pay for something that ought to be free — or so close it feels like free. |
| | Before the RIAA, the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congresss came along and mucked everything up, Internet radio was on its way to becoming a real business that would have been good for everybody concerned. Most music webcasters wanted to support artists, and to intermediate some kind of marketplace, and operate there with some kind of business model. But when the regulatory regime puts stations like KPIG out of business (and what they're doing here is hardly a business), there isn't much hope that any over-the-air commercial broadcasters will continue bothering to webcast at all. |
| | In time, the only over-the-air broadcasters still on the Web will be huge conglomerates willing to eat the royalty expenses and NPR affiliates that made some kind of "privately negotiated deal" with the RIAA that has never been explained. |
| | Speaking of which, can somebody step forward and explain that deal? |
| | [Later...] More questions and answers here and here. |
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